Indie Filmmaking Resources & Underground Cinema's Caveh Zahedi

Notable Websites:


Short-Film Venues:

Recommended Filmmaking Books:
  • “$30 Film School” by Michael W. Dean
  • “Adventures in the Screen Trade” by William Goldman
  • “Crafting Short Screenplays That Connect” by Claudia H. Johnson
  • “Digital Filmmaking 101: An Essential Guide to Producing Low Budget Movies” by Dale Newton and John Gaspard
  • “Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices: How to Write, Produce, Direct, Shoot, Edit, and Promote a Feature-Length Movie for Less Than $15,000” by Rick Schmidt
  • “From Reel to Deal: Everything You Need to Create a Successful Independent Film” by Dov S-S Simens
  • “How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime” by Roger Corman and Jim Jerome
  • “How to Make an Action Movie for $99” by Andrew Mayne Harter
  • “Make Your Own Damn Movie!: Secrets of a Renegade Director” by Lloyd Kaufman
  • “Rebel Without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player” by Robert Rodriguez
  • “Script Partners: What Makes Film and TV Writing Teams Work” by Claudia Johnson and Matt Stevens
  • “Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting” by Robert McKee
  • “The Filmmaker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for the Digital Age” by Steven Ascher, Edward Pincus, et al.
  • “The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook” by Genevieve Jolliffe and Chris Jones
  • “The Guerilla Film Makers Movie Blueprint” by Chris Jones
  • “The Screenwriter’s Bible: A Complete Guide to Writing, Formatting, and Selling Your Script” by David Trottier

The above cinema resource list will be updated regularly, so send suggestions my way.

***

According to a new feature in Back Stage magazine, entitled "Creating Indie Cinema: A Guide to Making Low-Budget Films":

"The rationales for making films are manifold: an undying passion to tell a particular story, a chance at making millions of dollars, or the hope of creating a 'calling card' flick that will result in more work. An actor unhappy with the roles he's been getting (or not getting) might decide to take his career into his own hands by producing a vehicle for himself. A writer unable to sell her screenplays (or tired of seeing her work destroyed by others) may finally direct her own project."

What this opening graph fails to mention is that in the middle of this huge article, there's a great little interview with one of the coolest underground filmmakers on the face of the planet: Caveh Zahedi.

Also, there's a wealth of inside info from the guys behind InDigEnt, the Sundance Channel, Zoetrope.com, and others. The article even talks to a super-low-budget (and I mean low) filmmaker that recently paid his rent by appearing in Sam "Majority Report" Seder's super-funny (and little seen) new Trio sitcom, "Pilot Season."

Key quotes:

“I think actors, especially, would be well-advised to make their own movies,” says award-winning filmmaker Caveh Zahedi. “There’s nothing more painful than waiting around, dependent on someone else to cast you.”
Some people make a distinction between performing and not performing,” Zahedi muses. “But I think that distinction is a little false. People are always performing in some way, and they’re always not performing in some way. I’m just being myself, but what is ‘myself’? It’s a construct on some level. I’m not trying to fake anything, but I’m definitely engaged in a relation with someone else whose gaze I’m aware of, and I’m acting accordingly.”
It’s the beast of necessity—if you have a story you have to tell, and you can only get $10,000 for it, then you should find a way to tell that story, and just do it.”—producer Jake Abraham “I mean, if you’ve only got a VHS camcorder or an old 8mm film camera, go for it. You’ve gotta work with what you’ve got.” —filmmaker Matthew Langdon Weiss
I think the most important thing if you’re an aspiring filmmaker is to get rid of the ‘aspiring.’ How do you do that? You make a film,” Academy Award-winning director James Cameron told The Guardian. “I don’t care if it’s two minutes long and shot on Super 8 or DV or whatever. You shoot it, you put your name on it, you’re a filmmaker. Everything after that, you’re just negotiating your budget.”

For some reason, the full version of this article, when it was posted online at BackStage.com, excluded the handy checklist of indie-film resources found in the print edition. So I've listed this new version of the filmmaking sidebar above (with thanks to the article's original author, of course, who gave me permission to create an updated, hot-linked version of the list since it otherwise wouldn't exist online):

***

Related Article: Shooting for Success -- An Actor’s Guide to the Student-Filmmaking Experience
Posted by Lucas Brachish on Tuesday, October 19, 2004
2 comments

Texas Conservative Drinks the Repub KoolAid; Bush Looks for Votes in Space

Over at the “Texas Conservative” blog, there’s an extremely fair-and-balanced comparison between "a Kerry quote and a Bush quote." Actually, Kerry is only given a couple of sentences while Bush is given around 700 words, but one comes to expect that from a site subtitled “Views on current events from a Texas conservative.” So when I say “extremely fair-and-balanced,” I mean that in it’s new sense of “wholly influenced by an Australian uber-conservative that’s got his dirty mitts all over American politcs thanks to a certain media empire.”

Texas Blogger calls Bush’s speech a "vision that will keep generations of Americans safer", but the way I read it, it's the opposite -- it's a protest against peace and a rallying cry for endless war. Kerry hasn't taken an "easy path of protest and defeatism," as Bush says. He's taken on the tough task of battling against a popular and powerful president that he knew, from the start, would drag his name through the mud no matter how clean his life had been.

If Bush had launched a U.S. invasion of Iran or North Korea, or if he'd cracked down on Saudi Arabia or bulked up our forces in Afghanistan, then perhaps I could see the logic behind his actions. But, instead, we attack an economically shattered country with a second-rate dictator, a crappy arms program, and no plans of attacking the U.S. (the much ballyhooed instances of Saddam paying rewards to the family of terrorists never – or at least almost never – coincided with attacks against the U.S.)

And Osama and Saddam were enemies!

All right, in truth, I've got no problem with Saddam or his sons being taken out -- and installing Democracy in Iraq is a noble idea -- but we had higher priorities on the list of nations that needed their asses kicked. So Bush's logic rings false. Also we know that Bush & Co. were already planning an attack on Iraq from BEFORE Sept. 11, so it's scandalous that Bush is still pretending that Sept. 11 is what drove him on this Crusade.

Kerry wasn't "changed" by Sept. 11 because he already loved and respected his country and was already prepared to protect his country from any threat. Sept. 11 was a terrible event, but for those who weren't in the midst of the fray, it's not the sort of thing that has to fundamentally alter one's viewpoint (disclosure: I was in NYC at the time of 9/11). Instead, Kerry has simply become more alert about foreign threats, as we all have become more alert. Alert does not have to imply fundamental and eternal change – but “not changed” also does not imply an inability to learn from an experience.

Bush, on the other hand, was "changed" only in the sense that he was changed from being an unpopular president (who lost the popular vote) to being the Commander in Chief of a Nation Under Attack. And he took advantage by using America's fear as an excuse to settle old scores (took advantage being the key phrase here, reminding me of Nabokov’s use of the phrase in his Humbert Humbert poem: "Because you took advantage of a sinner/because you took advantage/because you took/because you took advantage of my disadvantage).

Kerry is full of rhetoric and bullshit much of the time, admittedly, but he can't touch Bush in these departments -- because Bush is an amazing bullshitter. He's King Bushitter.

Look at this part of his quote:

"He has complained that my administration -- quote -- 'relies unwisely on the threat of military preemption against terrorist organizations.' Let me repeat that. He says that preemptive action is ‘unwise,’ not only against regimes, but even against terrorist organizations."

This is ingenious (and disingenuous), because the first part actually does reflect a Kerry statement (out of context), but then, after Bush says "let me repeat that", he doesn't actually repeat the statement at all, and instead says something entirely new -- an entirely new and outlandish statement said in the (false) context of being a quote from Kerry, but parsed in such a way that the statement could be defended as not being a lie, exactly, but an interpretation (a bad one).

What Kerry is actually saying is that it’s unwise for Bush to RELY on this strategy. He’s not saying the strategy should be completely abandoned, but instead is pointing out the folly of relying (solely relying) on such a potentially destructive, lethal, and limited solution.

That being said, Kerry’s own ideas are limited in nature and not incredibly groundbreaking, but how anyone can believe in Bushes rhetoric is incredible, because it’s all so far from any shred of truth.

Oh, Bush has done one good thing. As governor of Texas, he helped give Texas Astronauts the right to vote from outer space:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=176206


Posted by Lucas Brachish on Monday, October 18, 2004
1 comments
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