Frownland
Of the spate of recent mumblecore films, Ronald Bronstein’s debut feature Frownland is easily the most idiosyncratic and distinctive. The film received the Gotham Award for "Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You" and Bronstein was nominated for the Independent Spirit "Someone to Watch" Award. In addition, Chrissie Iles, the film and video curator at […]
Killer of Sheep
Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Charles Burnett grew up in South Central Los Angeles, the scene of the 1965 Watts Riots in which thirty-four people were killed and over a thousand people were injured. Burnett was part of a group of African-American filmmakers – Haile Gerima, Julie Dash, and Billy Woodberry – who came out of […]
Spike Lee: She's Gotta Have It
Following on the success of Stranger Than Paradise, She’s Gotta Have It (1986) provided American independent filmmaking with even greater momentum, adding to the consensus that a bonafide movement had begun. Like Jarmusch, Brooklyn-based Spike Lee was a NYU film-school grad, whose 60-minute thesis film, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983), won a Student […]
River's Edge
River’s Edge (1987) was produced on a budget of $1.8 million by the independent producing team of Midge Sanford and Sarah Pillsbury, who were also responsible for John Sayles’s Eight Men Out (1988) and Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan (1985). Based on a true incident in California in which a group of teenagers covered up […]
Boys Don't Cry
When Hilary Swank won an Academy Award for her extraordinary performance in Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999), it guaranteed that the film would reach a much wider and more mainstream audience despite its controversial subject matter. The film’s commercial success accomplished Peirce’s goal of raising consciousness about hate-crimes in this country by dramatizing the […]
Writing the Reconciliation Scene
As a teacher of screenwriting I’m always amazed that in the scripts of my students, after setting up dramatic conflicts between characters, characters will often suddenly and abruptly reach a “new understanding," defusing whatever dramatic tension the script has been building up to. This occasionally happens in actual films as well, such as in River’s […]
Some Notes on Screenwriting
Before I had my own weblog, Mystery Man on Film commented about the brief excerpt from my book that I posted on my Web site: “Then the chapter went on to talk about how Gus Van Sant threw out the screenplay for Elephant and just improvised and shot it using an outline. I fail to […]