I posted earlier this month about how much I longed for a female Lloyd Dobler, in other words for a young female character who is funny and ballsy and eloquent. I went to a screening of Juno last night and I’m pleased to say that Ellen Page rocks the non-wussy-girl-character house. As does Diablo Cody’s hilarious script. The music drove me a little bit nuts because, much as I love them, there’s only so much Moldy Peaches I can take but overall it’s a really lovely, warm-hearted film and I found myself breathing out with relief at finally seeing someone kinda like I was when I was a teenager on screen (I was less whip-smart, less pregnant and more English but you know what I’m saying). It is so refreshing to hear teenagers be witty and clever on screen because, as Cody pointed out in the Q&A following the film, so many films are terribly condescending to young characters (but she said it much better because she is as funny in person as she is on paper - I have a bit of a girl-crush on her it seems).

I had a lovely time watching clips from This American Life last night at Stranger Than Fiction in the charming company of Ira Glass and Chris Wilcha. I have never actually watched the TV show, mainly because I don’t get Showtime and am afraid to add more channels to the terrifying smorgasbord of my telly experience, but I’m going to purchase some episodes from iTunes now that I’m in my very-late-to-the-early-adopter-party phase with my iPhone podcasting, movie-watching lifestyle.

Anyway, my friend Sarie recommended that I listen to this particular episode of the radio show all about breakups (which you can do for freeeeeeeeeee online) and it’s rather brilliant. If you, like me, have been wrestling with your business accounts all day in a mad panic realizing that the year is nearly over and you haven’t recorded ANYTHING financially numbery (see how I love this stuff so much I know the lingo!) with much enthusiasm, then you’ll need a good dose of funny, sad, heartbreaking stories. Wallow in it. You know you want to.

Plus it’s all true. And truth is stranger than fiction.

This is why I love McSweeney’s and will be buying their journal (sprinkled with Dolly Parton quotes!) for myself for Christmas. I think it’s a motto to work by.

It is the last Fall 07 Stranger Than Fiction screening tonight. Stranger Than Fiction is a documentary series curated by Thom Powers that has become a really fun Tuesday social for NYC doc folk. You get the chance to get a sneak preview of a documentary at the IFC Center followed by a Q&A with the director, followed by drinks somewhere nearby. Simple but effective. I haven’t had a chance to go to a lot of the Fall films this year but I took the opportunity to see Jessica Yu’s The Protagonist last week. I saw The Protagonist at Sundance earlier this year and was really moved by it so I was grateful for the chance to watch it again and it was wonderful to hear Yu talk about it afterwards. The Protagonist evolved when Yu was asked by Greg Carr and Noble Smith of The Carr Foundation to do a project on Euripides. Yu ran with the idea and made a film that, although it does involve Greek puppets reciting lines from Euripides, is mainly about agency, certainty, fate, and crisis in the lives of four contemporary men. The men are very different from each other - a former: German terrorist, evangelist, bank robber and martial arts student (who is also Yu’s husband) - but the similar trajectories of their stories become clear as the film progresses, and in this teasing out of the larger human themes I think Yu has done an incredible job.

Euripides is known for his female characters so it is interesting that the film became such a strong portrait of masculinity. Yu explained that they had originally looked for female characters too but that the women had always had an inkling that something was going wrong whereas the men just powered along blindly and then ran smack into a wall which caused the subsequent transformation.

I know I’m not explaining this very well but it is a film that you really need to see to understand. Luckily it is opening this Friday at the IFC Center so New York folk can catch it very soon.

Tonight Ira Glass and Chris Wilcha are coming to Stranger Than Fiction to preview clips from the TV version of This American Life and to talk about the differences between creating radio and television which I am very interested in since I am just a little bit obsessed with radio. I still think of radio as something incredibly old-fashioned, mysterious and glamorous and am constantly listening to BBC Radio 4 and NPR as I walk around the city or potter around my apartment.

Stranger Than Fiction is back in January for more documentaries and more hob-nobbing. Hooray!

Marc Andreessen has written an interesting post about how the writer’s strike may accelerate a shift of power from the studios to the talent. He argues that the entertainment industry is shifting toward the entrepreneurial model of Silicon Valley which means that the creators will also be the owners of their product. I think many of the points he makes are very prescient but all this talk about free this and free that glosses over the time and talent that it takes to use many of these new tools well when it comes to promotion and distribution over the web. Also, is it really that easy to get a venture capitalist interested in your latest documentary about Chad (Africa not Lowe)? I’m not so sure. Still, it’s definitely worth a read and here’s an excerpt:

What would a new entertainment media company, producing original content, look like in the age of the Internet?

• Starting from the end of the process: you know distribution is now nearly free. Put it up on the Internet and let people stream or download it.
• Marketing is also free, due to virality. Let people email your content to their friends; let people embed your content in their blogs and on their social networking pages; let your content be searchable via Google; let your content be easily surfaced using social crawlers like Digg. All free.
• Production is very cheap. Handheld high-definition video cameras cost nearly nothing. You can do almost every aspect of production and post-production on any Mac. Hell, you can even score an entire movie for free — there are hundreds of thousands of bands on the Internet who would love to have their music embedded in a new entertainment property as promotion for the bands’ concerts and merchandise.
• The creators of the content are the owners of the company. The writers, actors, directors — they are the owners. They have a direct, equity-based economic stake in the company’s success. They get paid like owners, and they act like owners.
• Financing is straightforward: venture capital, just like a high-tech startup. We live in a world in which financing a high-quality startup is simply not difficult — not for a high-quality technology startup, and increasingly not for a high-quality media startup. Modern financiers love being co-owners of a new company with the talent that will make the company successful — and that’s how it will happen here.

I discovered the Whole Earth Catalog when I was at college and working in a small independent bookstore in Brighton in the UK. The catalog was originally published in 1968 and contained a wealth of information from books to tools to classes and beyond. It had a joyful DIY, countercultural feel and every page contained huge amounts of amazing ideas. I discovered Buckminster Fuller through Whole Earth and immersed myself in his ideas about “whole systems.”

Whole Earth had a profound influence on many technologists. People have described it as a kind of pre-internet internet. Steve Jobs called Whole Earth one of the bibles of his generation, “It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.” Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth colleagues have shaped many aspects of our contemporarty digital world, inspiring the birth of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL) and WIRED magazine. As Tim O’Reilly says, “A huge amount of the O’Reilly sensibility, a mix of practicality and idealism, was learned from the Whole Earth Catalog. And of course, the Whole Earth Catalog is one of the wellsprings of the modern DIY movement, for which Make: magazine is now carrying the torch.”

The sections of the catalog included industry and craft, communications, and community, all ideas that continue to inspire us at Shooting People as filmmaking moves into the world of Web 2.0. In this spirit we have launched our new TOOLS blog where we will continue the fine tradition of communicating and sharing resources with each other. It’s not quite as nice as the Whole Earth Catalog to hold in your hands but I hope that it will be useful nonetheless.

Here’s the shortlist. AJ Schnack has more information on each film on his blog including some robust criticism of the list that I find myself agreeing with. I was really disappointed that films like Billy The Kid, We Are Together, Manda Bala, and The King of Kong didn’t make the list. The King of Kong is one of the funniest and most skillfully constructed documentaries I have seen in a long time and I wish that films like this would get more recognition just for being great films and telling great stories.

“Autism: The Musical,” directed by Tricia Regan

“Body of War,” directed by Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro

“For The Bible Tells Me So,” directed by Daniel G. Karslake

“Lake of Fire,” directed by Tony Kaye

“Nanking,” directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman

“No End in Sight,” directed by Charles Ferguson

“Operation Homecoming - Writing the Wartime Experience,” directed by Richard Robbins

“The Price of Sugar,” directed by Bill Haney

“Please Vote For Me,” directed by Wejun Chen

“A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman,” directed by Peter Raymont

“The Rape of Europa,” directed by Richard Berge and Bonni Cohen

“Sicko,” directed by Michael Moore

“Taxi to the Dark Side,” directed by Alex Gibney

“War/Dance,” directed b Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine

“White Light/Black Rain,” directed by Steven Okazaki

UPDATE: More docs are coming to mind. What about Kurt Cobain About a Son for a spot of innovation and music just for change or In the Shadow of the Moon? I haven’t seen In The Shadow of the Moon yet but it has space and astronauts in it for gawds sake! Any one else have thoughts on what’s missing?

Thanks to Pamela Cohn over at Resources for bringing my attention to Matt Syrett’s quantitative analysis of film production and distribution. I’m pathetically terrified of numbers to the point where I muddle up my 6s and 9s in panic (and my 3s and my 8s if I’m really freaking out) but as Matt says:

Whether you want to make money on your film or just find an audience for your unique vision, marketing should play a central role in your work.

This blog is dedicated to my thoughts on marketing independent film, especially using quantitative analysis. Don’t worry if you failed high school math or know nothing about marketing… my goal is to make the insights approachable by almost anyone.

I have to confess I haven’t yet summed up the courage to study his conclusions in detail but I’m interested to see what this sort of analysis brings up - and I absolutely agree that filmmakers have got to think about the marketing of their work. It’s about strategically working out how to tell the right people about your film and get them interested in seeing it. Call it something else if the word itself makes you uncomfortable but do it.

I should do the same with math.

Oy, still having problems getting this blog set up on Wordpress - videos aren’t embedding properly for some reason - but this is a great excuse to embed this as a test! Apologies for this minor diversion, we’ll be back to independent film again shortly.

UPDATE: I believe this is actually a prairie dog. The devil is in the details.

Thanks again to Screenwriters bulletin Editor Andy Conway for bringing my attention to this brilliant interview with Harlan Ellison (this wasn’t done for the strike but is very timely) - Andy is doing a great job covering the WGA strike so sign up for Screenwriters if you want to read more. I’m having a few issues embedding the video for some reason today so here’s the YouTube link.