I just received some sad news this morning in response to the Dune production diary I have posted here on my site. Jerome Wybon, a director of numerous “making of” and behind-the-scenes documentaries for French DVD releases, just sent me the following e-mail: Hello I have just began reading your blog about your work on […]
I’m addicted to DVDs, and like many addicts I’m somewhat ambivalent about my substance of choice. Back in the day (and I am old enough to use that expression) I got a pleasure out of watching movies that I don’t seem to get so much any more. In some ways this seems strange because in […]
While going through some old storage boxes recently, I came across a fat folder of documents from my time working on Dune. Mostly daily call sheets for the first and second units, plus some weekly schedules, memos, etc. I’ve added some five dozen of these to the appropriate pages of my journal as Jpegs and […]
These days, whenever I see items in the news about the National Film Board, I feel a bit of sadness. It seems to have fallen quite far from its days of greatness. When I took an Editing Masterclass in Rockport, Maine, in 1997, I was pleasantly surprised at the reaction of the other students, from […]
A few years back, Francis Ford Coppola predicted that the future of film was an adolescent girl in the mid-west armed with a cheap camcorder. That hasn’t exactly happened (yet[1]), but ever-evolving video technology has definitely had an effect on the movies we see. While new hi-def equipment is being used more and more frequently […]
Seeing Psycho projected on a big screen for the first time in decades was almost like seeing a new film for the first time; Hitchcock’s images have a remarkable visceral power when seen large.