Fear-Free Fundraising

Road-tested rules for bang-up fundraising events

Seems like lately, all the filmmakers I know are ready to party! They’re all throwing fundraising events to raise cash for their films. While I applaud their resourcefulness and dedication to a fundraising tactic of relying upon individual, not foundation, money, I confess that I tremble at the thought of what they are getting themselves into. So many babes in the party-planning woods! They are about to find out how much time, energy, resources, and focus it takes to host a successful fundraising event. How can they ensure the biggest bang for their buck and avoid getting burned?

topics: authors, bay area, directors, diy, funding, producers

Fear-Free Fundraising

Road-tested rules for bang-up fundraising events

Seems like lately, all the filmmakers I know are ready to party! They’re all throwing fundraising events to raise cash for their films. While I applaud their resourcefulness and dedication to a fundraising tactic of relying upon individual, not foundation, money, I confess that I tremble at the thought of what they are getting themselves into. So many babes in the party-planning woods! They are about to find out how much time, energy, resources, and focus it takes to host a successful fundraising event. How can they ensure the biggest bang for their buck and avoid getting burned?

topics: authors, bay area, directors, diy, funding, producers

In Production

Hess and Janos salute the volunteers of America

Look what’s happening out in the streets: 65 million Americans volunteer every year. That may not be what Paul, Grace and Marty had in mind, but there is a revolutionary aspect to community participation these days. Via Volunteer Nation: Stories of Service, veteran producer-directors Ben Hess and Dan Janos are using the latest technology to mobilize the millennials (18-35). “That demographic consumes content online and on mobile devices, but not on traditional television sets,” Hess notes. “We’re looking at the convergence of activism, social awareness and digital media.”

topics: activism, bay area, directors, diy, documentary, exhibition, festivals, independent film, internet, political film, producers, public

First-person

Funder as supplicant

As a program officer at The San Francisco Foundation, I say “No” to artists and arts organizations daily. I try to soften the blow, detailing the reality of limited resources and an overabundance of projects, seldom discussing quality or appropriateness, thinking I am kinder in vagueness.

I also write personal essays and make films. Last year, a dream project, three years in the making, was realized when I produced and co-directed a concert documentary, Janis Ian: Live From Grand Center, with KETC/PBS in St. Louis. The program features the legendary Grammy Award-winning artist performing 15 songs from her 40-year career—augmented with archival footage, including Leonard Bernstein introducing her at age 15 to a national audience singing "Society’s Child" and a 1975 performance of "At Seventeen."

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, documentary film, funding, gay lesbian cinema, music, performance, producers, public television

Platform

Eddie Muller, Noir City and the lure of troubled times

Author, raconteur, commentator and former newspaperman Eddie Muller launched Noir City, an annual San Francisco-based festival of noir, seven years ago, and it’s attracted an avid following, both in the Bay Area and beyond. (It now tours many U.S. cities). A self-described “second generation San Franciscan, product of a lousy public school education, a couple of crazy years in art school and too much time spent in newspaper offices and sporting arenas," Muller has built a small empire around his passion for this dark, cynical, highly stylized brand of storytelling. He says his career as an "ink-stained, fourth estate wretch” sidetracked his early ambition to become a filmmaker, but this year, he brings the two worlds together with "Newspaper Noir," a tribute to and lament for the heyday of print journalism. The films, presented in nightly double bills, feature the usual suspects: an assortment of criminals, hard-bitten editors, lethal femme fatales with betrayal and skullduggery on their minds and ordinary Joes, losers driven by despair and sucked into a vortex from which there’s no escape. For Noir City 7, which runs January 23-February 1 at the Castro Theatre, Muller and co-curator Anita Monga acquired several one-of-a-kind 35mm prints struck by the studios especially for the festival. SF360.org got a chance to speak with Muller this past month, after he’d returned from a film-scouting mission to South America.

topics: actors, bay area, castro theatre, cinephiles, film festivals, genre films, hollywood, noir, performance, producers, world cinema

Platform

Wendy Levy, Sundance and the politics of participation

We all know that the Sundance Film Festival, which opens Thursday in Utah, has films. But for the industry population that attends Sundance annually, the action is off-screen—not only in the hallways where air kisses reign, but in the worldly, wonky panels where filmmakers earnestly share ideas and experiences, and generate enough memes to populate a metroplis. One of the most interesting discussions this year will be the one hosted Thursday, January 22, by Wendy Levy, Bay Area Video Coalition’s Director of Creative Programming. She’ll be introducing BAVC’s Producers Institute for New Media Technologies to a no-doubt awestruck audience at the New Frontier on Main. While "interactive" may be the buzzword behind an ambitious project like The Producers Institute—where directors experiment other communication platforms to give new kinds of depth, breadth and reach to their projects—it’s also the clear descriptor for the whirlwind force leading it. Levy, a veteran of many nonprofits (including Film Arts Foundation) and a filmmaker herself, is as engaged and interactive as they come. She seemed the perfect person to offer not only thoughts on the program she’s presenting at Sundance on PI and what’s being called the "New Documentary Movement" —but to also offer a short Sundance primer before this year’s festival.

topics: digital filmmaking, directors, distribution, documentary film, political film, producers, q&a

Take Two

"Lola Montès," revived

“Sadism demands a story,” remarked Laura Mulvey in her landmark piece of feminist film criticism, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema.” In Max Ophüls’ opulent swan song, Lola Montès (1955), sadism also demands a spectacle. Ophüls’ Technicolor rhapsody— newly restored by Rialto Picture to match the director’s original vision— opens in a three-ring circus worthy of DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Costumed dwarves, swinging chandeliers, horse-riding acrobats and tiers of audience members kaleidoscopically divide the frame, as the Ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) invites the audience to ask questions for 25 cents a piece to the star attraction, the scandalous adventuress Lola (the beautiful Martine Carol).

topics: performance, producers, reviews