Invaluable for film students, especially since, in assuming that its readers have some understanding of art, Hope can hit...
A relentlessly useful insider’s guide to independent film from a longtime practitioner.
So, why is it that in independent films—that is, films made outside the traditional studio system—the sets make Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets look like the Emerald City? That’s easy, writes Hope, the production power behind 21 Grams, American Splendor and other films made by his production company, Good Machine. The answer is that there’s no money to be had, and whatever money there is has to go into the movie itself and not, say, the marketing budget: “[S]o invariably productions are based in the ugly sections of town where the rents are cheap.” That insight alone casts new light on Ghost World, Wonderland and many other on-the-thin-dime films. Most of those films scarcely see the light of day, outside a few art houses, festivals and perhaps IFC, but when they do, it’s usually as much a surprise to the director as to everyone else. Take In the Bedroom, which, magisterial performances by Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek aside, made the jump to the big time mostly because the distributor put more money into it. “Usually, a film is worth the most when it first hits the marketplace,” notes Hope matter-of-factly, but such added money also increases a film’s shelf life. Part memoir and part textbook, the book offers a variety of insights, from the workflows involved in promoting a film via social media to the astonishingly complex politics of dealing with a nonprofit organization. Hope even has a few kind words for critics, such as this entry in the section that closes the book, “100 Opportunities for Making the American Independent Film Industry Better”: “Loss of job for newspaper based film critics reduces curatorial oversight which lessens word-of-mouth and want-to-see.”
Invaluable for film students, especially since, in assuming that its readers have some understanding of art, Hope can hit the topic of money hard.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-332-1
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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