• Anne Thompson sorts out truth from rumor in the fallout of the Paramount Vantage absorption. Notable: Vantage’s Nick Meyer will still be able to produce and acquire films, “It won’t be the originally planned 12 movies a year. It will be more like six, and they will be more likely to be commercially accessible, less arty films.”
• The Museum of the Moving Image has launched a long in-the-works website called Moving Image Source, featuring criticism, promotion of international events, and access to and information about some of the museum’s resources. I’m currently reading this piece by B. Kite on Jean-Luc Godard.
• “I forgot, until someone reminded me this morning (and I can’t remember which blog, sorry), that yesterday was the anniversary of Congress approving the 19th Amendment,” blogs Jette Kernion. And what better way to celebrate than with a little “Sister Suffragette”?
• At the Indiepix blog, Danielle points to the above clip, which I really should have seen before but haven’t. It’s Called Lucky Three, and it’s a short film by Jem Cohen, starring Elliott Smith.

You knew this was coming: The Hollywood Reporter reveals that in addition to apparently ending his political career, Eliot Spitzer’s date with call girl Ashley Alexandra Dupre may have a lasting impact on New York state’s recently-resurgent film industry. Gregg Goldstein notes that although both the Repblicate state Senate and the Democrat state Assembly are in favor of upping the tax credits, they have wildly different visions of how the new plan should look. The Senate plan, in putting more emphasis on breaks for above-the-line costs such as actor salaries, would seem to benefit visiting, big-budget studio films; the Democrat Assembly plan, in focusing specifically on below-the-line costs, is more concerned with supporting homegrown talent, and is “meant to help build New York’s film industry infrastructure by supporting and establishing ongoing production jobs.”

So who’s gonna win? Right now the safe money says Spitzer’s replacement David Patterson will do everything he can to rebuild bridges broken by Spitzer’s scandal by playing nice with the Republican Senate. Also, he’s apparently BFF with Spitzer-hating Senate leader Joseph Bruno, which makes it all the more likely that he’ll turn his back on his own party in the name of post-prostitute reconciliation.

I wonder why the grassroots film community hasn’t made a bigger deal out of this yet. It’s enough to make a girl wish that Jem Cohen would start blogging.

[Via FILMMAKER Blog]

The debate over the New York Mayor’s Office proposal to more strictly regulate public photography has hit a kind of a fever pitch over the last week. A week ago today,  a group called Picture NY (which includes filmmaker Jem Cohen) organized a rally in downtown Manhattan that got quite a bit of local news attention. Around the same time, web comedy troupe Olde English released a protest video, done in the style of early-90s soft-rap. The clip seems to be on its way to viral classic status; since I wrote about it here at the beginning of the week, it’s been viewed about 13,000 times on SuperDeluxe, seemingly without any kind of formal promotion from the site. It’s super-broad and hyperbolic, but sadly, I think a case could be made that political media needs to be both in order to disseminate messages to web video audiences.

I think the protest itself is valid, and if you feel the same, you may want to sign this petition before it is submitted to meet the deadline for public comment, which is EOD today. However, like Stu VanAirsdale at The Reeler, I’m a little wary of how all the hoopla surrounding the protest has led to a distortion of what the debate is all about.

…Read more

We love it when two previously-blogged topics collide. According to Anthony Kaufman, filmmaker Jem Cohen (whose collaboration with Patti Smith I posted about here) sent out an email today asking friends and colleagues to join him in protesting proposed changes to New York City permit regulations for amateur photographers (which I wrote about previously here). As Cohen explains, the proposed changes (which would make permits necessary for any shoot involving more than two people and a hand-held camera that lasted over thirty minutes) would severely limit DIY photography and film/video making in the city:

The fact is that we simply CANNOT predict where, when, and how long we are going to film or photograph; we CANNOT afford expensive liability insurance policies; we occasionally NEED to work with other people or to use tripods to support our gear. (The regulations would, for example, effectively rule out a great deal of time-lapse photography which depends on tripods and cannot possibly be done with time limitations of 10 to 30 minutes, as well as the use of large format still cameras and long lenses).

One of Michael Bloomberg’s greatest successes as mayor has been his promotion of local film and television production. By offering some amazing tax incentives, the Bloomberg administration has re-established NYC as a feasible shooting location for indies. Kaufman says the proposed regulations would tarnish the city’s reputation as a haven for filmmakers pretty significantly. “If the New York Mayor’s Office of Film and TV really cares about New York as a vital indie filmmaking center,” he writes, “They need to stop putting in effect procedures that help Hollywood productions and cripple the low-budget mavens that once made this city the artistic capital of the world.”

If you want to join the protest, click through for the contact info on Anthony’s blog. The Mayor’s office is allegedly accepting feedback on this issue until August 3.