Though the county fair vibe of TFF is fine for folks with children, browsers and downtown vendors, serious filmmakers may be given pause. Sans a distribution platform, or a science-themed script for the Sloan competition, it shouldn’t be a priority on the level of Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, Rotterdam, Berlin or Venice, which all, rightly or not, have established status as hothouses for new talent and new work by veteran directors. Unless the timing of TFF is reconsidered, it’s unlikely to join their ranks.
Category: Robert Stepanek
Nightlife
P.S. YOUR CAT IS DEAD!
Who says there are no second acts in American lives? Not Steve Guttenberg. With an image defined by roles in cinematic cheese such as THREE MEN AND A BABY, DINER, and of course the entire POLICE ACADEMY metastasis, he’s unpredictably emerged as a first-time film director with an unlikely choice: P.S. YOUR CAT IS DEAD!, adapted from the novel/play by James Kirkwood.
DIGITAL HOLLYWOOD NEW YORK
Despite the recently depressed market for internet IPOs and concomitant drop in share value of .com enterprises on the NASDAQ extant, there remains a climate of qualified optimism in that segment of the creative community who operate outside the umbrella of corporate patronage regarding the ability of the web as a means to bypass the pitfalls normally associated with traditional means of distributing their work. For independent filmmakers in particular it would seem that anything producing anxiety in Hollywood on the scale that the rise of the internet has can only be a positive development in the quest for a more democratic process facilitating audience access.