Profiles

About this column: Many filmmakers ponder in anguish, How do other people—celebrated people—do it? Am I taking too long to make this documentary? Does everybody spend as much money as I am spending, or am I spending too little? And when filmmakers share their lessons learned in interviews in the glossy trade magazines, their tales seem to follow the arc of otherworldy heroes rather than real documentary makers, i.e. human beings like you and me. So each month, the Doc Doctor will go out into the world (this real world) of filmmakers who are successful and find out how they made it. The "Anatomy of a Film Column" is a chance to learn from filmmakers' hits and misses in real life examples. —Fernanda Rossi, story consultant a.k.a. the Documentary Doctor

About this new column: Many filmmakers ponder in anguish, How do other people—celebrated people—do it? Am I taking too long to make this documentary? Does everybody spend as much money as I am spending, or am I spending too little? And when filmmakers share their lessons learned in interviews in the glossy trade magazines, their tales seem to follow the arc of otherworldy heroes rather than real documentary makers, i.e. human beings like you and me. So each month, the Doc Doctor will go out into the world (this real world) of filmmakers who are successful and find out how they made it. The "Anatomy of a Film Column" is a chance to learn from filmmakers' hits and misses in real life examples. —Fernanda Rossi, story consultant a.k.a. the Documentary Doctor

About this new column: Many filmmakers ponder in anguish, How do other people—celebrated people—do it? Am I taking too long to make this documentary? Does everybody spend as much money as I am spending, or am I spending too little? And when filmmakers share their lessons learned in interviews in the glossy trade magazines, their tales seem to follow the arc of otherworldy heroes rather than real documentary makers, i.e. human beings like you and me. So each month, the Doc Doctor will go out into the world (this real world) of filmmakers who are successful and find out how they made it. The "Anatomy of a Film Column" is a chance to learn from filmmakers' hits and misses in real life examples. —Fernanda Rossi, story consultant a.k.a. the Documentary Doctor

Filmmaker Alex Karpovsky is sure to leave reviewers scrambling for a dictionary in an attempt to define the hybrid genre of his latest film, Woodpecker.

About this new column: Many filmmakers ponder in anguish, How do other people—celebrated people—do it? Am I taking too long to make this documentary? Does everybody spend as much money as I am spending, or am I spending too little? And when filmmakers share their lessons learned in interviews in the glossy trade magazines, their tales seem to follow the arc of otherworldy heroes rather than real documentary makers, i.e. human beings like you and me. So starting this month, the Doc Doctor decided to go out into the world (this real world) of filmmakers who are successful and find out how they made it. Each month, her "anatomy" will be a chance to learn from their hits and misses in real life examples. —Fernanda Rossi, story consultant a.k.a. the Documentary Doctor

A lot has changed since 1985, when Kathy Wolfe started Wolfe Releasing in order to distribute lesbian films on video.  For one thing, 20 years ago, the acronym LGBT—which stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender—didn't even exist. 

Case Study No. 2

Rock and a Heart Place, produced by Nancy Sabino and Michael Sodano
Running time: 80 minutes

Film Vitals

Logline: Each Christmas, 400 volunteers band together to give the greatest gift: joy to the forgotten of society, the homeless, the seniors and the disabled of their neighborhood.

Running a family business. Keeping children’s education first. Staying independent through increased corporate consolidation amidst a radical overhaul of the way film and video is distributed. Given all of that idealism, it may seem that educational film and video distributor Landmark Media has its work cut out for it.

I thought that making Monster’s Ball was rough. I vowed upon wrapping that film that I would never make another. After the accolades and success of that film, I was offered tons of projects from studios for lots of money (which I really could have used.) But all of them were jokes: Who’s My Baby’s Cousin’s Daddy, Leprechauns From the Hood (really). I felt that as a black filmmaker, my sophomore attempt at film should be just as interesting as my first; that I should not sell out.

In 1973, a young, cinema-loving bohemian couple fled the high rents of Manhattan for the more affordable suburbs of Huntington, NY. Once there, Vic Skolnick and Charlotte Sky found that they had also fled, inadvertently, the vibrant independent cinema scene in New York City, which was then in its heyday, with more than a dozen arthouses sprinkled throughout the boroughs.