HOUSE OF GAMES (1987) Director: David Mamet Starring: Lindsay Crouse, Joe Mantegna, Ricky Jay Why We Love It: Whether as a playwright or constructing taught, nail-biting motion pictures, David Mamet is arguably one of the industry’s most respected master storytellers. As far as the indie film world goes, it all started with his first feature, House of Games. Lindsay Crouse stars as Dr. Margaret Ford, a successful psychiatrist and author seemingly in need of a little danger in her life....

Screenwriter Eliot Laurence, director Shira Piven, and actor James Marsden sat down with moderator Dana Harris after the Film Independent at LACMA screening of Welcome To Me, the story of $86 million lottery winner Alice Klieg (Kristen Wiig). She’s a woman with Borderline Personality Disorder who gets rich, quits her meds, and buys a talk show that talks all about her. Creating a character afflicted with a mental illness is no easy feat....

Moroccan writer/director Houda Lakhdar is thoughtful when she talks about her close friend and creative collaborator, Sofia Aissaoui. The two filmmakers—who met at Ecole Supérieure des Arts Visuels (School of Visual Arts, ESAV) in Marrakesh— found in each other kindred spirits. They’ve been working together ever since. But interestingly, neither one started out wanting to become a filmmaker. Aissaoui wanted to be a journalist, while Lakhdar studied architecture. Both women found their way to filmmaking by discovering their love for stories and their desire to explore issues in greater depth through stories....

With high budget, high profile films under their belts one would assume that directors like Colin Trevorrow, Paul Weitz and Anne Fletcher have staggering levels of awareness and confidence. But at the Los Angeles Film Festival Coffee Talks last month, it was refreshing to hear that all three of them are, in fact, human. Fletcher, who has directed rom-com hits like 27 Dresses and The Proposal, kicked off the Coffee Talk with an anecdote about her first time on set as a director....

Writer-director and Film Independent Fellow J. Davis’ Manson Family Vacation screened at the LA Film Fest in June, and, considering its inspiration, it’s almost shockingly lighthearted. The film follows two brothers: one, a workaholic family man, the other, an eccentric who is inexplicably obsessed with Charles Manson. Played by Jay Duplass and Linas Phillips, respectively, the unlikely pair takes a tour of all the places in Los Angeles Manson and his “Family” famously visited....

Growing up in New York’s historic Harlem neighborhood, filmmaker Thembi Banks considers herself fortunate to have been immersed in such an eclectic cultural environment during her formative years. With the support of family and an abundance of creative mentorship afforded to her by the Big Apple’s best and brightest, she chased her creative passions onto the stage as a dancer and actor before finally landing in the film world, with ambitions on both sides of the camera....

It’s befitting, then, that the 2018 LA Film Festival should stop to recognize the innovative work of filmmakers and artists being done in the ever-evolving music video field. The Festival’s inaugural Music Video showcase—held September 23 at ArcLight Cinemas in Culver City—was a beautiful display of art meeting talent to create visionary pieces of cinema… all on the big screen. From political statements to expressions of the singular need for love, these musician/filmmaker collaborators put their all into these pieces, and did not disappoint....

Supported by Founding Sponsor Netflix, the Film Independent Amplifier Fellowship is a highly customized program designed to support six Black artists on the cusp of a major career breakthrough. While other programs throughout the industry are designed to help filmmakers get their foot in the door, this one is intended to yank them all the way through. How? Through year-round support in the form of grants, mentorship and professional coaching to strengthen not only our Fellows’ craft, but to bolter business acumen, confidence, financial sustainability and ability to achieve their greater career aspirations—plus a $30,000 unrestricted grant, just for fun....

No, I’m not talking about the actual real world as it currently exists. I’m talking about the world in the late Ray Bradbury’s iconic (and eerily prescient) sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451. The book—about a fallen future world where books are illegal and the conscientious reawakening of one of the “firemen” whose job it is to burn them—was first published in 1953 and was swiftly adapted for a variety of medium, including as François Truffaut’s sole English-language film, in 1966....

By far my favorite example of a feature-length video essay is Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, which seeks to unpack the myriad ways in which our idea of Los Angeles as a city is shaped—and distorted—by popular entertainment. Andersen—a CalArts professor and native Angeleno who was inspired to begin the project after watching Curtis Hansen’s 1997 noir L.A. Confidential—used clips from over 150 different films to explore a sprawling set of themes, including everything from Hollywood’s myopic preoccupation with the film industry, to the role of modern architecture as a shorthand for effete villainy in ’80s and ’90s action cinema....

Screenwriter Michael Starrbury discovered his love of cinema after sneaking into a movie theater as a young boy to see the classic Prince film Purple Rain. When Apollonia purified herself in Lake Minnetonka, it was as if God, Allah, Buddha and that Hindu elephant was giving him a sign. Now, he’s one one of the nominees for the Film Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay for The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete....

This goes quintuple for those trying to break into Hollywood, where opportunities are scant, with a seemingly endless parade of self-styled auteurs competing for resources. Really, any advantage you—the filmmaker—can develop to recognize and leverage literally any fortuity in the system is critical. And you know what helps with those skills? That’s right: more education. One weekend each year, the Film Independent Forum descends on LA—an intensive three-day crash course in all things film, aimed at equipping visual storytellers with the knowledge, resources and expert advice needed to get their projects both made and seen....

SHOOTING ON LOCATION Film Independent at LACMA curator Elvis Mitchell began the Q&A by asking Gray about the look of the film. “I decided I had to make this on film,” said Gray, a diehard celluloid fan and proponent. “I had this obsessive notion that you had to see the grain.” But unsurprisingly, shooting on location in South America on film presented a unique set of challenges. Upon arriving on location, Gray and his team quickly realized there were no trained film loaders available locally....

Only the second feature-length animated film ever produced after Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the Fleischers’ take on Jonathan Swift’s classic fantasy-adventure saga appealed to Ageds in part due its titular character’s “gentile giant” quality. No surprise when considered against Inc. No World’s brooding, R&B-inflected soundscapes—which somehow simultaneously sound both enormous and intimate. Says Andrew, “the main thing that we’re looking for was something innocent, joyful, fun and open....

Launched earlier this year and culminating in a sold-out filmmaker panel at the LA Film Festival in June, the Stateside phase of Global Media Makers saw the Fellows spend an entire month right here in Los Angeles, honing their craft through an intense curriculum of collaborative labs, workshops, networking events and hands-on creative seminars with some of the brightest names (and best technology) in American filmmaking. “Global Media Makers was designed to create a dialogue about important issues that will lead to better cross-cultural understanding—not only among filmmakers, but with their audiences around the world,” says Evan Ryan, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs....

On April 30, Film Independent Education presented its latest “Green Set” session—a virtual panel of experts in sustainable film and television production. Panelists included: Stephanie Dawson, producer and founding member of Women Independent Producers (Down with the King, Maya & Her Lover); Michael Kaliski, CEO/founder of environmental consultant Good Planet Innovation (commercial-focused); Jon Michael Kondrath, producer and CEO/founder of ReKon Productions (The Jessica Cabin, The Hyperions); and Jennifer Sandoval, Director of Business Development at Earth Angel (The Iron Claw, The Whale)....

Next month, we’re hosting the Film Independent Forum, our annual conference for independent filmmakers that proves it actually is what you know and who you know—not either/or. It’s a special year for the Forum, partly because it’s its tenth anniversary and partly because we’ve got two of the most groundbreaking people in the biz delivering the keynotes: writer/director Jill Soloway (Transparent, Afternoon Delight, United States of Tara, Six Feet Under) and Tim League (Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, Drafthouse Films and Fantastic Fest)....

But before the whirlwind of the past six months, Liu and producer Diane Quon workshopped Minding the Gap as Fellows in the 2017 Film Independent Documentary Lab and took the film to the Fast Track finance market at the 2017 LA Film Festival. That, plus years of tireless work resulted in a film described by The New York Times as being “a rich, devastating essay on race, class and manhood in the 21st century....

Likewise, dressing Chastain’s Tammy Faye Bakker was a dream job for costume designer Mitchell Travers, whose recent projects include last year’s big-budget musical In the Heights and Hustlers. His next project is the upcoming miniseries for Spectrum and Paramount–George and Tammy–about the tumultuous relationship between country music legends Tammy Wynette and George Jones. One of his personal favorites on the Tammy Faye set, Travers shares, was the pink and green dress she wears to a pool party, where the intrepid housewife/entrepreneur crashes a meeting hosted by Reverend Jerry Falwell....

Mad Men seasons 1-5: one week. Orange Is the New Black: 72hrs. The Killing season 1: 24 hours. —Kady Kamakate, Executive Assistant Because I have a young daughter, I possess a knowledge of Wonder Pets that can only be explained as a symptom of extreme binge viewing. –Josh Welsh, President I devoured all five seasons of Friday Night Lights during the first trimester of my first pregnancy. I cried at the end of almost every episode....