BigShinyThing

BST: Why are you holding AMW this year?

ANDREW LOGAN: Jes Benstock of Living Cinema shot the last event but didn’t have enough money to edit. So he then raised money with a new idea which was to take it right back to 1972 and to show how culturally it had influenced so many people and things. With me, I suppose, at the head of it. It is very much a family and friends thing. Very family-orientated but absolutely huge at the same time.

Can anyone enter?

Yes. I think we have 19 or 20 entrants this year.

What are the criteria for entry?

The contestants kind of find their way there. We don’t have auditions. It’s about transformation. Of course, it would be nice to have hundreds of people. But it’s quite tight and everyone takes 2 minutes on stage. And if you’ve got 20 people on stage that takes an hour. It kind of limits itself — finds its own level.

Can you confirm who the judges are this year?

We’ve got Ken Russell, Zandra Rhodes, Richard O’Brien, Tim Curry, Amy Lamé, and Betty — my housekeeper of many many years. And Tony Elliott. And then Philip Hughes who gave me a wonderful show up in Ruthin Craft Centre up in North Wales and he also published the book on my work. Altogether there are about twelve.

[The judges tend to be] the kind of people I’ve been involved with. And people that I admire. I’m not into names, names mean nothing to me. It’s just a bit of paper. That’s not the point of it.

You’ve described AMW as a family affair. Can you explain a bit more about that?

My brother Quentin has been in quite a few now. And my sister has been in every one. My mother judged it a number of times. My brother Peter used to the music and him and his wife — they both entered it. It was in 1973, when Derek [Jarman] shot it. Peter was doing the music so he had to get up — as the music was playing, walk up and down. It has always been a family thing.

Where do the similarities to Miss World start and end?

Contestants have a questionnaire which they fill in. Daywear-swimwear-eveningwear. Great isn’t it? It’s three outfits. It’s also fantastic to have an interview. It’s such a simple idea really — we just enlarged on that. In 1972 Miss World was huge in the UK, like it is in India is now. Every household watched it. Every household! No one escaped it.

Crufts Dog Show was the real inspiration. I’d been to Crufts Dog Show and we had one of the forms, for the dogs. Which kind of inspired the form for AMW.

There have been several films made already of the contest. Can you tell us a bit about the film that was made of the 1978 contest?

[The director Richard Gayor] was interested in disappearing tribes — so he chose us. He had been to 1975 so wanted to film 1978 and actually made a very beautiful movie. That’s the movie you should see. It’s about the event and the build up. It was the first time that 35mm handheld cameras had been used in this country and it was lit beautifully. Very sensitively done. I remember the credits — they said the AMW in mirror pieces. We laid it out on velvet and threw it up in the air and then reversed it. It produced a wonderful, magical movie and it’s timeless. You look at it and you wouldn’t really know it was 1978.

This year’s theme is The Elements. Can you tell us about how the themes work?

[The central theme of transformation] is timeless. There is a continuum between this generation of contestants and previous ones. Sometimes, I’m sitting there and someone comes out and I think — I’ve seen this before. Of course I don’t say that — I smile and applaud. Of course I’ve seen it before — there are only so many things you can do with the human body. Even though some of the transformations are absolutely fantastic.

There is always a theme. But I don’t know what the contestants are going to come as. I have the form, I read out the name and the description of the outfit and we do that all the way through the performance.

When you launched AMW the UK was in recession — and now we are again. It seems that AMW comes back whenever we need it most.

When I started the event and as it unfolded, I saw more and more that I wanted to continue with this event ‘til I dropped dead — brought in on a wheelchair. It’s fascinating that the format remains exactly the same and yet you get these things that happen. We had the war in ‘82- that was Miss Aldershot [who won]. There was punk in ‘75 — that was shot by Mike Ballard — the art editor for Interview, Andy Warhol’s magazine. The Alternative Miss World seems to indicate what is happening — or what is going to happen.

What’s the most surprised you’ve been by what someone came out wearing?

I think it might have been before someone came out. And it was my friend, the late, great Divine. I met him through Zandra and he came to the Alternative Tower of London. It was 1977 — it was the Queen’s Jubilee and we had a day-long party and he came to that. We became firm friends and he co-hosted the 1978 event.

I was getting ready in a caravan at the back because it was being held in a circus tent. I’d only ever seen him as a man — as Glenn. And a door opened and there… was Divine. He said, The look on your face, I’ll never forget it. I was a bit surprised.

Most of the others… Ok. When the donkey fell of the catwalk. That was a surprise to me. The donkey was the throne because it was in a circus. The donkey was fine because he fell on all these soft contestants in their outfits. I really wanted to have an elephant but it’s a good thing we didn’t because if that had fallen on the contestants it would have been most unfortunate. The whole thing is about surprises — you never know what will happen. All you can do is stand there and let the thing unfurl.

This year, a lot of health and safety seems to have crept in. however, it means that you have to use your imagination even more — so if you can’t use fire — what will I use? The postitive effect is that it stretches the imagination even more.

I remember the last contest drew some controversy because the then director of the Royal Academy – Sir Norman Rosenthal – took part.

Norman’s great fun. He got some artists to help him out, including Sarah Lucas. He didn’t win, by the way.

Do you see AMW as anti-establishment?

It’s what people make it. I just put it on — that’s it. I leave all the interpretation to others.

Other than the films, what other documentation do you have of previous contests?

Each contestant before they go on is photographed. So we have a documentation right back to the beginning. David Bailey came one year — he did 1973 — and took some pictures. That documentation is really important.

I want to do a book of these wonderful images. I have everything here. I’m just waiting for someone to come along and say they’d like to do an AMW book which I’d be very happy with.

You’ve mentioned Piers Atkinson whose work is currently part of the Stephen Jones hat exhibition at the V&A. Do you feel like AMW has nurtured talents like his?

Piers started here in 1995 for the Fire AMW. He’s actually here [in the studio] today. He’d just left college and came up and helped me work on the contestant numbers that they wear.

We have all these funny little customs and you need someone to help out with them. He worked with me for a number of years and then went on to work with Zandra. He did Daily Rubbish for Fashion Week and now he’s producing a souvenir programme for AMW.

Have you ever held AMW outside of London?

It’s very English but I’ve negotiated many times over the years to get it held someone else in the world. Places such as Japan, America — which was going to be a huge tour of all the big cities of America. Fantastic! Well, that didn’t happen.

And India but then a man set himself alight for Miss World. And we thought, well it might be a bit difficult — they might get a bit muddled up… I would love to take it somewhere else. We have many Russians coming this year if we can get their visas sorted out.

I think AMW is very English but it would transfer somewhere else but it’s never had the opportunity.

To conclude, can you tell me a bit about Andrew Logan?

I was trained as an architect. I think I am very different from any other artist anyhow. I think my work is unique. There’s no one else working like I do. I just happen to be based in London. But I am a great traveller. If I wasn’t an artist I think I would have been a traveller.

[Thanks to Andrew and his team for the interview and photo access. AMW 2009 - The Elements, is at the Roundhouse, 2 May 2009. Book tickets here. Jes Benstock's film, The British Guide To Showing Off, is due for release later this year]

As with the defence of ‘homosexual panic’ in gay bashings, crimes of passion seem to have an automatic ‘get out of jail’ card. We were angered and dismayed to hear that Bertrand Cantat — who hit actress Marie Trintignant an estimated 19 times in one attack — has been freed from jail half way into his eight year sentence for her murder. Apparently a ‘model prisoner’, Cantat now intends to resume his career as a singer and no doubt benefit from the deeply dubious halo effect of being ‘the left wing popstar who smashed his girlfriend’s head in in a jealous rage’.

Born Jan. 21, 1962, in Boulogne-Billancourt, just outside Paris, Marie Trintignant started her film career at age 5 when she appeared in “Mon Amour, Mon Amour,” which was directed by her mother and starred her father. She went on to act in more than 50 films and nominated 5 times for a César. She was also the mother of four children.

La Meute (The Pack), a feminist organisation, said that Cantat’s release sent the wrong signal to men in France, where one woman is killed every three days by a partner.

Kerr starred in The King And I and From Here To Eternity but it is for her role as a sexually-deranged nun in Black Narcissus that we think she should be most fondly remembered.

She was nominated for the best actress Oscar six times and was given an honorary award by the Academy in 1994 (as is the way with brilliant actors who continuously miss out on the Academy’s votes). Kerr, who had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for a number of years, died in Suffolk on Tuesday.

Source: BBC.

In a très élégante piece of pre-film release publicity, The Simpsons feature in a spread with ubermodel Linda Evangelista and other fashion darlings.

Via Dlisted.

Criterion have released Beales of Grey Gardens, containing not-before-seen footage from the original documentary. According to the blurb:

The 1976 cinema vérité classic Grey Gardens, which captured in remarkable close-up the lives of the eccentric East Hampton recluses Big and Little Edie Beale, has spawned everything from a midnight-movie cult following to a Broadway musical, to an upcoming Hollywood adaptation. The filmmakers then went back to their vaults of footage to create part two, The Beales of Grey Gardens, a tribute both to these indomitable women and to the original landmark documentary’s legions of fans, who have made them American counterculture icons.

We agree with mr FourFour who says that Grey Gardens started to make a whole lot more ‘sense’ once he turned on the subtitles [we nicked the above still from his blog]. We’ll be watching the new edition with them on as well. “I really see better with the whole thing over my face”. Indeed.

Via WOW Report.

A five-time Academy Award nominee for best director, most recently for 2001′s Gosford Park, Altman finally won a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2006.

“No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake than I have,” Altman said while accepting the award. “I’m very fortunate in my career. I’ve never had to direct a film I didn’t choose or develop. My love for filmmaking has given me an entree to the world and to the human condition.”

Obituary at Seattle Pi.

Is social networking clique-ifying? Cult director Michel Gondry has chosen iMeem (which touts itself as providing ‘the best of social media’) to market his upcoming film instead of using the ubiquitous (read mainstream) and amateur-looking (read ugly) MySpace. In a rather nice device, users can contribute their own dreams to promote The Science of Sleep. The site is the work of a collaboration between iMeem and lovely magazine RES.

[Via Protein Feed]

About six months ago we noticed the noise online regarding Snakes on a Plane – an apparent b-movie that had sparked the imaginations of a gazzilion bloggers and film geeks with its silly and immediately get-able title. The noise was roughly split into three camps: those who thought the film sounded great but silly and wrote about it seriously; geeks who thought the whole thing was a hoax and lunatics who used the whole idea to build wealth of photos, shorts, blogs and general arsing about on the theme of being trapped on a plane with a bunch of snakes.

At the time, the BST line was that the film was a nice postmodern exercise in ‘build it and they will come’ type hype. The apparent in character endorsement of proposed star Samuel L Jackson helped. We theorised that New Line Cinema — the film’s distributor — was chucking the meme out there to see if it generated enough interest to justify making a movie. Hell — it beats laying the $100m-odd wager that equates to most film releases nowadays. We thought we’d wait and see what happened and to be honest we were also hedging our bets.

But in the event something even more interesting has occurred. Snakes on a Plane and its fantastic premise (that’s an elevator pitch if ever we saw one…) has become the world’s first mainstream consumer generated film with ideas (and catchphrases) thought up by bloggers rumoured to be integrated into the final ‘plot’.

Jackson himself is quoted as saying:

I hope that people in studios are looking and paying attention and trying to figure out how and why this phenomenon took place. I hope that there’s some young filmmaker somewhere that knows, that understands that now they could put a premise on the internet — ‘my premise for this film is… boom… who has a scene?’ — and people will start writing the first scene for that particular film, and then they’ll choose that scene. Somebody’ll write the next scene, and they’ll choose that particular scene, until they end up with a whole film, and then somebody
will say, ‘Who do you think should be in this film?’, and then they go through that, and they come up with a whole cast list of people, and if everybody sends a dollar in, we can hire these particular people and shoot this particular film, and we’ll have a film that’s all-inclusive, that’s something that a lot of people came together on, and had a collaborative passion about. And I think that would be kind of a wonderful thing to see happen. And hopefully that will be somewhere down the line… [audience applauds]

Source: Henry Jenkins’ blog. Note: We tip his upcoming tome, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, as the Next Big Thing.

We have written about collaborative film projects before [Swarm of Angels, the 1 second film project] — but a mass market studio one effort is really big news and — as Jackson says, has the potential to change the model for the future. Our friends at Addictive also didn’t miss this story — they’ve produced a trailer for the film [above].

Snakes on a Plane is released on 18th August.

Swarm of angels invites 50,000 “angels” to each pay £25 to fund a £1 million feature film. The Angels are being invited in batches — first 100, now 1,000, next 5,000, 25,000 and 50,000 — with the level of input being determined by the donation (£25 being the entry level). The first very privileged 100 places have now gone, but the 1,000 Swarm is still open (just about). The film –when it comes out — will be produced under Creative Commons so as hackable and remixable as it comes.

A Swarm of Angels reinvents the Hollywood model of filmmaking to create cult cinema for the Internet era. It’s all about making an artistic statement, making something you haven’t seen before. Why are we doing this? Because we are tired of films that are made simply to please film executives, sell popcorn, or tie-in with fastfood licensing deals.

We want to invent the future of film. Call it Cinema 2.0.
To do it we need your help.

VJ Collective The Kleptones have just signed up to do the soundtrack so you’ll be in good company. Via Protein feed. [See also our earlier post about Mod Films]

The news is a symbolic nail in the coffin of the 30 second spot. Swedish director and screenwriter Vilgot Sjoman, who sadly died on Sunday, and director Claes Eriksson, had sued the TV4 channel after it put commercial breaks in the broadcasts of their movies in 2002. Two films, Sjoman’s Alfred and Eriksson’s The Shark Who Knew Too Much were made before Swedish broadcasting laws allowed commercial stations to put commercial breaks throughout movies and the Svea Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling saying that the station had violated the directors’ integrity and copyright because they had not given permission for the breaks. Story via Newsvine.

A bad artist imitates, a good artist steals.

Pablo Picasso’s quote is the mantra for production company MOD Films, who plan to hook remix culture into feature-film making. Hype or heat? We’re not sure. They’ve won funding from NESTA, The Australian Film Commission and others, and have their first film, Sanctuary — an SF short — due for release ‘real soon now’, according to their bloggy website. They’re saying all the right things, but will it fly? Handily, they’re presenting at a London geekfest later this month — we’ll be there and report back what we see. Stay tuned.

The ‘how to’ could be a manifesto for remix culture:

Upload your own video, photos and music; Explore shared content; Grab what you want.

First collection of clips ripe for remixing? Things on kittens. Of course. More seriously, this could be a very useful tool for communities-of-interest who have lots of individually-recorded footage of events, and who want to collaboratively edit it down to a single film — think weddings, club nights, street protests: welcome to group mash-ups. Last year we pointed at the Glastonbury Festival coverage on Flickr as a tipping point for photosharing. This year we’re predicting Glasto ’06 The Movie — assembled and edited in close-to-real-time on something like Jumpcut, from video and still images contributed by festival goers themselves via their videophones… sponsorhip opportunity, anyone?

Sourced (along with reviews of loads more sharing/remix sites) at Techcrunch.

Nigeria has the world’s third largest film industry — ‘Nollywood’ — after the US and India.

Nigeria has perhaps the most distinguished literary tradition in Africa; Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri and Ken Saro-Wiwa are the best-known writers, but it is clear that Nigeria’s home video industry has no pretensions to high art. What it’s all about is money. Nollywood movies were originally financed by importers of blank video tapes as a way of promoting sales of their product — and commerce remains king.

And according to a recent Guardian Unlimited report, the street markets of London represent one of Nollywood’s most important distribution channels. Evidently Londoners just can’t get enough low-budget VHS schlocky horror and African bling.

But the directors of these amazingly successful genre hits have bigger plans:

“They sell a lot of our films in Peckham and in Dalston market [in London],” says Paul Obazele, the veteran producer on American Dream, who has already turned out four movies this year, and plans a US cinema opening for this latest effort. “But Peckham is becoming too small for us. We have decided to take on the world.”

We reckon they’re in with a chance. All they need is a noughties Tarantino to pick up on their mashup of Hollywood glam and Nigerian pop culture, pump up the violence, and glue on a saleably funktastic afrobeat soundtrack — the proto-house grooves of Fela Kuti’s Expensive Shit, maybe. Today Peckham, tomorrow the world.

Up until few weeks ago we were completely unaware of Grey Gardens, a biodoc about Big and Little Edie, mother and daughter, and distant cousins of Jackie Onassis. The film was made by the Maysles five years after their infamous Rolling Stones film Gimme Shelter and is clearly massively influential — it’s even been lauded as one of the finest documentaries ever made. And yet somehow it didn’t hit our radar — until now.

Suddenly references to Grey Gardens are popping up everywhere in our queer little corner of the world. A mash up of Little Edie prancing around in her leotard to Madonna’s ‘Hung Up’ has appeared on YouTube (via PerezHilton.com)and Kylie Minogue has been styled as her in the new issue of Another Magazine.

We give it a few more weeks before it hits the mass market — the musical is due to open off Broadway next week order your copy of Grey Gardens (REGION 1) (NTSC) quick.

According to analysts at American Technology Research (ATR), Apple has announced a special event next Tuesday promising “fun new products”, which they have interpreted as full length film downloads. ATR has said in a research note to clients that it sees a “greater than 50% chance” that Apple will launch a movie download service on Tuesday, with the increasingly media-centric computer company having just reached 1 billion downloads via iTunes. The three year old service is now on track to reach the 1.5 billion milestone by the end of the year.

Apple is attempting to drive the video on demand market by offering firstly music video content followed by the world’s first legal TV download service last year.

Story via MediaTel.

The BBC reports that Michael Winterbottom’s new film, The Road To Guantanamo, will be released simultaneously at cinemas, online and on DVD, becoming the first film to be released via all three channels at the same time.

This news comes only a couple of weeks after Stephen Soderburgh announced simultaneous release of Bubble cinematically and on DVD. More on the impact of these releases on the cinema industry in our earlier report.

Mr Anderson explains:

Bottom line: even in Hollywood, the home of the blockbuster, hits are losing their power. It’s not nearly as dire as in music, but it’s trending in the same direction. Does this mean the end of movies? Not at all–there have never been more films made, just as there has never been more music available than today, despite the fact that the bestsellers sell less.

It’s not that people aren’t watching films and listening to music, it’s that they’re watching different films and different music–we’re just not following the herd to the same hits the way we used to. I’d guess that most of the decline in box office is due to the rise of the DVD, not a loss of interest in movies. Likewise for music, where the ubiquitous white earbuds suggest that music has never been a bigger part of our culture, despite the fact that CD sales are back to mid-90s levels.

Guess Tom Cruise should start looking for a new job.

Via boing boing.

Hot on the heels of the news that a possible new TV show won’t be distributed via television, today sees a movie released simultaneously in cinemas and on cable, heralding a threat to the traditional $25 billion-plus worldwide ‘theatrical window’ during which first-run films are only screened at cinemas.

Technology Review has the story:

Today is the release date for Bubble, a new film directed by Soderbergh and released by HDNET Films, an upstart film company cofounded by Mark Cuban. Setting Bubble apart [...] is that the film will be available in cinemas and on the HDNET cable channel on the same day. What’s more, just four days later, it will be out on DVD. In other words: there will be no “window” between its theatrical release and its availability for home viewing.

The gap between theatrical release and viewership on cable and home video sales has been shrinking steadily for some time. In 1993, the average time between theatrical debut and availability on video was 191 days. By 2003, it had shrunk to 155. Occasionally, poor-performing titles will be rushed to DVD, to capture any remaining interest in them; but Bubble’s release is the first time a film is set for both a theatrical and cable television release.

Cinema owners don’t share Hollywood’s enthusiasm for quick DVD and cable releases as a cure for current the slump in film revenues, however. Quoted in The Hollywood Reporter in August 2005, National Association of Theatre Owners president John Fithian rebuked a call for compressed windows from soon-to-be Disney CEO Robert Iger thus:

(Iger) should know that Hollywood studios would be merely one shriveled vendor among many in that new world of movies-as-commodities-only.

This rather self-defeating view — that given instant availability of DVD or online delivery, people will simply stop gong to cinemas — has sparked a passionate riposte from HDNET’s Mark Cuban asking ‘just what business are the cinemas really in?’:

How sad is it when the President of the National Assoc of Theater Owners doesn’t think his members can create a better movie going experience than what we can see in our houses and apartments ?

Guess what John, I can whip up a mean steak, but I still like to go to restaurants. Because I enjoy it. I enjoy getting out of the house with family, friends, who ever.

Every single Mavs [basketball] game is on TV. It wasnt that long ago that some people in the sports business thought that having games on TV would reduce attendance. After all, why go to the game when you can watch it for free on TV ? Then someone decided to do some research and as it turns out, the more games you broadcast on TV, the more people who go to your games. At the NBA, when we do our analysis to determine the revenue opportunity in any given market, the number of games broadcast is one of the criteria analyzed.

He’s got a point: surely the experience of the cinema, is — or should be — about more than the films? Maybe it’s time for the multiplex chains to start re-examination of their ‘pack em in’ strategy and start looking at why people go out to see films in the first place…

The full film is on the weirdhat site. It demonstrates beautifully the formula of Lucas’s films: “In a galaxy, far, far away …etc.” Or as Mr Weirdhat writes:

Okay, holy crap. This is awesome. I think it justifies the whole thing, and I’m only four minutes into it. The first appearance of Palpatine in TPM and AOTC is ON THE SAME FRAME. And at the same time in ROTJ, Vader is telling Moff Jerjerrod that the Emperor is coming.