May 2004

I could just be romanticizing it now that I’ve moved, but in New York all the filmmakers I knew seemed to be creating by any means necessary—from Super-8 shorts to animation on their laptops while fundraising for a summer-shoot, to staging readings for a work-in-progress in between compiling documentary footage.

After more than twenty years in the business, I decided to quit my career as a costume designer. I was profoundly depressed by the excessive violence, sex, and emptiness in the scripts I was seeing and the movies I was working on.

It seems you can’t turn around these days without hearing people moan about the high cost of health insurance. Whether it’s presidential candidates duking it out in television commercials, small business owners worried about paying for insurance, or average Americans buried by the cost of prescription drugs, paying for health care is on everybody’s mind.

Long gone are the days when Austin, Texas was merely a breeding-ground for progressive types, presidential hopefuls, and music junkies. As home to the South-by-Southwest Film Festival (SXSW), Austin has become the independent filmmaker’s Eden. As first time filmmaker Allison Berg explains it, "I thought [SXSW] was one of the best festivals for my film to get into . . .

In the Flying Saucer café in Brooklyn, New York, Rodney Evans settles into the same chair he sat in to storyboard almost the entirety of his first feature, Brother to Brother. "I can’t draw," explains Evans, "so I would sketch out these stick figures in a spiral-bound notebook, and then a friend of mine who is an artist made them look like people.

There are two Sundance Film Festivals.

Everyone knows the value of networking, right?