Indie Film Hustle

10 stories

Indie Film HustleCinemaIFH 879: The Onion Co-Founder Reveals Why Most Comedy Scripts FAIL with Scott Dikkers What if the reason your comedy screenplay isn’t working has nothing to do with your jokes? What if the real problem began long before you wrote the first scene?

11.03

Indie Film HustleCinemaIFH 878: Why Most Screenwriters NEVER Finish Their Scripts with John Paxton Jr. There is a strange addiction in the creative world that very few filmmakers are willing to admit. We love talking about the movies we’re going to make.

10.27

Indie Film HustleCinemaIFH 877: Why This Oscar-Nominated Animator REFUSED to Play Hollywood’s Game with Bill Plympton There comes a moment in every independent filmmaker’s life when a difficult question must be answered: Are you making movies because Hollywood has given you permission, or because you simply cannot…

10.20

Indie Film HustleCinemaIFH 876: The Screenwriting Secret Behind ALIEN & TOTAL RECALL with Matt R. Lohr There is a strange irony in the world of screenwriting. We spend years searching for the perfect formula, the ideal three-act structure, the precise moment when a character must change, and the…

10.13

Indie Film HustleCinemaIFH 875: The Screenwriting Advice Hollywood Writers Actually Use with Ron Peters There is a romantic version of screenwriting that refuses to die. A writer sits alone, waits for inspiration to arrive, and suddenly brilliant pages pour effortlessly from somewhere beyond the…

10.06

Indie Film HustleCinemaIFH 874: Do You Really Need Film School to Become a Filmmaker? with Miranda Sajdak There is a question almost every aspiring filmmaker eventually encounters: Do I actually need film school? It sounds simple until you realize filmmaking careers rarely follow straight lines.

09.29

Indie Film HustleCinemaIFH 873: Film School Won’t Teach You This About Making Movies with Jason Kartalian There is a version of filmmaking that exists in textbooks, classrooms, diagrams, and carefully planned shot lists.

09.22

Indie Film HustleCinemaIFH 872: How One of the WORST Movies Ever Made Became a Cult Classic with Jackey Neyman There is something beautifully unpredictable about independent filmmaking. A movie can arrive with enormous expectations and disappear within months, while another film made with almost no money…

09.15

Indie Film HustleCinemaIFH 871: The Screenwriting Advice Hollywood Writers Actually Use with Andrew Bloomenthal There is an enormous difference between loving movies and understanding how filmmakers actually make them. Andrew Bloomenthal has spent years exploring that difference from both sides of the table.

09.08

Indie Film HustleCinemaIFH 870: He Waited 11 YEARS to Make His Movie—Then Jimmy Kimmel Changed Everything with Don Barris Hollywood has always sold aspiring filmmakers and performers the fantasy of being discovered. You write the perfect screenplay, perform at the right club, meet the right producer, and suddenly…

09.01

The small bracket on top of every camera, from a phone rig to an ARRI.

The hot shoe is where the flash goes, and the microphone, and the monitor, and whatever the next decade bolts on. Every camera has one and nobody photographs it. This magazine is named after it because that is where the whole business meets: the body, the glass, the light, the sound, and the person holding it.

I shot news in Gothenburg for nine years and documentary for hire after that, then stopped taking assignments to write about the tools. Since 2021 I live in Tokyo, ten minutes from the used-camera shops of Shinjuku, which is not an accident: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Ricoh and Sigma make almost everything worth pointing at a subject, and their own press writes about it first, in Japanese. So this magazine reads it there, and in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and in English from the reviewers who actually put a card in the slot — around eighty sources and thirty channels, counted and plotted so you can see what is moving.

Bodies and lenses, cinema cameras and drones, film and the darkroom, firmware and the software that finishes the picture, the rumours before the launch and the reviews after it, and the photographers and shows the rest of it is for. I test what I write about on a job before a word goes down. I shoot film on Sundays and do not think that makes me interesting.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link to whoever reported it. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the photographer or the maker. A story written in Japanese appears in Japanese, as its author set it down; the link goes to the original.

— Mara Lindqvist, Tokyo