Film school has always been a sketchy
proposition. Attendance can be as costly as the budget for a small film, and
the educational value of attending classes to learn things you could ostensibly
pick up on your own or through apprenticeships means that the whole experience
could amount to a waste of time. For the right person, however, film school
offers the ideal entry point to comprehending the craft and the industry. There
are numerous educational opportunities for budding filmmakers in New York
City—some more noteworthy than others. If you’re looking at your choices, here
are a few that merit some consideration.

Tisch School of the Arts at New York
University

Scorsese went there—but so did Brett Ratner.
NYU’s well-founded role in feeding a diverse crowd of filmmaking talent into
the world speaks not only to its vast influence and historical definition, but
also the discordance of the environment. Nanette Burstein’s 2004 reality series
Film School provides a keen window
into the frustrations of NYU’s highly competitive graduate program, where
filmmakers of various ages and ethnicities take advantage of the school’s
massive technical resources and often fail. But for every missed opportunity,
there’s a groundbreaking work that manages to get noticed by the right people.
The three-year M.F.A. program provides the usual mixture of courses in
craftsmanship and creative thinking, but the more intriguing opportunity lies
with the school’s MBA/MFA dual degree program in producing, now in its third
year.

www.gradfilm.tisch.nyu.edu

Ghetto Film School

Predominantly aimed at teenagers with minority
backgrounds, the Ghetto Film School is one of the more unique educational
programs in the country, creating opportunities for young filmmakers whose work
might otherwise go unnoticed. Based in the South Bronx, the school boasts
support from high-profile filmmakers including Spike Jonze and Lee Daniels. It
also recently partnered with the Cinema School, a new public high school
dedicated to the filmmaking craft that opened at East 172nd
Street in the Soundview section of the Bronx.

www.ghettofilm.org

The Film Program at Columbia University’s
School of the Arts

Positioned as a rival to NYU, the Columbia
University School of the Arts’ Film Division has plenty of reasons to stand out
in the crowd, starting with its faculty. The school’s staff includes a broad
range of accomplished filmmakers with firm ties to local and international film
culture, including Bette Gordon, Tom Kalin, Mira Nair and Ramin Bahrani. Famous
alumni? Everyone from Kathryn Bigelow to Peter Farrelly. Generally acknowledged
as a haven for aspiring screenwriters, Columbia requires students to work on
each other’s projects, encouraging a collaborative, rather than overtly
competitive, approach.

arts.columbia.edu/film

New York Film Academy

You’ve probably seen the subway ads for this
factory of a film school, where students can take individual courses or
complete a two-year M.F.A. program in production. As NYFA also has a location
in Universal City, Calif., students looking for a highly immersive experience
may be let down by the school’s commercial nature, but most alumni say that
technical classes will get the job done if that’s all you need to know. Learn
to shoot and cut your film; just don’t expect a fun ride while doing so.

www.nyfa.com

SLAVA RUBIN, CO-FOUNDER OF ONLINE FUNDRAISING SITE INDIEGOGO.COM:

In
the current independent filmmaking industry, online fundraising is
accelerating, production and distribution costs are declining and social
media is connecting filmmakers and fans. With the proliferation of
social media and online video, there is more content than ever, making
it more important for filmmakers to focus on promotion, building their
fanbase and rising above the noise.

For
an aspiring filmmaker, “big studio money” is rarely attainable,
especially for someone trying to break into the industry. Filmmakers
know that they have to start small and tap their colleagues, friends and
influencers for financial and creative resources. In today’s online
world, there are more possibilities available beyond just a filmmaker’s
inner social circle. Consequently, “Do-It-Yourself” (DIY) is no longer
the average filmmaker’s mantra. It has evolved into “Do-It-With-Others”
(DIWO).

ARIANNA BOCCO, VP OF ACQUISITIONS AND PRODUCTION AT IFC FILMS:

Filmmakers
should look at other films comparable to their own that have gone
through a similar process and were successful. I think there are a lot
more opportunities now with the ability not only to premiere at a
festival but to take advantage of the publicity and marketing of a
festival to actually exploit the film. We look for filmmakers who will
have staying power as an artist and with whom we would want to work with
again. Any filmmaker who shows individuality—and, of course, talent—is
someone we would want to promote. One other important factor is the
ability to collaborate—if you are a first-time filmmaker, then this
would be your first experience with a distributor. We look for
filmmakers who are open-minded.

DAN NUXOLL, PROGRAM DIRECTOR FOR ROOFTOP FILMS:

A
lot of filmmakers don’t believe this, but, as far as festival
programmers are concerned, the most important thing of all is that the
film speaks for itself. I am not going to claim that there aren’t
festivals that will gravitate towards a film that has some hot new actor
in it—of course that happens, and if you do have some budding superstar
in your cast, by all means make sure that the word gets out and that
this detail is made clear in your cover letter to the festival, etc. But
also note that casting a C-list actor or sitcom secondary character
will not likely help to get your film into one of the better festivals.
In fact, it might hurt if their presence is a distraction. And don’t
spend a fortune on packaging and glossy press kits: All this stuff goes
into the garbage as soon as the film is received. Think about it:
Festival programmers are going to watch hundreds—perhaps thousands—of
films in a few months. All of the publicity materials are dead weight.
Nobody but the intern is going to see those materials, so save your
money and save the trees and don’t go nuts with the packaging and press
materials. Also, research the festivals and pay attention to what sort
of films they program. Some festivals program lots of genre films,
others don’t program any. Send your sci-fi gangster film to Fantastic
Fest, but don’t send it to Human Rights Watch. That might seem like an
obvious point to make, but you would probably be surprised by what gets
sent our way.

JESSICA EDWARDS, FOUNDER OF PRODUCTION/PUBLICITY COMPANY FILM FIRST:

This
is the Internet age, so use it to your advantage. Get on it early and
update it often: photos from shooting, merchandise that can be sold,
small local press stories where you filmed. Target the audience you are
going after. Is it a music-related film? Let the music blogs know. Is it
a design film? Give those blogs an early photo or a clip to build
excitement for your eventual release. Does the film have an actor with a
lot of fans? Provide fan sites with photos from the set. Put the film
on people’s radar as early as possible. Nothing in life is free: You are
hiring a publicist to act as your advocate and represent you and your
film in the way you want the press and audience to view it. And it’s not
an easy job. You should expect to pay at least $3,000 a month
for a documentary that doesn’t have a lot of talent attached and up to
$6,000 for a narrative film with many actors and a planned premiere and
press days. And enquiries should be made to your publicist about their
current slate.

BRIAN NEWMAN, CONSULTANT, SPRINGBOARD MEDIA:

In
today’s marketplace, it is the rare film—the extremely rare film—that
makes back more than $500,000 in profit, and it’s probably more like
$300,000. That’s not an exaggeration. Talk to producers who have played
Sundance and won awards about what they sold their film for, and how
much they received on the back end. The best strategy is to spend less
than this amount on your film. If costs go above that, you won’t make
the money back in today’s market. If you raise more than that, spend it
on the marketing and distribution of your film, or on the next film
because, no matter what you think or what anyone tells you, that is the
real ceiling for profits today. Keep your costs down the old-fashioned
way: beg, borrow and even steal to keep costs as low as possible. Spend
money where it matters— good lighting and sound. You can’t afford any
actor who will make any difference to the bottom line on sales, so don’t
spend money there. Follow the tax incentive money closely. Use your
social networks for favors, from equipment to expendables. Keep your
dream budget a dream until this nightmare economy changes.

This year is proving to be no exception:

Allen arrived at Cannes with You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, an amusing ensemble piece that intelligently juggles themes involving death and sex with a dexterity reminiscent of the filmmaker’s 1980s period—except the setting was, once again, London, not New York.

Leaving the city was the best thing that ever happened to Woody Allen. While Annie Hall and Manhattan retain their combined stature as definitive New York cinema, his urban dramas made at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st reeked of anachronisms. Casting younger actors to play the rambling “Woody” character yielded an embarrassing blend of contemporary and dated sensibilities. When Jason Biggs bitched at the camera in Anything Else (2003), you could practically sense Allen nibbling his fingernails behind it, slowly coming to the realization that he no longer belonged here.

Recently, Allen told a group of reporters in Madrid that New York’s price tag has grown too high for his movies. New Yorkers were not pleased. “Hey, Woody Allen,” read a Gawker headline, “Please Stop Bitching About New York.” But the reality is that Allen’s bitching belongs overseas. Instead, our culture pundits should take aim at Oliver Stone, a New York filmmaker long overdue for an exodus.

Allen’s practical reason for leaving New York—that nobody would fund his movies—is plausible since he churned out one box office dud after another. When Allen left the states, however, he was welcomed abroad with open arms. Match Point, his 2005 London-set noir starring Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, landed him his best reviews in years. And Vicky Cristina Barcelona made him an Oscar contender once again. Both movies have a unique sense of the environments where they take place, filtered through Allen’s exotic vision of European luxuries. His brief return to his old stomping grounds last year with the disjointed Larry David vehicle Whatever Works only furthered the need for him to stay away from Manhattan. Allen belongs in his new terrain, making movies that at least give him the chance to escape his old shell. In Europe, Allen makes distinctive fantasies, whereas his recent New York comedies are merely out of touch.

Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, an unnecessary sequel to his 1987 classic, hits theaters this week a mere two days after the release of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. Although Stone’s followup ostensibly updates the vision of elite stockbroker culture first portrayed in his initial installment, he appears to suffer from his own Woody Allen problem.

The movie’s opening act is a rush of engaging drama, with Shia LaBeouf playing a slick trader dating original hustling criminal Gordon Gekko’s daughter (played by Carey Mulligan). Gekko is portrayed by Michael Douglas with the same smarminess he originally brought to the role. This time, however, he slips into the plot as a whiny dad hoping to make amends with his estranged kid. His feeble attempts at reconciliation turn an initially engaging story about fiscal corruption on the crest of the 2008 stock market crash into sentimental gibberish. Call it the Darth Vader syndrome: Just as George Lucas turned his iconic villain into a pathetic child with the origin story of the Star Wars prequels, Money Never Sleeps destroys the legacy of Gordon Gekko by making him seem sympathetic.

In the original Wall Street, Gekko represented a particularly gruesome New York state of mind, and the character virtually served as an expansion of the city around him. The movie’s final shot shows the reformed Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) walking up the steps of a courthouse, after helping the cops bust Gekko for his illegal business transactions. The camera pulls back to reveal a bird’s eye view of the city, suggesting that the island of Manhattan contains millions of Gekkos—an unkillable contagion. That’s what makes the movie timeless, and the detached view of rich family drama in the sequel so listless. Gekko was a symbol. By turning him soft, Stone has killed his most famous creation.

By not getting Gordon Gekko, Stone demonstrates that he doesn’t get New York. When Allen’s grip on New York faded, he fled. Stone should follow suit. Money Never Sleeps feels like it was made by an outsider, and probably should have been outsourced.

But if we throw Stone and reject his mangled vision of the city, there are other filmmakers waiting to fill their shoes. Sean Baker’s observant Prince of Broadway (which opened earlier this month) delivers a sharp portrait of Downtown counterfeiters, a group of illegal immigrants plagued by family troubles and skirmishes with the law. Chop Shop, Ramin Bahrani’s 2007 tale of life in a Queens junkyard, emphasizes the agony of the lower class by displaying the work routine of a child (he also directed Man Push Cart about a Pakistani immigrant who sells coffee and bagels from a Manhattan pushcart). Josh and Benny Safdie’s recent Daddy Longlegs focuses on an eternally frustrated New York City projectionist constantly forced to choose between work obligations and responsibilities toward his children.

These movies feature unpolished, hardened urban characters that come closer to expressing the local zeitgeist than anything in Stone’s return to Wall Street. Money Never Sleeps signals that Stone, like Allen before him, needs to wake up—and pack up and leave.

Katie Aselton directs and stars as Annie, the giddy but sexually frustrated wife of Darren (Parenthood star Dax Shepard). When the couple’s joint sevenyear-itch sets in, they get to talking about allowing each other a single evening of sexual freedom. After a bit of hesitant bedroom chatter, they agree to the stunt. But the tension of the unknown hangs in the air.

Aselton is best remembered as the female counterpoint to real-life hubby Mark Duplass in The Puffy Chair (which he co-directed with brother Jay), and here she guides the action in the tradition of Duplass’ earlier works, using shaky-cam techniques and improvised dialogue to situate her airtight concept in a naturalistic setting. This off-the-cuff maneuver generally leads to dicey territory, but Shepard and Aselton generate enough playful chemistry together to make the setup feel convincing enough. That’s the first reason why The Freebie doesn’t have the obvious failings that so many ill-conceived relationship-centered indies sport. But its inventiveness mainly emerges from the manner in which Aselton maneuvers the credibility of the performances.

With the plot embedded in the title, The Freebie initially comes across as a quaint romcom. Despite its airy exterior, however, Aselton takes a dark turn that moves it away from easy gags and into a more nuanced take on human behavior. The prolonged sequence in which Annie and Darren go their separate ways to seduce strangers in the night plays out with a fair amount of suspense: Who will score first?

The fallout is predictably difficult to watch—devolving, as I suppose it must, into a shouting match of hurt lovers. Aselton wisely leaves a fair amount of ambiguity in the scene, although the abrupt end suggests a missing third act. It feels too sudden, even if that’s the point. With its abrupt cut to black, Aselton portrays her characters’ relationship as a constant work in progress, but all good stories must come to an end.

–
The Freebie
Directed by Katie Aselton
Runtime: 80 min.

The worst bastardization of New York high society since Woody Allen’s recent domestic ventures, The Extra Man is a grating one-note comedy posing as something more. An unnaturally stilted Paul Dano plays Louis Ives, the sort of well-heeled young gentleman who went extinct half a decade ago. Losing his job at a Princeton prep school leads Louis to resettle in New York City, where he rooms with middle-aged loon Henry Harrison (Kevin Kline), a washed-up playwright and high-class gigolo. The titular “extra man,” Henry spends his days escorting wealthy older women about town, hiding his insecurities in arbitrary companionship.

Kline’s slapstick certainly steals the show, but since The Extra Man rarely makes its punchlines work, his performance easily stands out. Co-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini worked with Jonathan Ames (a former New York Press columnist) to adapt his novel, but the script simply dawdles in the absurdity of the tale without allotting much depth to its characters. Louis falls for the equally bland Mary (Katie Holmes), his co-worker at an environmental magazine, while the young man engages in a series of ludicrous social outings with his patronizing elder roommate. John C. Reilly shows up as a zany bearded tenant, speaking in a ridiculous falsetto that’s never funny. Only Klein seems like a good fit for Ames’ satiric portrait of the big city. A highlight reel of his comic bits would make for a much better movie.

The directors initially showed promise with the great documentary-fiction hybrid American Splendor, a moving portrait of the recently deceased cartoonist Harvey Pekar. The distinguishing trait of Pekar’s work was his penchant for turning mundane matters into dark comedies starring himself. Pekar would surely disapprove of the falsity on display in The Extra Man, but he might write a decent comic about the torturous experience of watching it.

Zoe Kazan is contemplating suicide. No, not in real life, where she’s doing just fine, thank you very much. But she’s had it with that dubious realm of interactivity known as Facebook. So it may be time for online suicide.

“I think I’m getting off of it,” says the 26-year-old actress. “I’m getting requests from too many weirdoes. They send me these messages and I’m like, ‘I really don’t want to know what you thought about my tits, OK?’”

Kazan’s fleeting topless scene opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Revolutionary Road hardly defines her potential in a slew of other screen and stage performances, and her expression of disgust over those perennial Facebook stalkers mainly seems like a point of pride rather than simply a need for privacy. Maybe it would have been a different story if they chose to compliment her acting strengths, too.

But there’s an additional level of depth to Kazan’s imminent Facebook departure, as it speaks to her tendency to resist the spotlight where so many other young female stars of the tenuous breakout variety waltz right into it. Of course, Kazan could do that with ease: Physically, she has the petite appeal of a Zooey Deschanel 2.0, her expressive blue eyes seemingly bursting out her diminutive noggin in an almost-hyperbolic image of pixie cuteness. But that’s exactly the kind of depiction that Kazan nimbly rejects.

“I actually think this is one of the ways that culture has operated to keep women in a subordinate position,” she says. “They have to think about their weight all the time, and not how they’re going to get ahead in the world. I would hope that the way I look is not where people put all their attention.”

As it happens, they do and they don’t: There are two versions of Zoe Kazan, at constant odds with each other. After her Revolutionary role, Kazan was situated as an indie starlet on the brink of major fame. She’s had a few gigs since then to support that contention, including appearances in the airtight studio productions It’s Complicated and I Hate Valentine’s Day, in addition to the overly cute Sundance breakout Happythankyoumoreplease. In late 2007, she was cast as the Flash’s wife in George Miller’s unrealized Justice League movie. New avenues of exposure enshroud her career.

But then there’s the other Zoe Kazan. The one visible as a shy New York college girl suffering from epileptic seizures and romantic confusion alike in Bradley Rust Gray’s poetically inspired The Exploding Girl. There’s the Zoe Kazan currently bounding around onstage as an aggressive weed dealer in Martin McDonagh’s new Broadway production A Behanding in Spokane, where she holds her own opposite a maniacal Christopher Walken on a daily basis. The potential here makes for an appealing contrast to the market-driven forces behind her nascent “It” girl status. But which side wins out? Kazan insists she’s content to evade the limelight—or maybe just mess with it.

“When people take on certain roles, I think they do it to be a movie or TV star,” she tells me. “I feel really lucky that I can play different roles.” That whole “I feel really lucky” racket sounds too familiar. I’m not convinced, and tell her so: You’re still doing Hollywood movies, I insist. People know your name.

“Oh, I know,” she says, and suddenly starts talking really fast. Defense mode. “I just mean, if you look at someone who took a lot of similar roles, look at—I don’t want to condemn anyone who’s still alive, but look at somebody like Katharine Hepburn. She played really similar roles over and over again. She made a whole career out of it. She was a very fine actress, there’s a certain thing that comes when you do that. People love you, but they identify you with that role. You don’t get that much range. I’m not interested in that.”

But Kazan wasn’t always so picky. After completing her undergraduate work at Yale, she began auditioning for various roles. It just so happened, she says, that the bad stuff didn’t gel with her style. “I auditioned for a lot of crap,” she says. “If I had been cast in any of it, things wouldn’t have worked out for me.” Pretentious but true: Kazan never put much effort into carving out a niche for herself. “The truth of the matter is that I don’t have some grand plan,” she says. “That would be cheesy. You just have to be ready. You can’t just be a kid with a crazy dream.”

Kazan may not realize it, but she simultaneously rejects and plays into the rise-to-fame myth: She has cultivated a name for herself and a résumé that gives her an aura of prestige, but remains free of the bonds typically  associated with young
celebrities—particularly young women—in the entertainment industry.
From Marilyn Monroe to Lindsay Lohan, America’s cult of personality has
been historically unkind to youthful female performers. In general,
they get pigeonholed as voracious sex bombs or tragic figures uncertain
of the image they want to project. When Brittany Murphy died, pundits
tended to focus on how sad she looked in photos. South Park wasn’t far off in its depiction of a country coming together for the joint slaughter of Britney Spears.

Kazan’s
diversity of projects helps her maintain artistic cred, but she also
remains free of industrial stigmas by the sheer virtue of her cuteness.
Bear with me here: In Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom, feminist
scholar Diane Negra discusses the nascent career of Shirley Temple and
her peers, identifying cuteness as “an image of juvenile vitality that
displaced the specter of the wan, malnourished child of the
Depression.” Perhaps this offers the connective tissue between Kazan’s
various performances: She’s an adorable refuge from a contemporary
climate marked by innumerable problems. Her characters tend to absorb
other people’s issues.

In The Exploding Girl, she
not only deals with her ailing relationship, but contends with the
non-platonic feelings of her longtime friend. When Walken’s racist
persona in Behanding casually drops the n-word, she admonishes
him—while her black boyfriend remains silent. New York magazine called the character “a principled idiot.” The New York Times aptly described her onstage persona in The Seagull as
“terminally unhappy,” but she remains determined. Time after time, it
seems, Kazan portrays an aestheticized Face of Our Times.

Offstage and offscreen, Kazan lives a pretty ordinary life. With her boyfriend, Paul Dano—who watched her practice her fake seizures for The Exploding Girl—she likes
to check out retrospectives of old movies at Film Forum and the Walter
Reade Theater. She freely calls herself “a real flirt” and refers to
acting as “just a business” that she doesn’t like to discuss among
friends. She shuns constant suggestions from peers that she should move
to L.A.

“There’s no dearth of
work here,” she says. Someone who knows her well said that her
coquettish persona in Behanding is a “stupider” version of Kazan
herself. “I have the courage of my convictions,” she says.

She
also has a famous relative, which probably doesn’t hurt, but Kazan—the
granddaughter of legendary Hollywood director Elia—shrugs off the
connection. “I assume that my last name opened doors at the beginning
of my career, because people were curious about me in a way that they
wouldn’t be if my name was Zoe Smith,” she says.

“But
I would expect at this point that I wouldn’t be able to keep working
just because of my last name.” Her parents are screenwriters. “They
were just concerned I wouldn’t be able to make a living,” she says.

Nonetheless, I happen to run across an article from Variety in
1957 where Elia Kazan himself proclaims that “television has taken over
as the medium of mediocrity,” justifying his decision to stick with
film, just as his granddaughter has. So maybe it’s in her blood. Either
way, Kazan’s hardly a figure of nepotism. She’s a righteous symbol, as
far as those things go—but only to the extent that audiences can
project their desires onto her poetically engrossing gaze. She may not
play inspiring characters, but we root for them anyway. In essence,
Kazan has perfected the art of the underdog.

In
due time, Kazan will have to make some serious choices. Hollywood keeps
calling and the flashy photo shoots beckon. She ought to stick with The Exploding Girl path,
and she knows it. But right now, Kazan is watching a lot of bad movies,
which she does for strategic purposes. “I don’t want to see something
that’s going to have a big impact on me, because I don’t want it to
affect the show I’m in,” she says. “So I go see a lot of really bad
movies between shows.” Such as? “I saw Step Up 2: The Streets between shows,” she says. “It pumps you up, makes you feel good, and has no impact on you whatsoever.” With Behanding set for a 16-week run, she says, “I’ll be seeing a lot of bad movies.”

But
hopefully she won’t be cast in one. For now, her cultured set of values
remains intact, but she knows the judgmental beast of the industry all
too well. “It’s a reality that women get paid less than men and get
worse roles,” she says. “But what are you gonna do, whine about it?
It’s part of the entertainment system. I still get to play lots of
great parts.” In her verbal resistance to industrial norms, Kazan
provides a potentially seismic role model for young actresses in the
era of celebrity oversaturation. Just don’t ask to be her friend on
Facebook.

It’s not some FlashForward plot made real, but a movie set—a big one. I notice papers on a nearby piece of equipment identifying the production: Boy Wonder. It appears to have a sizable budget and actors with major TV cred.

This sort of sight may be common in Manhattan’s photogenic nabes, but it’s unusual here. Then again, Brooklyn neighborhoods hold a separate appeal, maintaining the grittiness that much of the city lost long ago. The urban extremes once found in Times Square and the West Village immortalized in 1970s movies such as Taxi Driver and Cruising have migrated across the river. At the same time, the notably thriving social enclaves of Brooklyn—particularly the areas of Williamsburg and Greenpoint—have grown increasingly gentrified in direct proportion to the down-and-dirty mystique. In that conflict lies a distinct two-headed beast ever-present in the movies of the region.

A few weeks after discovering the production, I meet with the director, Michael Morrissey, at his office in Dumbo. A blond-haired, blue-eyed 39-year-old, Morrissey radiates old-school Brooklyn pride, and his love of cinema is tied to the area. “I went with my girlfriend to see Do the Right Thing in a completely black neighborhood,” he recalls. “I just wanted to get in there, because that’s New York.” Morrissey grew up in the Marine Park area, which he calls “everyday America,” but he’s quick to identify the different neighborhoods surrounding it. “Marine Park is quiet, middle class, filled with cops,” he explains. “Drive for five blocks and all of a sudden you’re in Borough Park. Jews everywhere. Drive a little further, and you can see the hipsters in Williamsburg.”

The crime rate inches up as you travel in any direction from Morrissey’s native hood, a factor he readily acknowledges in Boy Wonder. The movie centers on a young man who, like the filmmaker, grew up in Marine Park. In an early scene, his mother is killed by a street thug in a nearby area. As a disgruntled young adult, he immerses himself in comic books fantasies, and eventually decides to become a masked avenger. However, Boy Wonder does not follow the standard superhero movie routine. Its protagonist lives in the same world as you and me, and his plan quickly backfires when he gets beaten up during a vain attempt to become larger than life. “You can’t be a superhero in the real world,” Morrissey concludes.

Boy Wonder involves an origin story in which multiple parts of Brooklyn play critical roles, as cultures clash within a single hermetic borough. “Every time I see a movie come out about Brooklyn, it’s always guidos and petty cops, guys with baseball bats,” Morrissey rants. “Everything is Goodfellas. That’s not Brooklyn. Brooklyn is this big melting pot.”

The movie, which Morrissey hoped to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January (it was rejected, but now he has his sights on Tribeca in 2010) stars neophyte actor Caleb Steinmeyer in an apparently intense, somewhat mortifying performance.

Morrissey shows me one scene—shot with the ultra-expressive RED camera—in which the actor paints his face black to take on a harmless subway mental case. “We actually spent all our money and shot for real on the subway,” Morrissey boasts. “We shot that scene in six hours, like fucking crazy people. It was nuts; we were running in and out of cars. But nobody looked at us.”

On the set of Boy Wonder in East Williamsburg—if it exists.

Invoking multiple New York clichés, Morrissey’s project bridges the gap between old Brooklyn cinema and a new wave of productions in the borough. Its neighborhood characteristics are key to the movie’s plot— but not overemphasized, either. “There’s nothing in there that’s iconic Brooklyn,” he says. “No big Brooklyn Bridge shot. It’s just kind of ugly-beautiful.”

Many recent Brooklyn movies subscribe to the ugly-beautiful paradigm, although it may soon approach oversaturation. Precise numbers are difficult to determine, but 2009 may have been a record-breaking year for the number of movie and TV shows shot in Brooklyn, which include studio productions like Kevin Smith’s Bruce Willis vehicle A Couple of Dicks and smaller projects like the indie drama Weakness. HBO’s hit new series Bored to Death takes place in a vibrant Fort Greene. (The vibe of the show is “mad Brooklynish,” one of its stars, Olivia Thirlby, told The New Yorker.)

It would be easy to attribute the flood of Brooklyn productions to the recession, given that shooting in an unassuming neighborhood accrues less chaos and allows for lower costs. But New York’s fragile tax incentive program for film and TV productions, which ran out of money earlier this year before getting reinstated in March, has made everyone a little uneasy about whether it’s worthwhile to shoot in the state at all. Nevertheless, New York City Film Commissioner Katherine Oliver insists, “All of New York City is actually experiencing an increase in production. After Manhattan, Brooklyn is probably the most popular choice, thanks to the borough’s beautiful neighborhoods.”

But for most of these projects, beauty matters less than personal connections to the region. Morrissey, for one, says he would have kept his production in Brooklyn even if the program had not made a comeback, given the specific locality of his story.

However, he’s not the only one drawn to the area out of aesthetic necessity. In recent years, a handful of younger filmmakers have developed a keen interest in dissecting Brooklyn on film, resulting in a nascent category of movies that express both resentment and appraisal for the makeshift counterculture. They are uncompromising, yet hip and sassy; at once ambivalent and intensely concerned: The demons of old and new New York rolled into a frenzied package of cinematic expression.

In many recent Williamsburg movies, the protagonists usually spend a lot of their energy intellectualizing while simultaneously mocking their puffed-up demeanors. “We think we’re so much cooler than those tools of middle America who watch MTV, but you know what? We all look the same,” spouts an energized character in 2008’s The Cult of Sincerity, which was shot in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, mainly in bars and cramped studio apartments. As the same character explains: “Anything homegrown is parochial— unless it’s kitschy. Then, it’s hip, because it doesn’t know how not hip it is. What is that?” Answer: It’s the qualifying ingredient of modern Brooklyn movies. Marco Ursino, the founder of the Brooklyn International Film Festival, told me earlier this year that he’s been seeing a slew of self-reflexive stories crop up in his submission pile. That’s a good thing, because he prefers the contemporary approach to showcasing Brooklyn grime. “We are not interested in period pieces,” he says.

Early eras of Williamsburg’s film history presented less contradictory depictions, mainly because the neighborhood was, well, less contradictory. Avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas’ short films captured the working class immigrant communities that dominated the area in the 1940s and ’50s. The climactic shootout of Jules Dassin’s 1948 thriller The Naked City unfolds along the Williamsburg Bridge. The place was hardly considered a fun hangout.

For the next 30-odd years, Brooklyn offered little appeal to filmmakers when compared to Manhattan’s complex cityscapes. In the 1980s, Spike Lee nailed Brooklyn’s racial tensions with Do the Right Thing’s Bedford-Stuyvesant setting, but the one scene suggesting a bourgeois invasion turned into a misnomer: When Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) confronts a white biker at the door to his building, the exchange concludes with a punchline. “Who told you to buy a brownstone in my neighborhood?” Buggin’ Out steams. “Motherfuck gentrification,” he says. “Why don’t you move back to Massachusetts?” The biker shoots back: “I was born in Brooklyn.”

Even if the white elephant of interracial tension was already on the table, few filmmakers chose to face it. Instead, the counterculture of the borough gradually emerged on the big screen. Nick Gomez’s 1992 indie drama Laws of Gravity portrays a group of vulgar young people hanging out in an unkempt Williamsburg that appears anything but hip. Louis C.K.’s riotous cult favorite Pootie Tang also takes place in a decrepit version of the ’hood, although it arrived in 2001, right on the cusp of a sea change.

Around the same time, The Utne Reader named
Williamsburg the third hippest place in America, just behind New
Orleans and Inner Mission in San Francisco. The following year, the New
York Times ran a story about young people moving to Williamsburg and
having babies (the headline read “The Birth of Cool”). The rise of
Williamsburg’s non-native youth culture over the past decade meant
another era had arrived. The stage was set for new stories to be told.

In last year’s charming romantic fantasy Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Michael
Cera and Kat Dennings dash around NYC in search of a secret concert
that eventually takes place at Williamsburg’s Union Pool. But the
location is identified in the movie as “Brooklyn Pool,” as if imbuing
it with symbolic definition indicative of the borough as a whole. The
climax involves hundreds of trendy-looking young people rushing down
the sidewalk, eagerly seeking entry to the venue. The transcendent
vision makes a relatively normal local event look like Woodstock in its
expression of gleeful unity. It feels warm, fuzzy and unquestionably
fake. (Perhaps as an act of penance, Peter Sollett, the movie’s
director, recently handled an episode of the self-reflexive
Williamsburg-set web series The ‘Burg.)

The fantasy of Nick and Norah sharply contrasts with the authenticity of Andrew Bujalski’s 2005 feature Mutual Appreciation, which
also culminates at a Williamsburg venue, the erstwhile Northsix, which
has since changed owners and been dubbed the Music Hall of
Williamsburg. The aura of the neighborhood comes through in subtle
strokes. “I plan on being a rock star for the next six months, while
I’m still alive,” jokes an aspiring musician. His tone is
characteristically derisive, but tinted with eager-beaver sweetness.

You
may have met someone in the neighborhood resembling one of these
people, but Bujalski never intended that effect. “I lived in New York
for four months while we were shooting the movie but was never anywhere
near enough a New Yorker to take, as my subject, portraiture of a
specific neighborhood,” he explains. “There was no mention of
Williamsburg locales or the ‘concept’ of Williamsburg, which made it
surprising to me when, upon the film’s release, so many people seemed
to instantly identify the film with that area.”

Bujalski
thinks that because the protagonist is an unemployed guitarist with
scruffy hair, viewers made the “cognitive leap.” “If I had made a film
about idealistic young middle-class parents who enjoy yoga, it would
have been called a ‘Park Slope’ film, even if we’d shot it in Queens.”

The neighborhood also takes on psychological definition in Ry Russo-Young’s admirable character study, You Won’t Miss Me (which
still has no theatrical distributor, but won Best Film Not Coming to a
Theater Near You at the recent Gotham Awards ceremony). The movie stars
Stella (daughter of Julian) Schnabel as a destructive young woman
failing to get her acting career off the ground. Although her character
lives in Manhattan, a close acquaintance lives near Bedford Avenue,
reflecting Russo-Young’s specific understanding of the duo’s
relationship. “There’s that crossover between friends who live in
Brooklyn and friends who live in Manhattan,” she says, explaining that
Schnabel’s character journeys to Brooklyn immediately after she gets
released from a mental institution. “She comes to him in vulnerability.
She would do it at that point. These locations take on meanings in
terms of the characters.”

No other recent Brooklyn product defines its people by the nature of their neighborhood more than Brad Saville’s Williamsburg. A riff on Richard Linklater’s Slacker, Williamsburg basically
unfolds as a series of static shots following various despondent
personalities, each of whom claims to be an artist but fails to produce
any actual art.

Saville,
a playwright in his late twenties, is originally from Virginia. He
dreamed up his black-and-white condemnation of aimless Brooklynites in
response to a perceived laziness overtaking the neighborhood. “People
come up here looking for something to do and attach themselves to other
people who have like-minded ambitions,” he explains. “They have those
stagnant two years after school where they try to get out of their
system whatever they need to get out of their system, like being an
actor. So they spend a couple years up here, and then they get married
and move away. They form these groups of people who hang out and they
all prop each other up. You surround yourself with seven or eight
people to help legitimize yourself. I think [Williamsburg] lends itself
to that.”

Saville rejects the sitcom vision of the Williamsburg elite popularized by the shortlived web series The ‘Burg. “It’s
like, let’s take the joke and rape it,” he says in a rant. “OK, I get
it, a stockbroker lives with a guy who has black-rimmed glasses, and
they don’t get along. What’s next? I was interested in doing something
about ambitious people in Williamsburg who were failing miserably.”

In
a sense, every Brooklyn movie about the modern “scene” is a
self-perpetuated contradiction, a story about anger and confusion
starring people with little reason to gripe. These narratives never
focus on the Hispanic, Italian or Hasidic communities that migrated to
Brooklyn over half a century ago. They struggle to belong in a world
that was never designed to make room for them in the first place. These
migrants, as it were, form nomadic tribes of disillusionment. Everyone
it seems has a little Boy Wonder in them, elements of fantasies where
their inner problems and aspirations matter more than the reality
surrounding them.

Only one movie has successfully critiqued this tendency: The delectably mad horror pastiche Murder Party. Director
Jeremy Saulnier’s wry 2007 slaughter-filled comedy follows a lonely
Brooklyn resident eager to join the festivities of a Halloween
gathering in an unoccupied warehouse along the East River. He quickly
becomes the unwitting prey of a few maniacal posers looking to kill him
for their vaguely defined art project. Naturally, the group’s psychotic
pomposity explodes onto itself in a series of amusingly deranged
circumstances.

I
first saw Murder Party during a midnight screening at Austin’s South by
Southwest Film Festival in 2007. A funny scene in which one of the
villains suggests that they finish off their captive by “stapling a
pancake to his face and throwing him in front of the G train” didn’t
get any laughs since few in the audience were familiar with the
notoriously slow subway line. Other moments that involved broad
slapstick, however, were more successful. The Brooklyn “humor” wasn’t
as universal as some might imagine.

Of course, urban enclaves of twentysomething culture exist elsewhere.

Few
places, however, invoke the paradox of gentrification, in which massive
crowds flock to an area where they can supposedly afford to let the
creative juices flow. Like the solemn decline of the Chelsea
Hotel—which went from a creative utopia to a post-apocalyptic bomb
shelter where aging artists desperately attempt to evade eviction—many
young Brooklyn residents aim to live comfortably in the borough’s
denser residential areas as a collective sense of denial. Historically,
it’s a New York malady diagnosed by the movies. The best of the bunch
capture a sense of innate dissatisfaction as much as they tap into the
passion that keeps people here regardless of the pervasive hindrances.

Saville
notes that the Williamsburg manifested in his film has vanished to the
extent that he wouldn’t make his movie today. “I think the
circumstances have changed, and the people have changed,” he says,
noting that

Anytime
Cafe, which used to offer cheap drinks and provided a space for his
production free of charge, no longer exists. “It’s gotten to be so
expensive that I don’t know how anybody that can call themselves
artists and live there. At the time, it was interesting, but I don’t
feel the flame the way I felt it four years ago.”

But
Morrissey’s Brooklyn memories go back much further than that. He
doesn’t mind the newer faces, he says, but sounds a little surprised by
them. “Nobody’s from here,” he explains, gesturing around his office to
some of his younger colleagues. “I think it’s fantastic, but they
wanted to do film and they came to Brooklyn? That just seems odd to
me.” He wishes the influx of budding artists would expand their stories
to the outer reaches of the borough. “I want to take the kids from
Williamsburg to other areas,” he says. “There’s more stuff going on.”

At
this juncture, modern Brooklyn movies emphasize a culture of
transience. Eagerness goes in, crushed dreams, lost ambitions and
occasionally smarter, smarmier perceptiveness goes out. Not a single,
fullon celebration of Brooklyn exists in this admittedly small (but
steadily growing) genre. Instead, the films reject sugary celebrations
of New York City prestige.

Audiences that want glamour can subscribe to the carefree outlook of recent city romances like Confessions of a Shopaholic or The Devil Wears Prada, where
everyone wears pricey name-brand attire and imbibes the finest wines
and cocktails. Brooklyn dramas—and the angst-riddled characters within
them—can’t afford such vices. Or at least they hide them well.

Korine’s first two directorial efforts, Gummo and Julien-Donkey Boy, sympathized with social pariahs and emphasized morbid imagery. But then came the arrival of an older, happier Korine with the gentler, life-affirming Mister Lonely in 2007.

The movie follows a depressed Michael Jackson impersonator whose life turns around when he encounters a commune populated by other costume-wearing recluses. Trash Humpers also features masked outcasts, but they bear a much darker presence. Predominantly shot on VHS and edited with VCRs, the movie cycles through the lives of these elderly-looking creatures as they engage in twisted versions of leisurely activities: Singing, dancing and, yes, fucking garbage (or “fornicating trash,” as an enthusiastic humper puts it at one point), they appear to embody Korine’s darkest fears and deepest aesthetic interests at once.

When I sat down with Korine last week before the world premiere of Trash Humpers—which he shot on a whim four months ago—at the Toronto International Film Festival, he hadn’t done any interviews about it yet, and admitted that he wasn’t quite sure how to express his intentions. So we hammered it out together.

New York Press: It sounds like you reacted to a few sources of inspiration here.

Harmony Korine: There’s a law in Nashville that everybody has to put their garbage dumpsters in these specific alleys. Sometimes, I would dream about these garbage bins, or I would look at these garbage bins and some of them had fallen over or propped against a tree. There was something vaguely human about them. Then I started thinking about when I was a kid, and I saw a group of old people that were like peeping toms. It just brought back a lot of memories. I was thinking, ‘It would be interesting if these trash cans looked human,’ and then…these people started humping on them.

There are a few startlingly effective monologues in the movie. Did you script any of the dialogue?

I wanted to make something that was more like an artifact, something that was found or unearthed. I just wrote down a series of loose scenes, but there was no written dialogue. I figured out how to do it in a stealthy way. Once we started shooting, it took on its own logic. By the time it was shot, it was done. The experience was as close to free-form improvised painting as film making can get. We were moving as quickly as we could think it. Once I figured out the characters, I did a lot of tests beforehand, going to these locations with people in costumes late at night and taking photos. I was just exploring certain ideas. I would look at these photos I’d taken, and this lo-fi footage—there was something haunting about it. Everyone’s always looking for the most pixels, the greatest beauty. I thought, ‘Maybe it would be nice to use the absolute worst.’

Any cinematic influences?

The only movie that I was actually thinking about as a reference was the William Eggleston movie Stranded in Canton. It has this liquid home movie photography and an accidental narrative. He just walked around filming his friends in black and white video. It’s very fluid.

Once you had the look of the movie, how did you work out the narrative?

It’s a universe where people only do bad things. They enjoy killing, fucking and burning, but they do it in ways there are transcendent, poetic. They take sadism to a new level, turning it into an art form. They suck out of the goodness until it’s just true horror.

We’re watching crazy people do crazy things, but the images are less disturbing than bizarre and poetic.

To me, the most beautiful thing in the world is an abandoned parking lot and a soiled sofa on the edge of the parking lot with a street lamp off to the side. America seems like a series of abandoned parking lots, streetlights and abandoned sofas.

Throughout the movie, we hear you chanting, “Make it! Make it! Don’t take it!” What’s up with that?

I knew this guy who was in a cast for six months, but he kept lifting weights with his left arm. When he got his cast off, his right arm was like a twig, but his left arm was insanely muscular. I could never get that out of my mind. He would sit there coaching basketball and go, ‘Make it! Make it! Don’t take it!’ But sometimes he would do it with his strong arm, and sometimes with his twig arm. I never forgot that.

In contrast to so-called “torture porn” horror, you don’t glorify the violence in Trash Humpers, but you do seem to appreciate the perpetrators of it.

It’s kind of like an ode to vandalism. There can be a creative beauty in their mayhem and destruction. You could say these characters are poets or mystics of mayhem and murder, bubbling up to the surface. They do horrible things, but I never viewed them as sad characters. They’re comedic, with a vaudevillian horror element to what they do. They dance as they smash things and set them on fire. They’re having a great time.

Three years after Al Gore lectured his way to the Oscar podium with An Inconvenient Truth, it would appear that 2009 is the true year of environment documentaries. A good movie needs to tell a compelling story, not just a slideshow. Post-Gore, savvy non-fictional meditations on the state of world’s health must involve not only planetary needs but the dramatically involving actions of certain individuals on its behalf.

In the past few months, Food Inc. has peeled away the corporate makeup of America’s food industry, and audiences turned out in droves. The Cove, which opened last week, made an impassioned plea to fight aimless dolphin slaughter in Japan, and continues to make even cynical viewers bow to the principles of activist intent. The coming weeks will find Joe Berliner’s Crude surveying Chevron’s ambivalence over its role in causing deadly pollution-related injuries in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador, and author Colin Beavan’s saga as an environmental junkie in No Impact Man.

While those movies reflect the modern feasibility of green politics and global awareness, Robert Stone’s Earth Days shows us how we got here in the first place. By exploring the original seeds of the modern environmental movement in the 1950s and ‘60s—through its eruption in the following decade with the first Earth Day April 22, 1970—Stone reveals that there’s nothing inherently “new” about green politics except that they have fallen back into favor.

That Earth Days follows a simple routine in its construction does not detract from the beauty of its earnest design. Stone contrasts expressive images of nature with ugly visions of factory-produced waste, as the principle talking heads behind Earth Day recount their initial wake-up calls. Though publications such as The Population Bomb and Silent Spring married scientific reasoning with desperate calls to action, their needs undoubtedly benefited from euphorically motivated flower power support. Hippies may have been clueless, Earth Days argues, but they sure knew how to mobilize.

The movie lacks a dramatic climax and avoids situating the earlier environmental movement in the context of modern concerns, so it may lose interest from viewers unmoved by passions from 40 years ago. However, the indictment of Western ideals from that era could easily apply to contemporary times. “Americans want to believe in a future that’s expansive,” explains one talking head, hitting a timeless note.

Earth Days’ political dimension is superficial, but intriguing nonetheless. It’s the rare left-leaning doc to make Richard Nixon look like a good guy, if only in a roundabout way. His support of eco-friendly projects helped make the ‘60s and ‘70s into an extremely productive time for the movement, although the efforts were virtually shut down overnight when Ronald Reagan took office in 1980. It was morning in America, and issues of long-term importance were put to bed.

Since the team behind Earth Day sneak around massively indifferent institutional forces, Stone situates them as if they emerged from an Ocean’s Eleven sequel: Subtitles identify them as “The Radical,” “The Politician,” “The Forecaster” and so on. These nicknames equate activism with an advanced form of role-playing, which turns the cause itself into Stone’s own personal casting director. The survivors tell their stories, and the camera does the rest. No PowerPoint necessary.

Obviously, the festival has been very supportive of stuff made outside of the traditional industry. On a purely personal level, to shoot a movie in Austin with a cast mostly from Austin felt great, especially when we packed the theater. To make a film like this, you need hundreds of people to contribute favors of all sorts. To be able to have a lot of them in that room was a thrill.

What was it like to premiere Beeswax at the Berlin Film Festival?

It was a different reaction. I think the SXSW audience is there to have a good time in a way that’s not entirely the case everywhere. It definitely played more as a comedy than it did in Berlin. It was like I was watching There’s Something About Mary. People were laughing over the next scene. It’s a thrill to hear that, but it’s certainly not the only valid reaction to the film. That’s the thing that’s so challenging when people ask me, "How did it go?" I always say, "I don’t know."

You know when a screening goes really badly, and you know what a standing ovation is. But between those two poles, you’ve got a roomful of people who have their own individual experiences of it, so it’s not like There’s Something About Mary, where you can tell the difference between people knocked out with laughter and those who are not. A quiet audience can still make for a great screening of the film.

Do you aim for an open-ended spectrum of reactions?

Yeah, that’s the agony and the ecstasy of it, the life I dream for the films. But it’s very hard to calibrate that reaction afterwards. Some people are going engage and others won’t find a way into it, which is sad. I wish everyone saw the film and found it instantly accessible, but I’ve accepted that with the approach I’ve had on these films, you can have a bad burrito for breakfast and you might not find your way into the movie.

How do you feel about someone going to see one of your movies and expecting a by-the-book comedy?

I think about that now. I try not to think about that when we’re making it. But it’s harder and harder not to worry about how something gets perceived, although those worries never seem to help me. I try not to think about, "Well, this critic liked my last film, so how can I get him or her to like the next one?" You have to take everything organically and a build a film the way you build it, thinking it through beat by beat, character by character. That’s a very personal thing that you put out into the world and hope it will mean as much to somebody as your favorite films have meant to you.

I don’t engineer for a mass audience or critics. I think I have an audience in my head. I picture my platonic ideal of a viewer and make it for that person. Every time somebody comes up to me and says they love the film, I definitely want to clone them.

So you pay attention to the reviews.

Yeah, and once you’ve digested everything you’ve read, you put it in perspective. If I hear that somebody said I’m an asshole, then that hurts for a day or a week or whatever. A year later, you get perspective on it. It’s the same thing when somebody says I’m the savior of cinema. For a day I think, "I’m the savior of cinema." When you’re trying to make a project, none of that shit matters. You’ve got things in front of you to deal with.

The movies are traditionally scripted, but do you think it’s beneficial for people to think that they’re improvised?

I think it’s rarely beneficial for people to think about the conditions under which the film was made. I mean, there might be some situations in which that’s productive.

I think we’re all naturally inclined to question the conditions under which art gets made. Your work really frequently engages that tendency since it feels so naturalistic.

Sure, but the dream is that you can break through that. Still, I know what you mean. There are a lot of films I’ve seen where, if it has a magic to it, then I come out going, "How did they do that?" We’re probably in a good space if the question is, "How did you do that?" If the question is, "I know how you did that, so confirm my suspicion," then we’re probably not in a good space.