Roger Ebert @ The Apple Store

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Roger Ebert :: The Apple Store, Magnificent Mile, Chicago

Long time Mac user and film critic Roger Ebert was at the Apple Store tonight talking about how digital cameras are revolutionizing the film industry as part of Apple’s “Works on a Mac” speaker series. I came in late so I missed in introductory commentary and the first film he showed. For most of the rest of the next hour Roger spoke about specific movies and how they were filmed on a low, low budget and with a digital camera.

The movies that Roger spoke a lot about (or the ones I heard – I was late) were Waking Life which was shot digitally and then animated and Lars von Trier‘s The Five Obstructions. Lars is the leader of the Dogme 95 Movement, which seeks to instill a sense of simplicity in filmmaking, free of post-production modifications.

Roger also spoke a lot about how letting anyone shoot digital is a way to get some really creative movies made for really cheap. How you can spend next to nothing and potentially have a movie in the theater. The entire time I was thinking about when I saw Robert Rodriguez speak at SXSW 2003 with Nick and Walt. Robert had just shot Once Upon a Time in Mexico digitally and spoke about his experience with it and his shooting of all the Spy Kids movies and previous movies he did digitally. Right when I was thinking about Robert again, Roger answered a question from the audience regarding the amateur look of people shooting their own digital movies. He answered by saying that shooting your own movie should be used as a stepping stone – to get attention and to get the money that you need to make that movie you dream of. He told the story of how Robert Rodriguez shot El Mariachi and slipped a video of it under a producer’s door.. and the rest is history.

Roger was also excited because what drives mainstream movies right now is profit. In order for a movie to be the most profitable on an opening weekend it must get teenage boys into the theater.. and to get teenage boys in the rating of the movie can’t be R, it can only be PG or PG-13. So you find Hollywood dumbing down movies to get a rating to make a profit. Independent films succeed not because they have big budgets and are out to make a crapload of money.. they succeed because of their creater’s passion to create something good. The problem is that adults take longer to see a movie because they have actual lives to live and they can’t always run out and see something on opening weekend. And most of the intelligent, challenging, creative, independent films don’t play in the mainstream theaters and don’t have long runs. Rogers advice: If find a really interesting movie you would like to see, go see it NOW!

Finally, Roger listed his favorite film websites as IMDB, Movie City News, Apple (for the trailers), Megacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, Film Site, IndieWIRE, and Film Threat.

The entire presentation was much less Apple salesy than I’d expected.. not that I really was imagining Roger to be a pitchman.. but it was at the Apple store, afterall. It wasn’t until the end that he professed his love of all things Apple, shared a story of his first Apple computer, and talked about how most of Hollywood uses Apple products (as does the Sun Times).

See also:
» New York City Photobloggers @ The Apple Store
» Joseph Cartright @ The Apple Store

6 thoughts on “Roger Ebert @ The Apple Store

  1. Ooh, this sounds like a great talk. I think Roger Ebert is really great in trying to help new filmmakers get heard and trying to fight the big movie studio machine.

  2. yeh, i apologize that the post is a bit rambling.. that’s why i hid most of it.. but i was pretty much just transcribing my notes from text messages i saved in my cell phone.

  3. If I had a top five list of people I most admire on this earth, this guy would be in there somewhere. Straight shooter, honest, no bullshit, eloquent, and reasonable human being.

    and he loves movies.

    *I* love movies!

  4. Man, Ebert has lost a lot of weight. I grew up in Chicago with Siskel and Ebert. When I was really little, I thought of them kind of like Ernie and Bert. Tall skinny guy with an attitude, short fat guy who was happy and nice. At least, that’s all I got out of S and E at age 5.

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