Studio e2

Happy 69th birthday
to four-time Academy Award winner
Frances McDormand!

In May 2017, a twenty-five-year-old NSA contractor in Augusta, Georgia printed a five-page classified intelligence report and mailed it to a news outlet. The document described Russian military targeting of American voting software vendors and local election officials in the weeks before November 2016.

Reality Winner had been an Air Force linguist before taking the contractor position. She had legitimate access to the NSA system where the report lived. She was, by rank, the lowest-level employee with clearance to see it.

The Intercept published the document within weeks. The FBI traced it back to her in days, partly because the printer she used had embedded a near-invisible dot code identifying the machine. She was arrested in June 2017 and charged under the Espionage Act of 1917. In August 2018 she accepted a plea deal and was sentenced to sixty-three months in federal prison, the longest sentence handed down at that time for an unauthorized media disclosure of classified information. She served most of it at a federal facility in Texas and was released to home confinement in 2021. The report she disclosed remained the most detailed public account of Russia's specific targeting of election infrastructure in 2016, and it appeared in subsequent congressional and intelligence-community reviews. She was the only person prosecuted for making it public.

She was twenty-five years old. No one else was charged.

Now you know her name.

Steven Soderbergh directed his first feature, s*x, lies, and videotape, in 1989 on a low budget of $1.2 million. Its historic Palme d'Or win at Cannes launched an independent film movement that allowed filmmakers to graduate into a flourishing mid-budget studio ecosystem. This mid-budget tier—which later funded Soderbergh's mature studio run including Out of Sight, Traffic, and Erin Brockovich—no longer has a sustainable theatrical home in the current marketplace. The average per-film acquisition budget at festivals like Sundance has declined 40 percent in inflation-adjusted terms since 2015.

The elimination of the mid-budget theatrical tier was the cumulative result of streaming platforms replacing theatrical distribution for adult dramas, the collapse of DVD physical revenue that heavily subsidized $20-to-$50 million films through the 2000s, and studios consolidating theatrical exhibition entirely around tentpole IP releases requiring budgets above $150 million. Without this middle tier, emerging directors face an immense structural gulf between micro-budget indies and massive franchise filmmaking. Follow Film Directors for more.

Working as a creative writer/director builds your inner story core. We start every project looking for the hook that will resonate and break through the clutter. --Kat Albert

Run-and-gun doc is not like narrative filmmaking or even a slow-and-steady interview-and-b-roll.

Equipment needs to be adaptive and fast to change, and the crew needs to be experienced with this style.

Other thoughts?

Is this your jam?

Because it's REEL life.

Alejandro Iñárritu is my favorite living director. It all started with Amores Perros for me.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography at the 87th Academy Awards in 2015. Alejandro Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki designed the film to appear as one continuous unbroken take, a technical and logistical achievement requiring precise coordination between actors, crew, and camera operators across every extended sequence.

The film was produced for approximately $18 million and grossed over $103 million worldwide. Michael Keaton delivered one of the most acclaimed performances of his career as Riggan Thomson, a former superhero blockbuster actor attempting a Broadway comeback. The film remains one of the most formally inventive Oscar winners in recent memory.

Follow Film Directors for more.

Billy Wilder's 5 commandments of screenwriting.