Latest News

Camila Meza is a jazzy singer/guitarist from Chile, and her latest album, "Traces," features a cover of "Little Person," from Synecdoche, New York. Here she is performing it live:

Update: Camila contacted BCK and provided a link to a better quality video. Thanks, Camila!

I came across it via Pop Matters' review of the album.

The other spectacular cover here is Meza’s closing version of “Little Person”, which is a tune from the intriguing Charlie Kaufman movie Synechdote, NY, written by Jon Brion. The original was a subtle stride piano feeling, and Meza keeps things simple here, accompanying herself on guitar only, offering up something as tender and heartfelt as jazz has to offer these days. (Source)

It only took me forever to get around to it, but I've installed a new Contact form, because the old one was all glitchy and broken. (If you've ever wondered what BCK does with the money folks donate, it's this sort of thing: buying plugins that work.)

Anomalisa hits DVD and Blu-ray this coming week in the U.S.! If you're thinking of grabbing it from Amazon, you might consider reaching them via any Amazon link on BCK. We get a teeny tiny itty bitty percentage of any sale made through BCK. The money's used to cover our running costs.

If you're in Australia, like me, the Region 4 edition is supposed to come out on the 9th.

GQ's website has a great profile of Charlie, and the woes of making films that garner acclaim but lose money. It opens like so:

Charlie Kaufman has a room, reasonably small, in his Pasadena home, where he writes, though writing is not strictly what he'd call it. He's rarely, for instance, hitting the keys.

He's crippled, he says, by insecurity, self-doubt and a large internet cache. Often, he simply sits and looks at stuff online, "Because I can't think. But I don't recommend it."

Sometimes, he walks to his nearest coffee shop, which is a mile-and-a-half away, and then walks back again. He admits this isn't the most efficient method of getting things done. He works better in the morning, he says, "but not much better". (Source)

Also, BCK gets a mention. We're fancy.

This almost-finished portrait of Charlie showed up in my Google alerts. It's by Anja Bell:

Nice!

This happened a couple of weeks back:

Trebon, South Bohemia, May 8 (CTK) - Anomalisa, a U.S. film directed by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, won the main prize at the international competition of feature films for adults, Anifilm, yesterday and Phantom Boy directed by Alaina Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli won the competition of feature films for children. (Source)

Nice!

No prizes for guessing correctly, and you won't have to wait long before finding out if you're right--it's the first film in the video. There are 52 other movies in the cut, and they all feature one writer or another battling with the ol' muse. You can find the list of films here.

It's called Ambiancé. Caden Cotard would be pleased.

We're not entirely sure why you'd need to watch a seven-hour trailer in order to work out whether you fancy seeing a film that lasts for 30 days, but cancel your plans - one has arrived.

Swedish director Anders Weberg has released a second full-length trailer for his upcoming experimental film Ambiancé and it runs for a total of 439 minutes.

Weberg, who is also an artist, released a 72-minute long teaser trailer last year. He reportedly has an even bigger one due for release in 2018 (mark your calendars now) that will run for 72 hours. (Source)

Here's the new trailer:

Feel like revisiting Eternal Sunshine? Cinephilia & Beyond takes a look back at the film, and it's a great piece with some old interview excerpts with the cast and crew, a stack of stills from the film and behind-the-scenes clips, even Leigh Singer's Eternal Sunsets video that I posted recently, and Eliot Rausch's brilliant What I Have To Offer--the short film adapted from Charlie's BAFTA lecture.

Having heard his friend complain about her boyfriend for what seemed to be a hundredth time, French artist Pierre Bismuth asked her if she would erase him from her memory if such an option was at her disposal. He soon passed this idea to his friend and filmmaker Michel Gondry, who liked the sound of it and discussed it with Charlie Kaufman, with whom he worked on Human Nature. From a simple discussion in a cafe, therefore, sprung out a film that many believe to be one of the very finest produced in this century. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a heartbreaking yet beautiful, insightful and above all hopeful movie about love, memory and loss, is literally unlike anything we’ve seen before or since. [...]

A solid box office success at the time of its release and the Academy Award champion in the Best Original Screenplay category, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a film you cannot cut out of your heart once you let it in. A monumentally important screenplay. Dear every screenwriter/filmmaker, read Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind[...]

One small thing jumped out at me, probably of interest to no one else: a snippet from an interview with the film's editor, Valdis Oskarsdottir. Years ago, someone sent me a link to a foreign-language article (Icelandic? can't remember) and they told me there was an implication in there that Oskarsdottir's experience on the film wasn't 100% fun, that there was some tension. Later, Oskarsdottir emailed me herself and said that was a poor translation. So now here's this excerpt from a different interview:

What was your dynamic in the editing room?
He isn’t the most patient man I know. He couldn’t sit still. Sometimes he’d sit on the sofa in the editing room behind my back and talk—I couldn’t hear him because I was working, and he’d get really pissed if I wouldn’t answer him. Sometimes when he was talking I’d stop and turn around and miss what he’d said, and he’d say to the producer ‘I hate it. She doesn’t answer me and then she rolls her eyes.’ And I was like, ‘How can he see that? He’s behind me!’ It took a while to explain to him that when I was working, I couldn’t hear him.

Would you work with him again?
No, I don’t think so. And I don’t think he’d ever want to work with me. (Source)

Big thanks to Cristian for the find!

When Charlie Kaufman was just a Charlie Kaufman, as opposed to the Charlie Kaufman, he emailed Tom Noonan:

I made a movie called “What Happened Was” in 1992 and it won ‘Best Film’ at Sundance and it was relatively popular.

Charlie had seen the movie back in the early 90’s when he wasn’t really Charlie Kaufman yet and he wrote to me, a couple different e-mails because I was a pretty available person and he began communicating with me and was very complimentary about me, the movie and loved it.

Then we stopped writing, time went by and “Being John Malkovich” came out and “Adaption” [sic] and Charlie, in an interview, was being asked who his influences were and he generally talked about me which was very gratifying.

Over time, because he was talking about me a lot, we ended up meeting and became friends at which point, he reminded me he had written an e-mail to me years earlier.

Charlie and I were friends basically through my work and were friends for more than a decade before he casted me in “Anomalisa,” the play, in 2005. (Source)