February 2005

From major corporate giants such as Mark Cuban and Roger Marino to more localized entrepreneurs like Mitchell Robbins, more and more investors traditionally unassociated with the film industry are funding and producing movies. Making motion pictures is no longer Hollywood’s exclusive province. In fact, in 2003 the box office revenue for independently made films checked in at around three billion dollars. These large revenues have attracted an ever-growing group of investors and venture capital firms to consider financing -- and profiting from -- motion pictures.

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Boston has seen many production companies come and go, but Picture Park has prospered for almost 15 years, and colleagues credit founder and Executive Producer Mark Hankey with its success. It is his philosophy that drives the company and his personality that sets the tone of collaboration of their work.

For most of us, high school was a time of boring classes, note-passing, and popularity contests. But at Newton North High School, thanks to a partnership with World Challenge Expeditions based in London, a group of students was able to visit Tanzania and climb Mount Kilimanjaro last summer. One of these students, Josh Woolf, along with his friend Ben Bancroft, filmed the adventure and has created the documentary "Four Weeks in Tanzania."

What began as a story about small roadside museums and private collections quickly morphed into something else entirely when documentarian and artist, Don Bernier, met Elizabeth Tashjian. A concert violinist as a child, an award-winning classical painter in her 20’s, and a Christian Science healer in her 40’s, Ms. Tashjian opened the Nut Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut at 60 years old. She aimed "to educate people about the beauty of nuts -- the kind that grow on trees, as well as the misunderstood ‘two-legged variety’ among us."

New England is renowned for its community of documentary filmmakers -- this area is a haven for award-winning educational and exploratory projects that have probed a broad spectrum of subjects. Terrific for grassroots productions and self-sustaining artists, the film scene here definitely thrives in some respects, but still leaves a lot to be desired for the growing population of local actors. 

New England was well represented in Park City this January; both the Sundance and Slamdance Film Festivals showcased features and documentaries with ties to the East Coast. There were all kinds of reasons to trek to Utah last month (besides hoping for a chance encounter with a Hilton sister); dozens of films screened for eager audiences, filmmakers crossed their fingers in hopes of picking up prizes or being picked up for distribution. Representatives from other festivals flocked to check out the goods and scout potential selections. read more...

Robert Patton-Spruill might tell you he’s a nobody but a few frames into his first feature "Squeeze," and you know that’s not the case. This is a man who knows storytelling. This is a man who knows music. And this is a man committed to more than being a "somebody" on someone else’s terms.