Category: Producing

Producing Writing

May His Memory Be a Disturbing Blessing, R.I.P., David Lynch

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

Filmmaker and singular artist David Lynch died on January 15, 2025, just days before today, what would be his 79th birthday. You can read obituaries and remembrances from: Variety also has a collection of remembrances from Steven Spielberg and others about Lynch and the Hard Times has an appropriately satirical take on Lynch’s passing. As fate would have it, the first David Lynch film I saw was his least favorite, if for no other reason…

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Producing Various and Sundry Writing

More Public Domain Highlights for 2025

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I think I’m going to need to expand my list of usual suspects for 2026, because there’s two more public domain pieces I want to share beyond the resources shared yesterday. First is an article, with plenty of audiovisual samples, by Ellen Wexler for Smithsonian Magazine. As you might imagine, the Smithsonian is very into collections, culture, and curating. Here, Wexler relies in part on Jennifer Jenkins, and the Center for the Study of the…

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Producing Various and Sundry Writing

Public Domain Day, 2025

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

Happy New Year! One of my favorite new traditions since 2019 has been noting all the creative works that enter the public domain here in the United States every January 1st. For this year, 2025, that means creative works first published in the U.S. in 1929 as well as sound recordings from 1924. There’s a host of caveats and, of course, U.S. copyright is different from other parts of the world, often markedly so. That’s…

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Producing Various and Sundry

When the Video Toaster was Punk AF

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

There’s a meme going around that generations should now be divided by “Too old to know Homestar Runner/at the right age to know and love Homestar Runner/too young to know Homestar Runner.” Admittedly, this is rather prejudiced towards knowing Homestar Runner, but seeing as I do (and seriously Stwong Bad, he’s the bee’s knees!), I don’t find this a problem. In part, because I think anyone at any age can discover the sparkling majesty of…

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Producing

Making the Most of Your Bad Film Watch

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

Like many a cinemaniac, I watch a lot of movies and, much to the confusion of friends and family, I will watch movies that are not only clearly bad, but are not of the so-bad-it’s-good variety. Why do I do this to myself? Well, if it’s a version of the Robin Hood legend or Treasure Island (see also my post last week), then I gotta see how they treat the story. Some folklore and pop…

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Producing

Every Frame a Painting is Back! (For a Second)

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

The algorithm fae have decided to gift me with the news that Every Frame a Painting is back… if only for a short while. Tricky fae. Starting about 10 years ago, and for tantalizingly too few episodes, Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou crafted meticulous videos that remind one of why cinema is magical. The care in making the videos is, of course, why there are not a gazillion episodes, but that invigorating feeling is why…

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Producing Various and Sundry

From “Future TV” to “Does TV Have a Future?”

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

One of the first tags I created here on the blog was “Future TV” which seemed to best sum up the various articles and such I was absorbing about what was sometimes called “Peak TV” and sometimes a new “Golden Age” of television. In hindsight, “the streaming wars” should have been coined as a nod to the far more fun “cola wars.” That’s because it became clear that Peak TV and the “wars” were over…

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Producing

A24: You Sunk my Hollywood Battleship!

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

If I had a dollar for every time I heard or read about major studios being too risk averse, I could fund feature films to my heart’s content… or could I? Films cost a lot of money, which is why there aren’t 147 major studios and, as one indie filmmaker friend of mine is wont to say, money isn’t a thing, it’s the thing. So how did such a small non-studio become such a major…

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Producing Writing

More About Showrunner Rules and Writers’ Rooms

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

So I’ve been meaning to do a few more posts about screenwriting and I realized I never followed up on “The 11 Laws of Showrunning by Javier Grillo-Marxuach” which I wrote about back in April… and which shows how the year is racing away from me. You see, I meant to follow up the next week with this interview with Javier Grillo-Marxuach where he talks about the 11 Laws, his books Shoot This One and…

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