Ira Deutchman

[7 mins. 20 secs.] Columbia School of the Arts film teachers Jack Lechner and Rob King are the guests on the first segment of this episode. They have produced a retrospective for Filmwax friend and fellow Columbia film teacher, producer Ira Deutchman (see Episode 444). The retrospective will include 17 seminal indie films in which Ira has been involved including sex, lies and videotape, A Woman Under the Influence and Parting Glances, plus various panels and Q&As with Deutchman and myriad filmmakers & indie film luminaries. The retrospective, called NY Indie Guy: Ira Deutchman and the Rise of Independent Film, will take place at Columbia’s Lenfest Center for the Arts, 615 W. 129th Street, from September 14th through the 23rd. Check out the website for schedule and tickets.

In the second segment, I interview photographer and filmmaker Sasha Water Freyer about her documentary Garry Winogrand: Everything is Photographable. The film will have a NYC theatrical at Film Forum beginning on Wednesday, September 19th. “What is a photograph?” Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) asks in his iconic, gravelly Bronx accent. Winogrand was a compulsive street photographer (although he hated that term), working for decades in NYC, then in Texas and California, to create a huge body of work (hundreds of thousands of images taken with his 35mm Leica) that comprise an encyclopedic portrait of America. During his lifetime he was celebrated (as a favorite of MoMA curator John Szarkowski) and reviled (especially for his book, Women Are Beautiful) and then more-or-less forgotten after his untimely death at age 56. Writes Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times: “(Winogrand) captured the fallout from the midcentury American moment – those few decades from the 1950s on, when placid, middle-class prosperity started to give way to something less affluent, more fragmented and harder to define.”

Filmwax Radio is presented by Rooftop Films. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram. The podcast is also available on iTunes, Stitcher & Youtube.

Episode 444 includes an hour-long conversation with the indie film pioneer, Ira Deutchman. Deutchman has been making, marketing and distributing films since 1975, having worked on over 150 films including some of the most successful independent films of all time. He was one of the founders of Cinecom and later created Fine Line Features—two companies that were created from scratch and, in their respective times, helped define the independent film business. He was also a co-founder of Emerging Pictures, the first digital projection network in the United States and a pioneer in delivering live cultural events into movie theaters.

Currently Deutchman is an independent producer, and a consultant in marketing and distribution of independent films. Among his clients are Istituto Luce Cinecitta, for which he promotes Italian cinema in the U.S. He is also a Professor of Professional Practice in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, where we sat for this conversation.

Among the over 60 films he acquired and released at Fine Line were Jane Campion’s “An Angel at My Table,” Gus van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho,” Jim Jarmusch’s “Night on Earth,” Robert Altman’s “The Player” and “Short Cuts,” Roman Polanski’s “Bitter Moon” and “Death and the Maiden,” Alan Rudolph’s “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle,” Mike Leigh’s “Naked,” and the award-winning “Hoop Dreams,” which in its time was the highest grossing non-music documentary in history.

Filmwax Radio is presented by Rooftop Films. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram. The podcast is also available on iTunes, Stitcher & Youtube.