Customer Reviews

Fog City Mavericks (Starz Inside)

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I watched this video twice on cable and now purchased the DVD so I can go back to it when I need inspiration. I have taken a number of film classes but they never teach you about guts and what it takes to make a great film. Here you will find that fire in the belly that it takes to make the next great film. A great experience for any aspiring film maker; or for anyone who wants to stand out from the crowd in their chosen industry, it is full of the "Right Stuff."

At 62, this documentary has given me the courage to step out and try what I have loved all my life, movie making. I am going to make a movie too.

Chuck Campbell

This is an inspiring film that plays fast&loose with a couple of facts early in the presentation that set my teeth on edge:

San Francisco is a squarish city that's about seven miles on each side. It isn't seven square miles.

Eadweard Muybridge didn't design and execute the first experiment in motion-picture photography using twenty-four still-image cameras that set the 24fps frame-rate standard for cinema everafter.

This film goes on to make a great many engaging declarations about the complex (often-adversarial) relationships between independent and commercial filmmaking in context of contemporary history. It's a profoundly inspiring and fascinating film that promotes independent investigation by an audience that demands more truth than the truthiness this film presents as though it were actual fact.

Fog City Mavericks: The Filmakers of San Francisco is at once compelling and straight to the point. This documentary style interview film profiles the many film-makers, directors, writers, and producers of San Francisco. Some people were born there and some made their careers there, but the film attempts to draw paralells between all of them for their non-conventional works and careers.

First and foremost, I don't think there is much instruction here to replace the training that anybody would get in film school. But there is plenty of inspiration. And there are plenty of examples of the kinds of attitudes that helped these people produce some of the greatest films ever made, even when they had to go up against the resistance of most or all of the Hollywood elite of the time.

The film also includes excerpts from the movies created by the artists profiled, including American Graffiti (Collector's Edition), Star Wars Trilogy (Widescreen Edition with Bonus Disc), Indiana Jones - The Adventure Collection (Special Editions of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark / Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom / Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), The Godfather DVD Collection (The Godfather/ The Godfather - Part II/ The Godfather - Part III), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Toy Story (10th Anniversary Edition), and Lost in Translation among others.

Francis Ford Coppola, Sophia Coppola, Frank Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Michael Douglas, Anthony Minghella, Milos Forman and Frank Darabont are just some of the filmmakers who are profiled.

And the narration of Peter Coyote is, as always, perfect to set the mood of the piece. This movie is an important piece of film history and has helped to put many of these productions into context.

If you love movies and want to learn a little bit more of the behind the scenes stories of how they were made, then this is the film for you.

Definitely check it out!

Enjoy.

If you're a film buff, grab this - great history of film and the huge impact the Bay Area has had on the industry.

Here, director, producer, writer and editorial wiz Gary Leva and his crew tell the story of some of America's boldest, bravest and honest film makers.

However, unlike the who-did-whats you may have seen tally-ho'd prior his subjects have a common element until now unknown focused on: San Francisco; a quiet roaring artistic behemoth that's a mere seven square miles of an uncompromising Bohemian slant reminiscent of Paris 1920.

In fact San Francisco is considered by the celluloid purest to be where American film began. Makes sense, since the gold rush boom brought in a tsunami of high-energy brave hearts from all points throwing caution to the wind for a taste of success; hard earned success. Is there really any wonder the city morphed into the ongoing creative Mecca it is today?

Two of the Fog City's "children" are considered by film enthusiasts to be the fathers of modern cinema: George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola.

They met on a set and each admired the others point of view without being too much of an egotist. They also both detested the Hollywood machine that forced box office results over art that was in its seventh decade a few hundred miles south.

Naturally youth and desire led the pair into a self directed company filled with friends to play in their medium of film. They would make films they liked on their terms.

When reality hit idealism, Coppola, like many film geniuses (think Orson Welles), would dip into the flaming studio cauldron and sell a bit of his soul to keep funding going.

Lucas, meanwhile, was sorely bashed and prodded when he ran a tasting spoon over the cauldron - even when he delivered to it a crowd pleasing mirepoix called, American Graffiti.

The suffering of fools was never a more well served cliché. Were Lucas a lesser man he would have certainly given up...Ah, but what does not kill us...makes us dig in and create Star Wars. Well, him anyway.

Fog City doesn't just spot light the two universally famous honor roll lads. It also offers smile broadening insights to many other San Fran leaders: Clint Eastwood, Saul Zaentz, Chris Columbus, and John Lasseter to name drop the bare minimum included here. You'll learn about a neat tie to Chaplin's legacy. And see how a group of some celluloid purest pop culturists successfully managed to dance around Hollywood politics to make some of the finest films ever illuminated.

The doc uses hundreds of clips that will warm your heart like grandma's rum-laced warm apple cider on a winter's sunset. The chosen scenes instantly place you in a happy crevice of your brain where you stored the endorphins of the first time you saw them. A sample? Sure: the Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones films, The Godfather works, Apocalypse Now, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus, Toy Story, The Incredibles, The Black Stallion, on into Lost in Translation.

The most important thing Fog City Mavericks does is restore your faith that there are keepers of the flame of the first doe-eyed filmmakers. There will always be a group of film fidgeting mavericks who will trust instincts, let hunger pangs roar and keep us sane by producing the anti Fast and Furious homogenized cookie-cutter crap the big blue meany studios want to force feed us nowadays.
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An absolute must see for any SF based filmmakers, anyone interested in the movie business, as well as all Bay Area residents.