This came from an article in the NY Times

To: Heads of production, Sony, Universal, Paramount, Fox, Disney

Cc: Joe Swanberg, Andrew Bujalski, Greta Gerwig, Aaron Katz and all their Facebook Friends

From: A.O.S.

You all keep trying to make Rock Hudson-Doris Day-style romantic comedies with the golden guys and gals of the moment, and the results are sexless, subtextless, bland career-girl-in-search-of-Mr.-Right retreads. Meanwhile, a bunch of hungry directors with digital cameras, time on their hands and not much money are making free-form studies about tentative hookups and long conversations among actual, overeducated, undermotivated young folks. Hollywood, it’s time to co-opt those dudes! Give them enough money for song credits and some production values and let them reinvent movie romance for this age of diffident couplings and vigorous social networking. And dudes, remember: you’re never too young or too hip to sell out.

To: Filmmakers, especially under 40

From: M.D.

The tripod is your friend. Few filmmakers can pull off florid handheld camerawork because most aren’t saying all that much through their visuals, handheld or not. (Also: Shaking the camera does not create realism.) Though it’s a cliché of contemporary cinema, fiction and nonfiction both, handheld camerawork that calls aggressive attention to itself tends to make empty images seem even emptier. If you want us to notice your cinematography, make sure you have something to say, like the French filmmaker Olivier Assayas (“Demonlover”), whose restlessly moving images convey a searching intelligence. He isn’t just waving the camera around; he’s saying something about the world and the people in it.

Read the full article here.