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Today we bring you another clip in the 3-hour installment of our Founder & CEO RB's interview with Film Courage. Film Courage has begun releasing the interview in segments and we're happy to announce that we'll be bringing these videos to the community right here on the Stage 32 Blog. The wide ranging interview covered a plethora of subjects including filmmaking, acting, screenwriting, distribution, indie film, the state or the industry, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, social media, and networkin...

When I was in high school I saw “Field of Dreams.” It was one of those films that really moved me and at the time I didn’t quite understand why. I had lost my father at an early age so I definitely identified with Ray's (Kevin Costner) pain and longing but the message of the film struck me on an ever deeper level that I at the time couldn’t identify. It wasn’t until years later that I would decipher why the very last scene in the film would always bring me to tears. It wasn’t u...

At the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, Stage 32 had the 2nd largest attended panel at the Marche du Film next to Netflix! Our fearless leader, RB, and managing director Amanda Toney spoke about crowdsourcing and the importance of using social media as a filmmaker to a packed pavilion where over 300 people attended! Following Stage 32's standing-room only panel, RB sat down with Cineuropa, founded by industry veteran Domenico La Porta to chat some more. In this video, RB goes over: More abo...

***Update - we are grateful beyond words for those who've contributed to the IndieWire article. Please show your support. If you haven't left a comment on the article we ask that you please do so here.*** At the 2015 Cannes Film Festival Stage 32 sat down with legendary and iconic Hollywood journalist Anne Thompson who writes the immensely popular column "Thompson on Hollywood" for IndieWire. Anne's pedigree is nothing short of spectacular having scribed for Variety, The Hollywood Reporter,...

My journey as a composer of music to picture has been so far a non-straightforward one. Whilst studying Applied Arts in France (graphic design, architecture, fine art, etc) I started off in my teens singing and playing guitar, writing songs, fronting a live band. I then started producing other artists on the UK Soul scene in my twenties and thirties, and eventually began editing music and composing on TV shows, short films and documentaries. I've worked on projects big and small, some very cr...

We were all broke musicians, so it ended up on the shoulders of the family of the director to come up with the funds to create a film print. Somehow, they worked that out and we prepared the film for the big screen. Knowing the film would be in theaters, we started thinking of it in a few new ways. We had heard that a film gets shorter each time it plays a new theater as it arrives in several reels. Those reels get patched together by a projectionist. Each projectionist ends up cutting at...

I came to movie making the hard way - by accident. Add to that my “thing” about doing everything as perfectly as possible - which in this case was impossible. The result is best illustrated by my motto “When ignorance meets ridiculousness - out of the box stuff happens.” It all seemed to have “worked out” as my first film as a producer and star, Won’t Anybody Listen, resulted in rave reviews in all the major trades, theatrical distribution, sale of broadcast rights to th...

Over the past month we've been posting clips from the awesome interview Film Courage did with Stage 32 CEO RB Botto. These clips cover a variety of subjects including screenwriting, filmmaking, acting, distribution, indiefilm, the state or the industry, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, social media, and networking in person, online and outside of LA to name a few, and serve to provide you with some free educational tips and advice. Film Courage has begun releasing the interview in segments and we...

Nothing beats the art of brilliant filmmaking. Fortunately over the last couple of weeks we at Stage 32 had the opportunity to view remarkable filmmaking at the 68th Annual Cannes Film Festival. Our good friends over at Film4 had four films in Competition this year including Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth and Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, Yorgos Lanthimos's The Lobster (which was awarded the Jury Prize), and Todd Haynes' Carol (which Rooney Mara won Best Actress). They have a remarkable talent for working...

Oddly enough, I consider myself a survivor. Not of the Holocaust, or of the dreaded C word, or an horrific accident, or a natural disaster, or a substance addiction. No, my survival is of the intangible kind. I have survived my own childhood. I have finally, at fifty-two, freed myself from a demon given to me at birth by my mother. This demon’s name is Rejection, and she has stopped me my entire life at every turn. I am able now to experience joy in my own insanity because she and I are intim...