After a fair bit of kerfuffle over its rejection from the SXSW Film Festival, Paul Schrader‘s The Canyons has managed to snag a distribution deal from IFC Films. Deadline Hollywood passes along word that the already-controversial film, penned by Bret Easton Ellis and “starring” porn star James Deen and perennial tabloid fodder Lindsay Lohan, will be getting quite the fancy release from the distributors, including a theatrical bow, a digital release, and a “Special Presentation” at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City sometime this summer. Snark aside, if you’re in Gotham this summer, mark your calendars now, this sounds like it’s going to be the cinematic event of the season. Schrader has described the film as “cinema for the post-theatrical era,” and the project utilized a bevy of crowd-funding techniques to raise both funds and awareness (a campaign we’ve covered here, here, and here) so it is, at the very least, an innovative project that will be interesting to track even on the most basic of financial levels (i.e. is this thing going to make money?). The Film Society of Lincoln Center event will include a chat with Schrader and Kent Jones, Director of Programming of the New York Film Festival, so we’ll keep an eye and ear out for those details to pass along to all our New York Rejects.

Paul Schrader’s next film, The Canyons, was written by famed author Bret Easton Ellis and stars Lindsay Lohan and some male porn star, which earned the project some hype right from the very moment it was announced that held straight through its production. But, despite all of its marquee talent, the movie put out a weird teaser trailer that didn’t seem to have any actual footage from the film and was mostly just a bunch of abstract images shot around L.A. Well, now the film has released a full trailer, and instead of being street photography stuff that doesn’t feature Lindsay Lohan, it’s…something else that’s completely weird as well. It would seem that either The Canyons was shot in black and white, its images have been altered to make this vintage-style trailer, or what we’re looking at still isn’t actual footage from the film. Which of these possibilities sounds most believable?

With all the time Bret Easton Ellis spends on twitter voicing his unpopular opinions, it was a bit of a shock to discover he found even more time to develop a project with Paul Schrader. That movie, The Canyons, we now have a first look at, and in a nicely unconventional way as well. Schrader’s film earned its financing via Kickstarter, so it’s an appropriate marketing choice to sell the movie as a down and dirty indie. Take a gander at the iMovie effects-ridden teaser for The Canyons (via The Playlist):

Over the course of its pre-production, The Canyons has established itself as being something of a poster child for modern filmmaking. Besides its casting of a couple of recognizable names, like tabloid star Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen, the film searched for much of its talent through Facebook auditions. And instead of relying on studio backing to raise funds, the traditional way, its writer, Bret Easton Ellis, and its director, Paul Schrader, raised money through a Kickstarter project, that offered up a bevy of ridiculous prizes backers could win. So what have been the fruits of all of their ultra-modern labors? It’s still kind of hard to tell. A two-and-a-half minute trailer has been released, but it doesn’t seem to contain any actual footage from the film it’s supposed to be promoting. Instead, it just gives us a montage of images shot around L.A., set to a Dum Dum Girls song; no Lindsay, no James Deen, no nothing. Despite the film’s apparent tagline of “It’s not The Hills,” this promo looks like it could very much be the credit sequence of some sort of reality show shot in the city.

The staff here at FSR have been tracking the development of The Canyons pretty closely. The reportedly microbudgeted film directed by Paul Schrader from a script by American Psycho/Less Than Zero novelist Bret Easton Ellis and guided by indie producer Braxton Pope, The Canyons has gained notice for utilizing social media outlets like Kickstarter to help finance it and Facebook to cast as-yet-undiscovered talent. Now, it appears that legendary acting veterans James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor porn star James Deen and postmodern performance art project Lindsay Lohan will star in the film, which ComingSoon describes as a “contemporary thriller that documents five twenty-somethings’ quest for power, love, sex and success in 2012 Hollywood.” Lohan is best-known for her starring roles in The Parent Trap, Mean Girls, and the Los Angeles district court. James Deen is best known for his roles at Jimmy Olsen in Superman XXX: A Porn Parody, Moe in Simpsons: The XXX Parody, and Egon Spengler in This Ain’t Ghostbusters XXX.

A money clip autographed by Robert De Niro and given to Paul Schrader on the set of Taxi Driver. A pitch meeting with the producer currently making a Schrader feature penned by Bret Easton Ellis. An autographed hardcover copy of every Ellis book. I’m sorry, are you some Hollyhood hot shot? No? Just a Kickstarter backer? Sure. We’ve written plenty about the Schrader-directed and Ellis-penned The Canyons, thanks to its inventive use of participatory cinema (including casting for roles on Facebook) and our exclusive debut of the film’s poster, but now the team behind the film (including producer Braxton Pope) have gone one step further when it comes to making a crowd-influenced film: they’re going for crowd-funding. Per the film’s new Kickstarter page, “Pope, Ellis and Schrader are partly financing the film themselves through Pope’s new company Sodium Fox in order to maintain complete creative control of the distinct source material…The Canyons team has realized the Kickstarter is indeed a part of this new independent change, and is seeking to connect with our fan base even further with this campaign.” The Canyons team is currently looking to raise $100,000, and to meet that end, they’re offering some of the most jaw-dropping backer rewards that I’ve ever seen for this type of campaign (you know, like those I listed up top). After the break, check out twelve unbelievable items currently available as backer rewards on The Canyons‘ Kickstarter page. If financing indie films means that Bret Easton Ellis will review your novel or Paul Schrader

Yesterday, our own Landon Palmer dedicated this week’s always-astute Culture Warrior to emerging participatory cinema, films that hinge on the involvement of outside audiences to not only finance them, but actually cast them and get them to the screen. Landon paid particular attention to director Paul Schrader and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis‘s The Canyons, one of the most tantalizing and high-profile projects out there that is relying on participation from others to get made. The pair, along with producer Braxton Pope, are relying on submitted auditions from all interested parties to form their cast, using their Facebook page and their LetItCast page to choose possible rising stars to fill out the  five major roles in the film. While we don’t know much about the film, we do know that it’s “about youth, glamour, sex and Los Angeles, circa 2012″ and that the five main roles include “Christian, a trust fund kid, power player and major manipulator, who is a film producer that enjoys filming his own three-way sex sessions; Tara, his girlfriend and former model; Ryan, a bartender and young actor who is angling for a role in Christian’s horror movie; Gina, who works for Ryan and is in love with him and is also looking for a role in the horror pic and finally, Lindsay, a former actress turned yoga instructor who is sleeping with Christian, and falling in love with him.” (Thanks to The Playlist for those descriptions.) Both Schrader and Ellis have distinctly dark worldviews, so it’s

Modern American design and its history have become major preoccupations within contemporary cosmopolitan circles. Gary Hustwit recently finished his third documentary on the subject, Mad Men makes us nostalgically long for clean copy and clear utility, and the death of Steve Jobs brought forth considerations of the important connections between user-friendliness, sleek aesthetics, and the construction of products around human intuition. Making the case that we have still yet to exhaust what continually proves to be a fascinating and increasingly relevant subject, Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey’s historical documentary Eames: The Architect and The Painter traverses the fascinating life of a couple whose contributions broadly determined what modern postwar American life looked and felt like. As narrator James Franco romantically points towards the beginning of the film, Charles Eames was an architect who never got his license, and Ray Eames was a painter who rarely painted. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of their influential lives was that they rarely operated within the confinements of either of these titles. They couldn’t be pigeonholed as architects, marketers, filmmakers, etc,. And as such, their work reflected an impending new world of convergence where art, commerce, and visual culture all became deeply related during the second half of the twentieth century. The many lives they influenced can be evidenced by the occupational variety of well-regarded professional people who lend their sound bites to the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Eames including filmmaker Paul Schrader, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, and architect Kevin Roche.

Clive Owen is an actor who has impressed me in the past with both his inherent charisma (in movies like Closer) and the level of his dramatic chops (in things like Children of Men). I like seeing him in roles where he really gets to show off and make some bold choices with his performance. So it’s been disappointing to me that recently he’s been playing stone faced soldiers, secret agents, and hit men in things like Killer Elite and The International. All of these tough guy action roles just kind of blend together in my mind and unfortunately Variety is reporting that Owen has just signed onto another one that you can throw onto the pile.

Can we all take a moment and be thankful that Paul Schrader – the man who wrote Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder and Raging Bull and Mosquito Coast and wrote/directed American Gigolo – is still pumping out films? His recent work doesn’t belong on the sky-high pedestal that these names do, but Adam Resurrected was a pretty solid movie, and his lack of retired status means he can team with Bret Easton Ellis to deliver Bait. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Schrader is going to work with Ellis on the script (and direct the film) which sees a young man taking revenge on the wealthy by weaseling his way into a yacht club, snagging a boat, and taking a few fat cats out to the deep end where hungry fish await. It’s unclear what propels the revenge, but this pairing is a dream come true. Don’t expect this one to be PC. Or pretty.

Welcome to the fifth and final installment of Guest Author month at Criterion Files: a month devoted to important classic and contemporary bloggers. This week, David Ehrlich, whose bimonthly column Criterion Corner was a favorite at Cinematical, takes on Paul Schrader’s incredible biopic Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. Tune in next week as Adam Charles returns Criterion Files to its usual rotation, and in the meantime you can take a look at the previous entries from guest contributors here. Infamous Japanese iconoclast Yukio Mishima once said “I still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line…,” a sentiment which suggests that his eventual suicide came only once his creative resources had run dry. Yet, as Paul Schrader’s sublime film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters so fluidly illustrates, Mishima ended his life with a self-administered sword thrust to the chest not because he was out of words, but rather because the page had never been a sufficient canvas for his artistic expression, or one to which he had ever intended to confine himself.

You hear the phrase “This movie could never be made today” quite often, and it’s typically a thinly veiled means by which a creative team allows themselves to administer loving pats on their own backs. But in the context of at a 35th anniversary exhibition of the restoration of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver with a justifiably disgruntled Paul Schrader in attendance, such a sentence rings profoundly and depressingly true. Like many of you, I’ve seen Taxi Driver many times before. For many, it’s a formative moment in becoming a cinephile. But I had never until last weekend seen the film outside of a private setting. And in a public screening, on the big screen, I’m happy to say the film still has the potential to shock and profoundly affect viewers so many decades on. For me personally it was the most disturbing of any time I’d ever seen the film, and I was appropriately uncomfortable despite anticipating the film’s every beat. Perhaps it was because I was sharing the film’s stakes with a crowd instead of by myself or with a small group of people, or perhaps the content comes across as so much more subversive when projected onto a giant screen, or perhaps it was because the aura of a room always feels different when the creative talent involved is in attendance. For whatever reason, I found the film to be more upsetting than in any other context of viewing. But one of the most appalling moments of Taxi

When’s the last time you were excited about a Harrison Ford movie? Go ahead, you can be honest. (Although if you say the most recent Indiana Jones stinker I’m going to have to ask you to leave.)