Filmmakers

Common kept his cool last week — and his artistic faith. While controversy swirled around his appearance at the White House for a poetry reading, the rapper-actor was anchoring a movie in Baltimore that should quiet even those pundits who tried to paint him as a gangsta. With concentration and intensity, he was helping first-time writer-director Sheldon Candis and a superb ensemble flesh out a script that proves (among other things) that gangsterism doesn't pay. "LUV" — it stands for "Learning Uncle Vincent" — captures the turning point in the life of an 11-year-old boy named Woody (Michael Rainey Jr)

Talk about a great story just falling into your lap. Baltimore filmmaker Ramona Diaz can't help but chuckle while recounting how she first heard about Arnel Pineda, the unlikely successor to Steve Perry as lead singer for Journey and the subject of her latest documentary, "Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey," which is showing Tuesday at the Charles Theatre. "I heard about Arnel getting the gig through an unsolicited email," she says, "that connected me with a link that was sort of going viral among the Filipino community.

Jason Winer comes to feature films from TV's "Modern Family. " But he always dreamed that someday he'd make movies. These are three of the filmmakers who helped shape his approach to directing: Woody Allen "From an early age, I was oddly into Woody Allen — like, when I was 7 years old. From a very early age, I enjoyed watching 'Annie Hall.' I watched it again in preparation for 'Arthur' because it was another iconic New York movie. I was watching it and wondering, 'What did I possibly love about it when I was 8 years old?

There is joy in Charm City. The Baltimore Ravens are the champions of the football world. Tuesday, upon the Ravens' return from the Super Bowl in New Orleans, hundreds of thousands of fans lined the streets of Baltimore and filled the football stadium. The city was euphoric and the fan base ecstatic. For the second time in this new century, Baltimore's Ravens are the best team in football. And yet, if not for one man, none of this would have been possible. If not for one man, there would be no Ravens football team.

The 2011 Maryland Film Festival showcases an extraordinary number of movies by filmmakers who grew up in Baltimore or have adopted it as their hometown. Here are a feature director, a documentary maker and a creator of avant-garde fantasy talking about making movies in Mobtown. Josh Slates' "Small Pond" is about a girl who's floundering in the provincial life of Columbia, Mo. Slates says he filmed it in the summer of 2009 as part of a brief homecoming and sabbatical in the Show-Me State.

The work of African-American filmmakers will be spotlighted in a touring film and discussion series opening in Baltimore next week. The National Black History Month Film & Discussion series, sponsored by Next Generation Awareness Foundation Inc., kicks off Feb. 5 with a daylong program of local and national films at the Maryland Institute College of Art's Brown Center, 1300 Mount Royal Ave. Included in the day's itinerary is a poetry showcase hosted by...

A trio of local guys are making good cinematically over the next few days, further evidence of the strength of Baltimore's standing as a still-nascent, but increasingly visible film colony. In theaters throughout Maryland today - indeed, in theaters throughout the country - Harford County's own Chris Robinson, a respected veteran of the music-video scene, makes his feature-length directing debut with ATL, a drama of depth and sensitivity about a group of African-American kids struggling to come of age on the often-unforgiving streets of Atlanta.

It's the little things about Baltimore that make Darryl Wharton want to create movies here -- like women's hairstyles.They're so "structured" and so sophisticated and so meticulously maintained, he explains. He knows women from other East Coast cities who come here just to get their hair done.Mr. Wharton is intrigued also by the way Baltimoreans talk. It's ideal for movie characters, he says."People in Baltimore have a definite vocal distinction about them," Mr. Wharton says.But, mostly, it's a great place for him to launch his movie-making career because the city is home for him and three other members of Middle Passage Cinema, his production company.

AS PERHAPS NEVER before, Baltimore is on the radar screen of the country's moviemakers. For the first time, the city made MovieMaker magazine's list of "Top 10 Cities for Movie Makers," the fifth annual countdown of the best cities for independents to live in and make movies. Editors of the industry publication interviewed writers, directors, location scouts, film office representatives and dozens of cinematographers about their favorite cities in which to live and work. Baltimore ranked ninth, ahead of Orlando, Fla., Atlanta and San Diego, and among heavyweights such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami.

A record number of teams, 53 as of Friday afternoon, are out frantically making movies in and around Baltimore this weekend, part of the annual exercise in creative cinematic anarchy otherwise known as the 48-Hour Film Project. "There will be at least 500 people out on the streets," said Rob Hatch, project organizer for Baltimore. "If they're aiming something at you, it's just a camera." Under the competition's rules, teams of filmmakers have exactly 48 hours to make a film between four and seven minutes long.

On Capitol Hill, in African-American churches and at historically black colleges and universities, people are talking about a documentary film that challenges negative reports and statistics regarding blacks, especially black men. "Hoodwinked," produced by former Laurel resident Janks Morton, debuted in fall 2012 during the Congressional Black Caucus' annual legislative weekend, and is now being shown at special screenings around the country....

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured distant reaches of the universe over the past 22 years, but with the end of the space shuttle program, has not been repaired since 2009. A filmmaker is challenging that decision with the documentary "Saving Hubble" and will speak in Baltimore on Tuesday. David Gaynes will speak at the Space Telescope Science Institute with his message about saving Hubble, which is expected to continue operating only through next year. NASA is focused on replacing Hubble with the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018.

CineMaryland, a television newsmagazine devoted to films and filmmaking in Maryland that has been available to local TV stations for 15 years, is going off the air. "We had a run of over 15 years, but at the end, nobody was watching," said show host and co-producer Rebecca Jessop. "It wasn't a tough decision to make, but it was sad. " Produced out of Howard Community College, CineMaryland had been broadcast on educational channels in Baltimore, Howard, Harford and Carroll counties, as well as other areas throughout the state.

Baltimore Councilman Nick J. Mosby has Tweeted himself into a movie role. He'll be playing himself -- a guy who Tweets a lot. With just over 500 followers, the District 7 representative might not be the biggest presence on Twitter. But he's apparently being followed by the right people. He'll be one of 140 personalities from the millions on the social media site included in a documentary called "Follow Friday. " The documentary portrays filmmaker Erin Faulk as she travels the country to meet and interview 140 of the people she follows on Twitter.

Matters of faith continue to divide people in dreadful ways, but there has always been at least one thing that religions have in common - the urge to express belief through art. That's a point driven home in a sumptuous 90-minute documentary by Baltimore filmmaker Robert Gardner airing this week on PBS. "Islamic Art: Mirror of the Invisible World," narrated by Susan Sarandon, provides a welcome look into a cultural legacy little known and little...

Nora Ephron was really all about the food. An acerbic observer of life whose wit translated so easily to the big screen, she was often as interested in the menu as she was in the script, and her appetite for moviemaking and crab cakes brought her to Baltimore in the early 1990s for the filming of "Sleepless in Seattle. " Ephron, who died Tuesday after a battle with leukemia, was called in to doctor a screenplay about a long-distance love affair between an architect in Seattle (Tom Hanks)

If you're a documentary maker, American history can be yours, but only at a price that may include your independence. For many of America's leading documentary artists, that's the message of the deal recently sealed between Showtime Networks Inc. and the Smithsonian Institution. Documentary filmmakers who intend to base their work substantially on the Smithsonian collection or interviews with its staff now must have their proposals reviewed by a new company called Smithsonian Networks, which is starting Smithsonian on Demand, a pay cable service, in December.

Maybe it's time for filmmakers to try telling one story at a time. Already this spring, Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End have committed the sin of cinematic overkill by trying to cram too many stories into a single film. And now Mr. Brooks, with Kevin Costner as a model citizen by day, serial killer by night, joins the list of the jam-packed. In addition to the story line centering on Mr. Brooks, there's one involving Demi Moore as an heiress-turned-detective with some serious parental issues to work out and another with Dane Cook as a serial killer wannabe.

When a group of Betsy Adelman's students at Ellicott Mills Middle School learned that a low-pressure air zone created by wind turbines could kill endangered bats by causing their lungs to burst, they set about making a 41/2 -minute documentary instead of writing an essay. Titled"Gone with the Wind,"it was shown during a nonjuried screening of environmental films by the American Film Institute at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in Silver Spring. Now it will get a second look as a tool for teaching teachers.

There are a lot of stories I remember reading in The Sun , many of them about sports - the story about Baltimore getting an NFL football team, and the story about the St. Louis Browns moving to Baltimore. But the review of "Diner" is the one that sticks out, because "Diner" was the first movie I wrote and directed, and The Evening Sun 's Lou Cedrone, who reviewed it, was an established and important critic in Baltimore at that time. It was one of those reviews where you pick it up and go, "Oh, my God. This is devastating.