Filmmakers

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 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.

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.

"Lovely Molly," the horrific tale of a woman either demonically possessed or tragically insane, may be the film that makes Eduardo Sanchez someone other than one of the guys responsible for 1999's "The Blair Witch Project. " Which would be fine with the Maryland-raised filmmaker, whose movie gets its local premiere tonight to cap the first day of the 14th Maryland Film Festival. "I love being one of the guys that did 'Blair Witch,' but I'm really proud of 'Lovely Molly,'" Sanchez, 44, said about the film he shot last fall in and around Hagerstown.

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)

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...

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 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.

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.

Oscar-nominated director Josh Fox was arrested on Wednesday at a public hearing chaired by Maryland Rep. Andy Harris, a Capitol Police spokeswoman confirmed. Fox, whose 2010 documentary “Gasland” raised environmental concerns about the natural gas mining process known as fracking, was attempting to film a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment that was focused on the issue. The hearing, titled “fractured science,” was intended to question the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's finding that the fracking process has likely been responsible for groundwater contamination.

Wallace "Wally" Henry Coberg, a theatrical designer and filmmaker who was at work on a new Edgar Allan Poe documentary, died of an apparent heart attack Nov. 18 at his Bolton Hill home. He was 63. Born in New York, N.Y, he lived in Edison, N.J., and Perrysburg, Ohio, before moving to Bel Air and graduating from Bel Air High School in 1966. He attended Boston University, Towson University and earned a degree at the Maryland Institute College of Art . In a 1974 Sun interview, he said he made a construction paper set at age 8 after watching Mary Martin play "Peter Pan" on television.

The holiday movie season is a crowded beast. So we asked filmmaker Hilton Carter, a MICA grad who now lives in Los Angeles, to give us his picks for what he can't wait to see. Carter, 31, whose dark short film "Moth" aired earlier this year on HBO, cut his teeth directing music videos for the likes of Blaqstarr and E Major. His latest project, heist comedy "One Last Run," will tentatively begin filming in Baltimore in mid-December (read more about the project and contribute on kickstarter.com)

"Witch's Brew," the latest effort from horrific Baltimore director Chris LaMartina, gets its world premiere at the Charles Theatre Wednesday night. The movie, filmed in and around Baltimore over the past two years, offers the twisted tale of a couple local brewmasters who run afoul of a witch. The results are predictably horrifying — especially to those unlucky enough to sample their "Slacker Lager. " As the movie's tagline so succinctly puts it, "Liver damage will be the LEAST of your problems.

While the War of 1812 might be known as "America's Forgotten War" elsewhere, that's definitely not the case in Baltimore and Maryland. Our obsession with all things 1812 is one of the regional characteristics so pronounced that it is lampooned in "The Second City Does Baltimore" satire now running at Center Stage . And Monday night, area viewers will have the chance to feed that appetite with two hours of a carefully researched documentary about...

The morning after an independent filmmaker heard he's been given a $25,000 arts award, he tried to assess what the check would mean. Matthew Porterfield, who walked away with the Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize on Saturday, worked seven years as a waiter at the Chameleon Cafe in Northeast Baltimore to support himself as an artist who made films the way he wanted. In his top-earning year, he once made $30,000 as a kindergarten teacher. Many years he made less than $12,000, despite high critical praise for his cinematic treatments involving the lives of people living in the Northeast Baltimore, where he was born and still resides.

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.

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.

Matthew Porterfield, the filmmaker behind "Putty Hill" and "Hamilton," was named the winner of the sixth annual Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize on Saturday. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts announced the winner of the $25,000 fellowship given every year in conjunction with Artscape at the Baltimore Museum of Art , where his installation is on display. "I'm speechless. To be a finalist among such fine artists is such an honor," Porterfield said Saturday night.