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Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why? Isaac Mizrahi in the tub, chatting with his mother on the phone as if the cameras weren’t there. No problem being filmed mid-soak. Nudity wasn’t a thing for him—or for me, really. When you’re around supermodels like Linda, Naomi, Kate and Cindy, modesty isn’t exactly part of the gig. Clothes came off as quickly […]

The post “Isaac Mizrahi in the Tub” | Douglas Keeve, Unzipped first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why? Isaac Mizrahi in the tub, chatting with his mother on the phone as if the cameras weren’t there. No problem being filmed mid-soak. Nudity wasn’t a thing for him—or for me, really. When you’re around supermodels like Linda, Naomi, Kate and Cindy, modesty isn’t exactly part of the gig. Clothes came off as quickly […]

The post “Isaac Mizrahi in the Tub” | Douglas Keeve, Unzipped first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

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Veteran documentary filmmaker and fashion photographer Douglas Keeve has signed with Buchwald for entertainment representation.

More recently, Keeve directed and executive produced Supreme Models, a six-part docuseries for YouTube and Vogue. The series is based on Marcellas Reynolds’ book Supreme Models: Iconic Black Women Who Revolutionized Fashion, as it portrays fashion trailblazers like Iman and Bethann Hardison, and fellow models Joan Smalls, Indya Moore and Precious Lee.

Also featured in the series on the official Vogue YouTube Channel is Anna Wintour, Pat Cleveland, Roshumba Williams and Veronica Webb. Keeve won an audience award at the Sundance Film Festival for Unzipped, a light-hearted documentary that followed designer Isaac Mizrahi as he prepared for his 1994 runway collection.

The 1995 documentary also featured Linda Evangelista, Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford alongside the famed fashion designer. Film critic Janet Maslin in The New York Times called...

YouTube Originals is bolstering its originals slate with a slew of unscripted orders including the acquisition of a Tom Petty feature documentary.

The streamer has acquired the rights to Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free: The Making of Wildflowers, exploring how the musician made his seminal album. The film, which is directed by Mary Wharton, features ever-before-seen footage drawn from a newly discovered archive of 16mm film as well as new interviews with album co-producers Rick Rubin and Heartbreaker Mike Campbell, along with original Heartbreaker Benmont Tench.

The film first debuted in March as an Official SXSW 2021 Selection, winning the festival’s Audience Award, and will see its theatrical release on October 20 for a one-night global celebration via Trafalgar Releasing.

Launching on YouTube later this year, it is produced by Peter Afterman with executive producers Dan Braun, Mary Wharton and Adria Petty and presented by Inaudible Films, Warner Music Entertainment and Warner Records.

Fashion documentaries have been going downhill ever since Unzipped. Douglas Keeve’s 1995 portrait of Isaac Mizrahi, a box office smash and critical hit, remains the pinnacle of what so many since have attempted. Like Madonna: Truth or Dare, from which it took much inspiration, that riotously funny glimpse into Mizrahi’s world full of design, famous friends, creativity and wickedly self-depreciating neurosis was a perfect storm of sorts between personality, fashion and celebrity that a film about this sort of person ought to be.

Every year brings us several of these sorts of documentaries. Like the majority of them, Sandy Chronopoulos’ debut feature, House of Z, is easily digestible and barely raises a sweat; a work of celebrity portraiture that fans won’t regret watching, but which offers little beyond what is promised on the tin. Taking the same narrative hook as Unzipped of a talented young designer’s comeback...

The who's who of the fashion industry will descend upon Lincoln Center for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week starting today. If you can't make the runway shows yourself, take a look at Indiewire's latest selections for Hulu's Documentaries page - a series of films examining the world of fashion.  Watch these and other fashion-focused docs now for free!James Belzer's "The Tents" provides a history of New York Fashion Week, featuring organizers, designers, fashion editors, and publicists before the event transitioned from its previous home in Bryant Park. A number of films take the viewer behind the scenes as designers prepare their latest collections: Matt Tyrnauer's acclaimed "Valentino: The Last Emperor"profiles the legendary designer; Douglas Keeve's "Unzipped" heads back in time, as Isaac Mizrahi plans his Fall 1994 line; "Craeft - Ports 1961 - New York Fashion Week / Fall 2010" details the hurdles between designer Tia Cibani and her Bryant Park runway show; and.

The 2005 Newport International Film Festival, set to run June 7-12 in Newport, R.I., will honor writer-director-actor Michael McKean with its annual Claiborne Pell Award for Lifetime Achievement. Douglas Keeve's Seamless, a documentary about the fashion industry, will serve as opening-night film at the fest, run by executive director Laurie Kirby. Hans Petter Moland's The Beautiful Country, about the Vietnamese children of American GIs, has been selected as closing-night film.

NBC Enterprises has signed designer and TV show host Isaac Mizrahi to an overall development deal. Mizrahi has been hosting The Isaac Mizrahi Show on the Oxygen Network for the past three years. With Marisa Gardini and Larry Brezner, he is developing a potential series for national syndication with NBC Enterprises, NBCE president Ed Wilson said. An award-winning designer, Mizrahi rose to fame in 1995 as the subject of director Douglas Keeve's highly acclaimed documentary Unzipped, which won the Audience Award for Documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival that year. Distributed by Miramax Films, the film was screened internationally at the Cannes and Venice film festivals and opened nationally Aug. 4, 1995. In 2000, Mizrahi wrote and starred in the well-received off-Broadway show Les MIZrahi.

NBC Enterprises has signed designer and TV show host Isaac Mizrahi to an overall development deal. Mizrahi has been hosting "The Isaac Mizrahi Show" on the Oxygen Network for the past three years. With Marisa Gardini and Larry Brezner, he is developing a potential series for national syndication with NBC Enterprises, NBCE president Ed Wilson said. An award-winning designer, Mizrahi rose to fame in 1995 as the subject of director Douglas Keeve's highly acclaimed documentary "Unzipped", which won the Audience Award for Documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival that year. Distributed by Miramax Films, the film was screened internationally at the Cannes and Venice film festivals and opened nationally Aug. 4, 1995. In 2000, Mizrahi wrote and starred in the well-received off-Broadway show "Les MIZrahi".

VIRTUOSITY

Paramount Pictures

Paramount's entry into the cybercinema sweepstakes (coming on the heels of TriStar's ``Johnny Mnemonic'' and Columbia's ``The Net''), ``Virtuosity'' is a special ef fects bonanza with a downbeat story line, trigger-crazy hero and a nasty computer-generated villain.

Director Brett Leonard's thought-provoking bloodbath is a bit grim for the prime date-night crowd, but young males will not be disappointed. Lack of a stronger lead female character both crashes the story and deletes the film's appeal to that audience.

A stylish but often trite thriller starring Denzel Washington as a wily hero battling a supervillain-composite embodied by Russell Crowe (``The Quick and the Dead''), ``Virtuosity'' has plenty of imagination, but it's overloaded with conventional violence and gunplay, while romance is offline.

The pluses the film gets for realizing a visually terrific sci-fi landscape include eye-popping computer-animated sequences of virtual reality environments. But these virtues are negated by Eric Brent's screenplay that combines concepts usually found in serious science-fiction literature with leftovers from a bad Hollywood cliffhanger.

Washington handles himself well in the action scenes and stays in the film's serious frame of mind for his many agonizing flashbacks and confrontations with authority (HR 8/4-6).

UNZIPPED

Miramax Films

Miramax, which has already dipped into the fashion world with Robert Altman's ``Ready to Wear, '' is trying again with this documentary about designer Isaac Mizrahi, and this low-budget item may hit the art-house pay dirt that Altman's all-star opus didn't. ``Unzipped, '' after all, does feature a close- up of Naomi Campbell's navel ring.

``Unzipped, '' which won the Audience Award for Documentaries at Sundance, is a seemingly cinema verite docu detailing Mizrahi's preparations for the unveiling of his fall 1994 collection.

Directed by Douglas Keeve (Mizrahi's lover at the time, a fact unacknowledged in the film), it succeeds largely on the basis of the designer's hyper-intense, neurotic, campy personality. Mizrahi now claims that he never thought the film would actually be seen, which may account for his willingness to reveal himself.

The presence of many of today's top models will add greatly to the film's commercial appeal, Mizrahi himself not being much to look at. Such fashion presences as Linda Evangelista, Campbell, Cindy Crawford and Kate Moss show up in various states of physical and emotional undress, and if nothing especially scandalous is revealed, the models seem to be good sports in terms of making fun of themselves (HR 8/4-6).

RIVER OF GRASS

Strand Releasing

Kelly Reichardt's debut feature is an ultra low-budget affair that chronicles dead-end lives with such accuracy that the movie itself seems stillborn. Set in a depressing area of Florida, a stretch of Broward County approaching the Everglades, the film is as soporific as the heat and the humidity that seem to emanate from the screen. The picture, which is playing a two-week engagement at New York City's Public Theater, is not a likely candidate for commercial engagements.

Supposedly conceived as a take-off on the kind of road movie in which a pair of criminal lovers take it on the lam, ``River of Grass'' seems less genre-busting than lethargic.

Reichardt's deadpan helming (featuring many fragmented, elliptically edited images), the ultra-bland dialogue and performances that are low-key to the point of nonexistence rob the film of whatever satirical energy it might have had (HR 8/7).

(c) The Hollywood Reporter...