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This week, look to the future of filmmaking with Zachary Wigon's exploration of the transmedia phenomenon, look back at Manhattan's post-Civil War era with Beverly Swerling's new novel, and look past the dismal script to Simon Russell Beale's indelible turn in Simon Stephens' drama Bluebird.        

Film

Transmedia and the Future of Filmmaking  

There are a lot of theories as to why the movie business isn't what it used to be. The financial crisis of 2008 significantly lessened private equity's desire to sink investments into films, independent and otherwise. A number of great indie and semi-indie distributors (Warner Independent, Picturehouse, THINKFilm) have gone out of business in recent years, leaving the ratio of independent films made to those bought at an all-time low. And most of the lucky films that do land a distribution deal get one- or two-week runs in a handful of cities scattered across the country and then go to die on VOD, as most independent distributors lack the finances to allot them even the most basic P&A budgets. Yet the problem, as evinced by across-the-board domestic box office ticket sales figures, has a far simpler answer: People simply aren't going to the movies as much as they used to.  

Read more here.   

Theater

Same Song, Different Bird     

At a time when the theater is more malleable than ever, when ambitious theater companies do everything short of rehearsing their audiences to make ticket buyers feel included in the show, Simon Stephens' Bluebird feels like a deliberate throwback. A 100-minute cab ride through various sad lives, the play about a London taxi driver and his penance is resolutely static.
Read more here.  

Classical Music  

Pianist Fuzjko Hemming returns to NYC   

For the first time since 2009, "legend of the piano" Fuzjko Hemming will be returning to Alice Tully Hall as part of her Piano Solo Concert USA Tour. The award-laden Hemming (whose severe hearing difficulties have not hindered her musical skill) will perform at Alice Tully at 7:30 p.m., Sept. 24. Prior to the Lincoln Center engagement, audiences can catch her at Purchase College Sept. 21; both concerts will have a portion of their proceeds donated to support Japan's earthquake reconstruction efforts. 

Books    

City of Promise  

When was the last time your heart started pounding as you read a novel? Or learned something you didn't know about Manhattan's history? If you can't remember, run, don't walk, to purchase a copy of Beverly Swerling's compulsively readable City of Promise.

Set in the Manhattan of the 1870s and '80s, when elevated subways and apartment buildings were just beginning to crop up in areas still considered no-man's-lands-pretty much everything above 42nd Street-Swerling tracks the financial success of Joshua Turner, a one-legged Civil War veteran who has the crazy notion of stacking people in the sky like layers of a cake, and his wife Mollie, a shrewd and lovely young woman who was raised by her madam aunt in the city's most fashionable whorehouse.  

Read more here. 

Gallery Openings This Week   

THE JOE BONHAM PROJECT represents the efforts of wartime illustrators to document the struggles of U.S. service personnel undergoing rehabilitation after traumatic front-line injury. Formed in early 2011 by Michael D. Fay, the Project takes its name from the central character in Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo's 1938 novel of a World War I soldier unable to communicate with the outside world due to the extent of his wounds. Scheduled to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, the exhibition will mark the silent sacrifices of American soldiers in the ensuing decade-long conflict.