Washington Square Films has signed directing duo Spielbergs (Alex Karpovsky and Teddy Blanks) for their first commercial representation. The twosome has already co-directed three music videos with the support of Washington Square Films, including videos for Tanlines (“Palace,” starring Natasha Lyonne of Orange Is The New Black) and RAC (“Back of the Car,” starring Sasheer Zamata, Saturday Night Live). Spielbergs’ music video for Kopecky (“Talk to Me,” starring Michael Ian Black, Wet Hot American Summer) was released earlier this week.
The Spielbergs duo initially met on Lena Dunham’s breakthrough indie feature Tiny Furniture in 2010. Karpovsky played the male co-lead for the film while Blanks created titles and composed the score. Tiny Furniture went on to win Best Feature at SXSW, an Independent Spirit award and a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award.
With a shared sense of humor and lively approach to production, Spielbergs’ collaboration draws upon Karpovsky’s background as an actor to evoke subtleties in performance and Blanks’ experience as a designer to curate a stylized visual aesthetic. Spielbergs’ work fuses absurd, surrealistic visuals with dynamic character driven storytelling, as demonstrated by their work on the forthcoming Amazon series, The New Yorker Presents.
“I’m a big fan of the work Alex and Teddy have done independently. I loved Alex’s film Red Flag, and Teddy created absolutely brilliant graphics on two films we produced: Listen Up Phillip and Queen of Earth,” said Washington Square Films founder/president Joshua Blum. “As a team they have great chemistry. They are both smart, witty and creative, and their shoots are lots of fun.”
Jonathan Schwartz, Washington Square Films’ director of sales and marketing/managing director, said, “I’m excited about their enthusiasm for advertising and branded content. Alex is a former editor and Teddy has created graphics for advertising, so they have experience with clients and agencies, and since they are both talented writers, they bring a wealth of ideas to the table.”
In addition to being an accomplished singer and songwriter, Blanks is co-founder of the Brooklyn-based design studio CHIPS. He has designed and produced title sequences for over 50 films and television shows, including Still Alice, Love & Mercy and HBO’s Togetherness, as well as book covers for Kim Gordon and Lena Dunham. Karpovsky has directed five feature-length films and an episode of the HBO comedy series Girls, on which he plays the role of Ray Ploshansky. He has also acted in over 30 films, including the last two written and directed by the Coen Brothers: Oscar-nominated Inside Llewyn Davis and the upcoming Hail, Caesar!
From Restoring To Hopefully Preserving Multi-Camera Categories At The Emmys
When Gary Baum, ASC won his fourth career Emmy Award earlier this month, it was especially gratifying in that the honor came in a category--Outstanding Cinematography for a Multi-Camera Half-Hour Series--that had been restored thanks in part to a grass-roots initiative among cinematographers to drum up entries. Last year the category fell by the wayside when not enough multi-camera entries materialized.
In his acceptance speech, Baum appealed to the Television Academy to keep multi-camera categories alive. He later noted to SHOOT that editors also got their multi-camera recognition back in the Emmy competition this year. Baum hopes that after resurrecting multi-camera categories in 2024, such recognition will be preserved for 2025 and beyond.
A major factor in the decline of multi-camera submissions in 2023 was the move of certain children’s and family programming from the primetime Emmy competition to the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ (NATAS) Emmy ceremony. For DPs this meant that multi-camera programs last year were reduced to vying for just one primetime nomination slot in the more general Outstanding Cinematography for a Series (Half-Hour) category. It turned out that this single slot was filled in ‘23 by a Baum-lensed episode of How I Met Your Father (Hulu).
Fast forward to this year’s competition and Baum won for another installment of How I Met Your Father--”Okay Fine, It’s A Hurricane,” which turned out to be the series finale. Two of Baum’s Emmy wins over the years have been for How I Met Your Father, and there’s a certain symmetry to them. His initial win for How I Met Your Father was for the pilot in 2022. So he won Emmys for the very first and last... Read More