Hi y’all. Welcome (back) to Top of the Line, IndieWire’s newsletter about all things related to film and TV craft! Like the many other fine IndieWire newsletters to which you can choose to subscribe, this year Top of the Line is getting a bit of a refresh. It’s going from a set of recent article links to something that’s a little more substacky — except not on Substack, because Stubstack is gross.
Representing the wider IndieWire team’s interests in music, cinematography, VFX, costumes, and more will be me, Craft Editor Sarah Shachat. I am thrilled to take on the most rewarding challenge in my four years at IndieWire since trying to explain to the Gen Xers on staff that some of the best production design and makeup work right now is happening on Dropout.tv (if you enjoyed “The Chair Company” and you’re not excited for the return of “Very Important People,” then I’m sorry, you’re only living half a life.)
So in this inaugural edition, it’s worth laying out what the new version of Top of the Line will and won’t be. It’s not going to be awards odds — we have a whole other newsletter for that, and I have a whole history of coming last in fantasy leagues. None of us would be served by my trying to parse minute shifts in the race post-Bake Off from my sit-stand desk in New York.
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Top of the Line will, of course, celebrate work that’s going up for Guilds and the Oscars (and eventually Emmys) and so on. I’ll try to pick out what’s interesting about some of the strong contenders — now that the “Hamnet” score is out on Apple Music, I am reminded how Max Richter shouldn’t be allowed to keep getting away with this. But I also will try and look at some of the crafts that aren’t quite as in conversation — it’s kind of wild how much of “Sinners” depends on its twin VFX that will in all probability be completely ignored for not being, you know, Na’vi.
What I hope to do with this is occupy a space that is adjacent to the normal craft writing we do at IndieWire, with a little bit more reflection on trends beyond specific projects, and with, I have been instructed, a maximum of one Crew Stories meme per issue. I make no promises, other than to try and be as specific as I can be when referring to types of machine learning software and individual use cases, instead of just saying “AI” like the LLM plagiarism machines are every kind of generative machine learning technology that there is.
As I kept saying to my family over Thanksgiving, who don’t work in media and wanted to know if I liked “Wicked: For Good,” the truth is that every film that gets made is a miracle. And they are so miraculous in large part because of the iceberg-sized amount of work by each crew that rests just below the surface of the proverbial ocean. I hope this newsletter provides a nice, quick dip below the water.
Costume Design Is Good, Actually
Over the last week, the water cooler, at least in my corner of Instagram, has been about agreeing that Luca Guadagnino said something risible about costume designers, and, yep, he sure did. Sometimes directors are dummies, but this has been true for all of cinema and at least now there is one reel out there where it is truly healing to read the comments. I highly recommend doing that, and not denigrating costume designers and the whole philosophy of costume design, jeez louise.
But honestly, one paragraph is more than that comment deserves. More of my brain power has been taken up by watching the “Kpop Demon Hunters” performance at the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the report from my brother that pretty much all the trick-or-treaters they saw at Halloween were dressed up as said Kpop Demon Hunters. The songs whip, of course; I’ve heard “Golden” in a retirement home, y’all. But the more staying power the film has, the more I’m struck by the editing and especially the sound work that supports them. Sometimes animated films do break through in other categories; I have no idea if it’ll happen for Netflix’s animated answer to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” but at least there will be no danger of the film going unseen.
There will be a normal newsletter focus the next time — probably on “Pluribus,” because “Pluribus” is getting really fun, and winter TV should get some love, too. See you then!
Sign up for the new Top of the Line newsletter here.