"Geoff Gilmore: Evolution v. Revolution, The State of Independent Film & Festivals"
"...after thirty years of independent film, have we reached an end? Is the independent arena creatively moribund and/or has the audience itself changed either because of a generational shift or simply a transformation in public taste? Perhaps more critically, are the changes with financial or structural models that fueled the independent arena’s growth now outdated or passe? For over three decades, video/DVD and cable were the revenue safety net for independent film and equity financing its fuel, and that may simply no longer be the case. So where are we now? I know most media and journalists seek definitive answers. All I know are the questions but I think they are instructive.[...]"
"If festivals are to remain relevant to what has always been their lifeblood (young people, new talent, and a new generation), their mission must continue to evolve. To this end they need to expand their accessibility and their creative focus and they need to take risks, to create the atmosphere for that aforementioned expansion of the sense of the possible. If festivals don’t continually rethink how and what to showcase for the future, even without abandoning their traditional cultural purpose and aesthetic standards, then the festival world will go the way of the dinosaur.[...]"
"Is the independent film arena truly struggling or are the production and distribution of independent films as difficult as they always have been and always will be? Maybe we can address this by asking several questions. First of all, there is the question of audiences - their tastes and motivations. A close second is the range the difficulties (both familiar and new) inherent in distribution. Many people say there are too many independent films produced given that the pipeline for distribution is so narrow. Even though more films are reaching the theatrical marketplace, the subsequent competition for audience and the perceived failure of many works in that theatrical arena creates an outlook that independent film is in crisis. Is it true? Again the answer is complicated.[...]"
"Structurally the biggest issue facing independent film is the theatrical distribution bottleneck. As long as theatrical exposure is the driving force to a film’s revenue streams in the so called ancillary markets, video/DVD, pay cable etc. then the expense of that theatrical release, the crowded marketplace and the competition with studio and specialized divisions of studios for that same filmgoer, creates a unique challenge. And if specialized distribution and the potential of new technologies, i.e. the Internet, are the answer, the question still remains how to reach filmgoers - how does marketing on the Internet succeed whether it’s viral, social community or niche, and when will revenue streams from new distribution mechanisms actually be significant?"
"The Revolution Is Dead, Long Live the Revolution" by Manohla Dargis, The N.Y. Times
"The current line on independent film, depending on who’s doing the spinning and why, is that it’s dead, in crisis or at least in trouble. The death notices are mainly attributable to the recent closing and retrenchment of a handful of small companies, though the biggest shock occurred earlier this year when Time Warner, the multinational that owns Warner Brothers Entertainment and HBO, dismantled three of its subsidiaries — New Line Cinema, Picturehouse and the paradoxically named Warner Independent Pictures — firing hundreds and absorbing others into the host body.[...]
"For my part, I am honestly sorry to see those small studio companies go, but their closings say less about independent film than they do about Hollywood. Some of the best American films of the past decade, including Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” (Paramount Vantage and Miramax), have been put out by specialty divisions, and it’s an open question whether corporate giants that close these units, like Time Warner, have the will to bring out movies that can’t be summed up in one sentence. It’s also an open question how Hollywood’s retreat will affect the indie infrastructure."
"At the New York Film Festival, a Global Glimpse of the State of the Cinema" by Manohla Dargis, The N.Y. Times
"There are a multitude of complex, interconnected reasons why foreign-language cinema has taken such a hit, including its displacement by American independent film in the public’s over-multimedia-stimulated imagination. In this climate small distributors are finding it difficult to take chances with challenging, difficult, thoughtful (each adjective another kiss of death) foreign-language films, even when individual titles come equipped with glowing notices and the imprimatur of a world-class festival like Cannes."
"[...]if the New York Film Festival is going to remain relevant in these difficult movie times, it needs to work harder to secure the best, and it needs to nurture a new audience, not just dine out on the faithful."
In Downturn, Americans Flock to the Movies by Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes, The N.Y. Times
"Over the last year or two, studios have released movies that are happier, scarier or just less depressing than what came before. After poor results for a spate of serious dramas built around the Middle East (“The Kingdom,” “Lions for Lambs,” “Rendition”), Hollywood got back to comedies like “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” a review-proof lark about an overstuffed security guard.
“A bunch of movies have come along that don’t make you think too much,” said Marc Abraham, a producer whose next film is a remake of “The Thing.”
Certainly exhibitors are looking for a profit lift in the downturn. A new report from Global Media Intelligence on Friday predicted that the fortunes of movie theater operators like Regal Entertainment and Cinemark Holdings would be “increasingly favorable against a backdrop of highly negative economic news.”
Cinematic quality has little to do with it. The recent crop of Oscar nominees has fared poorly, for the most part, at the box office. Lighter fare has drawn the crowds."
"It would take a very generous person to call these pictures anything other than middle-of-the-road, at best,” said Roger Smith, the executive editor of Global Media Intelligence."
"Neo-Neo Realism" by A.O. Scott, The N.Y. Times
"What kind of movies do we need now? It’s a question that seems to arise almost automatically in times of crisis. It was repeatedly posed in the swirl of post-9/11 anxiety and confusion, and the consensus answer, at least among studio executives and the entertainment journalists who transcribe their insights, was that, in the wake of such unimaginable horror, we needed fantasy, comedy, heroism. In practice, the response turned out to be a little more complicated — some angry political documentaries and earnest wartime melodramas made it into movie theaters during the Bush years, and a lot of commercial spectacles arrived somber in mood and heavy with subtext— but such exceptions did little to dent the conventional wisdom.
And as a new set of worries and fears has crystallized in recent months — lost jobs and homes, corroded values and vanished credit — the dominant cultural oracles have come to pretty much the same conclusions. Remember the ’30s, when we danced through the Depression with Fred Astaire and Busby Berkeley and giggled amid the gloom with Lubitsch and the Marx Brothers? (Not many of us do, of course, which makes this kind of selective memory easier to promote.) Then as now, what we wanted most was to forget our troubles. In recession, as in war — and also, conveniently, in times of peace or prosperity — the movies we evidently need are the ones that offer us the possibility, however fanciful or temporary, of escape.
Maybe so. But what if, at least some of the time, we feel an urge to escape from escapism? For most of the past decade, magical thinking has been elevated from a diversion to an ideological principle. The benign faith that dreams will come true can be hard to distinguish from the more sinister seduction of believing in lies. To counter the tyranny of fantasy entrenched on Wall Street and in Washington as well as in Hollywood, it seems possible that engagement with the world as it is might reassert itself as an aesthetic strategy. Perhaps it would be worth considering that what we need from movies, in the face of a dismaying and confusing real world, is realism."
"Why Hard Times Won't Mean Good Times at the Movies Again" by J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
"A reorganized and self-regulated Hollywood bounced back in 1935, but times were different then. Movies were America's universal culture. Now, they're not even close. Like then, the technology is changing—but in a far different way. Movies are expendable. Folks will give up $12 tickets, cancel Netflix, and cut cable to save their high-speed Internet connection. With the president's fireside chats posted online, the new Hoovervilles will certainly have broadband. Is there a downsized future for Katzenberg's product? As one bankrupt mogul said to another, "YouTube?!"
Maybe free online movies are strictly for the indies. But if times get worse and the studios want to get real, they'll have to find the audience where it lives: Hulu for Hollywood."
Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine, delivers the State of Cinema Address at the 2008 San Francisco International Film Festival:
"One of the biggest movements in our culture was the movement from oral culture, orality, to literacy. Gutenberg. The impact of the printing press and literacy and the word and the written text and books made Western civilization. That was the foundation. We’re going, basically, through the same thing right now—another transition, from the written world into this “vizuality" world. That’s the big thing. That’s really what we’re talking about.[...]
"So there is this supra-intermedia, the copy, where the copies become so abundant that some people call it the free economy. People are really concerned about, you know, things being free. How do we make movies when things are free? What do we do? The business model is a big, big factor in this shift. When you have this superabundance of copies and they’re really worth not very much, the only things that have value are things that can’t be copied.
What kind of things can’t be copied? Well, immediacy. If you wait long enough, you can get a copy of this film, but if you want it right now as soon as it comes out you can pay. And you will pay. People will pay. They’ll pay for the immediacy of getting it now. Or personalization. Yeah, you can eventually get the soundtrack or the new Coldplay album, but if you want it customized or personalized to the acoustics of your living room, OK, go pay. What about authenticity? If you buy a piece of software—you can get free software anywhere, but you’re not really concerned about that; you really want to make sure that it’s the authentic version of it. So it’s worthwhile to you to make sure that it’s the right one. Maybe there’s a knockoff band that does something, but you want the authentic one, so you can be willing to pay because authenticity cannot be copied. It has to be generated. So this personalization has to be generated for you. It can’t be copied.
Patronage is another one. Lots of times, people want to have a relationship with the creator. They don’t care about the copy. They want to patronize, they want to support the creator, so they will pay in that sense. And then there’s interpretations. There’s the old joke about software: The software’s free, the manual’s $1,000. To interpret it, to actually maintain it, to use it, to figure out how to use it, you pay. The copy’s free but you’re going to pay for this interpretation. Accessibility is another one. OK, it’s all free but you can’t find it. Alright, well, you’ll pay for someone to direct you through, to bring it forward, to have access to it 24 hours, seven days a week, whatever it is. The copy’s free, but the accessibility costs. Or embodiment. We see this with singers. Copy’s free, but if you want to see me perform, embody the music...Or, you can get the text, PDF, for free, but some people like the artifact, the embodiment of the book. They’re going to pay for the book, even though they can get a copy for free. And findability—I think I mentioned that already. It’s not quite the same as accessibility, but it’s very similar.
So these are generatives. These are things that aren’t copyable. They have to be made at the time. Therefore, those are the things that will become most powerful in this economy. The only scarcity, really, in this abundance of copies, is things that dwell and focus around attention. A lot of people are concerned about the new media economics, but I can say very, very surely that wherever attention flows, money is going to flow later. That’s what we see happening right now."
"Big Pictures: Hollywood looks for a future" by David Denby, The New Yorker
"The movie theatre is a public space that encourages private pleasures: as we watch, everything we are—our senses, our past, our unconscious—reaches out to the screen. The experience is the opposite of escape; it is more like absolute engagement."
"No exhibition method is innocent of aesthetic qualities. Platform agnosticism may flourish among kids, but platform neutrality doesn’t exist. Fifty years ago, the length of a pop single was influenced by what would fit on a forty-five-r.p.m. seven-inch disk. The length and the episodic structure of the Victorian novel—Dickens’s novels, especially—were at least partly created by writers and editors working on deadline for monthly periodicals. Television, for a variety of commercial and spatial reasons, developed the single-set or two-set sitcom. Format always affects form, and the exhibition space changes what’s exhibited.[...]"
"The studio executives may be planning to distribute movies through the Internet, but they know the value of the theatrical experience. As Tom Rothman, the chairman of Fox Filmed En-tertainment, said to me, “There is something about the commonality of the experience that is irreplaceable.” Rothman, who grew up in theatres, knows the excitement of a full house, “the infectious urgency of movies.” And executives can remember what it was like to be twenty-one. “You want to have sex with someone,” Schamus said. “You say, ‘Do you want to go the movies with me Friday night?’ Movies are a pretext for social interaction. So don’t think of the future in terms of technology. It’s not a question of platforms but of how people want to use social spaces, how given ethnic and age groups want to interact.” I hope Schamus is right, because even people who like going to movies alone don’t necessarily go to be alone. In a marvellous paradox, the people around us both relieve us of isolation and drive us deeper into our own responses.[...]"
"At the moment, the smart money may be going small budget. Just recently, wealthy individuals, pooling their money in hedge funds, have begun setting up deals not with studios but with successful producers like Joel Silver and producer-directors like Ivan Reitman. The production money will go to genre films—thrillers and comedies and horror pictures—in the low-budget (about twenty-million-dollar) range. John C. Malone, the chairman of Liberty Media Corporation, is opening his own studio to make movies on a similar scale. Some of these pictures will undoubtedly be routine, but the relatively low stakes could also allow producers to hire writers and directors who are willing to do more daring work, the way B-movie directors, toiling quietly on back lots, did sixty years ago.
Films made fast and cheap in this way would still need studio distribution and marketing, but once the theatres go digital that may no longer be true. Distribution is the key to freedom. In the future, what is to stop a group of producers, directors, and writers from forming a coöperative, raising money for a slate of films, and hiring non-studio distribution and promotion people to get the movies to digitized theatres—liberating themselves at last?"
Links below via indigogo.com
Crowd Funding: Customers as Investors - wsj.com
Adventures in Self-Releasing: The Less Money Equation - Moviemaker.com
Making your first movie is a lot like starting a new business - Examiner.com
Prepping Your Film For Distribution - independent-magazine.org
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