FIlm: Business or Art or.....

I read a very disturbing blog on the film industry a few days ago by James Fair (lecturer in Film Technology at Staffordshire University).The thing that made me sick was the site of a corporatist organizational chart. If you're anything like me, the site of these charts makes you want to puke (You may want to put your hand over it).

So here we have a film scholar (as if good filmmaking was ever a scholarly endeavor) telling us that business models are questionable in light of the artistic and creative aspects of filmmaking. Then he goes on to suggest there may be a better model out there, even though this one is working. But the current system isn't working. It never did work. The film industry is having one of its greatest depressions. Even when it was on top, 50% of all industry product never made a profit.

The problem is not that we need a better business model. The problem is that even having a conversation about a business model is absurd, which brings me to David Lynch. When I listen to him talk about the process of making a film, there is no business model or organizational structure. You may say even he has departments run by department heads, which may be true. But in a truly harmonious film production these departments operate as single entities to fulfill their respective tasks, and like our scholar mentions, none of this is ever set in stone.

The problem that 99% of the film industry continues to have is that film is not a business, nor is it purely an art. It's the business of making art, and that means that the art has to come before the business, since you can't sell your art if you don't go about making it first. This may depend on your definition of "art", which is an abstract word much like love. I think of art as stuff that moves people emotionally and even physically. That has absolutely nothing to do with making money in itself. If the moving of people can be achieved then I think the money making potential is there. You don't start out with the idea of having to make money and then come up with art that has that goal. That is not art. Nor should business have as its goal to make money without first having some higher purpose, to fill a need or fix a problem or help society.

Of course, failed American corporatism and its decades of authoritarian conservative ingrained tradition will continue to insist to its dying day that pure business models (regardless of product and with no other goal than money) are the way to go about doing any business, even art. But, like the Roman Empire, blind leading the blind (no one knows anything in Hollywood) kind of thinking is ultimate doom.

Pull out David Lynch's Inland Empire DVD. You do have one right? There, not only will you find David Lynch show you a great quinoa recipe (maybe you eat too much meat to be able to make good films that can sell on their own merit) but you'll also hear him talk about his artistic "business model", which amounts to getting one idea, then getting another idea, and eventually putting these ideas together. But if you were to talk to a good sample of great artists, you'd find that each of them have different ways of doing their art.

Even most indie filmmakers have a model where they come up with a script, and even a cast an crew, and sometimes even make the film before they go about looking for an "executive producer" (since often the only real business aspect of films is the distribution after they're made). They may or may not take notes from that producer. My understanding is that most indie producers act as patrons and seek to fund artists with no expectation of return. That is the traditional model of artistic endeavor around the world.

The one reason that any good films even exist in America, I think, is that there are indie renegades out their like David Lynch and there is also the independent spec screenwriter factor. Screenwriting can be done in a vacuum away from all the failed corporatist bullshit. So in that regard, screenwriters have the ability to be true artists, going about writing in whatever artistic way suits them (as George Lucas did far away from Hollywood). For that reason, we have some great screenplays in existence that Hollywood then gets it's greedy clammy little hands on and plugs into its organizational chart to end up with something resembling art (so long as no dogs are killed).

Another fallacy about the chart above, with the quintessential executive asshole at the top, is that there is no marketing department. Anyone and everyone knows that in the Hollywood studio system marketing is god. They only make films that project (as proven under failed corporatist business formulas) to make money. So we end up with trilogies and sequel after sequel riding on the success of previous success. We see film stories (like Inception) ripped off of other films (like The Matrix) that worked and we see a plethora of remakes that are again remade on a regular ten year schedule, just like regular old white men on Exlax.

Fuck all that.

Alexia Anastasio at Comic Con

I ran into Alexia's project, Adventures in Plymptoons ( a documentary on animator Bill Plympton), on IndieGoGo, where I was amused with her (and Bill's) total irreverence to anything conservatively morally straight. They have since launched a Kickstarter.com campaign to fund post production of the film. Check out Alexia's trailer:This was enough to get me to pony up $50 to help her out. We need more indie films like this and as an indie filmmaker I sincerely believe we should all help each other out. What goes around comes around. The bottom line being that if a couple thousand indie filmmakers help each other out that's enough of an audience right there to launch a film to success. There are easily a few thousand indie filmmakers out there. Something like 5000 to 6000 enter Sundance every year, not to mention thousands of other film festivals. Billions of dollars are spent every year on indie films and only a handful of them ever see the light of day, even when they're good. We have no one to blame but our collective selves.

Do you really like the crap coming out to the cineplex every week? Wouldn't you rather see indie films out there? Well do something about it. Put your money where your mouth is. Support indie filmmakers. Buy their films. Demand to see then on OpenIndie.com. Chip in a few bucks at Kickstarter or IndieGoGo. We can do this. It's a no brainer. Have you seen Ants? You know, that animation with Kevin Spacey as the bad ass grasshopper that controls hundreds of ants with his little gang, until they all realize they have him outnumbered and scare the shit out of him.

Well, we are the ants; we the indie filmmakers. The studios are the thug grasshoppers trying to control us. Why do we put up with their shit?

Alright, so anyway, I checked out Bill's booth at Comic Com, where Alexia was a guest, and interviewed her, just for kicks. Check it out.

A Film Festival Genome Project

I had a thought after listening to Tim Westergen talk about Pandora Radio and The Music Genome Project , and how that should be applied to films. Many filmmakers are frustrated with the rejections they get from film festivals. Arin Crumley and Susan Buice really shed a lot of light on this process with Four Eyed Monsters and the accompanying vlogs where they talk about the festival and marketing processes they went through. So add 2+2 and what you get is this: a gnome film festival.

If you're not familiar with Genome, listen to Tim on the Workbook Project's This Conference is being Recorded archives. The Genome project categories music, one track at a time into about 400 attributes with ratings in each one (as I understand it). As Tim says, this translates into a truly democratic form of music promotion based on these categories and based on comparing the music that a listener wants to hear with other music that has the same characteristics.

So there would really be no direct all encompassing human judgment factor on rating an entire film. It's more on these individual traits. In film you could have categories like acting, actor, directing, director, photography, DP, genre, running time, locations, production company, on and on.

This makes so much sense for film festivals where fairness really is an important issue and one that is now clearly forsaken over branding, theme, diversity and other marketing factors that really are what drive film festivals.

Of course the Genoming [sic] of thousands of films submitted to festivals would be a monumental undertaking. So I think it would have to be something of a universal service for all festivals (like Withoutabox, which in fact already does this on a very small scale of non-merit factors), where you have a company categorize films and then you'd have festivals look at that database and select what they want. But again you could end up with festivals choosing films based more on marketing factors than quality or originality or other more merit type factors, and you'd also have to deal with devising a good objective way to rate acting, writing, directing and artist type performance.

Perhaps there could be a new wave of festivals that would choose film solely on the merit and quality categories, or at least those could be the primary factors with marketing playing a secondary role.

Another important point here is that filmmakers need and even crave objective feedback. This would give them that feedback and could even serve as a marketing information database for the entire industry. Filmmakers, studios, distributors and anyone involved with film production or distribution should be willing to pay at least something for such a service.

I'm both a filmmaker and an experienced data-driven software project developer and I think his would be really not a big deal to make happen. But it would cost. It would take a lot of labor to categorize films, and ongoing labor to maintain it; plus coming up with categorization strategies would also be a major hurdle. But probably Tim and the Gnome Project could help out with some insight on that.

Who Needs Hollwood? Not these guys.

There's a new movement in filmmaking. It's what you might call a "who need's Hollywood?", DIY approach. A number of new filmmakers have had some awesome success with this. The thing is there is no one way for everybody. Each filmmaker seems to find their own road. But there are some commonalities, like social networking, self-distribution, and audience interaction, and always hard work.

Arin Crumley and Susan Buice successfully produced, directed and distributed their feature film, Four Eyed Monsters, through the internet and a lot of Google time. One thing about this is that technology moves so fast, and things are ever changing, so that what worked for them is already outdated. But their independent spirit in going down their own road, even paving their way through a wilderness, was the thing we can all take away from their experience and apply to ourselves. By the way, Four Eyed monsters garnered two Independent Spirit Award nominations.

The road they took started with vlogs on YouTube. I think they planned this as part of their strategy in marketing their film. Their vlogs were about the behind the scenes "making of" stuff that you might find in typical DVD extras. But there is nothing typical about these guys. The film itself was kind of a similar docudrama of their relationship, much of it in a vlog fourth wall style. That sounds a bit repugnant on paper. But the film is really beautiful. Check out the trailer to get a feel for it.  So while the film was about their relationship's birth, life and death, as the tagline reads, the vlogs were about that too, along with the making of the film and with more reality.

The interesting this is that their "making of" experience is like none you've ever seen, or maybe never will. They forged their way to gather a YouTube and social network audience, which they translated into theatrical sales, by capturing emails and zip codes and persuading  theaters across the country to show their film during four Thursdays September in 2005, I think it was. That itself is quite an accomplishment. But it doesn't end there. in fact it still hasn't ended.

They acquired support form a number of online web film distributor ventures, including YouTube, where they were the first online feature release, and Spout.com, who paid them a dollar for everyone who they referred to Spout, amounting to $35,000. Their vlogs were so popular that they included them as a series of episodes on the DVD, along with the film and a soundtrack CD. The DVD has sold around 1500 copies through their website, mainly. Now they are talking to DVD distributors and I think they are available at Borders and maybe on a cable movie channel in the future.

This is backwards from what the conventional Hollywood big business model professes. In that model, you never release to the DVD market and certainly not the internet, until you have exploited the theatrical market. Not these guys. They offered their film for free on YouTube, along with the vlog episodes, which built interest for the DVD and generated the theatrical and DVD markets.

I've heard filmmakers worry about exposing their film like this, as a quick way to kill all chances for conventional distribution. but what Arin is saying is that conventional distribution is a pipe dream. Susan calls it the prince with the glass slipper. This is so true, and so obvious, it's amazing filmmakers haven't seen this before. We are wasting our time submitting to festival after festival, where are chances are a few hundred out of 5000 to 6000 for the big festivals. Even if we have a good film, and even if it;s picked up by a festival, the chances of finding a distributor this way are so remote. There are usually one or two film at any festival, if that, that get a distribution deal. Then what? Our films are shelved. We don't have to accept this treatment.

Like Arin and Susan we have the greatest marketing tool at our fingertips, and it's free. The internet. Lance Weller and some others have a website, WorkBookProject.com, where these kinds of things are discussed openly. You'd be surprised at how many filmmakers are finding audiences this way.

Here are some websites to check out:

FourEyedMonsters.com
WorkBookProject.com
Spout.com
YouTube Screening Room
Blip.tv
IndieGoGo
BraveNewTheaters.com

At these sites you'll find a lot more links.

Check out my own venture at OutInTheStreetFilms.com, and my film project, Stop War.

Indie Film: Ignoring Quality

I saw the premier of an indie film a few weeks ago, How to Rob a Bank. This wasn't too bad of a film. But, nothing to write home about. Then maybe it'll grow on me. But, I got the feeling I was watching someone's cousin who had the right connections to get something produced, and not a diamond in the rough, as we'd like to think are found at indie fests. It's a shame, because the story is good, the premise is good, the acting is good, the camera and sound are good. The execution is lacking.

If I had read the screenplay that I'm assuming this film was made from, I can imagine it wouldn't get too far in terms of what you'd expect typical prodco readers want to see in a good screenplay, if there are typical prodco readers.

It has holes in it. It lags in places. A few people actually walked out of the theater. I think the guy next to me fell asleep, and he was on the crew.

We hear so much about how a screenplay has to be a good compelling story. If it's a comedy it should keep you laughing every few minutes. The action should keep up a pace. Then you go to a fest and see some sophomoric B film like this.

I think the cast and crew put forth an admirable effort. But, the script clearly wasn't ready, unless you don't mind competing with stuff like 40 Year Old Virgin. Even that was more polished.

But, this isn't the only film at the fest I thought violated high standards. Some of the others were slow and lagging too. There seems to be a lower bar at fests where filmmakers can put out lower quality stuff that you know could be improved if they'd just put more effort into it, and I mean effort into the story, screenplay and editing. They shine in the production phase. But, films are so much more than working 20 hour days on the set, no matter how good of a job it is.

Festivals

Something I do notice at festivals is that although almost every film is amateurish and has obvious flaws, there is always something redeeming there. Sometimes, it's just the passion of the director, cast and crew that shines through, and you can forgive the flagrant violations of things like poor angles, lulls in the story, static shots, and more. A lot of that is due to low budgets, maybe an inexperienced DP or inability to do re-shoots.

I saw an Iranian film that repeatedly had long shots holding on one character in a two way dialog, not showing the other until at the end as a quick reaction. I could tell that rated very low with a lot of viewers. But, if you could look past that, you might see some great merit.

The things I can't forgive are things fixable with just a little more effort, like weak or slow stories, pacing, or editing.

There are always those with high standards in terms of a finished look. They don't think of themselves as snobs, but that's what they are, because they criticize based on what they expect to see in a Hollywood film. Just breaking a few conventions will throw these people off. They're missing the point. The same people would consider 40 Year Old Virgin a good film. I'd take a decent story with unmotivated angles over that film anytime. In the context of indie filmmaking criticisms concerning the polish of the work really aren't valid. When there is polish there it's icing. It's what might win the fest instead of placing.

There aren't many great films in all existence, let alone at a festival. How many at the LA Film Fest would you say stack up to any of the IMDB or AFI top 100? I'd say, exactly none. So, there's plenty of room for criticism on any of these indie greats. No matter how much you liked How to Rob a Bank or think it was pretty much flawless, and I can see how some could say that, it ain't no Saving Private Ryan.

It's a matter of relativity. Relativity to trailer versus the actual short, relativity to something done on little to no resources. Relativity to your particular prejudices and notions about quality.....

I'm referring to things in pre and post, the story, script, editing. I know the masses of cast and crew work diligent 20 hours days. But, that's not all there is to making a film. The most important part is the script. You might say in terms of man-hours, 90% of the work is done in production. But, in terms of importance to the project 90% is done in pre and post. I always get the feeling at the fests that the directors and producers lag in the area of polishing the script and making sure they have a good cut, even if it means spending another year at it. They seem to be playing to the cast and crew, who are their anxious audience waiting with baited breath for the premier. That's not the place to focus your energy.

Rules?

To clarify my meaning, I feel that great artists need talent and must know a craft. That doesn't mean all artists who are great in a given discipline, like writing, have to know the same craft and all apply the same tools to their work. It means they need to know their own craft, which could be unique. So, to make blanket statement like 'never break the 180', 'use motivated angles', 'use a three act structure' and on and on, is like saying artists must apply certain rules or conventions to be successful.

This is a fallacy. It may be useful for artists to use similar tools if the tools work for them. But, there are no tools, rules, or conventions that are mandatory for success, except maybe something more abstract and blanket like the rule that art must be compelling or interesting. But even that is optional. Art can be disturbing, repulsive, disgusting. It may have a limited audience but it could still be successful. It worked for Lynch to get him an AFI grant and launch his career.

It's just plain wrong to say you need any conventions. You may need them. But don't project your needs upon others.

Now, if you look at a work and say, "it just isn't compelling, I couldn't get past the first page, no one will ever watch that, people walked out after the first 10 minutes", and if others agree with you, then I think you might have a good argument that something isn't working. But, you still don't know that it's these conventions that are missing, unless you can take the work and point out specifically how a certain tool works to make better. But, in doing that you've applied your craft, not the artist's craft and it becomes your work and not theirs. They must agree and apply the tool you suggest, if they find it valid. But, they could just as well make an alteration with their own tools, like a fluid camera for example, that will make it work.

When you and others apply certain conventions or tools across all work, it then takes on the attribute of being a rule. It's seems you think certain things are always necessary and must be done, just as with laws, people must always do certain things that are mandatory, like drive on the right side of the road. When you do this you are creating rules. But in art no rule is mandatory. Every one of them is optional. So, effectively there are no rules, only guidelines.

David Lynch

I think Lynch's shorts fall into the category of art that some would define as bad art. The thing about them is originality. If something is original enough it is interesting and it's quality doesn't matter. If you look at Clerks, you could say quality is lacking, yet it's highly original. Lenny Bruce might be another example.

I'm curious what the critics here would have to say about Lynch's shorts. Look at the reviews of them here. Most here would probably say he sucks as well. What people are missing is that consideration has to be given to the circumstances and restrictions under which the films were made. Another consideration should be originality. one implied my trailer is no more original than a thousand others they've seen. But, I feel there is originality there that is interpreted as bad craft disguised as artsy technique. It's no more that than Tarantino's Death Proof is as unoriginal as the grindhouse films he is paying homage to. Oh, pardon me if you think I'm comparing myself to Tarantino. It's an analogy, not a comparison. But, of course, those who think I suck largely think he does too.

But, I don't think Lynch had a movie audience for his short films, as we'd consider one when we write. He may have had an art community audience (God forbid). His first one Six Men Getting Sick was a continuous loop played at galleries. So, while the audience matters, which audience matters? In this case it's the one that got AFI to consider his work. The point is audiences differ quite a bit. You must know this well. That audience would call the work of probably anyone here passe, unoriginal, and they'd likely sneer at us.

But, when we make a film and put in into festivals, that's a specific audience too, one that I think likes originality above all else and forgives technical problems, taking resources into consideration, and looking for passion and promise in the filmmakers, not polish.

This topic has been discussed in detail here.