The glory days of independent film, when hot young directors like Steven Soderbergh and Mr. Tarantino had studio executives tangled in fierce bidding wars at Sundance and other celebrity-studded festivals, are now barely a speck in the rearview mirror. And something new, something much odder, has taken their place.
Here is how it used to work: aspiring filmmakers playing the cool auteur in hopes of attracting the eye of a Hollywood power broker.
Here is the new way: filmmakers doing it themselves — paying for their own distribution, marketing films through social networking sites and Twitter blasts, putting their work up free on the Web to build a reputation, cozying up to concierges at luxury hotels in film festival cities to get them to whisper into the right ears.
Nothing new here but it’s always nice when the major news outlets turn their attention to independent film and the problems we’re facing now.
From the blog of Felicia Day. Apart from being adorable and talented, Felicia is pretty smart. She’s been around the block a few times with the whole “original web series” thing which, at the end of the day, is the same as independent filmmaking. All four of these questions apply just as much to your indie doc feature as they do to her web series about online role-playing gamers.
The internet isn’t TV: It’s 20 million channels rather than 200. If you can’t sit down and easily identify what kind of person will like your show and name 5 places that person might go to on the internet, you will have a hard time getting the word out, no matter how good it is.
Scott Kirsner, creator of the Cinematech blog, answers questions about the (much-speculated-upon) forthcoming revolution in DIY film distribution. It’s inspirational stuff if you’re disheartened by the lack of opportunity in traditional distribution right now.
Look, I do think that if you can do what Joss and Radiohead do, which is leverage the power of established media companies and their distribution channels while also doing some DIY experimentation, that’s not a bad thing. But I also believe there is incredible opportunity for total unknowns right now. You have access to the tools to make what you want, inexpensively. And you have access to all these distribution channels – DVD production, CD production, book production, digital downloads – that were really locked up just five or ten years ago. What can you do to overcome the power imbalance? You start by making really remarkable stuff that no one else is making, focus on a niche audience, and then experiment with different ways to grow that small initial audience.
There were a number of interesting announcements at Sundance this year, though few of them had to do with big-ticket film acquisitions. (This comes to the surprise of no one.)
In the continuing deterioration of the traditional system of release windows is this plan (also announced at Sundance) from IFC Films and the South by Southwest Film Festival to hold a simultaneous release of Joe Swanberg’s latest film, Alexander the Last, at SXSW 2009 and on IFC’s “Festival Direct” video-on-demand (VOD) channel.
Four other SXSW ‘09 titles will also screen on-demand via IFC Festival Direct, concurrent with the upcoming festival. IFC also announced the launch of of a new IFC Festival Direct genre label, branded IFC Midnight and unveiled some twenty titles that have been added to the slate for its on-demand platform.
Can the festival “event” outweigh the incentive of staying home? That answer is easy when the world comes to a place like SXSW to party and take in the live music along with the interactive and film events. But at a smaller, regional festival like mine, I really don’t know what my audience would do.
It’s impossible to dismiss Hall’s concerns, though they do come from a certain glass-half-empty perspective on the situation. The thought that moviegoers might stay home to watch a film on demand rather than venture out into the night to share the experience with an audience is certainly within the realm of possibility. Who among us hasn’t opted to catch the latest Will Smith flick on DVD, when we could watch it on our own couches with the convenience of the pause button and the absence of an audience that seems determined to talk through important bits of dialogue (or conversely, to shush us with righteous indignation when we wittily point out the film’s inconsistencies)?
I prefer to think that such Festival Direct flicks will serve as word-of-mouth ambassadors for themselves and for festival films in general. It is equally within the realm of possibility that some of those people who do see Swanberg’s latest opus on demand will enjoy it enough to go see it on the big screen at a festival, or encourage their friends to go. Those who don’t follow through on that particular film may be turned on to the idea that festivals are where the interesting films can be seen. As with everything else in indie film, the potential audience for film festivals (as compared to their penetration of the populace in general) is infinite. Anything that can be done to spread the word of their merit — and their existence — is probably a good thing.
One of the most influential distributors of foreign and independent films, New Yorker has amassed a library of more than 400 titles, including Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” and Claude Lanzmann’s epic Holocaust documentary “Shoah,” said Dan Talbot, who founded the company in 1965.
Mr. Talbot, 82, said in a telephone interview that the company was going out of business because its library was being sold. It had been pledged as collateral on a loan taken out by its former owner, Madstone Films, which bought New Yorker Films in 2002.
Lesson: Even if you sell the rights to your film to someone you trust, those rights can then be resold, traded, used as collateral, and foreclosed upon just like any other property. Think twice before you sign those rights away for more than a few years.
These are ‘difficult’ films, not popular mass-market films,’’ Dan Talbot told the New York Times in the 1987 profile. ‘‘They’re meant for a small, elite audience. And nothing has changed in 20 years; it’s still a very tiny, elite audience. There were other distributors who were bringing in these films, but I would say that our role was to introduce some of the more risky films that on the surface did not seem to have a wide audience. Distribution of that kind is a very financially masochistic business.”
Lesson: There are distributors out there who love movies and who will help you get your movie in front of the audiences who want to see it. That doesn’t mean that anyone will be getting rich in the process.
Mr. Talbot said he was crushed by the end of the company. “I nurtured this,” he said. “These films are like babies.”
By chris, February 19th, 2009 in distribution, news | Comments Off
Over on the B-Side blog I’ve written a brief response to an in-depth article from TV By the Numbers about the relative place of iTunes in the world of consumer video consumption. We have a long way to go before traditional network TV is ever really “endangered” by alternate viewing methods. On the other hand, it doesn’t take a genius to see the writing on the wall. Who wouldn’t prefer to consume video entertainment on their own schedule, wherever they want, on whatever device they like?
Roger Erik Tinch (art & online director at CineVegas) pens a few thoughts on the future of how we will consume films in the next year and how they’ll be delivered to us. Most interesting to me were his thoughts on physical media:
Most recently THE DARK KNIGHT, selling 10 million units, and MAMMA MIA! THE MOVIE, selling 2 million units in it’s first day, have done huge blockbuster sales amidst a grim economic backdrop. The fact that these films exist in HD on iTunes hasn’t slowed down their plastic disc counterparts. Now I’m not saying online distribution won’t succeed, I’m just saying it will succeed, but only in the rental realm. Instead of popping on down to your local Blockbuster you’ll instead power up your Xbox or TiVo and order something while in your pajamas.
While this makes sense from a certain perspective, I have become completely disenchanted with the idea of owning a DVD library. Maybe it’s just the fact that this panoply of DVDs overwhelms my smallish living space or that being a new parent has made movie-watching time a rare and precious thing, but I’m looking forward to the day when these shiny plastic discs can be housed completely on a vast (and cheap) hard disk or, better yet, hosted in “the cloud” for quick and easy retrieval on command.
BTW, that’s not Roger in the picture, that’s my former college roommate Scott — but the fact that movies were once stored on laserdiscs bigger than the human head always makes me laugh.
Festival consulting is available at reasonable rates. Whether you just need a few answers or want a complete strategy for your film, I'm here to help. Read more >>
First Time Here?
There's a lot to learn about film festivals. Learn more about Film Festival Secrets and see some of our most popular articles. Read more >>
From the blog of Felicia Day. Apart from being adorable and talented, Felicia is pretty smart. She’s been around the block a few times with the whole “original web series” thing which, at the end of the day, is the same as independent filmmaking. All four of these questions apply just as much to your indie doc feature as they do to her 
There were a number of interesting announcements at Sundance this year, though few of them had to do with big-ticket film acquisitions. (This comes to the surprise of no one.)
It’s lights out for New Yorker Films, the boutique distributor that brought international films and “difficult” cinema to the U.S. for over 40 years. 
