The discussion/rant was a bit of a mash up of my positive and negative lists, both the hope for the future and the fear of the present as we live it in Indieville It is commonly understand that change only comes when the pain of the present outweighs the fear of the future. I would like to have some change -- so be warned, I may have slanted it a bit in hopes of that change.
TOWARDS THE NEW MODEL: FILMMAKING AS AN ONGOING CONVERSATION WITH YOUR AUDIENCE (NYFA 5.28.09)
We are cursed. And it’s that old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. We certainly are living in interesting times. Still though, I’ve always considered that curse a blessing. I know that back in my early days -- when I gave up trying to be happy and instead decided to pursue an interesting life -- I found as a result: things got better and I got a lot happier. So I am here to tell you, that although a lot of what I may say today may make it sound like the sky has already fallen, if we filmmakers finally surrender unrealistic expectations and instead embrace our opportunities, and precede along logical, practical, passionate and community-oriented lines, we are going to have it better than we’ve ever had it before. These interesting times are gong to open up film culture in a freer, more engaged way.
I am assuming that all of you recognize yourself as filmmakers, and the type of filmmaker who aspires to make ART, to be truthful, bold, groundbreaking. I want to help you understand what it means to be that type of filmmaker in the context of today and what it is going to mean for you tomorrow. To do that, I want you all to first look at where the business, the culture, and the practical aspects of filmmaking are for the various people who maintain the apparatus that makes filmmaking work: the distributors, the financiers, the marketers, the exhibitors and the audience.
You need to recognize these folks as your collaborators, and for you to be able to see with their eyes, to stand in their shoes, we first must all speak the same language. We need to have a common definition for cinema. For this common definition, I want to move away from the technical or business vernacular and instead define it on the most human scale possible: cinema is a dialogue between the audience and the screen.
I don’t think film-going is any more a passive experience than filmmaking is, and cinema is where creation and consumption unite. If we embrace the active spirit of film-going, if we accept that there is a quiet dialogue running in the heads of all audiences, we are going to start to find some answers on how we – the filmmakers – survive this vast paradigm shift our culture is now engaged in – because I am confident we are not just going to survive, but we are going to prosper and bring better work to more audiences in all sorts of new ways. But hold that thought. We will come back to those answers later.
Having first accepted this definition of the common dialogue that cinema is, we must now look at the situation all those aforementioned collaborators of ours – sometimes called “the suits” -- are in. And this is where it is going to get ugly:
• Right now, according to this week’s Variety, Art House admissions are down 66% whereas Hollywood Product’s ticket sales are up 16%.
• Last week more Americans defined themselves as “game players” than those that called themselves “Movie-goers”. More leisure time activities compete for our attention than ever before, and the movies are losing.
• In a recent poll, 20% more Americans preferred to watch films at home on DVD rather than in the theater.
• By my account, only about 4% of the independent films made in America annually, get traditional distribution. I saw more good work produced for under $1M last year alone than I usually see altogether in five years – yet only two of the 18 or so excellent low budget films I saw had traditional distribution and neither of those made much money.
• The acquisition market in the US has collapsed to the point that you can not expect to get more than $50K for a twenty year all media license for a non-genre feature and even then it is doubtful your film will play beyond NY & LA.
• International sales prices meanwhile are down 40% and very little is now bought on presale.
• Private equity investors are asking for budgets to drop by about 60% from where they were a year ago; what once was $15M is now $6M; what once was $8M is now $3M – and on each of these, the financiers demand twice as many name actors for each film as they did last year.
• Distributors and financiers, aka studios, are generally built for the future library value of the product they make; but in a world where a digital copy is easily disseminated in a blink of an eye, that library value can vanish overnight – and with that, their stock value, and certainly thousands of jobs will vanish too.
• Although the bootleggers have already built a platform that provides whatever you like wherever you like whenever you like, the industry leaders can no more decide on a common format for just such a platform than they could over VHS tape or BluRay disc or internet digital music downloads.
• Our cultural curators, the critics at magazines and newspapers, have almost all lost their jobs, leaving virtually no one to champion the undiscovered gems.
• The newspapers and magazines where they worked, once the easiest way to unify upscale opinion, are shuttering left and right, leave the marketers with no place to advertise efficiently and effectively.
• The economic collapse has wrecked havoc on everyone, and not the least of all: non-profit arts organizations and film festivals. The local launch pads for many films have vanished or shrunken and more will be doing so soon.
Now that you get the picture, let’s try on those shoes I spoke about. Put yourself in your well-suited collaborators’ place:
• If you are a marketer, how do you position something if there are no critics to champion it and no place to advertise it?
• If you are an exhibitor, are you going to take a chance on something with no marketing budget from someone that isn’t promising bigger films down the pike? When the big guns insist you run their film for a long term booking, how do you take a chance on something new even for a short while hawked by some upstart filmmaker?
• If you are a distributor, why should you pay money for a film when most festival prize winning films by the biggest names are being given away for the promise of a NY & LA theatrical opening – if even for that.
• If you are a financier, why would you invest in something that can sell for, at best, only 40 –60% of its value? And even then, it can be easily stolen out from under you by a savy pimply-faced pirate knowing basic computer code?
• If you are an audience member, who loves new work, and wants to engage in a dialogue with your social network, how do you resist the temptation to press “download now” when it is free and simple and you know that it won’t be available to you anytime soon near by in its traditional form?
• If you are a filmmaker how do you hear all this and not feel the shoes you walk in are actually cement boots headed off a short pier?
Now that I’ve told you all this, I want you to know that by the time I finish tonight you are not going to want to kill yourself because even if others have not yet found the answers, they have started to pave the paths towards them. You are not going to hang from the rope you’ve been desperately clutching on to, because audiences have been telling you what they want for a long time now if you wanted to listen. No plastic bags or pill bottles are needed in any filmmakers’ arsenal when they have the incredible tools being handed to them as they are… right now… for free.
Filmmakers are lucky because we’ve got to watch the Roman Empire that once was the music business burn before our ears, and we have seen musicians rise like phoenixes from the ashes finding and exploring new methods of bringing songs to their fans and even finding ways to earn the money that is needed to do so. If we embrace their example, extract some lessons from those who have recognized their audiences as collaborators, and utilize the liberty that comes with our independence to explore and even be willing to fail as we innovate, aggregate, and motivate, we can have a truly free culture before us. (If you haven’t read Scott Kirsner’s “Fans, Friends & Followers” do so tonight and you can get specific examples of people doing it right.)
Music is different from film because musical artists seldom ever bet it all on each new album. Musicians expect the fans that they developed with one effort to come back for more, but here in the film world, we are reinventing the wheel each time. Today musicians work to engage their audience for the long term, for the long tail, but the film business remains a series of one-offs. If a diverse film culture is going to flourish in this country, we have to move to a new model where filmmaking is a process, an ongoing conversation between the filmmakers and their various audiences. That is the new model I hope you can embrace when you walk out of here tonigh.
For film to make sense as a business in today’s world, filmmakers must accept the responsibility of bringing their audience to their movie and to engage them in a meaningful way. Filmmakers must reprogram themselves to accept that it is their obligation to seed, corral, and drive their audience. The marketing, publicity, and distribution apparatus out there will build upon that audience foundation the filmmaker first developed, but in choosing what films they will take a risk on, these new collaborators will be motivated to work with the filmmakers who come with several wheels already rolling – those that have already built an audience foundation, a dependable fan base.
You don’t need anyone’s help to build an audience. You start to grow it yourself and soon others will join in. You just need to be willing to work, to reach out to others, to curate, to recommend, to listen, to make sure you have something to say that will excite others, to join them in a dialogue. There is no excuse not to engage with others through the multitude of social media that is available now for free to anyone. It is your obligation. You can not afford to be precious and think you only make art. The culture supports for the “seventh art” are virtually non-existent in this country. You have to complete the equation and bring the audience to the dialogue.
I recognize that it is my obligation too. It is part of the price for the privilege of making and enjoying culture. I kept seeing good work that quickly was being forgotten. Every festival delivered me new gems but I recognized that these films were not being helped by the mainstream media. So what did I do? I got some friends together and started HammerToNail.com to champion true indie work, to curate for the fans. I watched great films not being distributed or screened on a big screen, so what did I do? I reached out to some friends and now co-curate a screening series at Goldcrest where we invite over 500 people to a 60 seat space to appreciate new work. I speak about a “Truly Free Film” culture so much, but know I am not being heard widely enough, so what do I do? I started TrulyFreeFilm.blogspot.com and got over my fear of Facebook and Twitter and try to speak to folks like you as much as I can. I ask you: what are you doing to save this thing that you say want to devote your labor to? Do you want a world where the only American cinema is blockbuster tentpoles told by privileged white men? I may be one of those, but I know I don’t.
Now, I am a busy guy. I have produced 60 films. I hope to produce 40 more – and those are just the ones I have identified right now. But I have time to do all this because IT MUST BE DONE. And it is freakin’ easy too. And even kinda fun. It has reached a point that even my eight year old can run and maintain his own blog. Share what you like; you will find others who like what you have to say (in fact with his obsession with lego, bakagan and Dr Who, he probably has more of an audience than I do with American Art Film). Champion them and they will champion you. Help your new friends find an audience for their work and they will do the same for you. Why do you think I am here speaking before you now? I am not some sort of self-less giver. I come here now because I will want your help later – and I expect you will want mine. Let’s make it a give-give, win-win scenario.
But that work must begin early, and it must be maintained. You have to be a good friend. You have to provide. You have to enhance the lives of your fans. It is not just about self-promotion. I don’t care that you are having coffee or walking your dog or even have ideas about the three most frequently said words after sex are (that was a popular tweet this week). I want substance. I want beauty. I want to be wowed – at least every once and awhile.
Kevin Kelly pointed out that to be a self supporting artist we all need 1000 True Fans who are willing to pay $100 a year for whatever it is we have to say (okay, maybe a bit more if you live in NYC, but…). Backed by such an army, there’s a whole new way for you to create. But it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a year on most social networks to develop those relationships, longer to refine them, and even more to enhance them – if you are going to have those fans, friends, and followers join in your ongoing conversation.
It must be part of every working artist’s job description now to develop your fan base and audience. We also have to recognize that those fans are ours, that they are our most precious resource and we’ve been giving them away up to now. You may have sold your work, but you should still own your fans. We must recognize that our fans are our path to freedom, but by abandoning our rights to them, we’ve turned our selves into slaves. By not recognizing our obligations to our fans, we have allowed our culture to continue to slide to lower and lower common denominators.
When you license your work for low fees because you want to move on and create again, and you haven’t even made sure that your contracts grant you access to the very data you’ve mined – who those fans who pay for your work are – you have sealed your fate for the next time around. You will never be free. It may benefit you to go the DIY route and it may not (that’s a whole other discussion we can have some other time). But what ever your path, you need to be gathering the data along the way on who cares about your work, who loves your work. You need to know how to reach them. And remember: if your fans follow you through some social network app, you don’t really know them – and you certainly don’t own them or their data. You don’t have a way to contact them outside of that app. It means nothing unless you have their email, and that too will be virtually useless unless you invest to make your relationship with them work. You must harvest your data if you are going to be able to survive.
Music – let’s go back to that -- is also different than film because most musicians have multiple art forms to offer their fans, in that they have both the recorded and the live performance, whereas filmmakers still only have a single product. Most music acts have also realized that the business is in the merchandise and not even in either of those art forms – and that certainly doesn’t mean that the merchandise can’t also be an art form. It can. Yet with these strong examples before us filmmakers can’t seem to get beyond the simple t-shirt or action figure to provide their fans.
If I am a true cineaste, how do I display my passion? Is it through the purchase of the complete Criterion Catalogue? You call a dvd a fetish object? I think not! Film lovers want something that shows how much they care, but now, at best, they can buy another book from Taschen. When are we going to have each film come with that artwork, that sculpture, that special thing, that says I am more than just a fanboy? That I am a true cultural conneisuer? Now, I have a 3’x2’ art work on my office wall that looks like a series of large pixels. But once you take a magnifying glass to it you see that they are film frames, one frame from each second of Kubrick’s 2001. It lets you know something about me and my tastes. We need to come up with more products like this to extend our conversations beyond the screen and theater walls.
Music will always trump film because music gets better and better the more you play it, but there are few films that hold up through multiple viewings. But film can go much further than it has so far. Why are we so locked into film as a form that can only be enjoyed when it is completed in a single seating? DVD technology allows for extensive micro-chaptering which in turn will allow for Search Engine Optimization, which in turn will lead to crowds embedding these tiny segments and thus promoting your film across a thousand outlets – but no one is doing this sort of chaptering.
Who said filmmaking is only 90 minutes long with a beginning, middle, and an end, even if not necessarily in that order? And why did we believe them? Why do our narratives have to be limited to that duration and form? With so many platforms and devices to launch and engage from, why are we still waiting for that first popular transmedia culture maker to emerge?
We aren’t doing ourselves any favors when we don’t even know what to name that thing that is that thing that we all want. The evidence is everywhere: audiences want a more immersive experience that they can join in and shape and modify, one that they can remix and rejoin, drop and pick up, forget and then recognize again as it transforms, but what is that? What do we call this thing? What do we name this thing can make movies an event again, that can make them effectively compete with all the other leisure time activities?
When a child says “Pokemon” they don’t think of just the tv-show or the movies or the card game or the video games or the cute figurines. The word Pokemon covers All Of It. Yet we have no audience-friendly term for the complete engagement with media content across all platforms in various ways. Studios call it the “franchise” but they still drive all the by-products off the narrative feature film leader. Madison Avenue calls it “brand management” but they keep all the products separate and never participatory. And both sides lobby for laws that keep our culture private, never motivating fans to make it their own, to disseminate it, or deliver it in new ways to their friends.
Our salvation won’t come from anyone other than ourselves. Truly independent film, truly free film must be the innovator on all fronts. We are the ones willing to take the risk, to embrace audience collaboration, to give them more than the simple one-off video product, and it is truly independent filmmakers that will reap the rewards.
In the most simple terms, when filmmakers recognize that each story can be told in different forms with different tones, different approaches, even different characters, they will also have new ways to engage audiences, to seed them, corral them, and drive them. It maybe with thematically related short films that are released before and after the feature becomes available. It may be with written texts that enhance their understanding or appreciation. It may be through games, through products, through live events.
However & whoever it is, the filmmakers who participate in these multiple platform ways will have solved more than just one problem. They will have engaged their audience in an ongoing dialogue that extends beyond the film product itself, but also they will have reinvented the film so it is once again an event, something distinct, something fresh, something they make a priority. The film will be the unifying action that the community comes together around. It will be how they find one another. It will be the deciding factor amidst the myriad of leisure time activities competing for there ever shortening attention. I think it is clear: providing a better dialogue with the audience is how we going to keep our diverse film culture alive.
And keep in mind that amidst all of this chaos, release patterns and methods are changing even faster. Film festivals are no longer markets. Festivals need to be recognized and exploited as media launches. Festivals are the moment when filmmakers get the most attention. Festivals are also the cheapest way anyone has of getting attention so whether you are surrendering your baby to another parent/distributor, or going the DIY route, you are going to want to use the festivals to publicize your film is available to be booked, that you are selling the DVD. That said, exhibitors are having a harder time playing indie films – be it finding slots or feeling it will be promoted sufficiently -- so where do you get your bookings?
If Robert Greenwald can take his (thankfully) fiercely partisan films into people’s living rooms, why can’t you? Countless filmmakers have found ways to incentavize individuals, communities, and organization to push their films, so what’s to stop you from building your own promotional army? People are selling DVDs directly from their websites, directly at their screenings. These are plans that you need to consider before you shoot and there is good reliable information available for free all over the internet to help you weigh these decisions. You need to put it into action before you apply to the festivals. You need to embrace it as your plan before you apply for grants. You need to accept that it is a filmmakers responsibility to find their audience and bring their work directly to them.
Now all of this is not easy, but it’s really not hard either. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it is happening right now. It requires labor but that which is derived from love is hardly really work. It requires delayed gratification but promises infinite satisfaction. It requires strategy and planning, but needs to be playful and sweetly chaotic. There is no one to discover you, but we all want to find you. No pot of gold waiting; but there is a life, a life time, a career, and a body of work begging to be created before you. Sure, it requires adding more to your job description. And it requires refresher courses along the way. It requires a different way of seeing altogether. The nice thing is we have good examples. We are ahead of the studios in our plans and we are willing to take bigger risks.
Your work is your life. You aren’t striving for any one thing other than to improve and to change. Don’t think about that ONE movie you want to make;focus on the long term and what you need to feel as excited, as engaged in fifteen years as you are today. Use your resources. Use your audience. Grow it. Sustain it.
What is stopping us? Let our barriers please not be ourselves. We have now been given the tools to bring us together, to share and to promote. Our products gain in value not by their scarcity but by how much they multiply and are enjoyed. Our desire is not to acquire, but to give away. Filmmakers, those who aspire to ART, to the bold, to the innovative, and to the transcendent have always thought differently: we’ve been most concerned about the outcome and not the income – and rightly so. Begin the conversation. Make it last a good long time. We will all profit from it.
We are cursed. And it’s that old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. We certainly are living in interesting times. Still though, I’ve always considered that curse a blessing. I know that back in my early days -- when I gave up trying to be happy and instead decided to pursue an interesting life -- I found as a result: things got better and I got a lot happier. So I am here to tell you, that although a lot of what I may say today may make it sound like the sky has already fallen, if we filmmakers finally surrender unrealistic expectations and instead embrace our opportunities, and precede along logical, practical, passionate and community-oriented lines, we are going to have it better than we’ve ever had it before. These interesting times are gong to open up film culture in a freer, more engaged way.
I am assuming that all of you recognize yourself as filmmakers, and the type of filmmaker who aspires to make ART, to be truthful, bold, groundbreaking. I want to help you understand what it means to be that type of filmmaker in the context of today and what it is going to mean for you tomorrow. To do that, I want you all to first look at where the business, the culture, and the practical aspects of filmmaking are for the various people who maintain the apparatus that makes filmmaking work: the distributors, the financiers, the marketers, the exhibitors and the audience.
You need to recognize these folks as your collaborators, and for you to be able to see with their eyes, to stand in their shoes, we first must all speak the same language. We need to have a common definition for cinema. For this common definition, I want to move away from the technical or business vernacular and instead define it on the most human scale possible: cinema is a dialogue between the audience and the screen.
I don’t think film-going is any more a passive experience than filmmaking is, and cinema is where creation and consumption unite. If we embrace the active spirit of film-going, if we accept that there is a quiet dialogue running in the heads of all audiences, we are going to start to find some answers on how we – the filmmakers – survive this vast paradigm shift our culture is now engaged in – because I am confident we are not just going to survive, but we are going to prosper and bring better work to more audiences in all sorts of new ways. But hold that thought. We will come back to those answers later.
Having first accepted this definition of the common dialogue that cinema is, we must now look at the situation all those aforementioned collaborators of ours – sometimes called “the suits” -- are in. And this is where it is going to get ugly:
• Right now, according to this week’s Variety, Art House admissions are down 66% whereas Hollywood Product’s ticket sales are up 16%.
• Last week more Americans defined themselves as “game players” than those that called themselves “Movie-goers”. More leisure time activities compete for our attention than ever before, and the movies are losing.
• In a recent poll, 20% more Americans preferred to watch films at home on DVD rather than in the theater.
• By my account, only about 4% of the independent films made in America annually, get traditional distribution. I saw more good work produced for under $1M last year alone than I usually see altogether in five years – yet only two of the 18 or so excellent low budget films I saw had traditional distribution and neither of those made much money.
• The acquisition market in the US has collapsed to the point that you can not expect to get more than $50K for a twenty year all media license for a non-genre feature and even then it is doubtful your film will play beyond NY & LA.
• International sales prices meanwhile are down 40% and very little is now bought on presale.
• Private equity investors are asking for budgets to drop by about 60% from where they were a year ago; what once was $15M is now $6M; what once was $8M is now $3M – and on each of these, the financiers demand twice as many name actors for each film as they did last year.
• Distributors and financiers, aka studios, are generally built for the future library value of the product they make; but in a world where a digital copy is easily disseminated in a blink of an eye, that library value can vanish overnight – and with that, their stock value, and certainly thousands of jobs will vanish too.
• Although the bootleggers have already built a platform that provides whatever you like wherever you like whenever you like, the industry leaders can no more decide on a common format for just such a platform than they could over VHS tape or BluRay disc or internet digital music downloads.
• Our cultural curators, the critics at magazines and newspapers, have almost all lost their jobs, leaving virtually no one to champion the undiscovered gems.
• The newspapers and magazines where they worked, once the easiest way to unify upscale opinion, are shuttering left and right, leave the marketers with no place to advertise efficiently and effectively.
• The economic collapse has wrecked havoc on everyone, and not the least of all: non-profit arts organizations and film festivals. The local launch pads for many films have vanished or shrunken and more will be doing so soon.
Now that you get the picture, let’s try on those shoes I spoke about. Put yourself in your well-suited collaborators’ place:
• If you are a marketer, how do you position something if there are no critics to champion it and no place to advertise it?
• If you are an exhibitor, are you going to take a chance on something with no marketing budget from someone that isn’t promising bigger films down the pike? When the big guns insist you run their film for a long term booking, how do you take a chance on something new even for a short while hawked by some upstart filmmaker?
• If you are a distributor, why should you pay money for a film when most festival prize winning films by the biggest names are being given away for the promise of a NY & LA theatrical opening – if even for that.
• If you are a financier, why would you invest in something that can sell for, at best, only 40 –60% of its value? And even then, it can be easily stolen out from under you by a savy pimply-faced pirate knowing basic computer code?
• If you are an audience member, who loves new work, and wants to engage in a dialogue with your social network, how do you resist the temptation to press “download now” when it is free and simple and you know that it won’t be available to you anytime soon near by in its traditional form?
• If you are a filmmaker how do you hear all this and not feel the shoes you walk in are actually cement boots headed off a short pier?
Now that I’ve told you all this, I want you to know that by the time I finish tonight you are not going to want to kill yourself because even if others have not yet found the answers, they have started to pave the paths towards them. You are not going to hang from the rope you’ve been desperately clutching on to, because audiences have been telling you what they want for a long time now if you wanted to listen. No plastic bags or pill bottles are needed in any filmmakers’ arsenal when they have the incredible tools being handed to them as they are… right now… for free.
Filmmakers are lucky because we’ve got to watch the Roman Empire that once was the music business burn before our ears, and we have seen musicians rise like phoenixes from the ashes finding and exploring new methods of bringing songs to their fans and even finding ways to earn the money that is needed to do so. If we embrace their example, extract some lessons from those who have recognized their audiences as collaborators, and utilize the liberty that comes with our independence to explore and even be willing to fail as we innovate, aggregate, and motivate, we can have a truly free culture before us. (If you haven’t read Scott Kirsner’s “Fans, Friends & Followers” do so tonight and you can get specific examples of people doing it right.)
Music is different from film because musical artists seldom ever bet it all on each new album. Musicians expect the fans that they developed with one effort to come back for more, but here in the film world, we are reinventing the wheel each time. Today musicians work to engage their audience for the long term, for the long tail, but the film business remains a series of one-offs. If a diverse film culture is going to flourish in this country, we have to move to a new model where filmmaking is a process, an ongoing conversation between the filmmakers and their various audiences. That is the new model I hope you can embrace when you walk out of here tonigh.
For film to make sense as a business in today’s world, filmmakers must accept the responsibility of bringing their audience to their movie and to engage them in a meaningful way. Filmmakers must reprogram themselves to accept that it is their obligation to seed, corral, and drive their audience. The marketing, publicity, and distribution apparatus out there will build upon that audience foundation the filmmaker first developed, but in choosing what films they will take a risk on, these new collaborators will be motivated to work with the filmmakers who come with several wheels already rolling – those that have already built an audience foundation, a dependable fan base.
You don’t need anyone’s help to build an audience. You start to grow it yourself and soon others will join in. You just need to be willing to work, to reach out to others, to curate, to recommend, to listen, to make sure you have something to say that will excite others, to join them in a dialogue. There is no excuse not to engage with others through the multitude of social media that is available now for free to anyone. It is your obligation. You can not afford to be precious and think you only make art. The culture supports for the “seventh art” are virtually non-existent in this country. You have to complete the equation and bring the audience to the dialogue.
I recognize that it is my obligation too. It is part of the price for the privilege of making and enjoying culture. I kept seeing good work that quickly was being forgotten. Every festival delivered me new gems but I recognized that these films were not being helped by the mainstream media. So what did I do? I got some friends together and started HammerToNail.com to champion true indie work, to curate for the fans. I watched great films not being distributed or screened on a big screen, so what did I do? I reached out to some friends and now co-curate a screening series at Goldcrest where we invite over 500 people to a 60 seat space to appreciate new work. I speak about a “Truly Free Film” culture so much, but know I am not being heard widely enough, so what do I do? I started TrulyFreeFilm.blogspot.com and got over my fear of Facebook and Twitter and try to speak to folks like you as much as I can. I ask you: what are you doing to save this thing that you say want to devote your labor to? Do you want a world where the only American cinema is blockbuster tentpoles told by privileged white men? I may be one of those, but I know I don’t.
Now, I am a busy guy. I have produced 60 films. I hope to produce 40 more – and those are just the ones I have identified right now. But I have time to do all this because IT MUST BE DONE. And it is freakin’ easy too. And even kinda fun. It has reached a point that even my eight year old can run and maintain his own blog. Share what you like; you will find others who like what you have to say (in fact with his obsession with lego, bakagan and Dr Who, he probably has more of an audience than I do with American Art Film). Champion them and they will champion you. Help your new friends find an audience for their work and they will do the same for you. Why do you think I am here speaking before you now? I am not some sort of self-less giver. I come here now because I will want your help later – and I expect you will want mine. Let’s make it a give-give, win-win scenario.
But that work must begin early, and it must be maintained. You have to be a good friend. You have to provide. You have to enhance the lives of your fans. It is not just about self-promotion. I don’t care that you are having coffee or walking your dog or even have ideas about the three most frequently said words after sex are (that was a popular tweet this week). I want substance. I want beauty. I want to be wowed – at least every once and awhile.
Kevin Kelly pointed out that to be a self supporting artist we all need 1000 True Fans who are willing to pay $100 a year for whatever it is we have to say (okay, maybe a bit more if you live in NYC, but…). Backed by such an army, there’s a whole new way for you to create. But it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a year on most social networks to develop those relationships, longer to refine them, and even more to enhance them – if you are going to have those fans, friends, and followers join in your ongoing conversation.
It must be part of every working artist’s job description now to develop your fan base and audience. We also have to recognize that those fans are ours, that they are our most precious resource and we’ve been giving them away up to now. You may have sold your work, but you should still own your fans. We must recognize that our fans are our path to freedom, but by abandoning our rights to them, we’ve turned our selves into slaves. By not recognizing our obligations to our fans, we have allowed our culture to continue to slide to lower and lower common denominators.
When you license your work for low fees because you want to move on and create again, and you haven’t even made sure that your contracts grant you access to the very data you’ve mined – who those fans who pay for your work are – you have sealed your fate for the next time around. You will never be free. It may benefit you to go the DIY route and it may not (that’s a whole other discussion we can have some other time). But what ever your path, you need to be gathering the data along the way on who cares about your work, who loves your work. You need to know how to reach them. And remember: if your fans follow you through some social network app, you don’t really know them – and you certainly don’t own them or their data. You don’t have a way to contact them outside of that app. It means nothing unless you have their email, and that too will be virtually useless unless you invest to make your relationship with them work. You must harvest your data if you are going to be able to survive.
Music – let’s go back to that -- is also different than film because most musicians have multiple art forms to offer their fans, in that they have both the recorded and the live performance, whereas filmmakers still only have a single product. Most music acts have also realized that the business is in the merchandise and not even in either of those art forms – and that certainly doesn’t mean that the merchandise can’t also be an art form. It can. Yet with these strong examples before us filmmakers can’t seem to get beyond the simple t-shirt or action figure to provide their fans.
If I am a true cineaste, how do I display my passion? Is it through the purchase of the complete Criterion Catalogue? You call a dvd a fetish object? I think not! Film lovers want something that shows how much they care, but now, at best, they can buy another book from Taschen. When are we going to have each film come with that artwork, that sculpture, that special thing, that says I am more than just a fanboy? That I am a true cultural conneisuer? Now, I have a 3’x2’ art work on my office wall that looks like a series of large pixels. But once you take a magnifying glass to it you see that they are film frames, one frame from each second of Kubrick’s 2001. It lets you know something about me and my tastes. We need to come up with more products like this to extend our conversations beyond the screen and theater walls.
Music will always trump film because music gets better and better the more you play it, but there are few films that hold up through multiple viewings. But film can go much further than it has so far. Why are we so locked into film as a form that can only be enjoyed when it is completed in a single seating? DVD technology allows for extensive micro-chaptering which in turn will allow for Search Engine Optimization, which in turn will lead to crowds embedding these tiny segments and thus promoting your film across a thousand outlets – but no one is doing this sort of chaptering.
Who said filmmaking is only 90 minutes long with a beginning, middle, and an end, even if not necessarily in that order? And why did we believe them? Why do our narratives have to be limited to that duration and form? With so many platforms and devices to launch and engage from, why are we still waiting for that first popular transmedia culture maker to emerge?
We aren’t doing ourselves any favors when we don’t even know what to name that thing that is that thing that we all want. The evidence is everywhere: audiences want a more immersive experience that they can join in and shape and modify, one that they can remix and rejoin, drop and pick up, forget and then recognize again as it transforms, but what is that? What do we call this thing? What do we name this thing can make movies an event again, that can make them effectively compete with all the other leisure time activities?
When a child says “Pokemon” they don’t think of just the tv-show or the movies or the card game or the video games or the cute figurines. The word Pokemon covers All Of It. Yet we have no audience-friendly term for the complete engagement with media content across all platforms in various ways. Studios call it the “franchise” but they still drive all the by-products off the narrative feature film leader. Madison Avenue calls it “brand management” but they keep all the products separate and never participatory. And both sides lobby for laws that keep our culture private, never motivating fans to make it their own, to disseminate it, or deliver it in new ways to their friends.
Our salvation won’t come from anyone other than ourselves. Truly independent film, truly free film must be the innovator on all fronts. We are the ones willing to take the risk, to embrace audience collaboration, to give them more than the simple one-off video product, and it is truly independent filmmakers that will reap the rewards.
In the most simple terms, when filmmakers recognize that each story can be told in different forms with different tones, different approaches, even different characters, they will also have new ways to engage audiences, to seed them, corral them, and drive them. It maybe with thematically related short films that are released before and after the feature becomes available. It may be with written texts that enhance their understanding or appreciation. It may be through games, through products, through live events.
However & whoever it is, the filmmakers who participate in these multiple platform ways will have solved more than just one problem. They will have engaged their audience in an ongoing dialogue that extends beyond the film product itself, but also they will have reinvented the film so it is once again an event, something distinct, something fresh, something they make a priority. The film will be the unifying action that the community comes together around. It will be how they find one another. It will be the deciding factor amidst the myriad of leisure time activities competing for there ever shortening attention. I think it is clear: providing a better dialogue with the audience is how we going to keep our diverse film culture alive.
And keep in mind that amidst all of this chaos, release patterns and methods are changing even faster. Film festivals are no longer markets. Festivals need to be recognized and exploited as media launches. Festivals are the moment when filmmakers get the most attention. Festivals are also the cheapest way anyone has of getting attention so whether you are surrendering your baby to another parent/distributor, or going the DIY route, you are going to want to use the festivals to publicize your film is available to be booked, that you are selling the DVD. That said, exhibitors are having a harder time playing indie films – be it finding slots or feeling it will be promoted sufficiently -- so where do you get your bookings?
If Robert Greenwald can take his (thankfully) fiercely partisan films into people’s living rooms, why can’t you? Countless filmmakers have found ways to incentavize individuals, communities, and organization to push their films, so what’s to stop you from building your own promotional army? People are selling DVDs directly from their websites, directly at their screenings. These are plans that you need to consider before you shoot and there is good reliable information available for free all over the internet to help you weigh these decisions. You need to put it into action before you apply to the festivals. You need to embrace it as your plan before you apply for grants. You need to accept that it is a filmmakers responsibility to find their audience and bring their work directly to them.
Now all of this is not easy, but it’s really not hard either. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it is happening right now. It requires labor but that which is derived from love is hardly really work. It requires delayed gratification but promises infinite satisfaction. It requires strategy and planning, but needs to be playful and sweetly chaotic. There is no one to discover you, but we all want to find you. No pot of gold waiting; but there is a life, a life time, a career, and a body of work begging to be created before you. Sure, it requires adding more to your job description. And it requires refresher courses along the way. It requires a different way of seeing altogether. The nice thing is we have good examples. We are ahead of the studios in our plans and we are willing to take bigger risks.
Your work is your life. You aren’t striving for any one thing other than to improve and to change. Don’t think about that ONE movie you want to make;focus on the long term and what you need to feel as excited, as engaged in fifteen years as you are today. Use your resources. Use your audience. Grow it. Sustain it.
What is stopping us? Let our barriers please not be ourselves. We have now been given the tools to bring us together, to share and to promote. Our products gain in value not by their scarcity but by how much they multiply and are enjoyed. Our desire is not to acquire, but to give away. Filmmakers, those who aspire to ART, to the bold, to the innovative, and to the transcendent have always thought differently: we’ve been most concerned about the outcome and not the income – and rightly so. Begin the conversation. Make it last a good long time. We will all profit from it.
16 comments:
For what it's worth, here's my latest thoughts on this:
Musician have live performance to make money. Filmmakers have something similar that cannot be recreated at home, for free: they have theaters. I know this blog has given up the ghost of art house theaters, but indie film (and foreign film) needs to fight its way back into theaters somehow, either their own, or the multiplex. That 20% who would rather watch a DVD? I would bet that that stat is from a broad selection of viewers, which would include viewers of crappy Hollywood movies who are tired of being let down and have little alternatives.
To expand the audience and interest of indie film, it needs to be less incestuous. I love talking about this stuff on these blogs, and reading about new films coming out, but I have plenty of friends who love indie film who are not part of making the films. They just want to see the films, and maybe discuss them after. These films have a broad appeal. We don't want indie film to be like modern dance, where the only people who watch it are modern dancers.
The thing that's really been bothering me lately is the idea that we should just give these films away (something I used to think may be the future). Just because something can be stolen, does not make that thing worth nothing. These films are important and are worth something. I'm beginning to suspect that the argument that these films are worthless is some sort of corporate conspiracy put out there to deflate our ambitions and our prices. Art has value.
The audiences are still there. The films are there. The trouble is the studio cartel controlling distribution and exhibition.
there's no substitute for the big dark room with a screen and sound and cushioned seats ...
Hi Ted,
Thanks for sharing these issues, as well as offering solutions here! One thing about filmmakers, especially Indies, is that we (if anyone!) can find ways to OVERCOME objections - like any good sales person! I think we can learn, grow and find strength in acknowledging what's so and taking responsibility for it. To live in denial of what's going on right now won't do us any good. But it doesn't mean we can't change the reality either. This is the kind of information we need to arm ourselves with, so we can be understanding of where the other side is coming from and respect one another's position. After all, most of us want the same outcome - to continue making a living doing what we love. It's just finding new, innovative ways to get there - together.
Here, here. I with all these comments. The thing is people aren't going to the theaters, but we know theaters and cinema are a wonderful thing. The whole point is to make the movie the event. Sometimes it requires adding more value to it. The film can be the key element of a much longer chain. We can give more to the screen than just the film. Distribution has never been as open as it is now. The companies with the money aren't going to take the risks -- precisely because they have the money. But if we build on each others actions, and we are willing to take the risks, like Lance Hammer and many other filmmakers have, we will turn the path into the road. We heading towards that goal, but just towards. Working together and sharing information we can get there.
there's a political aspect missing from the discussion of theaters ... it's similar to the routing of public education ... david denby's piece in the new yorker from january 8 2007 covered similar ground: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/01/08/070108crat_atlarge_denby
that article includes this quote from james schamus:
"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 ehtnic and age groups want to interact."
was that just a clever way of neutralizing the public sector?
Ted,
Thanks for giving such a candid and timely talk at NYFA and sorry I couldn't stick around to thank you in person. As a scientist and a filmmaker I find the issues facing media and the environment similar ... and often wonder if I'm a complete masochist for trying to bridge these arenas. There's a need more than ever to recognize the interdependence of art and science and the aspects of social awareness, engagement and participation that lead to transformational, sustainable solutions.
Keep up the good work!
Jen
This is fascinating and so important. Thank you, Ted! I also think there's an important factor that needs to be addressed that is in part responsible for the current situation, and that is, the way the arts in general have been slowly eliminated from our public schools.
This is critically important because, I think, one of the results of a lack of exposure to the arts at a young age is that audiences grow up to be far more easily manipulated by broad-stroke media campaigns that tell them what they want to see and when.
This is why, I am working to bring my latest film, We Pedal Uphill, to colleges and highschools this year. Some of the most stimulating post-screening discussions I've had have been with students.
We need to engage young people in our art... and because, as you say, the newspapers are choking to death, we need to connect with them directly and soon.
Everything I read says that people are going to the theaters, albeit for fewer films. If you look at the MPAA website, the numbers are fairly encouraging (for Hollywood, I know it's spin, but still). One stat that really stuck out to me was the comparison of the cost of doing anything. I think movies cost too much, but a ball game costs 70 bucks or more and theater is even more. Teenagers, who can't drink and have less money to spend at the mall, are always going to the movies, which is why they make so many movies for them - and those films have muscled grown up films out of the theaters. Sure, indie films get less people watching them, but how much of that is just the fact that they never get a chance, or that the theatrical run was just a launch for the DVD later? Indie films compete to get a very small share of screens, while Hollywood films launch on a thousand to four thousand screens. That's not competition, that's slaughter. And occasionally an indie film does defy all these odds and still gets seen by a lot of people, so the audience may be out there. It's just not in the same places they used to be. But this is a different world, with different films, and different ideas about what indie is than it was fifteen years ago.
Excellent message Ted. Building bridges among our fellow networks and friends is critical to any measure of success. The long and winding road of McCartney takes on a high meaning in the exploration to provide quality media that people will listen to and/or see in theaters. Conversations are the heart of our endeavors to achieve success.
Ted - these are really great suggestions and I thank you for the dialog. Please forgive the gratuitous typo's as I often get interrupted
Getting an audience and distribution deal these days isn't really the problem many of us are running into. It's getting the distributors to pay you for what your work is worth. And that they will not do, whether you have an audience or not.
Scenerio, Veteran genre filmmaker and friend take out 2nd mortgages on their homes. Make a 1.5 to 2 million dollar artistic genre film. He's built up enough of an audience and name within his genre, under the studio system, that he's now seeking creative freedom from, that he can gets all the advertising he wants on any of the genre sites. Now 3 years later he finishes film, He gets midway into the foreign sale's on his film, (not enough for him and friend, to start seeing any return yet, but just enough for the sales agent to see his fee.) when a tiny little territory (Brazil) releases the his work. As a result the film rockets on IMDB from a rating of 14,000 to 158. just 58 from being in the top 100 most popular searched film on IMDB, in one week, just from one tiny territory release, Now the the film is being pirated online like crazy. with over 50,000 downloads in one week. (I know filmmakers with films that have placed at Sundance and received distribution as a result, who couldn't pay a pirate to pirate their film, because there just isn't a demand for the film) and the press reviews from all the online genre press that have seen it so far have all been great, with JoBlo even calling it "a fascinating and fiercely original work of art!" There is no doubt the film has an audience and that it's a good film. Yet not one US Distributor is willing to offer more than a 75K advance, with same back-end as always. (he could potentially make far more distributing his work himself, and in a shorter time than waiting for back end, right?) and he's faceing not seeing more than 250,000 grand from the foreign sales, with 100,000 to 150, grand of that going to the sales agents. So he and friend are facing putting their homes up for sale. This is where the industry is now. Ask the producers who made Michael Douglas latest indie, how their doing in sales?
So What does a filmmaker do now? He has the audience and the advertising, but no distribution willing to pay him for his work. The only way i can see him making his investment back, to pay off his 2nd mortgage is self distribution.. Right?
In response to Lillian above, the answer is Yes.
It's not what he's used to; it may not be "fair;" but, since he's already developed a name for himself, a BRAND, he should seize on this conundrum to rethink his expectations for recouping the project's money and how - in this case, bypass the middlemen who aren't biting anyway, and reach out and cultivate his fans directly. He may still not get close to earning back all his negative costs this time (?), but he will have paved a path to getting his next project out to his audience and fans directly.
Why wait for a distributor to "pay you what you're worth?" I think the emergent Indie Film Distribution paradigm is Monetize your audience, yourself - PAY YOURSELF WHAT YOU'RE WORTH. But, you're gonna have to do twice the work that you used to do as a filmmaker, because now you have to drive a film's distribution, as well as its creation/execution.
But Lillian, why paint self-distribution as a last desperate measure? If a filmmaker/film has an audience, isn't it great that you can now deliver that film directly to the audience, keeping the revenue, and cutting out the distributor who BTW doesn't market the film to your audience or make your money? Yes, a lot of work - so budget for and hire a part-time marketing/communication assistant or intern. I know, easy to say, harder to execute. But it can be done.
It was so great to hear you speak on this topic right before I went into production on my web series. Your lecture has inspired me to reevaluate the length of each episode in my project based on viewers' shortened attention span, especially when viewing material on the internet, and the new "gaming" culture.
Thank you for putting a positive spin on creating in uncertain times. I keep hearing about how the funding for independent work is not what it used to be, but many naysayers fail to tip the nose of the proverbial plane upward to offer hope. I have no experience creating my own work prior to this economic crisis; before I started working on my web series with NYFA I lived in the comfy bubble of Drama School and following graduation I worked as an actress for two years. I have no basis for nostalgia about the good times in creating independent film.
I'm choosing to look at what's available to me rather than whine about nonexistent money that I wasn't even aware of in the first place. The internet and social networking as medium to really infiltrate peoples' daily lives with art is like the wild west right now. Its expansive and inexpensive.
As I move into the editing room I will be keeping your words in mind.
Thank you so much!
Maia
www.maiamccann.com
maiastar@gmail.com
@Lorie, I was wondering if you or Ted know of anyone who has given their 1.5 million dollar film away for free, and is able to now make a new film with the profits from that film? Really, and truly that is the only thing standing in the way of filmmakers embracing this open source film model. The obstacles to budget reduction are entirely too numerous, involving a ALLOT of people, contracts and production changes, and a long time. But something has to change for the indie right now! And there's only one fear standing in the way of filmmakers embracing this new distribution model - the fear of ending up a welfare recipient, drinking wool-lite in the alley behind Sav-On. We are talking about ALLOT of money here. The only way I can think to over come this fear is to convince a filmmaker with a million dollar budget, a good, unique film, with an audience, to take the plunge, lead the way, and do it. If Teds is certain this path is the way to go and wants to try it with the filmmakers I'm working with now, see if he can convince them to go for it... I can get them together. It shouldn't be too hard to convince them, they're pretty open-minded peeps, and they're film is being pirated anyway, and they haven't received a dime on the film yet, so what do they have to lose? I'd pitch the model to them myself, only I wouldn't know where to begin, what to do, or even why to say it would work, to convince them. Ted if your interested my email is lllngish@gmail.com.
Bottom line is whether going the studio or self distribution route, I think this the end of indie films over 4 to 500 grand. We've somehow got to come up with a way to get our budgets under that, in order to profit and make another film. I don't know too many people who'll work on the pay those budgets provide, so perhaps we'll also have to become our own attorneys, insurance agents/providers, accountants, payroll, locations scouts, security, story board artist, VFX artists and supervisors, web designers, etc.. So I'm sure Marketing and Communications will fall on the filmmaker also. No matter which way you look at it, it sucks.
Three - Distribution is a full time job and the job of Suits not ARTISTS. We're not talking about Lucus, or Spielberg here, were talking about real ARTISTS! I'm an associate producer, I organize, negotiate, wheel, deal, and push pencils for a living, and I'm damn good at it. If I wanted to open a distribution business, I'd be board to DEATH, but I'd likely be successful. Mr. Malone on the other hand, is a Visual ARTIST, who this time out had the guts to put his own money where his heart is, and is needlessly being pushed into self-distribution, by industry dominating distributors seizing an opportunity to use the "bad economy" excuse, to starve and eventually kill off its Indie competition, and take back its accolades, without looking like an evil corporation) It takes allot of nagging on our part, to get him to stop talking about and doing creative work,(pull him away from Maya and After Effects) and get him to start talking business to outlets, and pushing pencils. His face starts to look really tired and as though he's going to be sick even discussing studio or distribution politics, or even US politics for that matter! He's not a suit AT ALL, and would suck trying to be one. Every Visual Artist I know tells me the same thing, when they are put in the position of having to be a suit it kills more and more of their spirit! I've always found Indie & Genre Artists to be very unique people. They're kind of like savants or something, Artists to the very core of their beings. ARTISTS do not make good Suits, and Suits suck at trying to be artists. I don't think the two can merge without film creativity suffering. Quite honestly, I don't think I want them to, it always results in something bazaar and tragic looking, like David Lynch standing in the middle of Hollywood Blvd. holding giant signs asking people to buy Inland Empire.
@ MTeplitsky, I paint it as a last measure, because making it available online for audiences to purchase is easy, making it available in Theaters, Rental & Retail stores, TV, etc...Is almost impossible without a distributor, because they buy from distributors. (allot of peeps still like the convenience of being able to pick up a DVD at Target while doing household shopping.) 2 1/2 years ago a friend took his $5 million film to HBO, they offered him $85,000 he passed, 6 months later Sony revisited the film, and picked it up at Cannes for 3 mil. with the usual 25% 75% back end sales split, and later sold it to HBO for 600,000 and Starz for 1.2 million! (he profited and made another film) If Mr. Malone himself goes to the cable networks and the rest of the outlets, they have this idiotic preconceived perception that he COULDN'T sell it to a studio Distrib, so it must be crap, and not that he WOULDN'T sell it to a studio, because what they are offering today would mean he and his investors would have to sell their homes. So the outlets offer reflects their idiotic perception. (Since he can't get for his film what a studio would get, then my question becomes would self-distribution still mean they have to sell their homes?) Two - I can see self distribution for music as a first resort option, as it's relatively cheap to produce and once written, its done in a very short amount of time. Compared with the Millions and years it takes to produce a film. Since now both DIY And studio distribution mean less return, The idea here, is to make films cheaper to produce not more expensive. Adding the costs of DVD's, manpower, P&A, and manufacturing additional products to package with my DVD (as Ted suggests to compete with pirates) to my production budget, means I now have to have even MORE capital at the outset to be maintain a career as filmmaker, and compete with pirates and the studio's. Three, - Either way there will not be a next film! Distributors used have the capital to ADVANCE at least half of your Theatrical/Video sales, up front.(and still do! despite their claims to the contrary) and since ancillary sales usually begin to come in toward the end of that first year and since the distib is getting a better price for the film, you were likely to profit in a reasonable amount of time. Making Investors happy and more likely to reinvest those profits into another movie. Short turn around means Indie-Filmmakers, Crews, and their families don't have to starve between films, as they are living on that income while making another film! Unless we are planning to RAISE the price of DVD's and online downloads, without those same advances, it would take longer to recoup and profit, as now you have to wait for the Download/online DVD sales to come trickling in, making it more likely you'd have to use those returns to survive on, rather than making another film. Today because the studio advances are SOOO low and the backend is exactly the same, both result in the same outcome. Although I do think one would still make more than 75,000 (studio advance) within the first year of self distribution. No? So I don't see another film with Mr. Malone on the horizon. He'll likely have to sacrifice creative control and go back to taking studio pictures and being slammed for crap he had no control over.
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