Month: October 2011

I have a few things coming up in my efforts to help save Indie Film. I get tired just looking at the list.

It would be great if you could join me. I need the help.

10/15 & 10/17: I am headed to London for the Film Festival and screenings of my films DARK HORSE and MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE. I will definitely be at the first two screenings of Todd Solondz’s film. Unfortunately I will be missing COLLABORATOR’s East Coast premiere at the Hamptons Film Festival that weekend (but I have a bunch of directors on new projects to meet over in the UK, so…) and Todd Solondz’s Masterclass & DARK HORSE screening in Abu Dhabi, but I can’t be everywhere I want to be at once, yet…

Tuesday 10/18: I will be presenting Sophia Takal’s impressie first feature GREEN as part of the HopeForFilm Screening Series at Goldcrest. I will be leading a Q&A afterwards. And then enjoying some wine with all attending.

Wed. 10/19 Tiffany Shlain’s film CONNECTED opens next week. I will be at the 5P show for a short Q&A after the show Wedneday Oct 19 in NYC at the Angelica. There are a lot of great folks lending a hand with their expertise at other screenings. Check it out here.
And order tickets here: http://www.fandango.com/angelikafilmcenter_aaeci/theaterpage?date=10/19/2011

Sat Oct 22nd, I expect to be doing something at the Flyaway Film Festival in Pepin, Wisconsin. COLLABORATOR’s there too.

On Oct 25th, I will be interviewing Geoffrey Fletcher (PRECIOUS) for the Harvard Alumni Arts, Media & Entertainment organization Harvardwood — and it’s open to the public. Order tickets here:
http://www.harvardwood.org/events/event_details.asp?id=184787

Fri Oct 28th, I will be giving an address to the Sloan Foundation Film Summit.

Sat Nov 5th: And of course there’s my first EVER stateside Masterclass with Christine Vachon on Nov. 5th at the Cantor Film Center at NYU in NYC. There’s one week left on the Early Bird Discount. http://killerhope.eventbrite.com/

The last two days, Sophia Takal and Lawrence Michael Levine have been sharing how they have navigated both a personal and professional collaborative relationship. For me, my curiosity about their process was sparked when I watched Sophia’s GREEN, a feature that moved, impressed, and scared me. I look forward to collaborating more fully with my wife on our movies (albeit only behind the camera), but watching Sophia’s film, I knew I had a lot to still learn about the how to of the dual pursuit.

I will be presenting GREEN in a little more than a week from now at my HopeForFilm screening series, and it is not a film you should miss. GREEN premiered at SxSW this year and deserves to travel far and wide. It has lodged itself into my memory. If you haven’t been following Sophia & Lawrence’s very revealing conversation this last three days, I suggest you travel back in time and start from Thursday’s post and read it one sitting.

Thursday, PART ONE: The Empress and Fat Friend 2007-8
Yesterday, PART TWO: Gabi On The Roof In July, 2009-2010
Today, PART THREE:

Green, 2010

Sophia Takal: With both Lawrence and myself sufficiently emotionally traumatized by the experience of making Gabi, I decided I wanted to direct a movie myself. I wanted to shoot Green as a way of getting back to ‘the work’ after a year on the festival circuit. I wanted the film itself to reflect my experiences shooting Gabi, my fears, my jealousies, my irrational, unjustifiably terrible behavior. And to do so I decided to cast my boyfriend and our new roommate (and extraordinary actress), Kate Lyn Sheil, as boyfriend and girlfriend.

Lawrence Michael Levine: When Sophia came to me with the idea to do Green, my first reaction was absolute terror. The script was about a couple that moves to the country, where they meet an attractive neighbor. When the man in the relationship becomes friendly with the neighbor, the woman in the couple becomes psychologically unhinged due to her feverish jealousy. The story, however, wasn’t the problem. The truly frightening thing about the project was that Sophia intended for me to play the “ romantic” lead opposite our best friend, roommate, and Gabi co-star Kate.

Ultimately, Sophia got me to do the project by repeatedly promising not to get jealous and claiming she’d matured since the Gabi shoot. I probably wasn’t as difficult to convince as I should have been. I thought the part she’d written for me was great and that the movie would be excellent as well. Also, I’d really enjoyed acting with both Sophia and Kate in Gabi. Mostly, I knew that Sophia and I had become increasingly dedicated to our work and that if we didn’t learn to function together on set we might see each other less and less. Interestingly enough, though there were moments of strife between us during Green, they usually weren’t triggered by Sophia’s jealousy. Despite the fact the Green featured some “erotically charged” scenes between Kate and I, Sophia handled the shoot remarkably well.

ST: For Green, I insisted on an intimate set (only 5 people on set at a time including the actors), no time pressures (if we did not finish it this summer we would just come back next summer), an extraordinarily low budget and, as a result, no hopes that could be crushed. I insisted that I was the one in charge, to get the final say, to be the director. And then I turned to Lawrence and asked him if he thought that was okay. And then I turned to Lawrence and asked if the shot made sense. And then I turned to Lawrence and asked how to articulate what I needed from his own performance. And then I yelled at him for interfering.

LML: Sometimes things were a little dicey because Sophia wanted to be the boss, but wasn’t quite as experienced (i.e. old) as me. She would ask me for advice and then get mad at me for giving it. There were also times when I overstepped my bounds. On one occasion, I gave Kate a note without checking with Sophia first. I’m sure there were others, but basically our ability to work together had improved.

ST: Estimated Number of Fights:
Pre-Production: 0(!)
Production: 9 (the biggest one being an argument about which was funnier: Lawrence eating an apple or putting lotion on his legs)
Post-Production: 5

That’s a huge drop in arguing. If that were some real statistic, some dead statistician would probably be really excited.

LML: I’m lost.

ST: It means we argued less.

LML: Well, the shoot was much shorter.

ST: FUCK you! Just kidding.

LML: We did fight less. Looking back on the past three years, we have worked together practically non-stop. I think we have a lot to show for it. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished, though I have to admit that sometimes I’m amazed our relationship is still intact.

ST: How did we pull that off? Well, a lot of discussion. A lot of rules. A lot of honesty and a lot of pain, truthfully. Tensions flared up, for sure, but all film sets are tense. Why would this one be different? What mattered was that we learned, through (sometimes brutally painful) experience what our limits were. It was okay for Lawrence to kiss another girl as long as he only paid attention to me in between takes. It was okay for Lawrence to suggest a shot for a scene, but only if I asked him first. It was okay for him to suggest a cut, but only if he realized I had the final say. Maybe it sounds uptight, maybe I sound like the most intense, obnoxious person in the world. But what I gain working with Lawrence is so absolutely invaluable: a partner, an ally, someone who challenges me, who forces me to reach beyond, who sees how far I can go and who will not let me slack off or give up. It’s worth all the rules, all the arguing, all the pain. In the end, I have found someone who can love me, push me, encourage me, demand the best of me, trust me with his work, and in a pinch, record sound for me. It’s totally worth it.

Sophia Takal wrote, directed, edited and starred in the feature film GREEN which premiered at SXSW in 2011 and won the SXSW/Chicken & Egg Emergent Woman Narrative Director award. She produced, edited and starred in Lawrence Michael Levine’s GABI ON THE ROOF IN JULY. She was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Film in 2011. 

Lawrence Michael Levine wrote, directed and starred in the feature film GABI ON THE ROOF IN JULY which played numerous festivals, won a number of awards and is currently available on VOD, iTunes, Amazon.com, etc. He produced and starred in Sophia Takal’s GREEN. 

Yesterday, in an effort to determine whether “Can A Couple Truly Collaborate Creatively (And Survive?)” we started to look at the origins of the collaborative filmmaking team of Sophia Takal and Lawrence Michael Levine — who just so happen to be entangled romantically too. Today, they share a bit about what they went through when they embarked on their first feature, Lawrence’s GABI ON THE ROOF IN JULY. They are as honest and forthcoming about their process, as they are in their filmmaking itself. As I said yesterday, “Whether you aspire to work with your significant other, or just collaborate well with your team, the back and forth and growth that Sophia and Lawrence have committed themselves to, can all teach us a few things.”

Part Two of Three
Gabi on the Roof in July, 2009-2010

Lawrence Michael Levine: Though making The Empress and Fat Friend had encouraged us to entertain the idea of making a feature, we still weren’t sure we’d be able to do it. I’d saved up a little money over the years, but I wasn’t sure how far that was going to take us. I was really into ensemble films at the time, which are more expensive – more characters means more locations, company moves and mouths to feed. I was also concerned that many of the early micro-budget films were alienating to audiences because they were poorly lit, so I felt it was important to improve on that which I didn’t think was possible for the amount of money I had. Fate, however, soon put an end to these concerns. Sophia was cast in a national television commercial that paid very well. As soon as she got her first residual check for the commercial, we went to work on the film that ended up becoming Gabi on the Roof in July.

Since Sophia and I were going to be paying for the movie ourselves, we decided that we might as well make exactly the kind of film we wanted to make. Both of us were pretty inspired by Mike Leigh at the time, so it seemed like an interesting idea to study his techniques and apply them to our own life experiences. That meant casting the actors first and developing the characters and story in collaboration with them. We gave ourselves six months to cast, rehearse, and generate the shooting script and then another month to shoot the film.

The rehearsal process for Gabi was simultaneously one of the best and worst times of my life. Artistically, I had never been more satisfied. The cast we managed to pull together was of a caliber beyond our wildest expectations, but the countless hours I spent away from Sophia with the other actors and with my co-writer, Kate Kirtz, took their toll on our relationship. Sophia’s sense of isolation, I think, was compounded by the fact that, as part of the rehearsal process, I required the actors not discuss their characters with one another. No actor could know more than his or her character would know. That meant that when I came home at the end of the day, I could not discuss what I had been working on with Sophia, which further fueled her jealousy and paranoia. This state of affairs was tough on her, so she made it tough on me.

Sophia Takal: Well, yeah, because essentially that process meant spending hours home alone waiting for you to get back from traipsing around the city with beautiful girls like Amy Seimetz and Kate Sheil, while I sat at home waiting for you. Then when you got home once you got home I couldn’t talk to you about where you’d been and what you’d been up to.

LML: Right. That’s what I just said.

ST: Different emphasis.

LML: Fair enough. The shooting of Gabi was equally divided between periods of artistic fulfillment and extreme tension. Working with the cast and cinematographer, Aaron Kovalchik, was a joy; however, due to our inexperience and lack of funds the set was in a state of constant chaos. Since most of the cast and crew were working for free, Sophia and I couldn’t take out our frustration on them, so we took it out on each other.

ST: Yeah. We took all of our anxiety and turned it in on each other. A psychologist would probably look at our behavior during that period of time and grimace. It was bad. One of the things that sucked the most was that we decided we couldn’t afford an AD, so I was the de facto AD, which meant I had to be the person on set to keep things moving, but I was also the star of the film so I would be rushing Larry and the DP while, for example, I was covered in whipped cream in between takes. It was awkward.

LML: She would be rushing me and then she’d have to step into a scene and I’d have to be a kind, supportive director, after she’d just been hassling me about time. It was rough.

ST:

Estimated Number of Fights:
Pre-Production: 65
Production: 52
Post-Production: 18 (one in which Lawrence threatened to throw the computer out the window if I did not make the cut he – the director – wanted)

LML: Though many of our shooting days were filled with awful moments, I think the worst point in the shoot was when I had to do a love scene with Brooke Bloom while Sophia crouched behind the camera attempting to hide the fact that she was weeping profusely behind a pair of giant sunglasses. Why she chose to be in the room at that moment, despite my protestations, I’ll never know, nor will I ever fully grasp how she convinced me to do her next project, Green.

ST: In the end, though, we made a movie. A movie that at certain points neither of us thought we could pull off and sometimes still wonder if we did. But we did it together and despite all the arguments we were, at times, the only people who believed in each other.

TOMORROW: We conclude with Part Three, As Sophia Takes Charge On Her Own Feature…

Trailer: GABI ON THE ROOF IN JULY:

Sophia Takal wrote, directed, edited and starred in the feature film GREEN which premiered at SXSW in 2011 and won the SXSW/Chicken & Egg Emergent Woman Narrative Director award. She produced, edited and starred in Lawrence Michael Levine’s GABI ON THE ROOF IN JULY. She was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Film in 2011.
Lawrence Michael Levine wrote, directed and starred in the feature film GABI ON THE ROOF IN JULY which played numerous festivals, won a number of awards and is currently available on VOD, iTunes, Amazon.com, etc. He produced and starred in Sophia Takal’s GREEN. 

Jealousy is great fodder for creation. Our hunger for love puts stress on us even once we have found it, earned it, and secured it. Love is both incredibly deep and incredibly delicate. It is strong and it is fragile. We can make movies about love until the end of time, and not even scratch the surface.

Indie & Truly Free Film are both currently awash in collaborative filmmaking teams. Some are siblings, some are friends, and at least one of them is a couple: Sophia Takal and Lawrence Michael Levine. When I saw Sophia’s GREEN, I was incredibly impressed and moved. Not only does Takal tackle the subject of jealousy straight on, she does it by also starring in it with her boyfriend/fiance; just to complicate things, their roommate, plays his lover. I understand creative challenges, but know I have a lot to learn when the creative challenges the personal. I asked Sophia and Lawrence to tell us a bit about how their collaboration came to be. Whether you aspire to work with your significant other, or just collaborate well with your team, the back and forth and growth that Sophia and Lawrence have committed themselves to, can all teach us a few things.

PART ONE (OF THREE): The Empress and Fat Friend 2007-8

Sophia Takal: Lawrence recently read Marshall Fine’s biography of John Cassavetes. Apparently, Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands never spoke about their relationship in public because they were afraid of the evil eye, so I think we’re both sort of nervous to do this. Also, neither of us have really blogged before. I briefly started a blog about bad haircuts (www.badhaircutblues.blogspot.com). Lawrence did a blog post once and “Ted Nope” made fun of it, so he took it down.

Lawrence Michael Levine: Yeah, that was humiliating. I find internet culture extremely frightening — I know people will make fun of this, but I guess you have to push on through. Where to start?

ST: I met Lawrence when I was in college. He was a TA in Andrew Sarris’ movie musicals class. I got a C+. I barely spoke to him during the semester.

LML: Yeah. Sophia and I could easily not have met. As a grad film student, I was one of the two T.A.’s assigned to an undergraduate class she was taking, but she wasn’t in my section. The other T.A. graded her papers and ran the discussion group that she was in. When the other TA had surgery, for a few classes I ran both discussion groups at once, but it was in a large auditorium and apparently Sophia sat in the way back where I couldn’t see her. I think she told me she slept and/or “surfed the net” and barely noticed me. Supposedly, the rumor amongst her classmates was that the other TA had missed the classes because of penis reduction surgery, which is amusing, but neither here nor there for the purposes of this post. What might be more germane is the fact that we met at the other TA’s apartment, when he threw a party at the end of the semester. I thought she was extremely beautiful and incredibly funny. Sophia spent most of the night talking to my friend, but she and I did talk for a bit and we must have exchanged emails or something because we kept in touch.

ST: We pursued a casual friendship, mostly e-mail based (sending each other recipes for latkes, quoting Jay-Z, and making plans to meet but rarely following through).

LML: I think she also must have told me that she was an actress because several months later, when I had a reading for a screenplay I was working on, I asked her to participate. She was the only actor that I invited to the reading that I hadn’t seen act before. The script called for a college girl and I didn’t know any, so I thought of her. She turned out to be great. After that, I developed a mega-crush on her because she wasn’t just funny, smart, and pretty, but she was such a gifted actor.

I was just finishing school — I think this was 2007 — when Sophia and I became a couple. Film school had really shaken my confidence and I was considering giving up completely on being I filmmaker, but I still had a passion for film and I know Sophia and I talked a lot about movies. I don’t think I would have recommitted myself to a life in film were it not for Sophia’s confidence in my abilities. She claimed to love the more personal stuff I was writing and suggested that we get to work, so after moving in together and announcing our engagement to our families, we quickly shot a couple of short films called, The Empress and Fat Friend.

ST: As I recall, we got into two arguments while making The Empress.

1. I found out I was scheduled to have surgery the morning after our shoot was scheduled to end. This was about 4 days before we were going to shoot. Lawrence wanted to reschedule the shoot for after I recovered, but I insisted that we keep the shoot date as planned. My recovery was going to take about a month and I didn’t want to wait that long to make the movie, but Lawrence did not want to risk having to rush the shoot because I was nervous about surgery and did not want me to be distracted.
2. It was midnight on our last day of shooting and I was supposed to be at the hospital at 5 am. I did not want to continue shooting and was upset that Lawrence forced me to even though I had surgery the next morning.

LML: Great art, or in this case mediocre art, requires sacrifice.

ST: I edited the film, burned hundreds of DVDs, and then found out that all of the DVDs I’d burned were way out of synch. These were the DVDs we sent to festivals, which, of course, all rejected us. Lawrence has never gotten mad at me for this mistake.

LML: For the most part, we enjoyed making The Empress and thought we’d done a good job once the sync issue was straightened out, so we did another called Fat Friend.

ST: We decided that Lawrence would direct the scenes I was in and I would direct the scenes he was in. There was one scene we were in together, which we thought we’d just play by ear. Playing it by ear, it turned out, meant arguing for a solid 45 minutes while the DP, sound recordist, and third actor waited around, bewildered. I don’t remember what the argument was about but I do remember the DP, Kevin Barker, settled it. We got into one fight during post-production:

1. The short that I cut was 19 minutes long. I refused to cut 4 minutes from the movie despite Lawrence’s insistence that it was too long. I cried and said that all of the moments were so good and his performance was incredible and I could not bear to cut a frame of the film. Lawrence brought our DP (also an editor) in to trim what he could. He took 5 minutes off the film without really changing a thing. We never submitted the film to a festival.

At this point, our relationship had not been irrevocably changed by our work together. Tiny arguments and big arguments had come and gone but work is work and were mostly able to separate the two. Then we decided to make a feature…

TOMORROW: The First Feature, And It’s His…

Sophia Takal wrote, directed, edited and starred in the feature film GREEN which premiered at SXSW in 2011 and won the SXSW/Chicken & Egg Emergent Woman Narrative Director award. She produced, edited and starred in Lawrence Michael Levine’s GABI ON THE ROOF IN JULY. She was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Film in 2011.
Lawrence Michael Levine wrote, directed and starred in the feature film GABI ON THE ROOF IN JULY which played numerous festivals, won a number of awards and is currently available on VOD, iTunes, Amazon.com, etc. He produced and starred in Sophia Takal’s GREEN.

In this Age Of SuperAbundance one of the things we need more than anything is trusted filters. How do we prioritize what to watch? How to discover new work? How do we escape our echo chambers to be reminded of how expansive our taste really is?

We need folks whom we trust to lead us to where we would not go on our own. Ideally, these people will do more than just lead us to good work; they will expand our mind, and widen our social circles. But where are they?

Historically speaking we have depended on our critics and arts institutions to work as our curators. One of the shortcomings of this relationship is that is geographically focused — and we really no longer are. Similarly, historic curators are historically plagued by having to offer consistency to their locally-based community; they need to stay employed and the locals have influence with the institution. It has been rare that curators are rewarded by experimentation or risk taking.

The local arthouse theater, where they still exist, and when they can afford to innovate or even maintain, generally must balance film education with mass audience taste. They have to listen to the large distributors, routinely do their bidding, in order to gain access –or even hoped for access — to the top revenue producing titles. They get penalized if they don’t maintain the full week run. If they can afford to drop the $150K needed to convert to digital projection, still can offer the wide variety that digital transmission promises without risking disrupting the fragile relationships with their top suppliers. The battle for survival makes a varied diet of cinematic variety almost impossible to maintain.

In this Interconnected Age, we can depend on a much wider range of tastemakers, influencers, and early adopters. Curating, when freed from a revenue-based judgement, can take risks and even shift focus from pure entertainment to education and discovery. The hopes of the rapid blossoming of a new curatorial class that I’ve carried in this interconnected age seem to outweigh the reality. I am surprised that as far down the social networking path as we are, the new curator clan has not yet truly emerged. Or have they and I just am too blindly focused on my own things to notice?

We get trapped in our limited circle of tastes partially due to consumption of single focused content. When we look at film blogs to learn about films, we focus on the type of film we already know we like. This is also true for any art form — our tastes lead us to more of the same. What was great about the newspaper, and local record shops and repertory houses, as they led us out of our common paths and encouraged us to try out new things. The forums of old, in having to reach a wide audience, could not afford to be single format or genre focused — but on the interwebs that singularity is rewarded. Maybe it is the volume of the anonymous commenters on blogs, but generally speaking I seem to find only more of the same from most websites. And I want more than that. I want to be surprised. I want to be led in new directions. And I think others do too.

Maybe it only requires greater access to our social graph, or greater transparency as to our friends’ tastes. Facebook took a big step in this direction the other week, but it is too early to tell whether this will just become more noise. The even bigger step is denied stateside by an antiquated law created when a Supreme Court judge was embarrassed by his porno preferences. I don’t want to hear from EVERYONE who is my “friend”. I don’t even want to know about what everyone whose taste is applicable to my own thinks I should watch. I want to be led forward.

Who expends my taste and my knowledge these days? Luckily I live in NYC, where taste & individual style remain currencies that are traded on side economies. On top of that, in our city of light, the darkened room is a hallowed hall; cinema — in its purest form — is still worshipped by a sturdy crew whose passion for the communal and large outweigh convenience or price point. But even with all NYC has to offer, I am not just reliant for curation for those in my proximity. The internet brings me to far off lands, and blogs that offer a wider range of things tend to do it best for me. I am often led to consume new things by those who specialize interests that diverge from my core passions. If someone is a good writer and clearly displays passion (and in an articulate way), I tend to jump.

On the strictly film front, I adore CineFamily in Los Angeles. As I have said before, they make we wish I was in LA (and I have dedicated my life to not being there). They add value to the movies they show. Hadrian Belove and his team write wonderful posts about the films they show. They don’t take things too seriously, never tredding down the elitist path that plague NYC’s film centers. Cinefamily cuts their own trailers, and they rock. They pair their movies expertly. They bring in guests on a regular basis. THEY MAKE EACH MOVIE AN EVENT. On my Pleasure Planet, CineFamily is in every city on every world.

Film festivals and film societies will probably always be our chief curators of film content, but…. the problem with festivals and societies is that they have to appeal to a general audience. Like Hollywood movies, they tend to lack the WTF element, which to me, is what makes something a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I like insanity in my programming — and I hate when it gets ghetto-ized into the midnight slot. I like my craziness in mid-afternoon. Every year when the New York Asian Film Festival comes to NYC, I wish I could find more time in my life. I would love to be able to be able to attend more of their movies. If the litmus test of a curator is “would I subscribe to a channel that had all their programming all the time?”, then NYAFF is winning big time.

Queer/Art/Film is a monthly series here in NYC at the IFC center is a great series with a great audience, run by Ira Sachs and Adam Baran. They have a film presented by a different artist each month who then talks about why they love it. The crowd is a highly knowledgeable group of film aficionados, and the conversation afterwards is often as good as the films.

And although I don’t exactly have an arm’s length distance, I still must recommend Michael Tully at HammerToNail (a website I helped found). HTN’s focus still remains primarily under $1M budgeted American narrative, but it has expanded. I am frequently tipped to new talent by Tully’s eloquent and passionate embrace of the under-seen.

And while I am on the subject of things I am already involved with, I think there is real potential in curated content offerings, particularly when they bring additional value. I am on the advisory board of Fandor, a streaming site & community that only has about 15% overlap with Netflix. When I talk to the Fandor team about their plans to involve the community I get excited about the potential there. I also get jazzed by the potential of new platforms (like Prescreen) and longtime practioneers (like Snag — owner of Indiewire)– now streaming narratives too — to help audiences to discover new work — particularly when they use expanding social engagement tools and practices. As these platforms add in real curatorial voices, armed with both authority and accessibility, they will gain in both value and utility.

But it is not the film only sites that do most of my “pointing”. Maybe it is because I work in film, but the film sites, still feel like work to me (albeit a labor I love). To get the real pleasure of transgression and good ‘ol timewasting, I have to drift into a different set of curators. They don’t usually recommend films per se, but they go into topics which lead me to search out a different sort of film than I usually do. Among those I gravitate to are:

BrainPickings.org

BoingBoing

Listverse

Netted by The Webbies – Everyday there is something available on The Net that will make your life better. Don’t you want to know about it?

Now I Know (Dan Lewis)

In terms of “culture” only, but who’s interest expand beyond film, and have been doing a good job of tipping lately…
Very Short List

I’d love to know who you like and follow as curators, so please comment.

The real question though, is what can we do to further the appreciation and celebration of curators? How can we give them greater prominence? How do we make sure they don’t get lost in the noise. The truth is I don’t need to discover new movies. I have preselected more than enough titles to satisfy me, even at my peak consumption rate, well past my life expectancy rate. I need curators who enrich the experience for me. I need curators who enhance the social relevancy of my consumption. I want a value-add from my filters.

Sometimes it seems like there’s more talk about movies getting made than there is actual activity. The question of how we all learn and remain aware of the actual practice of day will always loom large. Since knowledge and access (i.e. connections) will always be key commodities in the pursuit of getting it done, conferences that provide the two are always a lure.

Fortunately we were given the opportunity to cover 11th Annual New York International Film & TV Summit, organized by BNA / ATLAS, and were able to dispatch one of our own forward thinkers to the proceedings. Gary reports back to us, in this first of two parts.

I did something odd last week: I went back in time and attended the kind of conference I hadn’t been to in years. These days I’m best known for documentary films and books released by my Disinformation and True Mind companies, but when I first met Ted Hope (who kindly invited me to attend the conference in his stead), I used to go to exactly this kind of conference as a young pup entertainment lawyer looking to meet experienced TV and movie execs.

The conference was the 11th Annual New York International Film & TV Summit, organized by BNA / ATLAS, and indeed it was loaded with exactly the kind of indie film royalty a striving young producer might want to meet: New York luminaries such as Richard Lorber, Steve Beer, Josh Braun, Ira Deutchman and many others, as well as some west coast execs like eOne’s John Morayniss, Nick Meyer, and Peter Kaufman. But at a thousand dollars a head to attend, there weren’t too many filmmakers in the room (notable exception, one of Ted’s students at NYU Film School whom Ted got a free pass for and whose short was accepted by Sundance this year). The majority of attendees were lawyers and accountants, which made me laugh when all of the Movie Magic software door prizes were given out to people who clearly weren’t about to produce their own film (I know because mine was one of two hands raised when a panelist asked if anyone had produced a film).

The other “Back to the Future” moment for me was when I asked what the conference hashtag was so that I could tweet about the panels. Not only was I met with a completely blank stare, but it turned out that a hashtag would have done me no good anyway, as there was no wifi and AT&T doesn’t have enough bandwidth in the Marriott Marquis Times Square to access email, let alone tweet. I don’t think that was too much of an issue for anyone else, though: unlike, say, a panel at SXSW where everyone has a laptop/tablet/smartphone out and is littering the social mediasphere at will throughout every presentation, I didn’t see anyone using anything more advanced than a ballpoint pen with which to record the proceedings.

OK, so that set the stage. As to the actual content of the conference, on day one there was a major focus on tax incentives, with Executive Director of the New York State Film & TV office, Pat Kaufman delivering the keynote address. Pat is well loved and for good reason: she reported that already in 2011 there are 82 films, 17 pilots and 23 TV series participating in New York State’s tax credit program with $1.5 Billion in activity, versus $1.4 Billion for all of 2010. (Fun trivia fact about Pat: she is married to Lloyd Kaufman, of Troma Entertainment fame, and has appeared in some of his unique films.)

From Pat’s address we went right into a morning of detailed information on first domestic and then international tax incentive programs. Also present were more than a few state and city film office representatives, including West Virginia, Greater Philadelphia, and Puerto Rico, with a special mention for the extremely charming new Film Commissioner for the Dominican Republic, Ellis Perez.

There were two clear takeaways for anyone sitting through the panels: (1) you’re an idiot if you don’t access tax incentive funding for your movie or TV pilot, to the extent it’s available (not so much for docs); and (2) don’t even think about trying to work your own way through the ever-changing thicket of programs — hire specialists (if you don’t know who, take a look at the speaker list for these panels — they’re all very good at what they do and worth the fees they charge).

The afternoon’s focus was geared towards the financing of films. First thing to note: the presenters were focused on movies that have budgets in the millions of dollars, have established sales agents, etc. Plenty of excellent information was on offer (e.g., Q: Which banks are active in film finance right now? A: Comerica, Chase, City National, Bank of America, Bank Leumi, Barclays, Union Bank), as well as some dry wit (Q: What is the typical role of equity in film finance? A: from Lucie Guernsey of Woodland Bay Capital: “To pull out at the last minute”). The finance panel really got into gear once Roy Salter of the Salter Group financial advisory firm let loose with the gem that if you just want to get something made, go to Europe where there are lots of state funds, ministries and others willing to fund art. If it’s money your after, though, then he and the other panelists have lots of advice.

Salter was actually pretty bullish on films as an investment. He noted that while private equity finance largely went away in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, there’s plenty of new investors from Abu Dhabi, India and elsewhere in Asia who are cognizant that movies are not like any other asset category and unlike almost everything else, they have provided net positive returns over the last decade. I don’t think he was talking about the microbudget kind of films that my company and surely those of many of the readers of HopeForFilm make though.

The real shocker for me regarding finance was a trend reported by Tom Leo of Sheppard Mullins: apparently there are numerous scams being attempted with supposed financiers telling producers that they can access a $100 million financial instrument and give the producer $5 million for his or her film … if only the producer can come up with $2.5 million now. A few years ago I published a book called Scamorama, about those Nigerian 419 email scams; I couldn’t believe that sophisticated movie producers were falling for these, so I turned to the person sitting next to me, David Oliver of City National Bank, who confirmed that indeed his firm had received lots of calls about bogus letters of credit in connection with film finance. Moral of the story: if it seems too good to be true…

Some other sage advice from Day One of the conference:

• Established indie producers can be your beard (veteran LA attorney Peter Kaufman, explaining why it’s often advantageous to bring on board the type of producer who can have a “halo effect” on your efforts to get the film made.

• Be generous with talent perks like business class air travel — a few thousand dollars spent on air fares can yield tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of publicity value if your star shows up for the film festival premiere or similar junket (Wilder Knight, Esq. of Pryor Cashman).

• The only barrier to entry for filmmakers attempting self distribution is getting exhibitors to return calls (Ira Deutchman, who went on to say that’s why theatrical bookers are still so important and that the self distributed films that do well are the ones with defined niche audiences, those that have a thousand “true fans.”)

• Sales agents are more honest now (Jonathan Sachar of Indiefcc.net, who likened some sales agents in the not so distant past to the real estate agent who’ll tell you he can sell your house for two million dollars just to get the listing, when every other broker says it’s worth a million).

• Saying your movie is on Netflix and iTunes is like saying your name’s in the phone book (Ira Deutchman on why theatrical release is still worth pursuing for its subsequent marketing value, even though it may be a loss leader).

[Plenty more zingers like these in the second part of my blog. Thanks for reading part one!]

— Gary Baddeley