Day: November 29, 2008

Categories
Truly Free Film

Art House Theaters Unite!

In order for a Truly Free Film Culture to take hold, independent theaters have to organize and work together.  Well, guess what?  Good news!  It’s already happening.  

Imagine if a whole bunch of great theaters got together and decided they would accept bookings from independent and TFFilmakers.  Sounds logical, right?  But ask a DIY filmmaker turned distributor if they were able to get bookings beyond NYC’s Film Forum, The Laemmle Sunset, and The Walker & Wexner centers, and I will know that the filmmaker hustled and hustled some more for each and every one of those bookings — virtually to the point of collapse.  The sad truth is that currently to get bookings for legitimate theaters, most filmmakers have to hire an established booker to ink the deal — and man, that ain’t cheap.
But now it looks like that stranglehold may finally be broken.  And guess who’s shattering these chains?  Sundance!  Freedom is looming.  Three cheers for Sundance!  Truly:  hip, hip and hooray!  A convergence of art house theatres from across the nation is to be held January 13-15, 2009 in Salt Lake City, Utah.  And from the sounds of it, Indie/TFF/Arthouse exhibition is going to take a great leap forward.
The Sundance Institute Art House Project is a partnership with art house cinemas nationwide to build audiences and develop a supportive community of theatre owners committed to independent film. Wow. Not that we can relax just yet, but this project is a great thing for both filmmakers and filmlovers alike.
The Art House Convergence is presented in cooperation with the Sundance Institute. At the Convergence, Art House theatres from all over the U.S. will gather just before the Sundance Film Festival (January 15-25) providing a rare opportunity for art house theatres to network and discuss successful marketing, programming and business models as well as current issues facing independent theatres.

John Cooper, Director of Programming, Sundance Film Festival, explains “Our organizing principle is to increase the market for film exhibition by expanding the number and effectiveness of community-based, mission-driven theatres in local communities, large and small, nationwide.”

So who are these theaters?  Mark them down, and then add to the list!

BAM, New York, NY, www.bam.org
Belcourt Theatre, Nashville, TN, www.belcourt.org
Broadway Centre Cinemas, Salt Lake City, UT, www.saltlakefilmsociety.org
Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, MA, www.coolidge.org
Enzian Theater, Orlando, FL, www.enzian.org
Hollywood Theatre, Portland, OR, www.hollywoodtheatre.org
International Film Series, Boulder, CO, www.internationalfilmseries.com
Jacob Burns Film Center, Pleasantville, NY, www.burnsfilmscenter.org
The Loft, Tucson, AZ, www.loftcinema.com
Michigan Theater, Ann Arbor, MI, www.michtheater.org
The Music Box, Chicago, IL, www.musicboxtheatre.com
Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City, OK, www.okcmoa.org
The Palm, San Luis Obispo, CA, www.thepalmtheatre.com
Pickford Cinema, Bellingham, WA, www.pickfordcinema.org
Rafael Film Center, San Rafael, CA, www.cafilm.org
Ragtag Cinema, Columbia, MO, www.ragtagfilm.com
Railroad Square Cinema, Waterville, ME, www.railroadsquarecinema.com
The Screen, Santa Fe, NM, www.thescreen.csf.edu

The conference will include a keynote address by John Cooper, Director of Programming for the Sundance Film Festival, as well as panel sessions on:
– How to use the not-for-profit business model to grow audiences for Art House films
– An exploration of new film distribution paradigms (participating in these panels will be Bob Berney, formerly of Picturehouse and Peter Broderick, Paradigm Consulting, Ted Hope, This Is That Productions — that’s me!)
– Innovative marketing and showmanship techniques
– Tutorials on emerging film exhibition and Art House theatre operations technology

Categories
Let's Make Better Films

Acting Not Being


This bit of iPhoneArt&Critique in from Hilton Als…  His title too.

Categories
Bowl Of Noses

Cool Cars #5: The Amazing Solar Powered Sailboat Car


From Spain comes the BRISA (Spanish for “breeze”), a three-wheeled two-seater 100% solar powered.  Tell your folks to trash the hybrid, it’s all sun or nothing now.  Read more about it here.

Categories
These Are Those Things

Games For Change

Alternative Reality Games and other new media ventures that included a social impact message really hit home this year.  There is tremendous opportunity within this field to make something beautiful that means something.

World Without Oil, debuting last year in 2007, set a high standard and had participants from all over the globe.

ITVS helped fund WOW as they did Fatworld.

FATWORLD is a video game about the politics of nutrition. It explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S. The game’s goal is not to tell people what to eat or how to exercise, but to demonstrate the complex, interwoven relationships between nutrition and factors like budgets, the physical world, subsidies, and regulations. Existing approaches to nutrition advocacy fail to communicate the aggregate effect of everyday health practices

Categories
Truly Free Film

Smelling The Coffee and Connecting The Dots

“Today you have to be like Leonard Bernstein,” said Mr. Kallman, “making sure everyone is hitting the right notes at just the right millisecond. The tipping point, if you will, is when everything converges and your timing with everything is impeccable.”

Finding the new business model for truly free film is not going to be easy.  It is going to take a lot of effort in all directions.  It is going to require developing new revenue streams where previously there was nothing.  It is going to take experimentation.  It is going to require a lot of trial and error.  And it is not going to happen overnight.
Truly Free Film and Indie Film has always been different from Hollywood product.  As an industry the specialized divisions have missed how significant the difference is.  The glue that might have kept an Indie ArtHouse Truly Free film community together has withered away.  Without this support there will be no gradual shift into the new paradigm.  It’s been a brutal year in terms of traditional film sales worldwide, and I don’t suspect it will get better.  Our “business” has to become something altogether different, something new.
This blog was started to help recognize what the steps could be to develop a new business model.  The I.A.T.F.F. community has to move faster than Hollywood as our margins have always been smaller and what might be small adjustments for Hollywood are seismic shifts for us.  It’s fortunate that we can learn from the hardships that the music and newspaper have had to endure.
It was reported in the NYTimes two days ago, that one record company, Atlantic, claims its digital sales have now surpassed its CD sales.  Furthermore Atlantic seems to have done this without any significant revenue drop in CD sales.  It is not clear whether this is the start of something positive or the exception to the rule.  Either way, there is going to be more hardship, before we get to harvest the real fruit.  The NY Times points out:  

With the milestone comes a sobering reality already familiar to newspapers and television producers. While digital delivery is becoming a bigger slice of the pie, the overall pie is shrinking fast. 

In virtually all these corners of the media world, executives are fighting to hold onto as much of their old business as possible while transitioning to digital — a difficult process that NBC Universal’s chief executive, Jeff Zucker, has described as “trading analog dollars for digital pennies.”

The reality that we all will have to work harder and move in numerous directions at once necessitates teamwork.  Not only do we have to work together, we will have to share what we learn along the way.  Many in the film industry have felt that privately held knowledge has been necessary for individual success.  If we don’t truly share information, there will not be an industry to work in.  Atlantic’s success optimistically can be viewed on what a concentrated effort might bring all of us.  It also illustrates what a vast undertaking it will be:

“I think we’ve figured it out,” said Julie Greenwald, president of Atlantic Records. “It used to be that you could connect five dots and sell a million records. Now there are 20 dots you can connect to sell a million records.”

Truly Free Filmmakers have more than those twenty dots to connect and that can not be done by working alone.  For each of those filmmakers fortunate to be selected for Sundance this year, they each need to reach for a different dot and pass it along to each other.