Year: 2008

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Let's Make Better Films

Truth & Accuracy Of The Historical Record

Deep Throat died yesterday.  Maybe after he saw Frost/Nixon and realized it was another bit of Hollywood playing fast and loose with history.  Elizabeth Drew has a pretty scathing piece in the Huffington Post on the film’s distortions.

I have been involved in a fair amount of film adaptations of novels.  The general rule of thumb is to keep the “spirit” of the novel in place.  We feel to change structure, scenes, even characters.  But novels aren’t the historical record.
Bio-pics too are a strange breed.  No one’s life can be told in 90 minutes.  So again, as a filmmaker, you are chasing your subject’s essence.  Often instead of the all encompassing tale, it makes sense to find a particular incident to stand in for the whole.
Yet filmmakers (and marketers) find it so enticing to say “Based on a true story”.  Using those words, what obligations do you have?  Films can be propaganda and historical revisionism.  And yet they are always reluctant to broadcast that intent at the head of the movie.  Having seen A BEAUTIFUL MIND and read much about it later, I could not help but be suspicious of FROST/NIXON, so I was waiting for the articles like Drew’s to start to hit.
It doesn’t matter that Frost/Nixon moves some scenes around (though it’s not always clear why), and engages in some invention. But such a gross misrepresentation of such important events — roughly seventy percent of the population is too young to have been aware of Watergate — about a figure over whom there is still serious debate, in the name of entertainment and profits, to my mind, crosses the line of dramatic integrity and is dishonorable.
The audience expects the “truth” with weighty historical subjects.  Even more so, they generally accept such films as truth.  Filmmakers need to find ways to contextualize their distortions and help audiences to filter what is being presented.  David Hare’s play “Stuff Happens” did this by pulling all dialogue from the historical record — we recognize that the context of these statements had to have been altered, but that recognition allowed us to look at the substance of the dialogue and characters with a new critical eye.  
With both F/N & W., I felt the filmmakers did not desire this positioning of the record with the audience, and I spent each film wondering what to make of it, whether I could trust it.  Stating that a film is “Based On A True Story” does not help to establish trust between it and the audience; quite the opposite: we have to suspect it all the more.  We need a clear filter when someone wants to serve the truth.  Filmmakers have to ask themselves more why the audience should believe them — and again we have been shown why they shouldn’t instead.
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Truly Free Film

How To Make Internet TV

The Participatory Culture Foundation has simple how to site worth checking out.  From what equipment to use, best techniques to capture stuff, licensing, publishing, and promotion, it’s all here.

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Truly Free Film

Locavesting: Is it applicable to film?

Mind you most of film finance is probably classifiable as Loco-vesting, but I was struck by one of the ideas cited in the NY Times’ excellent YEAR IN IDEAS roundup.  Locavesting is simply the practice of investing in local businesses.  

A region’s benefit in incentivizing locavesting is akin to the logic around state tax credits: money spent in film is again transfered to the region’s other businesses generally.  Civic leaders recognizing this might come up with additional incentives to encourage it.  Certainly a savvy producer would be sure to foreground this with any locally-based investor-wannabe.  The promise of regional cinema could be grounded by such a locally based film slate investment fund.

This is that excerpt from the article:
Locavestors
By AMY CORTESE
Perhaps you’ve heard of locavores: people who eat only foods that have been produced within a 100-mile radius. Now some people — call them locavestors — are investing in much the same way. The idea is that, by investing in local businesses, rather than, say, a faceless conglomerate, investors can earn profits while supporting their communities. To help match mostly local investors with capital-hungry local businesses, regional stock exchanges are starting to spring up around the globe.

Consider InvestBX, which was formed to serve businesses looking to raise relatively small sums in England’s West Midlands region. In February, InvestBX’s first listed company, Teamworks Karting, which runs an indoor go-kart center in Birmingham, raised more than $735,000 to open a new track in nearby Reading. In November, Key Technologies, a high-tech firm with 232 employees and annual sales of some $26 million, floated shares worth nearly $3 million. To list on InvestBX, a company must be based in the United Kingdom and have a significant part of its operations in the West Midlands. Companies can raise about $3 million from “local and U.K.-wide investors.”

Local exchanges address a financing gap for smaller companies, which may not be able to attract venture capital and for whom the major exchanges may be out of reach. “Small businesses need funding options more than ever in today’s recessionary climate,” says Trexler Proffitt, a professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., who recently completed a feasibility study for a seven-county Lancaster exchange. (His conclusion: affirmative.)

In a way, we’re coming full circle. Until the 1950s, when they began to consolidate, there were thriving regional exchanges all across the country. “Globalization has been advantageous, but we’re starting to see the sacrifices we’ve made,” Proffitt says. “People are interested in figuring out how to connect to their local communities again.”

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Let's Make Better Films

The Search For Emotional Truth: SW30

a guest post from filmmaker Stephen Kijak:

So Ted posed a questions to me for this blog and asked me to relate it to my recent doc, “Scott Walker – 30 Century Man”. “How did I find my subject’s emotional truth in the documentary form?” Well, being a firm believer in the form/content relationship, I was surprised how much I fought the form on the way to finding it, and thus the emotional truth it unlocked. I had set out to make a more elliptical, formally challenging film about this musician, Scott Walker – himself known to be something of an enigma. It wasn’t going to be a doc at all at first – I had conceived of a screenplay structured around a suite of Walker’s swirling wide-screen 60’s “tenement dramas”…(bad idea).

When I heard that the J.D. Salinger of rock was about to make his first album in a decade, it seemed the best opportunity to make a film, and of course, it had to be a doc. With a figure who had slipped into the unknown like this, what better than the truth of the documentary to shine a light? But then as the limits of access to this reclusive mystery-man became more and more of a problem (I wanted two weeks in the studio, they said, maybe a day! In the end I got two, plus a day of still photography.) And probably only one hour-long interview (never enough!)

But that, I discovered, was actually the key. And absence is still a presence in some ways. And the delayed contact – the interview was the very last thing I shot – proved to be a blessing. As I gathered material – lots of interviews at first which made me nervous because it started looking like an extended, artier Behind-the-Music (but without the sex, drugs, and rock and roll!) – I could barely sense the actual narrative. And we found that he had done such a good job of keeping to himself over the years, that half our interview subjects would ask ME for information about him…”Is he still cute?” asks a once-smitten Lulu, “Well, I must confess. I don’t know anything.” said Bowie at the start of our interview, “Who knows anything about Scott Walker?” Great. Where is my film?

But as we built the film around the empty space that should have been occupied by its subject, it made the actual needs of the narrative so much more evident. And eventually, with the accumulation of interview and archive material, a sense of intimacy with him developed in my mind – I felt like he really was taking on a life inside the film.

So when we did sit down to do the interview, and eventually got it back to the edit – the form emerged, almost imposed itself on the film. To slip him into his own narrative, we started at the beginning, and the rest fell in line in a very linear pattern. Enigmatic ellipses went out the window. A man and his work are revealed and the mystery, built up, examined, and contradicted over the course of a life, remains at the center of the film, made stronger by the simplicity with which it was eventually, formally, put together. I end the film with a slightly enigmatic sequence that starts with the camera zooming slowly into a key-hole…lock picture, unlock film, and hopefully, leave the viewer with their own keys to understanding the messages and lessons in the life and work of Scott Walker.

(“Scott Walker – 30 Century Man” opens on Wednesday December 17th for one week only at the IFC Center. www.scottwalkerfilm.com)
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Truly Free Film

Web Marketing For Filmmakers

Jon Reiss returns!

Here’s a great blog post about the very very basics of marketing your film’swebsite. I’m sure you know a lot of this – but a lot was news to me (post excerpted):

1. Go to Godaddy.com and purchase a domain name. Get one that ends with .com. Get your movie title. If it is unavailable add “movie” or “themovie” or “film” to the end. (You don’t need to purchase any other services during check-out.)
2. Sign up for WordPress.com. Make your blog the title of your movie/ domain. Start posting press releases and other articles, such as reviews.
3. Sign up for Youtube.com. Make your username title of your movie/ domain. Post your trailer, or you can do a video “pitch”.
4. Sign-up for an account on Facebook.com.
5. Sign-up for Flickr. Get your username title of your movie/ domain.
6. Sign up for an account at del.icio.us. Bookmark your domain, facebook page, blog page and you tube page.
7. Sign up for a google account, to use their alerts, place connect with people who talk about you.
8. Sign up for Box Office Widget. Place this on your website and on your blog. Use it as your signature on forums.
8. Sign up for Spottt. Place this banner code on your myspace page, blog, and the thank you page from Box Office Widget.
10. Go to Yahoo! Groups and find all the groups that may have interest to your film and join. Participate in the group, rather than just spam the group.

This was written by one of the co-founders of Neoflix. Neoflix themselves have set up a number of marketing tools for filmmakers – they are going to give me a tutorial in the coming weeks and I’ll be passing that information along.

And this DIY Flix sites seems pretty amazing at first glance as well.

But back to marketing. I think marketing does not come easy for most filmmakers. Even filmmakers who pitch well – when it comes to the nuts and bolts business aspects of DIY filmmaking – they blanch. Its quite different from being creative. Very different. Doesn’t feel right and doesn’t feel fun. 

I have an extra handicap of coming from the punk era where this kind of straight business had a certain smell. But its time to get over that – web marketing necessary if you are going to create an audience for yourself and survive as an “independent” filmmaker in these changing times. My mission for then next couple of months is to become immersed in all manners of web marketing for filmmakers – I’m going to use Bomb It as a case study and I’ll keep you posted.

-Jon Reiss (jon@jonreiss.com)
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Truly Free Film

Who Is Really Prepared For Sundance?

If only I had more hands.  And more time.  And less things that really got me excited — like movies I want to make.

Anyway, I have been wondering what films and what filmmakers had gone ahead and made a trailer, built a website, had been blogging, placing clips on line.  You know: all the sort of stuff that needs to be done so you can truly launch at Sundance.  
It currently looks like the list of Those Who Are Prepared is not surprisingly dominated by those that have the most funding (and thus the most hands).  But it really doesn’t have to be so (I know that’s a lot easy to say, than do, but still…).  
Cinematical has run with a good opening list of the trailers for Sundance films.  I hope someone does a list of websites soon too.
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Truly Free Film

What’s Needed Now? Chesanek contemplates

Brent had some thoughts to the question of what’s needed now:


I completely agree about what’s needed. If you notice, Pitchfork is a conglomeration of so many sections, from lists to music videos to interviews, etc., that it becomes a one-stop shop for visitors, or at least a magnificent starting point to news, reviews, features, interviews, videos, etc.

This could be done for our community, but adding a local basis with subdomains. So NYC film events and reviews of films playing here is one subdomain, LA, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Orlando, Austin are others. They could all share content but arrange it based on the local scene and screenings and then could add local content.

Getting audiences to a specific time and place to see a film is just as crucial as getting them a review of that film. Imagine a public iCal or Google Calendar with film schedules, not showtimes necessarily, but dates and schedules, so we can see, for example, The GoodTimesKid is playing only FOUR DAYS this week at Anthology while Pleasure of Being Robbed is playing for the next 10 days at IFC. One calendar with all the theaters’ schedules. Is there anything like this?

Right now in Google Reader I have all these feeds in a folder. But the problem is that things disappear as I read them, and then articles and features don’t get the face time that they do on Pfork or in a more traditional magazine format. So I read a Hammer to Nail review and then the next day I don’t have that review or that screenshot from the film there to remind me that the film is playing, nor do I have a schedule of how long I have to see that film. RSS readers and scroll-down blogs are magnificent, but again, they don’t lend repeated viewing–they’re designed to do the opposite.

Pitchfork is setup so well I prefer going to it rather than subscribing to its feed. It encourages browsing and promotes repeated viewing of its features. I think for our purposes, Pfork is arranged better than content in an RSS reader or scroll-down blog. If I go to Pfork, I get new content as well as another reminder of that record they loved and reviewed 3 days ago–while I didn’t have time to seek it out and listen then, I do today. The more we see something, the more inclined we are to look into it or at least remember it.

Building something like this for my own use is possible if I scour the web daily and go crazy coding something myself or figure out how to customize iGoogle or My.Yahoo, but maybe it could be stronger if there was one central build of it, at least for each metropolitan area. I know the web is very much about letting users decide on their content, but I think it’d be more effective in promoting the lesser-talked about films if it was moderated by a party with that goal. Pfork is still not user-generated in the least, but it’s absolutely a community and beyond, because record stores notice their sales heavily correlate with Pitchfork’s content and because there is such a large anti-Pitchfork crowd.

I ask again, is there anything like this?
–Brent Chesanek