The sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick.
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Month: June 2010
We are now treated to another Jon Reiss guest post. Jon holds the world record for the most comments on a single TrulyFreeFilm post, but he is one of our New Model Gurus, helping to pave the path to the emergence of a sustainable Artist/Creator Middle Class. We he speaks, I listen.
Two weeks ago I wrote a guest post here about the need to educate filmmakers on distribution and marketing their films. This weekend the Los Angeles Film Festival is hosting a truly wonderful event which I am proud to have developed in collaboration with LAFF and Film Independent (with strong push and support from Ted): Seize the Power: A Marketing and (DIY)stribution Symposium.
The Symposium is designed to focus on the nuts and bolts solutions to the current distribution and marketing malaise plaguing our industry. The intention is to provide an introduction to a wealth of new tools for filmmakers (and all artists/media content creators) as well as strategic guidance from many of the key practitioners and thought leaders in our field. It is an antidote to the concerns of too much talk talk talk on this subject with little true education.
In addition there is a non-public component that you can participate in via twitter. I will be giving a distribution and marketing boot camp to the LAFF competition filmmakers Friday June 18th 9am – 12:30pm and 2:30pm – 5pm and Saturday June 19th from 9am-11:30am. All times PST. We will be tweeting bullet points on #totbo We have done this in the workshops I have given in the past month – and we have found that people around the world start to participate and chime in – creating a global discussion around these topics.
The Symposium: Starting Saturday afternoon at 1pm – Ted kicks it off with a presentation on the need for the artist entrepreneur to encourage filmmakers to think expansively about their creative output in order to create sustainable careers.
Although I understand it in terms of the dictates of the infrastructure, it has always surprised me that we don’t have more films that are truly about politics and the world we live in. It seems that creators are afraid to even wade in those waters. That can not be said about filmmaker Raoul Peck, who will be in NYC this weekend to present his latest feature “Moloch Tropical” at The Human Rights Festival. I couldn’t resist asking him about the need for film to address politics, about where his inspirations come from. Today’s guest post is from Raoul, in reply.
I will always remember one of these rare press conference of then President GW Bush on the eve or after the bombardment of Bagdad by American forces. In the room the best and brightest mind of the world press. In particular the US pundits known for their incorruptible defense of freedom of speech.
And there we were, with a president obviously lying every single lines of his declaration, with nobody having enough guts to ask even one hard question, let alone to counter his transparent lies.
We came to a point where words didn’t mean anything anymore.
Flash forward, …years later in December 2008, the same president, another press conference, in Iraq.
There, for the lack of a better “word” to address the – again – lying president, this young journalist throw his shoe at him.
It was the only answer possible: absurdity, derision, ridicule.
With these same feelings I started to work on “Moloch Tropical”.
The ritual of democracy had reached such a cynical point, that only derision and irony could really address it.
Yesterday, I ranted a bit about the apparent silence in the film community regarding our collective need for forward thinking experimentation (and support thereof). The need for such action is reinforced in a recent WSJ article by Clay Shirky promoting his new book:
This issue isn’t whether there’s lots of dumb stuff online—there is, just as there is lots of dumb stuff in bookstores. The issue is whether there are any ideas so good today that they will survive into the future. Several early uses of our cognitive surplus, like open source software, look like they will pass that test.
The past was not as golden, nor is the present as tawdry, as the pessimists suggest, but the only thing really worth arguing about is the future. It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity. We are now witnessing the rapid stress of older institutions accompanied by the slow and fitful development of cultural alternatives. Just as required education was a response to print, using the Internet well will require new cultural institutions as well, not just new technologies.
Yes, we are overwhelmed. There are too many choices. But solutions are being found. And the tools have never been better. How can you not be moved by stories of discovery like this.
Even more so, the benefits of such future focus is underscored by this great video based on Philip Zimabardo’s lecture that my wife, Vanessa, turned me on to:
Categories
On Line Video Curating
In Media Res is:
dedicated to experimenting with collaborative, multi-modal forms of online scholarship.
Each day, a different scholar will curate a 30-second to 3-minute video clip/visual image slideshow accompanied by a 300-350-word impressionistic response.
Dan McGuire tipped me to Superclogger. It almost makes me want to get stuck bumper to bumper. If you want to go drive on the 405 and find them, follow them on Twitter here.
You’d think with all the collapse in the “Film Business” we’d have a whole lot more experimenting going on. Or at the very least the encouragement for experimentation. Why is it that everyone wants to keep doing it “business as usual”. It’s broken! Those days are over! The sky has fallen! Dust yourself off and let’s begin something new! Stop sniveling.
It is a different business now than what it used to be. There is no U.S. acquisition market for films, even if the movies are good. Library value as an asset is a thing of the past (or at least libraries being something you could base easily predictable cash flow or resale on is over). People don’t want to pay to see movies — unless they are the sort of culture (including niche culture) unifying event film. It is truly hard to get people’s attention when they are overwhelmed with the plethora of choices — we are a world of distraction and rapid attention shift. It is even more difficult to get people to talk about good stories, even when more are told and made than ever before. Everything requires more work and more thought than it used to.
Which is not to say that the art and industry of film is over. Far from it. It is just a different business.
