Year: 2011

Categories
Truly Free Film

Guest Post: Ava DuVernay “What Color is Indie?”

Back in January I heard of Ava DuVernay for the first time when the NYTimes ran a story on her new distro initiative. I thought “wow, there’s a good idea, that can be replicated in many forms.” It lifted my spirits, but then the assault of super-abundance of everything pulled my attention elsewhere. Recently, my attention got pulled back when a Twitter conversation turned it to the overtly white male dominance of the “indie scene”. Fortunately, I was put in touch with Ava, and she guest posts today with some of experiences in DIWO distribution.

My name is Ava DuVernay and I just completed a 7-week theatrical release of my film I WILL FOLLOW in 20 major US cities, including NY and LA, without studio or corporate backing and no formal P&A. The release was accomplished through AFFRM, a black film distribution collective that I founded. Have you heard of us?


I may incorrectly assume that most of Ted’s readers have never heard of AFFRM, or I WILL FOLLOW, or the excellent black film orgs that make up the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement — for which AFFRM stands.

Why do I think that? Because we haven’t cracked that American indie establishment circle. You know, the Tribeca-Indiewire-IFP-FilmIndependent-SXSW-Lincoln Center of it all. The gate-keepers to the mainstream indie treasures. We haven’t had their attention. So we might’ve slipped by you.

It’s weird. Some new group pulls off an $11,235 per screen full-run simultaneously in multiple cities with absolutely no formal P&A, no four-walling, no touring, no service deal on their first try, and enterprising filmmakers and film pros don’t want the skinny on how? Maybe you just hadn’t heard. We’ve had full features in NY Times, LA Times, CNN, NPR and USA Today, but not one inquiry from the many DIY, DIWO, new distribution panel programmers or experts? The circle is tight.

With AFFRM, we sought to take the DIWO approach a step further, to give it infrastructure and branding. To align like-minded regional black film organizations and push them to go beyond their existing mission, to a renewed vision with national reach. It worked. Like, really worked. And we’re anxious to share what we learned, and to learn from others. But if you only get your news, views and film picks from the circle, you don’t know about us – and others like us.

My point is… you’re missing stuff. Many lovely films, many talented filmmakers and maybe a new idea to add to the discussion on how to move film distribution forward without corporate permission. I’ve been astonished by how many black filmmakers and film pros have approached us in the last few weeks about how we did what we did. Several dozen. And further astonished by how many of my non-black counterparts have approached. Zero.

Makes me think, what color is indie? I mean, what does it take to be of color and truly considered authentic American indie? To have done something seen as meaningful to the circle of the American independent film establishment, both artistically and as a business model. Like, if I don’t participate in what a good pal calls “white people festivals”… am I indie enough? Do you take my film as seriously because I chose to world premiere at Urbanworld in NY instead of submitting to Tribeca? If I don’t run my film through the labs or diversity initiatives of a recognized institution… do I not have that cool indie cred you need to see my movie with its beautiful black cast? I wonder.

I understand wanting your indie film product of color vetted through the proper channels. I get it. But just be aware that that is what you’re doing. Be aware that your indie is handpicked by a select few. And be clear that your indie is very white boy in view. Not a bad thing. White boys like all kinds of cool stuff – other white boys, white girls and the occasional thing of color that speaks to their sensibilities as white boys. But be real, that’s limited.

It limits you from hearing new marketing and distribution ideas, meeting filmmakers and experiencing films outside of this establishment construct, outside of the circle. You’re missing some good new stuff and ignoring success stories from many folks of color (See: I Will Follow or Mooz-Lum) or are by folks who are just downright colorful (See: Audrey Ewell’s Until The Light Takes Us and Bob Ray’s Total Badass). It’s not progressive. And it isn’t what I feel most people who love, support and live indie film really want. I don’t think its purposeful hateration. I think its just this lull of curation and prestige and, to be quite honest, laziness. Whatever it is… its affecting the whole business. And its far from positive.

If these statements makes you proclaim that I’m trippin’ and “there IS no circle”– then I’m happy that I’m not talking to you. Really am. Thrilled, in fact. And I invite you to see my film about a grieving black woman shot in Topanga Canyon that Roger Ebert called “one of the best films he’s seen about the death of a loved one.” You’re just my kind of audience member.

If on the other hand, these statements coax you to admit that you haven’t gone to a non-establishment fest or seen a film not featured in Filmmaker Magazine in years, then I invite you to step outside and take a look. Be like a couple of folks at Sundance Institute who’ve reached out to us to share and compare notes. Or the folks that head up RiverRun where I was invited to sit on the jury a few weeks back. Those RiverRun people take their mission of inclusion seriously, working to connect with the black community in Winston-Salem by leaping out of theoretical planning meetings and into bold action. They presented a special festival panel at the local historically black college this year, on which I was pleased to participate. I wondered if it was the first foray of a non-ethnic film festival at an HBCU? First I’m aware of. It was super impressive. And its what we all need to be thinking about.

Bottom line: It would benefit us all to be conversing and connecting. It’s not too late to break the boundaries of what you think this thing called indie should be, should look like. For instance, I dig that Indiewire, after years of really poor connection with black independent cinema at large, has wooed the wonderful team at ShadowandAct.com to be part of its blog network. It’s a step in the right direction for iW amidst an ongoing, challenging lack of coverage of black fests and black and brown indies on the main site.

This post is not meant to be a ball buster but a spirited call-to-action. There are new ideas, new paths for distribution, new films and filmmakers you’re missing if you only look from inside. There are riches in the niches. Both monetary and cosmic. Heck, you love indie film! You care about its future! So why not step outside and look around? Its nice out.

Here’s the opening weekend video of the thousands and thousands and thousands of people who came out to AFFRM’s inaugural release for I WILL FOLLOW in March. Quite a spectacle that you may not have seen or heard about. But now… you know.

Thanks for the invite, Ted.

— Ava DuVernay

VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOiuV6uYvas

Ava DuVernay is a filmmaker and film distributor from Los Angeles, California.  Her Twitter is @AVADVA. More on AFFRM at www.affrm.com. More on I WILL FOLLOW at www.iwillfollowfilm.com.

Categories
Truly Free Film

Guest Post: Christopher Boghosian “Los Angeles Won’t Make Your Movie!”

Last Friday, Rosen & Bennett offered up some first feature advice: go home. Today Christopher “I Am A Nobody Filmmaker” Boghosian comes to a very similar conclusion after spending some time knocking around Los Angeles. His last post generated quite a lot of buzz. Wonder if you fellow LA residents feel like wise?

Moving to Los Angeles just might be the worst decision a filmmaker can make. Whereas the city is arguably the best place to break into the studio system, LA is quite adverse to independents like me.

Life is tough in LA. Its high cost of living demands a well-paying job, while filmmaking requires flexibility, but the two rarely go together. Finding and keeping the “perfect” job becomes a job in itself. Even if you’re well-off, the congestion and state of atrophy in LA is sure to zap your creative energy. Everything takes longer; a couple errands can easily consume your entire day. And because everyone is in each other’s way, anger and resentment runs rampant in lines, stores, and, yes, especially traffic. Keeping the optimism and energy needed to make a film becomes an emotional challenge few conquer. In LA, the struggle to survive while creating quickly turns into the struggle to create while surviving.

To make matters worse, aspiring filmmakers are nothing special in LA. In fact, we’re a nuisance. Did you know it’s a misdemeanor to film in LA without a pricey permit? Yup – you can end up in jail with shoplifters and prostitutes. Whereas the city bends over backwards for big budget movies, it seeks to foil and defeat micro-budget projects. People like me, trying to make a movie for virtually nothing are viewed as pariahs, beggars and wannabes. Sure, there may be that rare person who supports our “passion,” but most are tired and resentful of the inconvenience. Even mom-and-pop storeowners have become savvy, demanding hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for the use of their little store.

Filmmakers might argue that LA is abundant in resources. That may be true, but resources cost money. What good is knowing a production sound mixer if you can’t afford her reduced rate of $250/day? And what good are all the actors if the talented ones don’t audition for your no-name, low-paying project?
Sometimes I suspect moving to LA is one big diversion. It seems productive and necessary for one’s filmmaking career; however, it just might be another distraction from the blank screen, a costly game of solitaire. It’s easy to be fooled; the move feels productive: packing and driving; buying furniture and decorating; applying for jobs and interviewing. But in the end, you’re right back where you started from, a blank screen, except now you’ve added a whole slew of burdens and concerns distracting you even more.

Without the support of my wife and family, there is no way I would now be completing my first feature film here in LA. I am incredibly blessed and I know it. On the other hand, LA is my hometown. I was born and raised here, thus, it supports me in ways it does not support my immigrant peers. I’ve got all kinds of family and neighbors willing to help me out. This is why I believe most aspiring filmmakers would be more productive back home where they presumably can focus less on survival and more on making films.

Independent film productions in LA often entail law-breaking, angry neighbors, and police shutdowns, whereas I continually here stories about community support for productions elsewhere, such as free catering, police cooperation, even auto dealers lending cars out for free. This is precisely why I am eager to shoot my next film in my wife’s tiny hometown in Indiana.

Making a film is incredibly difficult, so why compound it by moving to an inhospitable city with laws and a culture aimed at thwarting you? If only the thousands who migrate here every year would stay home and make the most with what they have! Ironically, top film festivals like Sundance actually prefer provincial films set in unknown towns and communities. Festival programmers want to be taken someplace new rather than see another crummy LA apartment.

So, perhaps, while driving out to Los Angeles, many aspiring filmmakers are leaving behind their greatest asset: their hometown.
-Christopher J. Boghosian

Christopher J. Boghosian is an independent filmmaker and blogger born and raised in Los Angeles, California. You can visit his site at FollowMyFilm.com

Categories
Truly Free Film

Guest Post: Jordan Passman “Value What You Use: The Film + Music Equation”

Just because you can do something, does that mean that you should. Do short term needs always outweigh long term goals? Does obtaining services for less than they are worth make you a good producer?

Last month Jordan Passman introduced us to his scoreAscore service, allowing filmmakers to connect with composers at prices they set. Today Jordan guest posts to expand on his vision to stop the marginalization of music in the film biz.

We fight for film music, and here’s why:

“We won’t be able to pay you but it’ll be great exposure for your work!”

“This is an unpaid request.”

“Ultra low budget, so no upfront fee”


There are an overwhelming amount of posts with these phrases in them on craigslist and others, and we need to stand together against them so they don’t completely ruin music for film. Films have inspired some of the greatest music of all time (Psycho, Jurassic Park, UP, Pink Panther, Star Wars & Forrest Gump), and it is our duty to keep this moving forward!

When you break down the filmmaking process, it’s easy to see why music gets so frequently marginalized. Music is a final thought. A composer is almost always the last one to join the creative team, and at that point filmmakers have already spent their budget on production, talent, editors, DPs etc. The filmmakers who are posting the above headlines on craigslist exemplify a major problem in this business. Often times, they already paid their DP, editor, actors, make-up artists…but now it’s time for music, and they have no money put aside for a composer, yet they expect someone to do the job at no cost. It’s like losing 500 dollars in blackjack, and then being upset over the two dollar charge for the valet who parked your car. The two dollar valet fee pays the overhead and the employees’ time, but it hurts to spend that money when you’re already in debt. I am confident that filmmakers still see the value in music for film, however, we need to remind them that it’s crucial to compensate composers for their hard work.

Composers should not be a last thought, but rather a key aspect of a film, one that merits fair compensation. The composers I know put everything they have into every job they have. They always deliver their best, even when they know they are underpaid or even unappreciated. It takes hundreds of hours of focus and dedication to deliver a film score (writing, orchestrating, recording, producing, mixing, mastering, etc.), and yet it’s sometimes expected to be done to perfection, with little to no budget! We’re in a world where the perceived value of music is less and less, and people think it can be created instantly on a computer. But in fact it takes an incredible skill set to create a powerful score. How do we instill the value of music into this artform? The solution is to put the choice into the filmmakers hands.

Because I am passionate about solving this problem, I created scoreAscore.com. I am a firm believer that “what you spend is what you get”, and my experience running scoreAscore has proved this theory. Like all other creative individuals, the best scores are produced by composers who feel valued and appreciated. Anyone who has worked with professional composers on a project with a luxurious budget knows what they do to enhance a film. I want to create a healthy and fair way for media producers to find music, and for composers to contribute to projects. scoreAscore allows filmmakers to name their price for their music. The mission of scoreAscore is to value composers’ work, so that all camps are happy. We can’t afford to lose the professional composers in this industry, and if we don’t pay them deservedly, we will lose the magic that music brings to films.

— Jordan Passman

Jordan Passman launched scoreAscore.com in May 2010. Born and raised in LA, music has always been a huge part of Jordan’ s life. In his early career, he worked in the entertainment industry throughout college (Creative Artists Agency, Warner Bros. Studios & Warner Bros. Records). After graduating from Pitzer College, Jordan joined the Film/TV Membership Department of ASCAP (American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers) in New York.

Categories
Bowl Of Noses

Everything Belongs Together

Let Lil Buck show you how to dance to Yo Yo Ma. Who says classical music’s not cool? The fool.

Categories
These Are Those Things

Where’s The AllMashUp AllTheTime Station?

And beyond this great clip (and The Grey Album, GirlTalk, & BiggieHendrix) what else plays on it?

Categories
Truly Free Film

“An Amazing Time To Be A Storyteller”

Lance Weiler was the Keynote speaker at the Darklight Festival recently. He shares his journey into transmedia and why he is so optimistic about the world before us. It is nothing short of a state of the union address on Transmedia — both how we got here and where we are. It includes a pretty solid survey of transmedia projects. Check out his video below if you are one of those types who actually want to know the world you are living in (and not just the one that once was).

Categories
Truly Free Film

Guest Post: Sam Rosen & Nat Bennett “Getting Un-Stuck and Making it Work”

Today’s guest post comes from two emerging filmmakers, Sam Rosen and Nat Bennett, who had a screenplay that caught my eye back when. Now they have their first film in the Tribeca Film Festival. Their path to getting it made revealed some lessons, ones that are applicable to all of us. You can boil it down to don’t wait or seek permission; find good collaborators and get going. But it always more than that too — and they know that.

When you’re a young aspiring filmmaker you hear a lot of stories about how hard it is to make films, how many years people work to finally put something together, and how often projects fall apart. And if you’re like us, you think, they must have been doing it wrong. It’s a naïve thought, but until you’ve made an independent film, it can be difficult to understand how amazing it is that any of them ever gets made.

One of us, Nat, went to school to write fiction. The other, Sam, has been acting since early childhood. Both of us grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, dreaming of the potential on the coasts. Together, we write screenplays. The two of us moved to New York a day apart in 2003, both hoping to launch artistic careers in the big city. But we hadn’t known each other in Minnesota, and only began to hang around each other because we had a mutual friend who told us we’d get along. Before long we were talking about working together on something. In 2005 we wrote a play, Ham Lake, that one of us, the thespian in our actor-writer partnership, eventually performed in a fifty-seat basement theater in Soho. We were convinced we had something great to share with a wider audience. The few critics who attended gave us good reviews. We extended our short run and a theatrical producer offered us a deal for a more substantial production. A legitimate run for the play sounded great, but we were already refocusing on adapting the story for a screenplay because we knew how much potential our story had if we could get it off the stage and onto film.

In Ham Lake we envisioned the kind of quiet indie movie we loved, like You Can Count On Me and All The Real Girls. We knew what we wanted, we knew what it should look like, and we knew some people who could help us. How hard could this be, we thought? Still naïve, we sweated over an overflowing screenplay that showcased everything we could think to share about what it’s like to come of age in Minneapolis. We were sure that our careers were off and running.

What followed was a pretty typical story of lost opportunities, impatience, miscalculations, bad luck, endless rewrites, and important lessons learned the hard way. A lot of people, including Ted Hope, did their best to help us. Our script was optioned, twice, but for one reason after another, our story always remained stuck in pre-production and our big Hollywood careers never took off.

Frustrated with the slow pace of progress, we wrote a new script in a few short weeks, creating a simple story with a few clear concepts and (we thought) vivid, lovable characters. All the locations we imagined were places back home we knew we could beg, borrow, or steal. The plan was to make a movie quickly, on the cheap, on our own, back in the town where we grew up.

What followed is also a pretty typical story, but this one has a happier ending, because instead of trying to find people who would give us permission to do everything our way, we found young filmmakers like ourselves who had their own contributions to make to the project. In particular we found Brady Kiernan, who along with his brother Spencer and friend Todd Cobery, wanted to get to work making a movie out of our script. And three months after we first sat down to talk with him, Brady was directing Sam in the film that will premiere later this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, Stuck Between Stations. To find success in New York, we had to go home. It turned out WE were the ones who had been doing it wrong.

Making SBS was no cakewalk. A ridiculous number of people have contributed time, money, and talent to the production, and we can recall more than a few times when we weren’t at all sure if it would all come together. We still find ourselves in the position of most indie filmmakers, searching for a distributor and hoping for a wider audience. But at the moment, none of that matters as much as the film itself. It tells a story we believe in and it tries to reward viewers for paying the kind of attention we paid when we watched our favorite quiet movies over and over, still dreaming about making any movie at all. SBS is not flawless, but we are as proud of its quirks and kinks as we are of the moments that we’re pretty sure we all nailed, because taken as a whole, Stuck Between Stations is the kind movie we want to watch.

If we had to do it all over again—and maybe some day we’ll get a chance —we’d do things differently with Ham Lake. But we definitely needed to fall down before we could dust ourselves off and get to the real work. And that, at least at the moment, seems like the essence of independent filmmaking: finding a way, one way or another, to do the work you need to do to tell a story that other people want to tell with you so that, together, you can offer the world something it’s never seen. That’s a little naïve too, probably, but it’s naïveté we can live with. At least for now, until we get back to work and make the next one.

— Nat Bennett and Sam Rosen

Watch the trailer here:

“Stuck Between Stations” Movie Trailer from Stuck Between Stations on Vimeo.