Thanks Slamdance for inviting me to chat with everyone!
Coffee with TED HOPE from Slamdance on Vimeo.
Month: February 2013
That lack of gender equality in the film business has been clear for so long. A lot has been written about it, and a lot more shall. Like so much, it is a problem for everyone, not just whom it effects most. It is all one world after all.
For a long time, white people did not accept that
I keep trying to define my own personal mission. Do you? I think knowing what we want to do, to accomplish, goes a long long way towards maintaining our enthusiasm as to how we use our labor.
Such a definition though is a bit fluid and needs regular check-ups. It is dependent on our time — both in terms of where we are (the right here, right now variety) and how it is expended (the tick tick tick beating of the eternal clock).
In so many ways I am fortunate. One of them is
The recent article on Hollywood in The Economist is a MUST read. Stop what you were planning to do for the next ten minutes, read this post and then read the article. You must. MCN pointed to it with the blurb: “Between 2007 and 2011, pre-tax profits of the five studios controlled by large media conglomerates fell by around 40%”. That hooked me. I read, and then I wept.
I don’t see how anyone can read that and NOT come to the conclusion that all the publicly-traded companies will divest their movie studio assets within the year. Maybe they will; maybe they won’t, but you know the
The San Francisco International film Festival has been chosen as an Academy-Award qualifying festival in the Documentary Short Subject category. Now we have three shorts categories as Academy Award qualifiers – Narrative, Doc and Animation.
Short documentaries of
Here’s another excerpt from Sherry B Ortner’s new book Not Hollywood, an ethnographic look at Independent Film since the late 80s. In this excerpt Sherry looks at social and economic background of producers in the independent sphere, finding that the majority come from upperclass background and educations.
The Sociology of Producers and the Neoliberal Economy of the 1990s
The independent producers who are part of this project are mostly within the age range of the filmmakers, Generation X, born between the early 1960s and the early 1980s. Some are a bit older, and most fall at the early end of the Gen X range, but on the whole there is not a major age/generation gap between the producers and the filmmakers. This is relevant in the sense that the producers and the filmmakers would share the worldview and the general aesthetic behind the independent films they make together. Beyond this, however, there are some interesting differences. First, gender: As we will see in the next chapter, women form a relatively small percent of directors and filmmakers. But it is a striking fact that women constitute almost half of the ranks of producers. In 1974, the Producers Guild of America (pga) recorded that 8 out of 3,068 members were female, or 0.3 percent (Abramowitz 2000: 65). According to Vance Van Petten, executive director of the pga, currently about 45 percent of its members are women (interview, December 13, 2007).
Next, class: It is an equally striking fact that independent producers tend to come from relatively high capital backgrounds and collectively are clearly part of the Professional Managerial Class or pmc. Many come from upper-middle-class families with significant amounts of money. Even if they are not all members of the pmc by virtue of money, they are almost uniformly so by virtue of higher education.
Today we’re happy to provide you with an excerpt from Sherry B Ortner’s new book Not Hollywood. Subtitled “Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream”, its an ethnographic look at Independent Film since the late 80s. In this excerpt Sherry looks at the darkness that is endemic of so many independent features. What do you think?
Dark Indies
From the beginning of this project, I immersed myself in independent films. At first I was somewhat mystified. While many of them were compelling, many of them were also quite dark and, in one way or another, disturbing. They were clearly ‘‘not Hollywood.’’ This generated the first question of my research beyond the purely ethnographic: what was this all about? In Part I of this chapter, I tackle this general question of ‘‘darkness’’ and propose to understand it in terms of the generational positioning of a new breed of filmmakers, the first post-boomer generation usually known as Generation X. I argue further that ‘‘Generation X’’ represents not a particular cohort that ended at a certain point in time, but an ongoing and open-ended social entity that is bearing the brunt of the massive economic transformations called ‘‘neoliberalism.’’
