We have lived so long in the era of the inverted pyramid that we don’t yet recognize that the pipes have all burst. For the last twenty-plus years the number of movies made each year increases, but the number of movies theatrically distributed remained around the same. But theatrical release — or even a festival premiere — does not a movie make.
No matter what camp you sit in — artist, audience, or industry — the onslaught of titles now available to you is nothing short of devastating. We miss more than we see, and forever will. It is a flood and no one is throwing us life rafts.
All the new digital platforms and social media tools have effectively crushed the dam. It was a barrier that needed crushing, but the result is a whole other life-threatening issue. As the tidal wave swamps the shores, how do you steer the boat? If the movies are the water particles, how do you scoop it up for consumption? Is what you ingest ever the same as what the neighbor down the road consumes? When the two of you talk movies, is ever the same thing anymore?
Recognizing and accepting that it never again will be that slow flow is the most critical necessity for the entire film culture to embrace. Abundance changes all the dynamics of the art form, of the industry, the entertainment economy, and of the culture. It should turn the practice of all the film support organizations on it’s head. Abundance requires a total shift in priorities.
Change is hard. Acceptance of the need to change is even harder. The situation is made even more difficult when it comes to a pleasure industry. Music, art, beauty, peace — can we ever have too much of? Pleasure and film lie in the same bed. Recognizing that very few will demand change until the pain of the present outweighs the fear of the future, how does a pleasure industry institute change?
The slow flow had its benefits but there is little use to nostalgia. The days of the slow build of word of mouth is a luxury gone past. When every critic had a pulpit that had a flock pre-grown around it, we had a structure you could build a review driven culture around. History has been the legends of the victors and as magnificent as our heroes journeys have been, I can assure you we all walked over many more diamonds never brought up from the earth.
Every week I hear another story of how difficult it is for distributors to make enough money these days. Every week I hear another story of how difficult it is for filmmakers to make back the cost of their film these days. Every week I hear someone complain that they don’t know what to watch. I have seen first hand that there a hundreds more worthy films than any festival could ever program. I have pre-selected enough films to carry me a decade beyond my life expectancy rate, even if I could maintain my maximum rate of consumption.
Filmmakers keep making movies without planning for their release. Even worse, filmmakers don’t know what it will cost to distribute their films. Worse than that, they have no strategy for releasing their film. It makes total sense that a filmmaker would want one of the great distributors to release their film.
It makes total sense for a parent to want their child to go to one of the best colleges, but does it make sense to leave a new born baby on the doorstep of Harvard’s president? For fifty years now, the film industry has encouraged filmmakers to have unprotected sex and discard the babies. Every once and a while some kind distributor can come and rescue the squirming spawn from the sprawl of infants and run them through the mill. Really? We call that a system? An industry? A culture?
We can do better. Let’s start by helping our artists recognize that their movie is only cinema when an audience engages with it. They can’t depend anymore — if they ever could — on a white knight coming to the rescue. We need to take responsibility for our children. We can’t give birth to them and then abandon them on a door step. It’s time we start helping people to plan to get the kids all the way through college. Otherwise it is nothing less than irresponsibility on everyone’s part.
Where do we begin? It will go along way just to learn how to budget, schedule, & financially project the returns from a multi-platform release. We can do that, can’t we? In hopes of making that happen, the SFFS has now launched A2E (Artist To Entrepreneur) — a complete line of training for artists to develop the knowledge, skills, tools, and best practices to maximize the impact of their work. We will start with a Direct Distribution Lab. You can start to read about here. More will be unveiled in the days ahead. I look forward to doing this with you.
