Month: June 2013

Categories
Issues and Actions

Can You Save A Small Town Cinema?

I received this letter this weekend.  I don’t know the cinema, but it looks real nice.  I don’t know the letter writer, but I sympathize with his plight. “Public Cinema” sounds like it was a great program and will be a shame to be lost.  There are always many sides to any story, but this does sound like a tragic tale. Here’s Hope hoping for a happy ending.

Dear Mr. Hope, 

I am sending this letter to you as the Founding Board Member of the Sixth Street Cinema, a very small art cinema and media arts center in the town of Mariposa, just outside Yosemite National Park. Our cinema has been a beacon for American independent film and world cinema for nearly sixteen years, and has acted as such in the most unlikely of places – a small, mostly low-income, rural community, often a three-hour drive from any similar programming. Since 1996, we have occupied the second floor of an historic Masonic Hall that we converted to screen films, and filled the very important role of being the town’s only cinema. Before 1996, there hadn’t been a cinema in Mariposa since the fifties.

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Categories
Truly Free Film

From Out of the Wreckage, A Future Rights Model

by Andrew Einspruch

Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.

Film distribution is broken. Ask any producer who has ever felt that the amount they get for their work seems paltry compared to what others are making. For that matter, Peter Broderick has been saying this for years at SPAA Fringe.

There are lots of online film distribution platforms duking it out in the nascent VoD space. From the behemoths like iTunes and Amazon Instant to YouTube and Vimeo, to any number of small players trying to carve out a spot in the world. Andy Green’s Distrify is one of the ones actually making it work.

Green held an intimate session at this year’s Australian International Documentary Conference called Future Rights Model, and talked about how they built the platform. He’d been a filmmaker and experienced first-hand the frustration of getting stuff out into the world. For example, one distributor, when asked about making DVDs available for one of his titles, told Green, “It’s a small film. I’m busy.”

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Categories
Issues and Actions

The Film Biz Must Face Reality

Maybe it comes from recognizing depressing stories don’t generally perform well at the box office, but the film industry remains infected with positive thinking. I certainly enjoy seeing a happy face in the morning, but I still prefer to face the truth. As one who has always enjoyed the dark side of tale telling, I have had to confront the industry’s preference for positive messaging and aesthetic in my practice for several decades now. It was the industry’s wholesale indifference to the fallacy of the entire enterprise beyond tentpole event movies that lead me to shift my work.

I would rather

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Categories
Truly Free Film

Sherry B Ortner’s “Not Hollywood”: Post-Feminism?

We’ve got another 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. This time Sherry looks at issues of sexism and Feminism’s current standing in the film world.

By Sherry B. OrtnerIt is a major point of the post-feminism literature that younger women find second-wave feminism irrelevant to today’s world, a world in which virtually all occupations are open to women, in which women—like the studio heads noted earlier—have been very visibly successful in many endeavors, and in which many men have been sensitized to the need for egalitarian relations between the sexes. Moreover, in this view, younger women see second-wave feminists as having more or less abandoned an interest in attractive femininity in the pursuit of gender equality; younger women reject this de-feminization and refuse to identify with the older feminist generation and often with the very term feminism.

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Truly Free Film

Why Is The Film Biz SOOOOO Slow To Change?

 

The Road To Change Is Hard To Find…

 

I know many of you recognize that the writing is on the wall.  Filmmakers have to stop planning first and foremost to bring their work to  market at film festivals or elsewhere.  The entire industry needs to get off of the single product focus and justify greater value in cinema in general.  Release patterns need to change.  We need to think of story worlds and long term relationships.  The end of the era of feature film dominance is inevitable.  The list goes on. And on. And on.

I certainly have done my share of list making, be it Best Practices for today, or what is currently wrong with the film biz.  I think such lists can save us — provided we are willing to not just behave passively but heed the call to action. And I am not alone standing on my soap box.  But if things are clearly broken why is change within the film biz not more evident?

Allow me to start with a list of what once where ten factors, and continues to grow…

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Categories
Truly Free Film

Towards A Sustainable Investor Class For Film Culture And Business

In my 38 Ways The Film Industry Is Failing Today post, I cited at #2 “The film industry has never tried to build a sustainable investor class”.  That was over two years ago.  What progress has been made?

The need for greater transparency, access, education, and community in film investment circles is only now being generally recognized in the film industry.  For over a century, the powerful kept close hold on the financial side of things, limiting access between creators and supporters.  This required always paying a visit to

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Categories
Issues and Actions

Simple Fixes: Recommend Whom To Hire

The film business is often said to be dominated by white men.  It is.  But instead of complain let’s do something about it.  

It would be great if there was a

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