Where are the champions? And I am not talking about the victors, but the amplifiers. It is so hard for good work to get noticed. Even if you get into a major festival it is easy to get ignored. And what about all the good work that doesn’t even make the festival cut? Do you really have to buy your way into a New York opening, so that the NY Times covers you, so you get a review, so that you may get bookings everywhere?
Don’t working directors have time to watch new movies? Writers? Producers? Actors? Cinematographers? How come we do so little championing the work of our contemporaries? I ran a screening series in NYC for several years. As part of it I would write a passionate letter and blast it out to over 1000 people. I started to publish them on my blog. I thought if I did it, perhaps others would follow suit, but… Am I missing something?
There is so much negativity amongst filmmakers, you’d think they all thought it was a zero sum game. Is there not enough praise to cover everyone who deserves it? All that is needed is for all of us to speak up more. It’s not so hard to write about a film you love is it?
I co-founded HammerToNail.com to help the under-seen get noticed. Where does true indie get noticed? The thought was we needed a filter and we did not need any more negativity. We only cover the films we love. And the idea was that it was only filmmakers writing about filmmakers.
Shouldn’t all filmmakers see it as their duty to publicly champion at least one new unknown film or filmmaker a year? Wouldn’t that lead to greater discovery? Wouldn’t that lead to a greater feeling of community?
And I bet I could get HammerToNail to publish it….
Other fields are already doing this. As I was writing this post, Ned Hinkle pointed out thetalkhouse.com to me, a music themed site where peers review each others work, including Lou Reed on Kanye West, and many more.
