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Issues and Actions

The Audience Award Of Audience Awards

VOTE BEFORE SUNDAY AT 11:59PM FOR THE NOMINEES OF THE 1st EVER FESTIVAL GENIUS AUDIENCE AWARD AS A PART OF THE GOTHAM AWARDS

This weekend, voting is well underway for IFP and Slated’s Festival Genius Audience Award for the 20th Anniversary Gotham Independent Film Awards. This first-ever award gives audiences from all across the country the chance to pick five of their favorite films that took home an audience award at one of the Top 50 US and Canadian film festivals in the past year. After you, the people, have spoken, your voices will be heard on November 10th when the five finalists, the first-ever Festival Genius Audience Award nominees, will be announced on both IFP’s and Slated’s websites. This award is a fantastic, unique opportunity for you to give your favorites of this past year one last round of applause, whether you’re just a casual festival-goer or die-hard movie buff. And also, when you vote, you’re also automatically entered to win a one night’s stay at the Andaz Wall Street in New York City and two tickets to the 20th Anniversary Gotham Independent Film Awards on November 29th at Wall Street Cipriani. So go vote THIS WEEKEND at http://gothamawards.slated.com … and then run to tell your friends to vote, too. Awards season starts here…and it starts with you.

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Issues and Actions

Rejoice! NOBODY Knows What To Do.

The LATimes Company Town Blog has a post on a recent conference on Blu-Ray that the Five Studios Home Entertainment Heads all participated.

The executives said the biggest issue they face is sorting through a proliferating array of distribution platforms and figuring out when and where to release their movies and at what price in order to maximize profits. Such staggered release strategies are known in Hollywood parlance as “windows.”

Read the full post, but my takeaway is that the indie sector needs to figure out new ways to experiment and gain both understandings and footholds.

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Issues and Actions

Net Neutrality Supports Independent Art

Troma’s mastermind Lloyd Kaufman is quite a serious man. Seriously. He puts in a great deal of time and passion trying to preserve and enhance the life of Indies everywhere. He most recently penned a good rallying cry for Net Neutrality that you should not miss.

The Internet, the last free, open and diverse democratic medium, is under attack. Net Neutrality, which provides that no content is favored over any other, and that content creators have an equal opportunity to freely disseminate their information, is being imminently threatened by media mega-conglomerates and their vassals. It is urgent that we fight those who would sacrifice our freedom for a profit. Net Neutrality will be the savior of independent art and commerce if we preserve it.

Read all of it on Save The Internet here.

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Issues and Actions

Social Media Strategy Overload Of Nothingness

There is a great deal of empty discussion in terms of what a social media strategy is in the indie film world. There’s even a great deal more when it comes to brands. WhatTheFuckIsMySocialMediaStrategy.com does a pretty good job of capturing, albeit with a welcome dose of humor. Just keep restoring the site, and you will get another “pearl” of wisdom with each click.
Hat tip to John Paul Rice and Jon Reiss for driving me towards this epic epicness.

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Issues and Actions Truly Free Film

Saving The Internet Through Storytelling

Today’s guest post is by John S. Johnson.  The Harmony Institute, a research group that John runs, is offering a free new guide to help combat the Telecom’s tales in their efforts to end net neutrality.  Here he explains a bit of the why and wherefore you need to download it (for free!) and read it NOW.

In 2010 it’s easy to forget how profoundly the Internet has revolutionized the way we communicate, interact and access information. When you logged on this morning to check your email, bank statement, or local news you may not have noticed that there are very few limits placed on the sites and services you have access to. While some people must crash the couch of their best friend to catch the latest HBO release, since he’s subscribed to all premium cable channels while they’re still stuck with rabbit ears on their TV, no one has an edge over anyone else when it comes to what we can access on the Internet.

Yet this principle of net neutrality that allows all sites, services and applications on the Internet to have equal access to consumers, and vice versa, is being fundamentally threatened. Today the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is looking to revise rules that have kept Internet Service Providers (ISPs) at bay for decades. These companies, like AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon, would love to become the gatekeepers of the Internet, reserving preferential bandwidth for those sites and services that make them the most money.

And I can guarantee you HopeForFilm is not one of those sites.

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Issues and Actions

Is NYC “Permitted” To Support Indie Film?

Today’s guest post is from attorney Steven Beer.  Steven not only has posted for us before, but also delivered a great call to arms in Indiewire with proclamation of the Era Of Filmmaker Empowerment. Today’s touches upon some of the issues that I raised recently regarding how film incentives need to help low budget production.

Independent filmmakers and producers from New York are accustomed to change and challenges, and as of this week, they will have yet another hurdle to jump.  As of July 11, 2010, the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, the MOFTB, has begun charging filmmakers a $300 fee for film permits.  Historically, New York City has not charged anything for film permits.  New York City has joined the ranks of other cities, such as Chicago, D.C., Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, and Seattle, all of which charge fees for film permits.  When the proposed rule was announced in April, it generated mostly negative reactions; concerned filmmakers signed petitions against the rule, believing that the fee would diminish New York City’s claim to being the capital of the independent film world.  Some scoffed at the fee, unable to see how an extra $300 charge could affect a film budget.  While opinions may vary, the fee is certainly changing the climate for independent filmmakers, no matter how large their budgets might be.

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Issues and Actions

Lack Of Transparency Limits Film Investments

NY Magazine has run a clear analysis on why the attempt to establish Film Future markets failed.  Our business is so far from transparent, it is laughable to outsiders.  The article articulates how we have no clear & unbiased info on how well films perform and all reporting is done by the studios themselves.  To run a commodities market, the public would need something more transparent (like other countries have) and without it court cases would abound.

Such chaos would almost inevitably lead to a call for mandated government-agency oversight of Hollywood accounting, and that, to studio thinking, would be Armageddon—albeit an Armageddon that would be celebrated by everyone who has ever been promised a net-profits check that didn’t arrive. In the space of just a couple of days this month, a jury demanded Disney pay $270 million in damages for wrongfully withholding profits on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, another found that actor Don Johnson was owed $23 million by the producers of Nash Bridges, and Nikki Finke’s Deadline website posted a leaked balance sheet in which Warner Bros. appeared to demonstrate that the movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which grossed $938 million worldwide, is somehow $167 million in the red. Given that statistic, perhaps stockholders should inquire whether any studio movies ever realize a net profit, and if not, why the people who run those studios are still employed.

If we are ever going to have a sustainable investor base for our industry, we need to bring the reporting and accounting practices up to the standards of other industries.  It’s time that we develop a list of best practices of what needs to be done to reach this goal.  I will add it to my To Do List in the meantime.