Category: Truly Free Film

We are on the verge of a new film culture and infrastructure.

Your Great Movie May Never Get Seen

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date June 10, 2010
51 Comments on Your Great Movie May Never Get Seen

If you think it is as simple as make a great film and it will get seen, you are not truly recognizing the world we live in. Great films get ignored all the time. Great films don’t get distributed, and when they do, often they are not distributed in a significant way. Filmmakers and their collaborators have to move beyond the dream that if you build it they will come as it allows both them, their work, and their supporters to be exploited.

You are reading this presumably because you either love watching great movies or because you aspire to making great movies. I write here because I want to do both of those things and I have the confidence that if we change our behavior, both are possible. I write here because I want to do both of those things and I have the concern that if we don’t change our behavior, we will lose the opportunity to do either for ever.

Change begins with a step, usually the easiest one for the most people to do. What would be that change that encourages either, and ideally both, for better movies to be seen more widely, and for more of the movies to actually be better? On all fronts, I think the answer comes down to collaboration. If the quality of culture and the access to quality culture is of a concern to you, you have to enter the equation.

Speak up and join in. Curate. Filter. Focus.

Tags audience building, collaboration, curation

Truly Free Film

The Future Is Ours If We Seize Today

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date June 9, 2010
5 Comments on The Future Is Ours If We Seize Today

Today’s guest post is from filmmaker Amos Poe.

“If you’re an American filmmaker, you’re a Hollywood filmmaker.” – Martin Scorsese

There’s been much talk lately about the current state of “independent” filmmaking which includes all aspects of fundraising, production, post-production and distribution. This is my perspective based on 40 years of experience and a modicum of hope.

In 1969 when I got my first Super 8 camera and started making films – needless to say, I had no idea there was such a thing as a “film school” – I picked up a book called “The Moguls”. As I recall (I’ve long since misplaced the book) it had a number of chapters, each dealing with a different man responsible for inventing and building Hollywood. All were immigrants – Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Adolph Zukor, Schenck etc. One chapter, I think it was Adolph Zukor, a German immigrant, went something like this.

Zukor was in the haberdashery business on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. He sold shirts, ties, suits… to men. One day a guy walks in and looks around, sees that there’s empty space in the entryway. Zukor walks up to him, “Good morgen. Can I help you?” The guy says, “I wanna help you. Since this space is empty, how would you like to make some money from it?” “What do you have in mind?”, Zukor asks. “How would you like to put a few Nickelodeon machines here?’ “Vat’s that?” Zukor had no idea what these machines were, he’d never seen a nickelodeon machine, or a film for that matter.

Tags Adolph Zukor, Amos Poe, Andy Warhol, Bob Shaye, Francois Truffaut, Guest Post, Harry Cohn, Ivan Kral, Jean Luc Godard, John Cassavetes, KickStarter, Louis B. Mayer, Millenium Film Archives, New Line Cinema, New Wave, No Wave, Schenck. Adolph Zukor

Truly Free Film

A Nice Example of Well Planned KickStarter “Rewards”

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date June 8, 2010
86 Comments on A Nice Example of Well Planned KickStarter “Rewards”

Check out Amos “the avatar of no-wave cinema” Poe’s KickStarter page‘s pledge incentives for his new translation of Dante’s “La Commedia” for an example of well thought out rewards. There are low ones that most will skip over so that they don’t think themselves cheap. There are high ones that feel out of reach but encourage you to also reach higher. They give a DVD (which frankly could have been a digital download) at the the second lowest level. Even if I didn’t know, like, and respect Amos and his work, I might be inspired to give (I did).

Update 6/9: It has been pointed out that offering profits via KickStarter may not be legal, so get your lawyer to weigh in on that before trying it at home. When Amos & Co. they took the share of profits off the “offering” (ain’t it great how easy it is to change things in this digital age?).

And check back here tomorrow for some thoughts from Amos on the current creative environment.

Tags Amos Poe, KickStarter

Truly Free Film

Thoughts On Audience Building

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date June 8, 2010
22 Comments on Thoughts On Audience Building

Today’s guest post is from filmmaker (and mind map builder!) Mike Ambs.

In a recent post here, Ted Hope listed “38 More Ways The Film Industry is Failing Today“; many of the questions and points made among the 38 stood out to me, and I’ve spent the last several days trying to openly brainstorm steps that could lead towards change. But today, I wanted to write about one in particular: Ted asked why we don’t encourage, or even demand, that a film build it’s audience (say, 5,000 fans) prior to production and greenlight.

For starters, I love the idea of audience builds. I think the practice of audience builds before a film gets too far off the ground would be a great shift in how we think of films, how we approach them, how to involve the audience long before they ever sit down in a theater – but it raises a few key issues:

Filmmaking is storytelling, and stories are told many different ways and take very different paths. Because of this, it might not be the best idea to mandate audience builds. One reason for this is it could, if taken advantage of, create yet another “door” that is opened easier only for some.

So the real question is, “why” take this route?

Tags audience aggregation, audience building, Guest Post, Mike Ambs

Truly Free Film

Keep It Simple

Last month, Clay Shirkey had a most interesting post entitled “The Collapse Of Complex Business Models“. Shirkey calls attention to Joseph Tainter who in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies” pointed out that “under a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”.

Shirkey explains that in Tainter’s view, complex societies don’t collapse despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it.

Subject to violent compression, Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, through a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex—agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on.

Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.

Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.

The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond.

Hmmm…. sounds a lot like the time we are living in now, doesn’t it?

As one can expect, Shirkey provides great examples and greater understanding. It’s a must read.

Thanks to Couper Samuleson for making sure I did not miss this!

Tags business structures, Clay Shirky

Truly Free Film

Audiences: Made, Not Born

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date June 2, 2010
50 Comments on Audiences: Made, Not Born

Today’s guest post is from screenwriter Jeremy Pikser.

When we say, “know your audience,” what do we mean, exactly? What defines the characteristics of an audience? Is an “audience” identical to a “market?”

Is the audience, as Hollywood (and, really, the entire ideology of market consumerism) would have us believe, a natural expression of human nature, the zeitgeist, or what people “want now?” To think so would be to ignore the domination of our sense of what all these are by exactly the cultural forces who are selling us what we “want.”

The creation of desire is a well worn concept, but it’s worth keeping in mind when we think about the “audience” for art. The requirement, for instance, of virtually every popular story to have somewhere in it a hot chick, a beautiful woman, a fair maiden isn’t, obviously, something that’s been created by Hollywood out of whole cloth. It has a long tradition in popular (and not so popular) art. But the entertainment industry has cultivated this notion into a much more powerful and self perpetuating “necessity.”