We are on the verge of a new film culture and infrastructure.
Our discussions on ReInvent Hollywood run 90 minutes (and you can watch the whole thing here), but in this day and age sometimes we only have time to watch ten minutes on the bus. Here are the high points in a highly digestible format:
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By Beanie Barnes
My favorite philosopher wrote that, in order to understand success and analyze what causes it, we need to study the traits present in failure. He pointed out that people who fail do not really write memoirs – generally, publishers do not return their calls nor do readers pay for such stories, even if a story of failure is more valuable than the one of success — just ask the authors of the brilliant book, What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, which they had to self-publish. This disregard of failure happens a lot in film where we often (and only) celebrate success. That is why it was so amazing that Sundance, at this year’s festival, opened the Pandora’s Box that is “failure.”
(And I have a lot more on the creative lessons I learned from Ang in my upcoming book — which you can preorder now at: http://bit.ly/HopeForFilmBook)
By Christina Kallas
So should we be discussing TV series as nothing less than long cinematic narratives? And if so, what would that mean? It is fair to say that TV, just half the age of film, has only recently (perhaps in the last 15 years) come into its own. Writers have only recently learned to take advantage of the unique powers of the medium itself. For years the focus was on each episode being a complete story, a standalone. Not only in procedurals but in series generally, the dramatic focus was on the unit of the episode. A TV episode was a mini-movie (much as a web episode is a mini-TV episode now). Then the primary canvas of the TV medium became the season.
By Paula Hoffmann, Director of Development, Vancouver Web Fest
When I first started working with the Vancouver Web Fest, I kept hearing the phrase “web series are the future”, but nobody seemed to know what that actually meant. What does that future look like? Everyone can agree that the entertainment industry is facing tremendous change brought on by technology, but the public’s desire for good stories hasn’t changed. What has changed is the way entertainment is distributed, how it is marketed, and how it is monetized. Once upon a time there were 3 networks, and then came cable and that changed everything. Now we have the internet and everything is changing again. I also keep hearing about the “death of television”, but it’s not dying, it’s evolving.
There are many ways I could answer this question. The one thing I know for sure though, is that if you work in the film business, and you don’t have at least one answer to that question, you are being irresponsible. I have a few other thoughts that stem from that same point, but I will leave those alone for now too…
We need to be able to have some answers to our industry to work in the same way we should be able to answer it regarding our government, or your kid’s education — we should have an opinion on how we’d like them all to work. Okay maybe the film biz is not as important as either of those things, but don’t you think we all should have an opinion on all of these? I do.
We just shouldn’t accept the way things are. We should try to move things forward.
One of the things I most want the film biz to be able to do is
