A creative life is a precarious thing. Actions occur that could profoundly effect your ability to earn a living doing what you love. We get blindsided again and again, sometimes not recognizing things until they are too late to alter them. It’s one of the reasons I have tried to meticulously track for you what are the good thing and bad things happening in indie film these days. Yet, it seems to me we all need to do a better job of tracking them if we don’t want to get trapped in a future we won’t be part of..
My thought is that we should be able to define a series of issues in which we can put events, ideas, and articles into as they occur, helping each other stay on top of them.
The first step is to define the issues. That is what I am doing today .
1 down, 99 to go. I look forward to the day when the need for A2E is no longer. But that sure ain’t now. We need to launch new iterations in new locations with new participants. We need to build on what has started. We need to put the entrepreneurial knowledge into the filmmakers’ tool kit. We need to make filmmakers as savvy with the platforms as they are with the creative aspects. If we want a sustainable, diverse, and ambitious filmmaking culture, we need to make sure that the creators and their supporters are the direct financial beneficiaries of the work they generate.
Here’s the initial wrap of round one. Much more to come:
Most industries and practices get stuck in a rut of doing things the way they’ve always been done. The film world is a stellar example of this phenomenon. Most practices are designed around the way the world used to be, not how it is now. The film world and it’s economy used to be based around scarcity, but now we live in a world of abundance. Adapting to this change will bring new opportunities. The first step is acknowledging that change.
A year ago (May 15, 2009) I wrote a blog post ” 38 American Independent Film Problems/Concerns”.Unfortunately, all of the problems I listed then still stand today; four or so from that list have improved slightly, but they certainly remain issues. Of more concern is that the list keeps growing and growing. I can contribute another 38 even more pressing issues today. You do the math: we now have over 75 things wrong with our industry that we are not taking action to fix.
In fact, we have no one to blame for this list but ourselves. It is our inability to be proactive that has brought on us this terrible state. Ask yourself what currently concerns and frustrates you about where film culture and the film business are today. What heights is our industry capable of reaching and how does it compare to where we actually are? Do we really have the capacity to sit and wait to get there? Isn’t our silence delaying the trip?
I must admit that I am a bit disappointed that I had no difficulty adding another thirty-eight items to this list of where we are failing. The exciting part (and why #38 of last year ‘s list was “lists like this make the foolish despair”) is that these lists demonstrate a tremendous opportunity for those willing to break from the status quo and take action. Things may be wrong, but they could always be worse. From here, we just have to work together to make it better. It is that simple. Every deficit is an opportunity for the creative entrepreneur, right?
So how has the film biz continued to reveal itself to be troubled this year? What do I suggest we start to focus on, discuss, and find solutions for? This list is a start, and I wager we will expand it substantially in the days ahead.
We cannot logically justify any ticket price whatsoever for a non-event film. There are too many better options at too low a price. Simply getting out of the house or watching something somewhere because that is the only place it is currently available does not justify a ticket price enough. We still think of movies as things people will buy. We have to change our thinking about movies to something that enhances other experiences, and it is that which has monetary value. Film’s power as a community organizing tool extends far beyond its power to sell popcorn (and the whole exhibition industry is based on that old popcorn idea).
The Industry has never made any attempt to build a sustainable investor class. Every other industry has such a go-to funding sector, developed around a focus on the investors’ concerns and standardized structures. In the film biz, each deal is different and generally stands alone, as opposed to leading to something more. The history of Hollywood is partially defined by the belief that another sucker is born every minute. Who really benefits by the limited options for funding currently available other than those funders and those who fee those deals? We could build something that works far more efficiently and offers far more opportunity.
A creative life is a precarious thing. Actions occur that could profoundly effect your ability to earn a living doing what you love. We get blindsided again and again, sometimes not recognizing things until they are too late to alter them. It’s one of the reasons I have tried to meticulously track for you what are the good thing and bad things happening in indie film these days. Yet, it seems to me we all need to do a better job of tracking them if we don’t want to get trapped in a future we won’t be part of..
