Tag: Guest Posts

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Truly Free Film

The Digital Recession, Pt 3: The Dreamer’s Disease

By Jim Cummings

This is part three of a four part post.  Part One.  Part Two: The Problem With Piracy.

Many of our peers seem to have rifts in their thinking about the digital revolution, that our future is uncertain, but that considering the negatives might distract from the steadfast pursuit of our work and thus lessen our chances of success. Does considering the reality of our own deaths prevent us from pursuing our lives or living them to the fullest? Of course not, so let’s stop deceiving ourselves that the death of the industry is not a real problem that deserves real answers.

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Truly Free Film

Jennifer Lawrence Does Not Want To Be In Your Movie: Lessons Learned Casting Our Microbudget Feature

By Scott K. Foley and Josh Rosenberg

Maya and DP Joe Fitz

When we set out to cast our microbudget feature, Jessica, we were certain we’d be able to quickly find an up-and-coming actress to star. I mean we’d written a script about a complicated and conflicted character, the kind of breakout-caliber role that actors dream about, and one that with a bit of luck would propel their careers, all of our careers, to the next level. What we didn’t know was how, as first time and microbudget filmmakers, we’d be expending an enormous amount of time and energy trying to get past the gatekeepers and how some much appreciated tough-love advice from an unexpected source would finally allow us to move forward and start making our movie.

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Truly Free Film

Close Encounters Of The Implosion Kind

By Russ Collins

Gary Meyer wrote: I do not like to be a doom and gloom guy but I think there are big changes afoot for commercial cinemas, but not the scenario predicted here.  Steven Spielberg Predicts ‘Implosion’ of Film Industry

 
Like Gary, I am not a doom and gloom guy. However, it is tempting for older cinema artists (like Steven Spielberg and soon to retire artists like Steven Soderbergh or maybe it’s just filmmakers named Steven!) to see gloom in clouds of change. Change is hard. It frequently makes us feel discouraged or unfairly challenged. The shifting sands of change can cause us to see threats everywhere and feel the world as we know it will end.  However, maybe we feel this way because it’s true. The world as we know it will indeed come to an end because change is the only constant, and creativity in art, business and all things is frequently born from what might appear to be destructive forces brewed from dynamic change. It is a defining story of living; a baseline truth, an ever repeating cycle of human existence that the Hindu religion represents so effectively in the story Shiva, whose joyous dance of destruction celebrates the cycle of creation, preservation and dissolution.
 
SHIVA DANCED ON THE MOVIES IN THE 1950s
 
Movie attendance at theaters in the USA by the late 1940s appeared stable at 4 BILLION admissions per year.  By the early 1960s movie attendance at theaters had fallen dramatically and re-stabilized at around 1 billion admissions per year – the theatrical audiences was just 25% of what it had been 16 years earlier. It’s hard to imagine.

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Issues and Actions

Can You Save A Small Town Cinema?

I received this letter this weekend.  I don’t know the cinema, but it looks real nice.  I don’t know the letter writer, but I sympathize with his plight. “Public Cinema” sounds like it was a great program and will be a shame to be lost.  There are always many sides to any story, but this does sound like a tragic tale. Here’s Hope hoping for a happy ending.

Dear Mr. Hope, 

I am sending this letter to you as the Founding Board Member of the Sixth Street Cinema, a very small art cinema and media arts center in the town of Mariposa, just outside Yosemite National Park. Our cinema has been a beacon for American independent film and world cinema for nearly sixteen years, and has acted as such in the most unlikely of places – a small, mostly low-income, rural community, often a three-hour drive from any similar programming. Since 1996, we have occupied the second floor of an historic Masonic Hall that we converted to screen films, and filled the very important role of being the town’s only cinema. Before 1996, there hadn’t been a cinema in Mariposa since the fifties.

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Truly Free Film

The Innovation Renaissance Is Born When Creative & Tech Hook Up

By Mohammad Gorjestani
 
This last month, Volio, the company I co-founded 2 years ago and head creative for, launched in a partnership with Esquire Magazine.
Volio is an interactive storytelling platform that basically feels like a “facetime” or “skype” experience except the person you’re talking to isn’t live. We take pre-recorded scripted video segments of a talking head and let you engage in a bit of a choose-your-adventure re-imagined type of way, powered by your voice.  
 
Volio is another product and example of the merger between tech and creative thats happening around the

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Truly Free Film

Change The Model: Build New Alliances To Deliver Greater Value For A Better Price

The post I did on “The Really Bad Things In The Indie Film Biz 2012” has generated a lot of health conversations.  The wise recognize that each of these really bad things is just an opportunity to make this all better — and sometimes to make some money.  The post has been shared and “liked” more that usual for this blog and I think that speaks well of our collective endeavor to rescue indie film.

I particularly liked all the comments the blog generated, and have done my best to reply to them.  Thanks for the participation!

I want to single out one comment in particular from Jb Bruno, who kindly has allowed me to repost it here:

Maybe one way to break the hold the people at the top have on the artists is to change the model, as it’s a model that serves them but not even one an audience really wants.

Movie-going in its infancy was about

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Truly Free Film

Film Festivals Offer The Life Lessons For Longevity

By Kellie Ann Benz

Okay, I’ll admit it. I think ‘Jersey Shore’ offered some of the best life lessons. I’m not too cool to reveal that I gleaned much from the leg-humping silverbacks who F-bombed their way into obscurity on that cautionary tale of a show.

Replace, if you will, their onenightstandpad with a film festival party, and you can see how they offered all of us a first rate how-NOT-to for which should be grateful. 

I cite their example as a sobering reminder for everyone packing for their first film festival.

First, the good news. Film festivals are wicked wild fun.  Truly.

Festival attendees are some of the most electric creatives you’ll ever meet – and when actors or actresses are in attendance, some of the most beautiful humans you’ll ever see with your own eyeballs – film festivals offer a throwback to Dominick Dunne-esque invitation only cocktail parties.  At the best international festivals, the ribald wits congregate as safe harbour from a cruel, cruel world that only understands their stories when told in a linear three act structure.  At the discovery-zone of regional indie festivals, you can feel welcomed into an exclusive club where only the cinematic smarty-pants go.

For the chosen ones with films competing, a film festival is

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