Not a whole lot going on here on the SpoutBlog but there has been a lot going on in the office.
SPOUT'S BETA SITE IS UP!
Check it out. And if you're going to be at SXSW next week, stop by our party:
Monday, the 13th
4:45-6:00pm
The Daystage Cafe
But if you are trying to choose between the party and the premier of Joe Swanberg's new film LOL, go to LOL. We feel bad about scheduling our party during his world premier.
This proposal is ridiculous. In the future it will be more expensive to make a documentary in this country than a feature film. Documentarians should get a packet of free Product Placement Coupons from the government in case their subject should ever choose to drink a Pepsi on camera.
So the film world is crackling with anticipation over how we'll get our films in the future. Caveh Zahedi wrote an eloquent manifesto for self-distribution in Filmmaker Magazine. Withoutabox.com, Myspace.com, and Yahoo! My Movies all want to make some type of community for filmmakers over the Internet. Google Video Upload, iTunes Video Podcasts, and a host of video download sites cloning like mogwai each week are all trying to standardize video download as a viable option. Mark Cuban's doing his part on multiple fronts with Magnolia Pictures, Landmark Theaters, HDNet, and Truly Indie. Then there's the gray beards from the original dot.com days: Movielink and Cinemanow (who still don't support Mac). Meanwhile, many young filmmakers are grabbing a Sony PD-150 and shooting their opus on the first few months of life post-graduation, then pursuing any one or all of these channels to reach an audience. Oh, and there's this online community built on love for film called Spout. Check it out. Or at least read the blog.
The Titanic of the old Hollywood system is going down. The unsinkable ship built on Thomas Edison's moving picture camera wasn't prepared for the digital age. The aristocracy are nobly buying off the porters for seats on the life boats. Third class filmmakers are scampering through the halls looting, pillaging, and generally reveling in the anarchy. Jay Epstein over at Slate.com is covering the play by play. And online startups are passing out 4x6 cards with their logo printed on them to all the passengers (you'll see ours at SXSW).
So to get my bearings I'm taking a look back to where we've been so I can get a sense of where all this is going.
1) Although the means of storytelling have been modernized for our pleasure, it doesn't appear our addiction to stories around the campfire and painting on cave walls is going anywhere.
2) Many great films have been made since Hollywood was turned from a farming community into the entertainment capital of the world. Look at 1939, the first Golden Age of cinema: Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Hitchcock's Rebecca. Also, countless pieces of crap have been produced. Memory has a way of sifting out the crap. It sifted out the crap then and will sift out the crap now.
3) Since the WWII generation hung up their fatigues and joined the workforce, the job market has gradually diversified. College grads today may be inundated with possible directions to take career-wise, but the probability they'll someday find a job that really suits their individuality is at an all time high. Same with all this video download, Long Tail, online community building jargon. In the end, we may look fondly on the simple days when the only thing worth seeing at the theater was Will Smith's latest flick, but the films we collect will be far more tailored to our refined interests, rather than limited to our base and blunt interests.
4) Rosemary's Baby, The Blair Witch Project, Silence of the Lambs, Primer, Fritz Lang's M, The Sixth Sense and Open Water all have two things in common. A) They're thrilling. B) They're all made by smart filmmakers. The future may involve scores and scores of films with high and low budgets clamoring for our attention, but it's the smart filmmakers and they're smart films who'll get it.
Big inhale. Big exhale.
So. Seen any good movies lately?
Here's something we all need: a good laugh. I think Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are funny guys, but comedy has a short life. Seen any "Hans and Franz" sketches lately? Right. So a funny movie that didn't follow the typical "funny movie" formula showed up at Sundance two years ago. I sat in a freezing cold library auditorium turned theater at 11:00pm and complained to my friends that I just wanted to go to bed. Then this little movie called Napoleon Dynamite started to make me laugh. I thought it would do great, but a year later when I heard my wife's boss quoting it, I realized it was doing greater than I ever expected.
At Slamdance this last week I was disappointed to see several films riding in after the Napoleon invasion. The premise was basic: make a movie with a goofy outcast and laugh at him/her for 90 minutes. I walked out of one and wish I'd walked out of the other (I won't mention the titles here because I think these filmmakers will have enough trouble connecting to an audience without me pestering them). Napoleon Dynamite had a fresh quality at the time. A quality with a short life span that makes imitation boring and, in this case, kind of mean. Why do I want to laugh at somebody who's kind of sad for 90 minutes?
So. People started salivating when they saw how well Napoleon was received. They thought Jared Hess had hit on some magic formula, like the very best combination of hops and barley and malt combined in the perfect way to make the perfect beer. But what they missed, was the fact that it was the freshness of Napoleon–the characters, the plot (or lack of)–that made it work. It wasn't anything that could be put on a checklist with the header: if you can meet these ten criteria then you will have made a hugely successful comedy. So people have this mental checklist in their heads, and they've completely lost the freshness, the unexpectedness which means of course, they don't have a hugely funny movie. They have a stale batch of brew we've all tasted before and long ago lost our wonderment about.
I find it ironic that this lesson is absolutely nothing new. It learned and preached time and time again. Yet at a festival like Slamdance, I still see young filmmakers taking the safe way to Park City.
This year, Park City, among other things, is abuzz with what the Internet will do to make films accessible that weren't accessible before. For instance, in the Queer Lounge at Sundance, withoutabox.com announced some basic community tools on their website (blogs, ratings, calendar building) and said they'll be distributing Arin Crumley and Susan Buice's film, Four Eyed Monsters, and Jacques Thelemaque's film, The Dogwalker. Although any details as to how that distribution will work have been inconclusive and murky, it's enough to generate some attention from people desperate for audiences to have access to more films.
Karina Longworth over at Cinematical interviewed Geoffrey Gilmore, Director of the Sundance Film Festival, earlier this week. His hopes for the Internet and distribution are tempered.
"What are the gates people have to go through? Everyone embraces the fact that there are no gates. Well, that's terrific on one level, theoretically, but what does it mean? It means there's a lot of junk out there."
Gilmore says regardless of accessibility, films still have a marketing problem. People need to be able to find out what's special about the film. So how does the audience find out about its distinctive quality? At Spout we've often used the phrase, "Infinite accessibility creates the problem of infinite choice." When confronted by the problem of making a choice from infinite options, we either fall back on what we know is safe or we make no choice at all. Which is why we need gatekeepers.
Geoffrey Gilmore is a gatekeeper. He's the ultimate decision-maker for what's programmed at Sundance. In the interview earlier this week, he came across as a benevolent gatekeeper: He judges films on what they set out to do and whether or not they did it well. If a film is shot on digital video he asks, "Is the film better because it's shot on DV?" Other gatekeepers are not so benevolent. Hollywood studios are gatekeepers allowing through only movies that stand to put money in their pockets, regardless of quality. Withoutabox.com is another kind of gatekeeper. Somebody over there is deciding what will be distributed and what won't. The 35 year-old film geek who runs the local video shop is a gatekeeper. All of these people decide somewhere along the way whether or not a certain film will reach you.
Gatekeepers are people who put the film on your radar. Whether through a national advertising campaign, a film festival, or a simple recommendation, they are the connecting point. The beautiful thing about a gatekeeper, like Geoffrey Gilmore or the video shop guy, is they don't just grant the films they love permission to pass through their gates. They become champions for those films. At Spout, we're not opening the floodgates for infinite accessibility. We're providing a platform for gatekeepers of all walks to come and champion the films they love to their widest possible audience. When audiences have an infinite number of films to choose from, we think they'll want access to gatekeepers more than they'll want access to films.
So typically the buzz at festivals has to do with films. This year at Sundance and Slamdance the buzz includes all sorts of new experiments to keep independent and foreign films in the "black box" without pandering to the multiplex.
Like the first screening I went to where Living Room Theaters announced their initiative for high-end boutique theaters to show independent and foreign films. It's a brand spanking new business plan and they'll be opening up in Portland and Miami to start. Hopefully they'll work out the kinks around ticket prices (they're target audience includes "Baby boomers in the process of retiring with high purchase power and considerable free time" and "College students"). The same day, the Sundance Institute announced plans for a new arthouse initiative. They brought a dozen arthouse curators here to Park City to develop their programs for this year.
And at the IndieWIRE party last night, IndieWIRE announced a partnership with The San Francisco Film Society to launch www.sf360.org.
The Web site will act as a kind of online networking center for everything related to the Bay Area film and visual arts community. Filmmakers will be able to find resources related to filmmaking, and film fans can get daily news relating to everything from local documentaries and experimental films to Pixar and George Lucas. (Read more at The Examiner)
Among their future plans, sf360.org is planning city wide movie nights and school screenings of films both with and without distribution. I was pretty pumped about the idea of viewing San Francisco from space and seeing the lights of outdoor projectors all over the city. Then I turned to chat with some guys at the party who turned out to be Ironweed. They're part of coordinating the film event efforts around San Fran and they've got a Movie of the Month Club going now that looks pretty sweet.
I can't help but wonder if I am the cause of all these new initiatives. I have been blogging about this other theater experience for a while now. But nobody is giving me credit for their business plans. That's just the way it goes. Maybe I'll become one of these guys that thinks up ideas and files patents all day long.
I'm in Park City in between films at the Slamdance Film Festival. Last night I saw Larry Clark's new film Wassup Rockers. Like Kids before it, he captures something rarely seen on screen about adolescence. So rare I'd forgotten I lived through it myself until I watched his film last night. It's the in between place where we're still a child and also fully aware—often more aware than our parents—of the world around us. Wassup Rockers reminds me how many of us played with sex and suicide as teenagers the way we played with Barbies and G.I. Joe dolls just a few years earlier.
The film follows seven Hispanic, punk-rock skateboarders living in South Central LA. They skate and have a band. They don't do drugs or cause trouble, but they're constantly harassed for existing outside the gangsta culture of their neighborhood. They wear tight clothes instead of baggy hip-hop gear. When they skate by, the kids in the neighborhood try to start something and yell, "Wassup rockers!" It's not meant in a nice way.
The story then takes them to Beverly Hills to skate Beverly Hills High where so many professional skate boarding videos have been shot (Clark shoots these scenes like you'd see in the videos but, refreshingly, he leaves in the wipe outs). A couple girls from the school notice the boys and flirting starts. The second half of the film is non-stop chase to get out of Beverly Hills prompting the question, "Is there any safe place for kids like these?"
The film is clearly not a documentary, but it's so authentic that almost every question asked of Clark in the Q&A afterward had to do with how he made a narrative story feel so real. I loved his response. The seven boys aren't actors. They're exactly who they are in real life. He'd met them hanging around a photo shoot after making his last film. He instantly liked them for their strength to be who they were in a neighborhood where it's dangerous to stand out and wanted to tell their story. So every Saturday for a year Clark met up with the seven, took them out to skate, bought them a meal and listened to their stories. He developed a relationship with the boys. His answer to how he got an authentic performance from non-actors? To paraphrase, we had a relationship. I knew intimately what they were capable of because I'd spent countless hours with them. They trusted me and I trusted them.
It's so simple. Know intimately who it is you're shooting. Know intimately what you're going for. Another pearl of wisdom he dropped was a piece of advice about composition. Frame your shot up and compose it in the camera just right. Then take a step forward and screw it up. That way you see what's in front of you and not your perfect shot.
More later.
Conversations are important— they keep a marriage alive, a business running smoothly, and whole countries intact. Unfortunately, conversations with yourself are not very fulfilling. They require a community, and they’re at the heart of what makes Spout a community. In our case, it all stems from our belief that film watching should be an activity shared with others—one that’s more open-ended, with plenty of time and space for conversation. We think it's a mighty fine reason to get in some Groups.
(These screen shots are of the Spout Alpha site and may look very different from the Spout Beta site that will soon be available to the public)
We love them and crave them—they're the glue that holds people together at Spout. They inspire us to respond in some way, or in other words, to be more human: to laugh, cry, form an opinion, develop a new idea, sit in stunned silence.
When we Tag them, we sort our films into categories that work for us. The video store may call a film "Action" when, for me, it's a "personal classic." Listing is similar. When you make lists of films, you use their stories to tell your own.
(These screen shots are of the Spout Alpha site and may look very different from the Spout Beta site that will soon be available to the public)
We are people—not animal, not a computer algorithm. We can get inside another person’s mind and begin to understand not just the WHAT but the WHY. It seems natural to connect people to films and films to people. At Spout, it’s hard to find a film without finding people and hard to find people without finding a film. We think that's the way finding films should be.
(These screen shots are of the Spout Alpha site and may look very different from the Spout Beta site that will soon be available to the public)
A guy and a girl are sitting in a bar. They’re discussing general things like work and mutual friends. She makes a film reference, he picks up on it, then the bartender, who has just come over to see if they want another round, says he loves that film too. Then he starts talking about another film and so on.
Films, people, and groups have an organic relationship. The lines are blurry. They're constantly expanding and contracting, overlapping in all kinds of crazy configurations. People watch films, say something about them in a group, which prompts someone else to say something about another film. Maybe a handful of the people there make a point to see that film. And who knows? Every so often, a person who ends up watching the film may be changed forever.
Maybe they'll take a completely different path in life, or maybe their view of the world will shift slightly. Then, as that person falls into relationships with various groups of people...well, you see where this is going. Along the way, people are talking about films with each other left and right. About a year ago, we thought: "If this can happen on an everyday basis in the physical world, what would happen if these organic relationships between people and film existed online, where geography isn't an issue?"
(This screen shot is of the Spout Alpha site and may look very different from the Spout Beta site that will soon be available to the public)
David Lowery wrote an articulate post about how independent filmmakers can learn about building an audience from touring folk musicians. I couldn't agree more. The article makes me want to write even more on this subject.
When there's frustration with Hollywood, I think it's misplaced to accuse Hollywood of holding down the independent filmmaker. I think it's totally appropriate to be frustrated that Hollywood makes a lot of really expensive, awful films.
There is a story I've heard a hundred times that goes something like this: a young filmmaker drops out of school, she shoots a film on borrowed loose change, gets that film into Sundance and, shortly after the premier, over a hotel coffee table she's handed a check for millions of dollars by a larger-than-life executive of a distribution company. The rags to riches little filmmaker's next film is funded by a studio with a budget 20 times larger than her first.
I see filmmakers get frustrated when their film goes to festival after festival and no executive invites them back to the hotel. The ball ended and Cinderella went home with a swan shaped wad of tin foil filled with leftovers. This is where a lot of bitterness can set in around the thought "I can't get my film distributed." But, as David Lowery points out, you can get your film distributed. You just don't get the option to have the Cinderella, overnight success distribution deal. But distribution is always an option.
Anybody who reads this blog knows I get frustrated with what's showing at my local movie theaters. I often don't get to see those films that went home unplucked by Hollywood. In Grand Rapids I get Hollywood schlock in heavy doses. Which is where the folk musicians can teach us all a lesson, preferably in ballad form.
Folkies know their odds of becoming Sony Records' next little darling and touring with Kanye West are about a million to one. They have no delusions of grandeur. What they do have is precedent to build a community of followers themselves. When you look at the film world, it starts to look a little silly. The scenario of birthing your baby, selling it off, saying your good byes and putting it on a plane to LA with five million bucks in your back pocket is just so bizarre. Especially when the audience for that film (people like me) is dotted all over the US. What will the movie theater experience look like in the future? I hope it looks more like the music industry. I hope we get our mega-blockbusters playing to a huge audience on Friday night, and on Saturday night David Lowery is packing out the house at my local college auditorium. Maybe I'll get through the the line afterward to shake his hand and tell him how much his film moved me.
I just came across this article in the LA Times from Novemember. I'm glad I didn't see it until now because I've been thinking lately about how the Information Age is providing more than a way for me to access information from everywhere around the world at any time. It's providing a way for me to define myself as an individual. I can connect to my niche interests and niche communities that were previously out of my reach. It's showing me new possibilities and inspiring me to believe.
This article I read is not just continuing to beat the drum of Hollywood's doom, but it's an insightful piece about how we're not just distracted from going the theater by technology, but the creativity eminating from technology inspires me believe in possibilities. Most movies at the multiplex just make me feel numb and dumb after 2 hours.
As it stands, Hollywood has become a prisoner of a corporate mindset that is squeezing the entrepreneurial vitality out of the system. It's not just that studios are making bad movies — they've been doing that for years. They've lost touch with any real cultural creativity. When you walk down the corridors at Apple or a video game company, there's an electricity in the air that encourages people into believing they could dream up a new idea that could blow somebody's mind.
At the big studios, the creative voltage is sometimes so low that you wonder if you've wandered into an insurance office. The dreamers have left the building. Back in the 1950s, David Selznick, out walking one night with Ben Hecht, glumly said, "Hollywood's like Egypt, full of crumbling pyramids. It'll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands." As I said, show people like to exaggerate, but these days when I go around Hollywood, I can see the crumbling pyramids too.
From Patrick Goldstein's article In a losing race with the zeitgeist
Most people have heard and experienced in some way shape or form that going to the movies is not nearly as popular as it once was. Industry analysts say sophisticated Home Entertainment systems, DVDs, gasoline price hikes and popcorn price hikes are all cutting into movie attendance. In spite of stadium seating, THX sound, Cold Stone Ice Cream, Dippin' Dots, free refills, video games, organic nacho cheese and Tom Cruise falling in love with a gun in his hand, the multiplex is still "making it easy for people to stay home," as Steven Soderbergh said in this month's Wired Magazine. The answer, according to experts, is to make sure the audience has no other way to see a movie besides sitting in a chair with sticky arm rests behind text messaging teenagers.
So I'm taking a little blue-sky time here to dream of the movie theater that runs on giving me more options, not less. The theater I'd want to live at. (I secretly hope Landmark Theaters will consider this a quick and dirty business plan to elaborate on.)
1. It's in the neighborhood. If an audience lives within walking distance, there would be no need to buy cheap land for a massive parking lot, and no worries about gas prices. Many old movie houses could be converted back to their original use. (The one in my neighborhood is currently a church.)
2. Beer. Yes, I'm that shallow and so is everyone else I watch movies with.
3. Multiple cuts, a win/win situation. As Soderbergh said in the same article, "I often do very radical cuts of my own films just to experiment.... I think it would be really interesting to have a movie out in release and then, just a few weeks later say, 'Here's version 2.0, recut, rescored.'" I like the film, I come back for the other cut. I hate the film, I try it again with the different cut.
4. Club combos. Like Wednesday night is for Hitchcock and knitting.
5. A grumpy baby room with a two-way mirror for moms to see the screen while they breastfeed (that one's for my wife) or for dad’s to not miss the action on their night out with baby.
6. The "no-movies" room. This is kind of like the bookstore cafe. You can hang out without paying for a ticket, or just hang around after the flick is over. You know how it breaks the magic sometimes if you leave the theater and then decide where to go and then drive there, get a table, etc.
7. Split screen double feature: Steve McQueen. Two movies, one really wide screen, lots of earbuds. I hold hands with my wife while she watches The Great Escape and I watch Papillon. You definitely can't get that at home (and maybe there's a good reason for that).
8. The Movie Book Club. We have a month to read Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan and then we watch Matewan and discuss.
9. An intermission. If theaters would “pause” the movie for five minutes during an appropriate moment, it would give people a chance to stretch, go pee, or grab another beer (see #2). Two years ago I would have beaten myself for suggesting such a thing. But then I really hurt myself during The Return of the King.
10. An “opening act.” These don't pay, so it would be before any trailers or ads. But for the hard core, if you come early–maybe 30 minutes before the movie begins–you get to see some experimental work, cartoons, or the work of a local filmmaker.
11. Alternative snack bar--pistacios, dried fruit, popcorn, pretzels, chocolate, maybe even raw veggies and dip. Lots of snacky type things that you load up on a tray and pay for by the ounce (imagine the price of popcorn then). Obviously pizza would be there, wood-fired preferably.
I'm drying up here, but I have the feeling there are more ideas out there, so I want to put some parameters on any additions to this list. 1) It needs to conceivably be a revenue generator, so don't suggest February as All John Waters Month. 2) It should be an incentive to leave home, so a booth with headphones and a DVD player has some serious overlap with my living room experience, and is therefore disqualified.
My wife works for a non-profit organization that is slowly but steadily planning and rebuilding one neighborhood of our city. I love hearing her talk about her work. To grow my knowledge about what she does a bit more, I picked up a copy of Jane Jacobs book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It's a classic resource for city planners and a great read for anybody curious about how people living in cities use the space provided for them. The principles in the book apply only to high-density city life, not towns or suburbs.
Among other insights in the book around why a neighborhood thrives, Jacobs points out the importance of certain public figures. They are not the mayor, the neighborhood association members or the district alderman, but the shopkeepers and bartenders. Jacobs calls them the "keepers of public knowledge." The daily life of these people is pretty ordinary. They sell goods and make small talk with people from the neighborhood people buying those goods. But these "knowledge keepers" serve an incredibly important function. They are confidants who carry the public knowledge of the neighborhood and transmit it to everyone else. So Mrs. Smith knows that Mr. Parker's mother died last night and Mr. Moore knows to keep his eye out for a strange looking man who's been wondering around, and so on. It's a seemingly small service, but it keeps the neighborhood unified, in touch and safe.
These keepers of public knowledge are on an immediate, street level serving the function of the news media (or the news media in its most noble and rarest incarnation) does on a global level. When I watched Hotel Rwanda last year I remember feeling what a lot of people felt walking away from that film: the shock of waste and the weight of responsibility. A genocide that didn't need to happen happened. Thousands upon thousands of people could have been saved if only we had known publicly what was really going on. When the keepers of public knowledge are absent or silent, we have an excuse to keep to ourselves.
For me, it reveals the power of sharing stories. Really, that's what the keepers of public knowledge are sharing. Neighborhood stories. Like, "Little Billy was doing terrible in school. Two weeks ago I see him carrying a violin case in here and he says he's taking violin lessons. Yesterday his mom tells me his grades are getting better and she swears it has to do with this violin teacher." In a week, that violin teacher has four new students from the same neighborhood, all through storytelling, not a big advertising budget.
Stories don't have to be true to have an impact. A movie or novel can make a difference in the life of a person the way a documentary can. An article on predatory lending can mobilize people to go after crooked mortgage brokers the way Upton Sinclair's The Jungle changed legislation. We sing Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer because somebody at Montgomery Ward thought the story of a rejected reindeer would make a great advertising campaign. It did and we're still sharing that story each Christmas. But if stories aren't shared there is a breakdown between us, between humans making important connections to one another.
It's the simplest thing. It's so simple it seems too easy. But tiny little stories can really alter the course of a person's life. So share them.
P.S. Be sure to ask yourself whether it's public or private knowledge you're sharing. I don't want to hear that the SpoutBlog promotes people starting rumors.
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