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Truly Free Film

30 Really Bad Things In FilmBiz 2014

IMG_9903It is now time for my complete list of The Suck In Today’s Film Biz. Earlier this week, I’ve dropped some bits on Keyframe and Filmmaker Mag. IndieWire picked it up. There’s so much that is wrong, it is easy to share the wealth. But here is all of those combined lists  plus many more. Can’t you hear everyone screaming “OMG, there is so much too fix! It is time we made this really work for ambitious and diverse film once and for all!”?  We wish, right?

I have been chronicling the negative in our film industry for sometime now — six years in these type of posts, but my original rant goes back to 1995 for Filmmaker Magazine.  Much of what I have stated in years’ passed remains still in need of getting done. Dig in to my past lists and when you combine them you will have well over 100 things that we could be doing better.  You’d think with so much wrong, more people would stand up and say “this has got to change!”. Where is the film industry’s national leadership? For the first time I believe we are capable of conceptualizing what an entire systems reboot could be — and one that looks out for ALL the stakeholders.  Isn’t it time for a international summit on this?

I have been also chronicling the good too, but today that’s for another day. Come back tomorrow for my comprehensive list of 30 Good Things In The Film Biz 2014.

By detailing what we have failed to do, done wrong, or continue to ignore, we build a road map of how we can improve things for the future. Here’s my contribution to that map for 2014.  Let’s build this better together.

  1. The “Winners Take All” Blockbuster Model Has Stomped “The Long Tail” Flat (in Hollywood). And as much as I hoped people would try to resist
Categories
Issues and Actions

The Search For A New Business Model: Bond360 Offers Cinepacks

Check it out! As the site says:

“From BOND/360 labs, CinePacks brings together the best of independent cinema in “pay what you want” digital bundles, allowing fans to discover great films that share a common theme. Each curated collection allows audiences to experience films that explore the communities, people, and stories tapped into the zeitgeist of yesterday and today.”

Categories
Issues and Actions

How Well Is Online TVOD Working Right Now?

As a great compliment — whether planned or not — to Marc Schiller’s recent post on Current Trends On Indie Film Online Marketing And Distribution, VHX has released a nicely present set of stats on their platform including:

  • How Much?
  • Where?
  • How?

You have to check it out if you are in the Indie Film Biz.

Categories
Truly Free Film

What Issues Do Filmmakers Need To Track?

If filmmakers don't track core issues, they will find their form abandoned in the parking lotA 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 .

Categories
Truly Free Film

The Box Office Numbers for Favor

By Paul Osborne

TeaserPoster_WebSizedSmallThere’s been a recent battle-cry within the independent film community – lead by folks like Ted Hope and Jon Reiss – urging us filmmakers to publish the revenue generated by our movies, specifically in regard to new forms of distribution.  Unlike the weekly box office reports of studio films, the actual figures for indies, particularly those using newer release methods such as Video-On-Demand, are hard to come by.  Without them, and subsequently without any way of determining the success or failure of specific releases, it makes perfecting and improving new avenues of distribution quite difficult.   How do you know what’s working, and what’s not, if you don’t see the results?

Categories
Truly Free Film

10 Must Read Or Watch Film Biz Articles Of 2013

  1. Steven Soderbergh’s “State Of Cinema” Address at SFIFF56: http://vimeo.com/65060864. This served as the framing for AO Scott’s 2013 Cinema overview.
Categories
Truly Free Film

Without An Audience, It Can’t be Art!

By Emily Best

I hold this apparently really unpopular view that without an audience, it can’t be art. “Art” is a social label, a negotiation between the artist, the object (or performance) and the viewer.

This is history’s fault. Art was reserved for the rich or those with access to the rich. We didn’t see how it was made, conceived, choreographed, or staged until it appeared in front of us. And mostly, everyone liked it that way. Artists got to create with very little interference. Audiences had very little interaction with the artists or processes that created what they saw in museums, theaters, and on stage, so they were happy to pay their hard earned money to witness that “magic.”

But now we live in the age of the digital download.