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