Scott Kirsner (Cinematech, Variety) is ever-present at the point where film and technology meet. Now he’s involved in co-hosting a “two-day conversation… about the future of cinema, video, games, and telling stories with new media.”
Longtime YouTube hater Mark Cuban, writing two days before the video site’s new Screening Room launch was announced, predicted that fast-growing Hulu will eventually put YouTube out of business. “The Youtube business model is broken and there is no light at the end of the tunnel as they are currently constructed,” he blogged. Because Hulu has the right to put ads on every clip and not, like YouTube, not just those produced by “partners”, “the more traffic Hulu generates, the more money it makes. The more traffic Youtube generates, the more money it loses.” I’ll be interested to see how he responds to Screening Room; if skeptical, he’d hardly be alone. Some links:
“In all the coverage in the blogosphere, no one has mentioned that this is the exact same thing AtomFilms did for 10 years, and it didn’t work for them,” writes Chris Albrecht, a former Atom employee, at NewTeeVee. And why didn’t it work? “YouTube has a much more massive scale than Atom could have ever dreamed of, but that doesn’t change the fundamental situation. People prefer farts being lit on fire to artsy short films.”
Another potential issue: much of the content that will be screening in the Room has been seen elsewhere. Two of the four films available at launch were pulled from the first issue of Wholphin, and according to the Wholphin blog, “Another dozen Wholphin films have been selected to appear in the Screening Room throughout the year.” Also of note: the Miguel Arteta/Miranda July short Are You The Favorite Person of Anybody?, a Wholphin title which was pitched in YouTube’s press release about the Room, has been on YouTube for almost two years.
Scott Kirsner has some suggestions for how filmmakers can make the most out of their Screening Room deals, recommending that they “post in the YouTube comments area, so YouTube users feel you are a real, accessible human being — not some remote big-shot director!”
Maybe Cuban can’t see the light at the end of YouTube’s tunnel, but Silicon Alley Insider can. “Google famously hasn’t figured out how to sell ads in the video stream itself, though it keeps promising that it will. Doesn’t matter…their most lucrative opportunities, so far, haven’t been in the videos themselves but on the real estate surrounding it.”
In his round-up of the various stories on Matt Dentler leaving SXSW for Cinetic, David Hudson pays tribute to Dentler’s years at the festival. “As I’ve said here in the past, any history of American independent cinema in the 00s is going to have to include a passage on the impact of Matt’s smarts, instincts and sheer guts as a programmer.” David also links to Scott Kirsner, who has some reservations about the digital division of Cinetic that will becomes Dentler’s new home, at least in terms of its potential attractiveness to filmmakers.
Meetings and podcast experimentation have kept me away from the computer screen for much of the day, so I’m just now getting around to watching a clip that Scott Kirsner posted early this morning at CinemaTech. It’s an interview with Mark Stern, who owns and operates a budding chain called the Big Picture Theaters. Located in a Seattle mini-mall but inspired by the “hip boutique hotels” of Studio 54 impressario Ian Schrager, the Big Picture reflects an attempt to revitalize the exhibition business by offering a luxury option. Stern’s screening rooms are equipped with Tempurpedic seats and digital projectors; you can order a martini from your seat, and hang out in a lounge and play pool after the show.
Stern’s got a lot of interesting things to say, but my takeaway was this quote about how he’s able to compete with the Cineplex Odeon across the street: “It’s like having two girls. One is pretty fair-looking, and one is beautiful. Cineplex Odeon, you look at it, and it’s a fair-looking girl. And if you go to the prom, and you have your choice between the two girls, would you rather have the beautiful girl, or the fair-looking girl? They’re both sitting right next to each other, and you can actually have your choice.”
According to Scott Kirsner, today is the 25th anniversary of the release of Tron, the groundbreaking Disney film that served, as Kirsner puts it “as the “shot heard ’round the world” for computer-generated visual effects.” Kirsner recently interviewedTron director Steven Lisberger, who notes that in spite of the innovation Tron represented, at the time Disney compared his film unfavorably to another 1982 release:
Tron was nominated for two Academy Awards, in sound and costume design. But it wasn’t nominated for Best Visual Effects.
“We found out that the statement that was made was that we had cheated when we used computers,” [Lisberger] said.
[...] Lisberger said that when ET came out a few weeks before Tron, Disney executives told him they wished ‘Tron’ had turned out more warm and fuzzy… like ET. (ET won the Best Visual Effects Oscar for 1982.)
In honor of Tron, feast your eyes on this infamous deleted scene from the film, in which Yori takes Tron back to her “very illegal” private quarters, where they can “talk.”
CinemaTech’s Scott Kirsner has posted a video interview with animator M dot Strange, whose feature We Are The Strange screened at Sundance this year. Strange is using YouTube as a major attention-getter for his work; he tells Kirsner that the site give him the opportunity “to create brand evangelists, crazy super-fanboys…that have the power of 1,000 regular people.” Some other highlights:
On the source of his pseudonym: “Before, I was making films under a different name, and people would see them and say, “I don’t know, it’s kind of strange.” So I had to put it in my name to make it obvious, so that people cannot say, ‘Oh that’s strange’ — it’s supposed to be, that’s the guy’s name.”
On his “Film Skool” series of lectures on YouTube: “I didn’t go to film school, but from what people are telling me, there are students who are actually at NYU right now, who watch my videos, because I talk about things like inspiration, and having a cause…so it’s like intangible stuff. It’s about how to be an artist and be creative and keep going in a world that constantly doubts you.”
On not fitting into traditional distribution models: “At Sundance, it was pretty much like, there was this build-up, and then once a large population of 50-year-old people walked out and asked for their money back, that pretty much scared all the distributors.”
And that’s just the first seven minutes. The whole thing is worth a look–and I love the funky, 70s-porn intro music.
Spout invited Scott Kirsner (Cinematech), Ry Russo-Young (Orphans), Lance Weiler (Head Trauma, The Workbook Project) and Alison Willmore (IFC News) to come and talk. We like their minds and think they’re really tapped into the future of filmmaking and what the new distribution “sledgehammer” will be.
While I gather my final thoughts on the 
