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State of the Indies, Part 2

By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago

Andrew O’Hehir’s annual survey of the year in indie film is up at Salon today. Consider it a companion to yesterday’s discussion of the best “undistributed” films of 2007. The big theme: the increasing dominance of studio indie arms (like Fox Searchight and Focus Features, which exist primarily because their parent companies want to win awards without actually having to take their attention away from their bread and butter tentpoles) is forcing “true” indies like Magnolia and IFC (which is still part of a huge corporation, but manages to operate under a curation strategy that’s more like MoMA than Miramax) to take risks, both in what they release and how they attempt to deliver it to an audience. Oh––and beware of iPods!

Ah, futurism. O’Herhir gives the impression that if the indie industry can’t figure out how to get anyone to see the legitimately good films that they have been distributing, their solution will be to basically scrap all that and start making content for the devices that they’re pretty sure kids are paying attention to instead (again with the kids!) Killer Films’ Christine Vachon acknowledges that iPods, “the YouTube universe and the whole notion of making things for cellphones” are forcing producers like herself to “shift with the times.”

Microcinema’s Joel Bachar takes it a step further: our devices have ruined our ability to respond to traditional content. “There’s this social-networking mentality; they’re Twittering, they’re blogging,” he says. “There’s more commitment to, you know, the experiential moment, and not much commitment to longer moments.”

Interesting. I’m going to go back to Twittering about the three 3-hour films that are sure to make my 2007 Top Ten while you ponder it.

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Indies

Four Eyed Monsters’ Arin on Social Networking and Film Exhibition

By Karina Longworth posted 2 years ago

CinematicalIndie has a lengthy interview with Arin Crumley of Four Eyed Monsters fame, and in an unusual twist, Arin has made a video of his side of the conversation, which Cinematical’s Erik Davis has posted alongside a partial transcription.

Arin and Erik cover a lot of ground–an explanation of how Arin and Susan racked up so much debt, the pros and cons of putting your feature film up on YouTube, the dynamic between Arin and Susan’s business relationship and thier personal relationship–but I was particularly interested in this segment, where Arin talks about the potential role for social networking sites in the distribution/exhibition process. (I swear, I’m not excerpting this just because Arin has a lot of nice things to say about Spout):

If you look at Spout and the way their site works … one of the ways I use is I kind of organize the films I plan to see…Netflix is no good because that’s just if the film is available on DVD, and some are not available yet. So what I do on Spout, there’s a button next to every film, you search that film, you find it, you hit the button that says I want to see this film. So if you project ahead to either their site, or other sites, or who knows who might build this tool…but the concept of being able to store and publicly share your interest in movies–and if you can also be publicly sharing your location, which of course changes from time to time–there could be an intelligent system that knows what people want to see. And because of digital projection, you could really be showing anything on a screen, you’re not limited to what film prints were mailed to you…theoretically, you should be able to have a theatrical jukebox, where anything can be shown there. It’s just a matter of, “Well, what do people want to see?”

Transcribing from YouTube is no fun, and the whole interview is really worth ingesting, so just watch it yourself (or, as Arin suggests, listen while you work–it is, after all, about 49 minutes longer than your average YouTube clip). And if for whatever reason you still haven’t signed up for Spout, go here, start a free account, and Arin and Susan will be able to subtract one more dollar from their mountain of debt.

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Indies