Things really are being made increasingly more accessible. Sure – there are issues growing within the already established ways of doing things, but the concept of embracing the current unconventional is just so super exciting to me! People are not only finding new outlets available for themselves, but they’re actually being able to utilize them, when that never was even an option for so many of them before. I think that’s pretty damn fabulous!
If filmmakers are able to get their work distributed via streaming or VOD services, it’ll be so cool to watch what happens to both sides of that division: to movie theaters and the distribution systems that support them, pricing of tickets (which has just gotten so ridiculous in my current neck of the woods—ugh!), how filmmaking in general and independent filmmaking specifically will evolve and adapt, and how many new filmmakers will find their audiences and continue on to make more movies and hopefully a real name for themselves.
Ah, the scent of possibility … delicious.
with passion & gratitude
— jb
(Article originally published on VanityFair.com)
Sundance 2011 Dispatch: Could Netflix Ever Replace This Festival?
by John Lopez January 21, 2011
Sundance can be equal parts glittering and ascetic. Thursday night, as industry insiders lined up for a midnight screening of festival selection Silent House, fedora-flaunting revelers boozed it up to beats from Snoop at Park City’s watering hole, Harry O.’s. More and more, the cinema-industrial complex is coming to rely on Sundance as the means to catch eyeballs for any film with a budget scantier than, say,
The Dark Knight Rises. It feels like the Sundance pedigree increasingly means quite a lot, as filmmakers fight for the American public’s fractured attention span. Last year’s festival, under the return-to-its-roots ethos of new festival director John Cooper, proved that you can program eclectically
and connect with broader audiences, with films like
Cyrus, Blue Valentine,and
Winter’s Bone. In fact, Globe-winner and Oscar contender
The Kids Are All Right started out at Sundance 2010.“If you’re in the specialty distribution business, festivals are more critical than ever to the success of any film,” Sundance Selects president Jonathan Sehring told us. “With Sundance being the most important American film festival, and one of the five most important film festivals in the world, it’s stature especially for American independent cinema is second to none.” Now that studios have largely shuttered or clipped the wings of their specialty divisions, Sundance Selects and its sister company IFC Films are among the few smaller companies trying to pick up the slack. They believe that not every movie has to be a four-quadrant release (to use the term that describes
Iron Man 2 being poised to appeal to everyone ages four to 98). But when even studios have a hard time raising cash from investors left spooked by the recession, getting anything other than a comic-book movie made in a profitable way feels like a miracle. The studio economics of wide-releasing don’t work for smaller films. However, combining the Sundance pedigree with new ways of getting films to audiences may be the lifeline that indie films need. For a second year, Sundance Selects has five films from the festival that may never see the inside of an Omaha movie theater, but will be available on-demand nationwide —Brendan Fletcher’s
Mad Bastards, Michael Tully’s
Septien, Paul Mariano and Kurt Norton’s
These Amazing Shadows, Joe Swanberg’s
Uncle Kent ,and Gregg Araki’s
Kaboom. “The economics of film distribution are in flux, the economics of independent filmmaking are in flux—digital technology has helped lower the production costs and enabled a lot more filmmakers to make movies,” Sehring says. “Right now, the cable VOD platform and, down the road, the Internet are going to be great ways for independent filmmakers to find their audiences.” Joe Swanberg’s Sundance debut
Uncle Kent is case in point. Swanberg’s made a name for himself along with the likes of the Duplass brothers and Andrew Bujalski, as one of the scions in the Mumblecore movement—(according to Sehring, they Mumblecoreans a a little tired of the name, which might be perceived as slightly denigrating, but what can you do?). In films like
