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Everything is Fine (Maybe?)
No Other Land As I devoted more time and energy to the Filmmaker newsletter throughout the last decade-plus, I’d often find myself in some form of dialogue with producer, strategist and consultant Brian Newman. His invaluable Sub-genre newsletter arrives on Thursdays (now, biweekly), mine on Fridays, and, like me, he’ll often comment on the production and distribution challenges facing independent filmmakers in an increasingly commercialized, politically cautious and algorithmically-driven media landscape. So, many Fridays, I have found myself trying to add something new to Brian’s erudite musings on the topic of the week, often defaulting to just throwing him a link. But our conversations would span across many in-person encounters too, and in one, we somewhat jokingly speculated, “What if everything is fine?” Or, maybe not “fine,” but what if our creaky, beleaguered system of gatekeepers is working as it should? Every few months I’d bug Brian to write this for Filmmaker, and for this final issue of mine, he agreed. — Scott Macaulay
Look back at the history of Filmmaker Magazine, or of film blogs, newsletters, and now Substack, and you’ll find a lot of handwringing over the state of the business. There is a general sense that we’ve left the golden age of independent and specialty film, and that there exists a bigger problem – either you can’t fund artistic films, or you can’t make a career producing them, or you can’t get them picked up for distribution, or there are many good films that never get distributed at all, or audiences can’t find them once they do get distribution because they aren’t marketed correctly, or they get lost in the algorithm, or lost in the noise, or overlooked due to the competition for our attention from social media, gaming, or just plain old sleep, or what’s holding back the best films is a system of gatekeepers, or some combination of all of the above. I’ve been guilty of writing about some of these things myself, especially about those gatekeepers.
But maybe nothing is wrong, and everything is just fine. The industry works just about as well as it should. And part of how it works is to be found in the gatekeeping. Yes, that system we all love to hate might just be the most necessary part of the system. We are facing a flood of content, and no one, not even the most ardent cinephile, can keep up with the number of films being made. The festival programmers, acquisitions executives, sales agents, distributors, bookers for the theaters, and even the critics who all seem to “conspire” against certain films getting seen are also the ones who help find the gems and bring them to the attention of the audiences who quite frankly don’t have time to watch even one-tenth of the films these folks turn down.
There’s this notion out there that there are numerous films getting held back by this system of gates, but maybe that’s because many of the films that don’t break through aren’t bad (although let’s concede that some are bad), but they also aren’t quite good enough to make the cut. If we’re honest with ourselves, many of these “undiscovered gems” aren’t always polished enough. They’re maybe one degree off from where they could be, and someone had to make that judgement call – a call that no filmmaker will make about their own film, of course. Or maybe that film is perfectly made, but its appeal will be to a limited audience. Film fests, theaters and even Netflix don’t exist to only appeal to a small audience, all of them need large groups watching.
And if you’ve met a few gatekeepers, you’ll learn that none of them went into this to turn down films, but because they love and want to champion them. Often, they also answer to someone else, who they must convince to love a certain film, and that next layer of management might be more focused on the bottom line than the art, needing butts in seats or eyeballs on the screen to survive. All of them take chances and try to push their audiences to find something new, but you can only do this for so many films.
Curation is a buzzword, but part of curation involves turning down a certain number of quality films, not just selecting the best. Even sales agents, the people filmmakers (and I) love to hate the most, can only sell what the market will buy, which is probably why they turned down your film. They are simply curating what they believe might sell to other curators.
Maybe Netflix doesn’t have that movie you made, but they’ve got enough content that no one is unsubscribing anytime soon. And guess what? These days, any reasonable person can find almost any movie somewhere, if you just look hard enough. And every week, you can go watch an “undistributed” film being… distributed, by its filmmaker at some theater in almost any city. Call it DIY, or self-distribution, or direct-to-fan, or whatever you want, but even with gatekeepers, films find their way, albeit with a lot of hard work.
But… What about diversity, or gender equity? What about the films about Palestine, or critical of China that aren’t getting picked up by a major streamer due to (self-) censorship? Well, yes, we still have a lot of progress to make, and let’s also concede that we need more diversity among those first-line curators. But here again, we continue to come up with programs to address these issues, even with the current administration’s attacks on DEI, because this is a business, and there is a market for these films. Tubi has found a market for super low-budget, diverse films. Watermelon Pictures is making a business of distributing films showcasing Palestinians and Arabs. No Other Land, which famously couldn’t get a distributor, has now made about $3.6M at the box office, using a good theatrical booker. Public media is under attack, but foundations are rallying to keep POV and Independent Lens going, even if they will likely move to YouTube to serve their public. Films will keep finding their audience, despite how bad things are, apparently. And part of that is because of gatekeepers who keep fighting to bring them to your attention.
What’s wrong with this picture? Seemingly nothing, except that very few of us participating in it have built a sizable nest-egg so we can retire and continue to make and watch great films without a side-hustle. But that’s how it’s always been for all but a lucky few. It’s no harder to make a living from filmmaking than it is from any other artform. Or any harder to get an audience. And today, if you want to skip the gatekeeper, it’s easier than ever before, but you have to step outside of that system and go direct to the most sophisticated gatekeepers – the audience.
Everyone has a sophisticated camera, editing system, distribution and marketing device in their pockets today. Young creators making short films and building audiences don’t see themselves just as influencers, but as budding – or even established – studios in their own right. As they become stronger artists, they’re looking back at the history of the artform, discovering and excitedly sharing on TikTok clips of films by directors such as Sergei Parajanov, and are taking the artform in new directions, while also building exciting new business models and more participatory ways of interacting with their audiences. And because they’ve focused on their audience, they aren’t bemoaning the system of gatekeepers.
Of course, they’re also taking the audience’s attention away from other options and crowding the marketplace with even more films – making gatekeepers even more important in helping us sift through it all and find the best things to watch. But now these new gatekeepers, the new curators, are also creators/filmmakers who we trust more than the old ones. Perhaps we aren’t living at the end of a golden age, but just the continuum of a bright one, and maybe just maybe, the beginnings of a new one.
Sure, I partly jest – there are lots of issues to solve. But we’ve been trying to solve them since IFP (now The Gotham) and Filmmaker were founded, and we’ve been writing and reading about all of these little solutions, and finding the hidden gems together, with the rest of us who care about these things. A film professor once told me that a true optimist is always depressed because they want everything to be as perfect as their dreams, while a true pessimist is always happy because they know things could be worse. Maybe the film world just needs more true pessimists so we can all be happy with things being just the way they are.
