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THE SAME OLD STORY…
There’s not much new in this Bloomberg story about the indie film scene. Too many films have been made, distributors are shutting down, and the whole indie-film economy is out of whack. It’s just another one of these recaps being narrated not in Variety or Filmmaker but in the mainstream business media, and the constant retelling of this tale has to be having an effect on potential film investors. Gone are the stories of filmmakers hitting gold with their low-budget labor-of-loves. Those have been replaced with tales like this one, from the lede:
The 55-year-old filmmaker borrowed $170,000 to complete “Lady Magdalene’s,” a comedy about an Internal Revenue Service agent assigned to manage a legal Nevada brothel in tax default, he says. He hasn’t found a distributor, and the home in Pahrump, Nevada, he planned to sell isn’t worth enough to cover the debt.
“Our backup was going to be the equity we had in real estate, and that equity has been wiped out,” Schulman said in an interview. Given the film’s potential commercial appeal, “You’d think distributors would be coming to us.”
