Just before the New Year Roger Ebert wrote a piece entitled "I'll Tell You Why Movie Theater Revenue is Dropping," where he gave six reasons for the downtick in movie attendance. Now, the "box office is down" story pops up nearly every year, and you can debate it different ways. David Poland, for example, frequently points out that movie-theater attendance isn't the sole barometer of the health of the film business, and that new viewing platforms can't help but cannibalize older ones. But Ebert isn't wrong that for many people, seeing movies in the theaters isn't what it used to be. (Andrew Sullivan has been on this topic too, quoting from readers for whom theaters can't beat their home experience.)

Brian Newman wrote about all this recently, opening his piece, "Rejecting the Movie Theater Argument," like this: "It's time I come out - and admit that I no longer care about seeing films on the big screen at the movie theater." Before I can argue with Brian, because I do try to see movies on the big screen at the movie theater, he catches me out with this line: "Film critics, film industry and almost every single person I know who is apoplectic about people watching films outside of the theater are missing a key point - that they don't (usually) watch such films the same way that others do. Nope. They watch them in private screening rooms rented by distributors and publicists. Or they watch them at film festivals."

Okay, that's me. My job requires me to see films early, so, yes, most of the time I do so at a festival or a press screening. I rarely go to the commercial cinema because many times I've already seen the films or because I've seen so many other movies that week that I'd rather just read a book. But I do go sometimes. And while I agree with complaints about the experience shared by both Newman and Ebert (ticket and concession prices being too high, for example), there's something less tangible that puts me off. Ebert kind of gets at it when he labels "the theater experience" as part of the problem, but I don't think it's only about the texters (who, frankly, don't bother me so much) or the long lines (which do). It's just these days there can be something junky and low-rent about the experience -- and low-rent not in an enjoyably trashy way but in a hollow, soul-less, corporatized way. I guess I'm finding that the giant lobby cards, video games, commercials and mind-battering onslaught of trailers distracts from my viewing. Maybe I'm just too used to the less-intrusive aesthetics of screening rooms, or the warmer, more culturally-apt vibe of a Film Forum, IFC Center or Alamo Drafthouse. Or maybe I'm just thinking about all this because I went to see Hugo the other day at the Regal Union Square. I liked (but did not love) the movie, and wondered if the aesthetic frisson of its various contradictions (older filmmaker using the newest 3D digital technology to build a bridge with the past and reawaken the spirit of Melies for a newer generation for whom moviegoing is a declining pleasure) was undermined for me by the frame the theater placed around it. As I walked out of the theater, past all those lobby cards, I could already feel the film being subsumed within the weight of its own nostalgia.

There's more to be said here, but at least half the time these newsletters are just sketches, and this is one of those. But I need to write more about independent filmmakers' continued fixation on theatrical, and the positive but also negative outcomes of that fixation.

What else? I just subscribed to The Rumpus's new "Letters in the Mail." For $5 a month you get three or four letters in the mail from writers like Stephen Elliott, Margaret Cho and Jonathan Ames. I did this despite never being one for letter-writing. (Email, including this newsletter, is different.) But even though I'm more an internet person I'm interested in things like art based on scarcity and an avoidance of the 'net. I'll let you know what the letters are like.

Finally, a personal plug for Madeline Olnek's Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, opening Friday at Brooklyn's reRun Theater. It was one of our "Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You" Gotham nominees, and I could tell you about how wittily the film incorporates genre tropes and reinvents a New Queer Cinema aesthetic... but maybe I'll just quote one of our jury members, who in deliberation for the nominees remarked, "There's something to be said about a film that just makes you happy." Go see it.

See you next week.

Best,
Scott Macaulay
Editor

IFP LABS: ALUMS SINGLED OUT IN THE NEW YORK TIMES In a recent New York Times article., New Directors Flesh Out Black America, All of It, writer Nelson George posits the notion of a new wave of black cinema, singling out recent and upcoming films that are "the most visible example of the mini-movement of young black filmmakers telling stories that complicate assumptions about what "black film" can be by embracing thorny issues of identity, alienation and sexuality;" films with points of view that "expand the palette of images for black American filmmakers." The five primary films cited - Dee Rees' Gotham Award-winning Pariah, Alrick Brown's Kinyarwanda, Andrew Dosunmu's Restless City, Victoria Mahoney's Yelling to the Sky, and Rashaad Ernesto Green's Gun Hill Road are all alumni projects of IFP programs - with the first four having gone through IFP's Independent Filmmaker Labs in 2010, and Gun Hill Road a 2010 No Borders selection of Independent Film Week's Project Forum. With the 2010 and 2011 "graduates" of these programs making their way in the world, a new group of emerging filmmakers and projects supported by IFP in 2012 will also begin the process of building their foundations for success. Applications for the 2012 Independent Filmmaker Labs for narrative and documentary films - supporting first time feature filmmakers - will be available in mid-January. More information here.
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