Earlier this week I posted “15 Lessons for Producers from the Cannes Film Festival and Market.” With the festival and market now firmly in the rear-view mirror, the consensus is that it was a solid one for the international sales community, without, perhaps that one giant locomotive title but with an appropriately modest number of films hitting their ask prices. Tastes were noted to have shifted, with buyers wanting “more Jennifer Lawrence and less Sylvester Stallone.” And on the pure indie level, I noticed, as I wrote in my piece on producers, a new crop of American independents have figured […]
Right now the answer is not entirely clear. The Xbox One, which was unveiled in a presentation last week, represents Microsoft’s latest bid for domination of the living room through a single multipurpose device. It’s not a complete reinvention of the Xbox brand, but it integrates and advances several technologies Microsoft has been working on over the years. Microsoft’s accompanying efforts to expand away from hardcore gaming into other areas of entertainment such as streaming video make it a viable contender to the PS4, Apple TV, and other devices/platforms. Here’s the video of the device’s entire reveal. The discussion of […]
Filmmaker and cinematographer Nandan Rao co-founded Simple Machine, an online distribution platform that connects filmmakers with non-theatrical exhibition venues. In this guest editorial, he advocates that we stop looking to others for our exhibition opportunities and invent them ourselves. — SM We Don’t Fit Into Their Business Model “The arthouse theater” is a business like any other and right now it obviously can’t afford to promote new and challenging independent cinema, not in the face of made-up fees and conversion expenses implemented by bigger, sneakier businesses. Their primary concern is getting bodies into seats and keeping the silver-haired donors happy […]
With all the discussion about the future of Kickstarter in recent weeks, it may be appropriate that a film that began its campaign at the beginning of the crowdfunding movement is finally coming out this Saturday. The Cosmonaut — a Spanish-made English-language film directed by Nicolás Alcalá and produced by Carola Rodriguez and Bruno Teixidor — raised over €300,000 from 5,000 contributors. It was the first crowdfunded film in Spain and helped pave the way for the foundation of Lánzanos, Spain’s Kickstarter equivalent. The Cosmonaut will be available to watch for free on Saturday on the film’s website; the DVD, theatrical […]
“I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists in Washington that their days of setting the agenda are over.” Guess who said these memorable words? In November 2007, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama uttered this now all-but-forgotten campaign promise. The president recently announced his plan to appoint Tom Wheeler (above), a true industry insider, to head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Wheeler is a career water carrier for corporate interests. He served as head of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) from 1979 and 1984, and ran the Cellular Telecom and Internet Association (CTIA) from 1992 through 2004. […]
This is a plea, of sorts, to the growing number of online platforms that wish to become a lasting link in the indie film value chain: please consider the interoperability of your systems. Increasingly, platforms do not require exclusivity, which is fantastic and frees filmmakers to release their films on multiple online/digital outlets at the same time. However, with the ever-increasing number of platforms comes more work for the filmmaker. Codecs, formats, resolutions, subtitles, audio specs, frame rates, aspect ratios — all of these are defined in platform requirements to ensure your video is compatible with their system. Then there […]
At his Hope for Film blog, producer and San Francisco Film Society executive director identifies and speculates on 17 current conditions of the film business, prompting us to consider how we’ll consequently evolve our own practices to take them into account. The post accompanies the launch of the SFFS’s A2E (Artist 2 Entrepreneur) program, a new pilot program “designed to give filmmakers the necessary entrepreneurial skills to achieve a sustainable creative life amidst this changing paradigm.” (It was this weekend, but you can read the schedule here.) I’m particularly interested in Hope’s point number four, below, in which he writes […]
One of the most frustrating things about covering film festivals is making discoveries that few movie lovers will ever see. Filmmaking is an industry after all, and as such, artistry will always play second fiddle to marketability. Even so, I was quite surprised to learn that one of my favorite films from the 2011 edition of the prestigious Karlovy Vary International Film Festival never found U.S. theatrical distribution. Surely someone could have figured a way to sell a John Turturro-starring, NYC-set story about two lost souls on opposite ends of an adult chat line? (Especially considering Turturro last year appeared […]
Louise Levison, a longtime movie industry watcher, found that 2012 was a deceptively good year for indies. Writing at Baseline Intelligence, she noted “independent box office in North America in 2012 was $4.5 billion and 41.7% of the $10.8 billion total.” She warns, “the one film that I feel made the 2012 indie percentage an anomaly is The Hunger Game.” It grossed $408 million in domestic sales and, without it, the indie share would be 37 percent, in line with what she calculates as the historical annual average of indie films of 35 percent for the period of 2000 to 2011. […]
Since I co-founded the distribution platform OpenIndie in 2009, the direct-to-fan model has matured into an attractive alternative to traditional distribution deals. Theatrical options in particular have increased dramatically, and success stories have grown from the few to the many. Having moved on from OpenIndie earlier this year, I will be writing a series of articles for Filmmaker on the new ways in which technology can enable distribution for independent filmmakers. In this first post, I’ll reflect on the theatrical space, highlight a range of the available crowdsourced theatrical platforms, and discuss their differences and the opportunities they present for filmmakers. The […]