From working in the camera department, I can still picture vividly some of the worn-down bodies I observed between takes: DPs, camera operators, ACs, grips and electricians standing at slightly odd angles, gripping their lower backs with one hand like a scissor jack propping up their spines. Whenever a fellow assistant or operator passed me a rig I didn’t have enough strength to hold properly, I would feel my lower back compensating in a way I knew it shouldn’t, and it wasn’t hard for me to understand that that strain might stick around if I kept it up. I heard […]

Film business sprang back to life in Cannes this year, with nary a peep from the usual “sky is falling” fearmongers. After two years of virtual markets, dealmakers were thrilled that premiering films could be watched together with international audiences, meetings could be done in person with near-full film slates and projects could be negotiated across territories with support from a multitude of producers. As UTA Independent Film Group’s John McGrath said on a panel at the American Pavilion, festivals and in-person marketplaces create the kind of urgency that drives deals and business. Indeed, there hasn’t been such an abundance […]

In 2018, I wrote a version of this article1 that treated the exhibition dominance of Digital Cinema Packages (DCP) as a historic certainty. Technology had advanced enough where the cost and/or ability to create a DCP were no longer considered a burden for independent filmmakers. As always with historic certainty, history happened: The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed the widespread adoption of virtual film festivals. Separately, the call for justice and equality led to the widespread adoption of accessibility features for films. These concurrent developments, combined with the decline of the theatrical market and technological obsolescence, have created an environment that can […]

While most producers these days are worried about the latest CPI number—that’s the Cinematic Price Index—one group of filmmakers is, somewhat paradoxically, not: those working on the lower end of the microbudget, or “no-budget,” continuum, producing finished features for the very low five figures. For them, production is retrofitted from whatever money can be raised, and if the price of gas goes up, well, the shoot just has to make do with less in another area. Among such filmmakers, there’s perhaps no one whose model is as stripped-down as Pete Ohs, who recently premiered his latest work, the well-received Jethica, […]

Crew bases depleted as streamer production gobbles up film and television labor, COVID safety departments continuing to add costs, and then there’s the price of gas—as U.S. production roars back following the 2020 shutdowns, producers in the independent sector are facing new budgetary challenges. In the face of rising costs and labor shortages, budgets for projects on ice since 2019 require revision, and the sticker shock is significant. Whether or not these increases are, to use economic parlance, transitory or persistent, they are right now making life more challenging for independent producers.  To put it bluntly: Independent features are getting […]

In February 2020, I attended a screening of Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems at Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema, a venue widely known and admired among film enthusiasts for its devotion to celluloid exhibition. I was awestruck by the exquisite 35mm presentation of a movie I had previously—like everyone else in the world—only seen projected digitally, and even more astonished when I spoke with the Safdie brothers afterward and learned how simple it was for them to strike a flawless 35mm print from their digital source. Back in 2005, when I directed Bad Reputation, a microbudget horror movie shot […]