Everywhere I’ve gone at this festival, the conversation — the obsession, really — has been about “new distribution models.” If you listen up, there’s some awfully excited chatter. Independent filmmakers are going to take control of their destiny! They’re going to forge new strategies! They’re going to make the technology work for them! They’re going to self-distribute! They’re going to plan out how to market their movie before the movie has even been made! (Think I’m kidding? I’ve heard that one several times.) They’re going to take a good hard look at the increasingly marginalized and battered — not to mention cash-poor — landscape of independent film and figure out how to impose themselves on that landscape, to make if work for them, by hook or by crook.
I honor their efforts, and I believe in them, too; if I were a filmmaker, I’d be saying, and doing, the exact same thing. But since I’m not a filmmaker, I can afford to stand back and say that my own excitement about the newly spartan and precarious, technologically fixated, catch-as-catch-can world of indie-film distribution is tempered by a profound ambivalence. It comes down to this: When people talk about “new distribution models,” most of what they’re referring to is innovative new ways to watch movies on television, over the Internet, on your iPad, etc. And before we even get into the possibilities and promises of all that, which are undeniably immense, there’s a voice in my head, a loud and passionate one that shouts, beyond reason: No! What you’re really talking about is giving up the theatrical experience! The shared experience! You’re giving up the dream of what movies are! And you’re daring to call that a revolution!
Okay, I just had to get that out of my system. Now let’s talk about the real world. READ FULL STORY »
