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CineSource Collective Narrative
Studios Booming / Indie Houses Bombing The fiftieth anniversary of Shadows, John Cassavetes’s groundbreaking 1959 film, has passed without so much as a “Boo!” Meanwhile, the big studios are booming and the indie houses are bombing.
About interracial relations among Manhattan beatniks — could it be more timely — Shadows was one of the earliest indies and it took the 1960 Venice Film Festival by storm, earning the Critic’s Award. The same year in Cannes, François Trufaut's 400 Blows dominate. To fund Shadows, Cassavetes corralled friends, family, and listeners to a late-night, New York talk show, "Night People," an innovative idea that deserves reexamination. Unfortunately, Shadows only snuck back into the US as an import from European distributors and garnered negligible box office numbers.
Fifty years later, the independent distributers who might be bringing us a new Shadows have largely closed up, from Warner Independent to New Line and the Wienstiens, while the studios are doing a stratospheric business, with tickets sales headed for 11.2 billion, 16% over last year and the greatest film year in history! And they are achieving this largely without megastar blockbusters, many of which, like Eddie Murphy's Imagine That did poorly or much worse then expected.
But all is not lost, according to Kevin Brown, of Likewise Media, a DVD manufacturing plant in El Cerrito, CA. “Songs you can listen to ten, even hundreds of times, but movies — like what, once or twice maximum for most people,” Brown told me in an interview at CineSource, West Oakland. “So you need lots of movies, especially for those specialty audiences who are not otherwise well served.”
Brown focuses on the African American market, as does Lawrence Holliday, see Holliday Entertainment, who has produced the sexy Big Things Happen In The Bay, starring Kat Willaims, and Asphalt Graffiti, a doc about the Oakland automotive art form called ” “Sideshows.” Also known as making “donuts,” it involves braking and accelerating while twisting the wheel, and it leaves those circular skids you may have seen across intersections. To see another cute little doc on it: Street Muscle: Oakland Car Clubs.
CineSource writer, Gus Manos, doubles down on Brown and Holliday in "Finding Financing," his upcoming article for CineSource (Sep09), with a companion piece "Thinking Like Funders" only on the web, in CineSource’s brand new “C Stories,” coming this week. Certainly, if less then rich African Americans can do it, cash can be found for other large niche audiences. Following the Cassavetes system, Manos notes, “(f)inancing usually requires cobbling together funds from several sources… and many indie producer/directors simply take it upon themselves, soaking friends and relatives or running up credit card debt, simply to get something to show.”
“You can talk all day long and hand people scripts,” indie director/producer Julie Rubio told CineSource in her Apr08 interview, “But if the people investing in you can’t see it, it’s not tangible. And they don’t know your angle on the story, the look of the film… make it real and you’re halfway there.” Rubio has just reedited her freshman outing, the sexy and stylish Six Sex Scenes and a Murder, with Steve Mirkovich, an A-List L.A. editor of The Passion of the Christ and Darkness Falls, among others. And she starting her second feature, Mass Pleasures, next month, with Oakland standing in for Hawaii in many scenes.
To get actual funding, “real money,” Manos recommends classes from the Producers Guild, the San Francisco Film Society (SFFS), which recommends “Think like a funders” the inspiration for his upcoming "C Stories" piece, or the Institute for International Film Financing (IIFF). According to Thomas Trenker, the founder and director, the institute holds seminars from LA to Lucerne and their events target both filmmakers and financiers alike, operating on the premise that both sides stand to benefit from a better understanding of each other’s needs.
But making the flick is not enough, you have to promote and sell it. This requires enough ink and action in the real world to trigger DVD sales. Nowadays, many floggers say cut back on expensive ads in old media and focus on direct personal contact as well as the internet.
Indeed, the soon to be released Age of Stupid is an epic from McLibel director Franny Armstrong. Stupid stars Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite as the sole survivor in climate catastrophied 2055, looking at footage from 2008 and wondering: Why were we so damned stupid? New ideas are often considered crank until accepted hence they invariably need new modes of financing. Stupid was done with 228 shareholders raising a total of $748,000. Similarly, it will open alternatively, with a 400-theater single-night event, which features an appearance by Radiohead. Moreover, in England you can download it, pay a license fee and show it on your 42” flat for your own profit. It’s a whole new world out there, so we may as well be getting used to it.
Empire Film Group out of Malibu, an indie distribution company, emerging to take the place of the fallen giants, says seven theatrical releases will drive a record quarter of their video sales for 2010, estimated at over 50 million. Those DVDs include "War Eagle, Arkansas," a family drama now in theatres, as well as "The Secret of Kells," an acclaimed animated feature, and "Thru The Moebius Strip," a $16 million, animated 3D sci-fi. "The acquisition and release of completed film and video properties has proven to be an especially wise business model for Empire," said Dean Hamilton-Bornstein, Empire CEO, which is pretty surprising since the studios say DVD sales have fallen.
Meanwhile, Animazoo announced it is starting Chechnya’s first motion capture system, using an IGS-190 full body motion capture suit, at a new Ministry of Culture initiative near Chechnya’s capital Grozny, which was left in ruins not once but twice in the last fifteen years by the Russian Army. According to obviously romantic Magomed Elgarayev, the current studio head, it has ‘no rivals’ in Russia, a situation abetted by its bilingual French, Spanish and Italian support staff.
So farm it out or make it underground, the indie feature, narrative, doc or anime, will always have a place in the cinema firament. If only it could be shot up there instead of laboriously Everest-assaulted, rope in teeth.