Writing in Salon,
Andrew O'Hehir captures what a lot of people are thinking: it wasn't a bad year for movies, but when it comes to independents, the long-form theatrical experience may be on its way out. There are no grand conclusions here, but O'Hehir talks to the right people -- IFC's Jonathan Sehring, Killer Films' Christine Vachon, Milos Stehlik of Facets -- in his attempt to assess the healthiness of independents surviving on the other side of the mini-major divide.
An excerpt:
Milos Stehlik, director of the Chicago-based video distributor and art-house proprietor Facets Multi-Media (which occasionally dabbles in theatrical distribution as well), has been observing the transformation of the indie-film niche for many years. The studio specialty divisions, he says, "release a lot of good movies, and that's terrific. But they are the big gorillas in this little pond, and the way they can play the economics is very different. If something doesn't work, they can absorb the loss. When something does work, they can maximize it and reap the payoff. Their business model is very different from anything a true independent with meager resources can muster."
So the mini-major studios are implacably shoving the genuine indie distributors out of the marketplace they created; isn't that just capitalism at work? Beyond empathizing with a few people's bruised egos and disordered career paths, why should you care about this? That's an open question, but my own hunch is that, Into Great Silence aside, certain kinds of unconventional and demanding films, the ones the specialty divisions don't know how to package and present as spiritually beneficial holiday fare, will get driven even further under the radar than they are already. In my conversation with Stehlik, we began wondering whether filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky and Krzysztof Kieslowski (not that they were ever so wildly popular) would even get noticed if they were working today.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 12/20/2007 06:50:00 PM
Comments (1)
Totally agree that indie filmmakers are finding it harder and harder to raise their budgets in the face of overwhelming studio dominace and their preoccupation with vacuous fare.
Kieslowski always had a friendly Polish government on his side to not only help him create cinematic masterpieces but a brilliantly cinematic tv series in dekalouge too...
I'm a filmmaker in exactly this position, government funding in Australia, whistles and bells hanging off my script but still difficult to raise a budget for a challenging indie film.
Rather than sit on my hands i created www.indiemaverick.net to bring together filmmakers and investors to raise budgets for challenging indie films that were finding it difficult to funding elsewhere.
Check out the site. Support the filmmakers. Add a film and raise your budget. Or stand by other filmmakers by investing in challenging, thought provoking projects.
If we want to see indie films survive then we need to put our money where our mouths are.
I've started the storm, but it takes good people like yourselves to help good cinema proliferate.
hope to see you at the site.
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posted by shanethall @ 12/26/2007 5:51 PM
