The Screengrab : independent film

Movie Audiences No Longer Necessary For Movie Success

Leonard Pierce — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:30:00 GMT

In these days of economic uncertainty, we've brought you many a blog post about how the sudden unavailability of cash infusions will impact the independent film industry. It's difficult verging on impossible to get any kind of consensus (fewer film festivals will be bad news because it will mean fewer chances for a movie to break out/fewer film festivals will be good news because it will sift the wheat from the chaff; independent film is dead because there's not enough money to take a chance on anything but a sure thing/independent film will thrive because it will become truly independent again and not rely on studio money and mass marketing), and contrarianism is the rule of the day.

Want proof? Take a look at this post from the excellent Poverty Jet Set blog, in which the question is posed: how important is an audience to the success of an film, anyway? Inspired by the lamentations of Project Pedal over their inability to draw millions of online viewers to clips from their upcoming documentary feature For Thousands of Miles, it seems like an absurd question: and yet, and yet..."In this age of mass amateurization and instant worldwide publication," argues Mark Schoneveld, "it doesn't matter how many people watch your videos, but rather, the quality of the folks who watch." After all, he notes, there are YouTube clips that draw in tens of millions of viewers -- but it's purely for the sake of ephemeral novelty, and few if any transform their YouTube fame into money, a career, or anything that will amount to more than a whatever-happened-to moment on VH1 sometime in 2018.

Of course, as elegantly as it's argued at Poverty Jet Set, this idea is nothing new. The notion that one should adjust one's thinking to relinquish the desire that mass audiences will suddenly develop the taste and sophistication needed to make millionaires out of genuinely meaningful artists in favor of the desire that you'll simply impress enough discerning people that one of them will throw some patronage your way has been around at least since the time of Shakespeare, and there's hardly an artistic genre that hasn't had this debate even in the pre-internet era. The only surprising thing is that it's still a lesson that needs to be learned instead of an axiom that needs only to be followed.

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Indie Film: Back from the Dead Already!

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

As you know if you've been following this blog for a while, independent film is dead. All hail independent film! Yes, as is always the case when someone walks the streets in a doomsaying sandwich board, there is someone immediately following in his footsteps with brightly colored pamplets about how you, yes, YOU can cash in big on doomsday-related futures! Oh, sure, a few people might say that this sort of the-king-is-dead-long-live-the-king stuff might just be an indicator of how the king's prognosis probably wasn't as dire as it was made out to be, but they're just the sort of Johnny Level-Heads who won't be making any money as the Jason Voorhees-like corpse of independent film is resurrected for the fifteenth time.

As part of their ongoing coverage of New York's Independent Film Week, IndieWire has brought in producer, distributor, and all-around insider Peter Broderick to assure us that independent film isn't dead after all – it's just a Brave New World. Part One of the series focuses on Broderick's dissent at Mark Gill's notably grim keynote address, where Gill described independent film financing as standing on the verge of a massive collapse which he compared to a medieval plague. Broderick argues that this is an old-world perspective, ignoring such new distribution angles as the internet, direct DVD sales, split rights, video on demand, and target-marketed fundraising. He provides useful charts and graphs, and even gives us ten basic principles of modern film distribution that makes it superior to the 'Old World' system, which he agrees is collapsing like a dying star.

In Part Two, Broderick discusses the changes in how film festivals help snag distribution deals, how theatrical distribution can be had without the aid of a major financier (and why he thinks, if you can't get theatrical release, that might not be such a bad thing), and other aspects of 'New World' distribution, including direct-to-video release, digital distribution, and educational and institutional funding. It's all very encouraging, and maybe even prophetic; but those of us old enough to remember the direct-market zealots who were going to 'revolutionize' how comics were bought and sold might want to have a large grain of salt handy while we read.

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Sun Rises In East, Independent Film Industry Doomed

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Every couple of months, someone in the press gets wind of the notion that independent film -- which, to our knowledge, has never been a field people have entered with an eye towards getting rich -- is on its last legs. Lamentations ensue, and then someone pulls out the box office receipts for The Dark Knight, and everybody has a good laugh. This time around, it's National Public Radio's turn to sound the doom bell for our favorite art form.

"Chicken Little was right", screams the headline to Kim Masters' article on the last days of indie film, placing into evidence the testimony of one Mark Johnson, a big-time studio producer (Chronicles of Narnia) who also dabbles in the independents. Unable to find a distributor for his small-budget southern gothic Ballast, he and director Lance Hammer are now taking it from city to city, screening it in front of whatever audiences will pay attention. "I thought that, at the end of the day, quality would win. We would like to think that if something is made well, it ought to be able to pay for itself," says the producer, who apparently has never ever paid any attention to any aspect of our culture. Art-house executive Mark Gill points out that independent films now have a 99% chance of failure (which, we're guessing, is up from the 98% of a few years ago, or the 100% of most of Hollywood history), and warns that "You have to be very good, or great, or you will die," which should come as exciting news to all the people who made great movies and failed anyway as well as reassuring every failure in the industry that they just aren't good enough.

Don't get us wrong -- no one is more sympathetic to the Sisyphean struggle of the independent filmmaker than we are, and no one would love to see a true meritocracy in film, where Charles Burnett gets to make any movie he wants while Michael Bay has to work double shifts at the car wash to afford a new fisheye lens. But all this weeping and gnashing and grinding of teeth every few years about how this time, indie film is really and truly doomed, and if you don't make Citizen Kane the first time you step behind a camera you might as well go back behind the counter at Taco Bell not only ignores the reality that determined artists have always found new and innovative ways to get their movies made, but does a disservice to aspiring filmmakers by making things seem even more dire than they actually are.

My Troma Summer, Part Two

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Previously on My Troma Summer

What happened was this: while filming the second Toxic Avenger sequel on location in Japan, Troma, Inc. co-founders Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz somehow got hooked up with Toxie fans Tetsu Fujimura and Masaya Nakamura, big wheels at Namco, the Japanese video game company responsible for Pac Man, and the foursome entered into a deal to create a Kabuki-themed superhero movie with a $1.5 million dollar budget, the most lavish in Troma history.

Of course, I didn’t know any of that at the time. I’d only just received a call from a guy named Andy (soon-to-be First A.D. of the project, then titled Kabukiman), who’d invited me to come down to Hell’s Kitchen and join the Troma Team for the princely sum of fifty dollars a week. In New York City.

Fortunately, I had a friend from the Harvard Lampoon who lived on the Upper East Side with his beautiful wife from Spain, and they offered me room and board in exchange for my help writing text for a coffee-table book featuring artistic photographs of feces. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

And so, thus installed, I showed up for my first day at Troma’s second floor walk-up headquarters on 9th Avenue, a cramped office stuffed with posters and swag from the company’s long and storied history. Off the main room was the private office shared by Lloyd and his silent, intimidating business partner, Michael.

Lloyd welcomed me and gave me a brief introduction to the company, then asked what my favorite movie was. At the time it was The Big Chill, which, I gathered from Lloyd's reaction, was not exactly the answer he'd been hoping for.

After that, I was handed off to Andy, a tightly-wired, anal retentive type who clearly relished his role as resident drill instructor in Troma’s boot camp for aspiring filmmakers. “All you college kids come down here after four years of parties and sleeping late and think you know how to make movies. Well, that’s not how it works in the real world, and I’m not here to wipe your ass, okay, so if I tell you to do something, you do it, then you tell me you’ve done it, otherwise I’m not gonna know and everything gets fucked up and it's your fault, understand? Now go down to Blimpy’s and get us some lunch, and don’t forget the fucking receipt!”

By the end of the first day, I’d screwed up Andy’s lunch order, accidentally washed another Troma Teammate’s contact lens down the drain after rinsing out a cup I thought was empty and somehow felt even stupider than I had after deliberately flunking out of college (though I hadn’t nearly killed the gorilla yet...that would come later).

But I also knew Andy was right: I’d been living in a boozy academic cocoon for the past four years, totally unprepared for the real world outside. Thus chastened, I headed back to my temporary East Side residence, determined to get my shit together, then took a crap on a plate of linguini for one of my friends' feces photos and went to bed.

Tomorrow was another day.

To Be Continued...

Street of Dreams

Phil Nugent — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

The 1989 shoestring production Chameleon Street was directed and written by Wendell B. Harris, who also plays the lead role of Doug Stone, a con man and sort of serial impersonator. In the movie, Harris's Street pretends to be a Harvard Medical School graduate and talks his way into a residency at Wayne State Medical School; he enrolls at Yale as a French exchange student, despite the apparent handicap of not speaking French. ("J'accuse, Jacques Cousteau.") Fixated on a woman who's a basketball player for Midwestern University — Paula McGee, who appears in the movie as herself — he presents himself as a Time magazine journalist and snags an interview with her. Other movies about successful impersonators share the joke that a big part of life is just appearing to be what you say you are, but Street's story has a special wrinkle that gives it extra potency: Street is black, and he knows from angry first-hand experience how important something as irrelevant as skin color is when it comes to deciding who gets ahead, or who just gets his foot in the door. When we first meet him, the smart, capable Street is already so embittered and ironic that proving himself by beating the white man on his own terms would give him no satisfaction at all. He wants what he wants now — and he also wants to show that the rules by which more cowed, conventional mortals agree to be judged are a joke. So he talks his way into scary situations and then somehow delivers: as a medical resident, he manages to brazen his way through his first surgery. But he's also sloppy and careless about the little things in a way that indicates a self-destructive streak: his Time-interviewer pose crumbles when someone takes a look at his letter of introduction and notices that he's misspelled the word "writer."

Chameleon Street isn't perfect; it's flawed in ways that betray its budget and Harris's inexperience. Sets often look as if they'd been thrown together in about five minutes using whatever motel lobby decorations were at hand, and Harris, staging one remarkable scene from Street's life after another, doesn't make it clear how much time is passing or to what degree Street has cut himself off from his family or how hot the police are on his trail. (Street's desire to keep climbing to better things extends to his romantic life — after things don't work out with Paula McGee, he romances a Yale student while costumed in homage to Jean Marais in Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. At the same time, though, he can't shake his addiction to his wife, and this unbreakable tie to his "real" life will lead to his downfall.) But many of us find it easy to shrug off the film's problems in light of what it has going for it. It's got its own distinctive humor, yet it's also eerie, and sometimes downright creepy, in a way that's appropriate for the story of a man who's only fully alive when he's in way over his head. Much of its power comes from Harris's performance. His condescension and contempt for everything around him--his feeling of being better than those around him when he's down and his need to put one over on his supposed betters--is chillingly believable, but with an undercurrent of real pain that makes him a hard man to simply dislike. When Doug pretends to be a doctor or lawyer, he doesn't quietly blend in, which you might assume would be the safest route; he puffs himself up like a ham actor, but in a way that those around him are quick to take for a show of authority. He's a very convincing phony.

Chameleon Street won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival and then went into limited theatrical release in the spring of 1991. That should have been felicitous timing. Black experience as it was captured in movies by up-and-coming filmmakers, such as Boyz N the Hood, Daughters of the Dust, Hangin' with the Homeboys, and others, was the hot entertainment media story of 1991, but Chameleon Street couldn't get a piece of it. The movie couldn't get any traction in terms of national attention. In December 1991, with the picture long gone from theaters, there was a report on the short-lived PBS arts magazine series Edge that indicated that the same executives who'd been eager to cut deals with Spike Lee and John Singleton had seen Harris's film and it had just made them uncomfortable. (One point of contention was apparently a scene where Doug Street pleasantly points out to someone that white people smell like dogs.) Harris reportedly received, and turned down, one offer from a studio that wanted to buy the picture, but not to release it; they wanted to remake it with Will Smith in the lead. (This was before Smith had first appeared in a movie, and some years before he's have the lead role in one; in 1991, he was the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.)

To say that Harris never managed to follow up on Chameleon Street (which was some four years in the making) is an understatement: not only has he not made another movie, his sly starring performance didn't even lead to much in the way of acting work. (Seven years after completing Chameleon Street, he played an officious FBI boss in Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight, and subsequently turned up in the 2000 gross-out comedy Road Trip. One website asserts that he's been at work on a documentary on UFOs.) This week, Chameleon Street debuts on DVD, with such bonus features as a making-of documentary and commentary and laudatory essay by the critic Armond White. It would be nice if whatever attention it now generates serves to flush Harris out into the open, but in the meantime it's just nice that the movie is locatable again. And if you rent it along with Out of Sight and Road Trip, you'll have the makings of one of the world's shortest and cheapest comprehensive career film retrospectives.