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Sunday, January 21, 2007

Hollywood Shines on Sundance; Independent Film Gets Burned

Dr. Media says,


Dr. Media says, Dargis is on the money. Anyone interested in the Indie films should mediate on what he says, AND remember that this has been true for 25 years in various forms. The BIG difference is he alludes to, that those indie flicks that are never likely to get a theatrical , which are most, have a better shot at getting seen on the web, BUT, that means that the budgets better be very low, cause the cost of acquisition has gone down just like the cost of production--if it's digi that is.
Of course what filmmaker wants to think that their movie is going get seen only on the web, or cable, or DVD, or VOD, none.


January 21, 2007

Hollywood Shines on Sundance; Independent Film Gets Burned

The big news last January from the Sundance Film Festival was the $10.5 million that Fox Searchlight, a specialty division of 20th Century Fox and part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, paid for the independently produced charmer “Little Miss Sunshine.” One year, numerous 10 Best lists and many millions of dollars later, the Little Independent That Could has become Fox’s best hope for a major Oscar.

As this year’s festival gets under way, the success of “Little Miss Sunshine” marks an impressive victory for Fox, but feels like a Pyrrhic one when it comes to authentically independent cinema. Once upon a time not very long ago, it seemed as if the studios’ specialty divisions might take independent film to another level, like the rich uncle who plucks you out of the weeds and makes you a star. One day you’re working in a video store; the next day you’re Quentin Tarantino.

Much as the Republicans shifted the political center to the right during the 1990s, the sale of Miramax Films to Disney in the mid-’90s shifted public perception of what constitutes an independent film. It’s old news that once Miramax hit the $100 million mark with “Pulp Fiction,” the company changed focus, growing bigger and bigger until it sized itself out of the Magic Kingdom. Still, it proved that a studio division could make money, win awards, attract talent and excite the audience, which is why Miramax and all it helped wrought is one of the best things to happen to Hollywood since the end of the old studio system.

In the last decade the divisions have released some of the finest movies being put out by the studios. Specialty division films tend to be well-made and directed at thinking adults; they’re prestige pictures and star Helen Mirren. Some are bad, some are brilliant. Few rock the world or the art, and fewer and fewer speak in foreign tongues. But in a studio context of franchises and repurposed television shows, these films are often the designated Saturday night alternatives. Alternatives that are sold, it is worth noting, on television and in big-city newspaper ads costing $100,000 apiece. To put it another way, an ad rate that is about half the take for another Sundance favorite, Kelly Reichardt’s “Old Joy.”

The two films had their premiere the same day, within a half-hour of each other: “Old Joy” played in a 150-seat house, and “Little Miss Sunshine,” in a packed 1,270-seat theater. People who actually saw “Old Joy,” a low-fi story about two friends on a weekend trip in the Oregon woods, seemed to love it, but, like many Sundance films, it left the festival without a buyer. Four months later it was picked up by the small New York distributor Kino International for what Gary Palmucci, the head of its theatrical sales, called the “low five figures.”

“Old Joy” first opened in Portland, Ore., before moving to Film Forum in New York on Sept. 20. Mr. Palmucci was leery about opening on that date because September marks the start of the most competitive season, when studios and independents alike roll out many of their prestige titles. But this was the time frame Film Forum offered, so Kino bit. “Old Joy” did spectacularly well at Film Forum, bringing in more than $29,000 the first week. It earned more than $21,000 the second week, but by then was competing with new studio-division arrivals, including Miramax’s film “The Queen.”

Mr. Palmucci estimated that by the end of its nearly six-month theatrical run “Old Joy” will have played in almost every major market in the country. Kino can’t afford to buy full-page ads in big-city newspapers but did run a few small ones. It also spent about $40,000 to blow the film up from 16 millimeter to 35 millimeter; $24,000 on 22 prints; $6,500 on 200 trailers; $4,000 on 50,000 postcards and about $3,000 on Web advertisements. Kino also bought posters and radio spots, and hired outside publicists. It has been a heroic effort, but the postcards, the trailers and all the glowing reviews have not been enough to make the film a hit for the distributor. As I write, “Old Joy” has pulled in less than $200,000.

OUR choices now in entertainment are “staggering,” said Eamonn Bowles, the president of Magnolia Pictures, adding “something needs to be extremely compelling to get people motivated to leave the house.”

Magnolia’s parent company, 2929 Entertainment, has decided that if people won’t leave the house, then it will start knocking on their doors. The company has begun releasing films simultaneously in theaters, on DVD and on cable, a strategy called day-and-date. It tested the waters in 2005 with “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” but its splashiest day-and-date release was Steven Soderbergh’s “Bubble” last January.

A story about murder in a small town, “Bubble” was shot in high definition, the first of six such features Mr. Soderbergh plans to make for 2929. Its release was widely deemed a failure (it earned about $150,000 the three weeks it was in theaters), but Mr. Bowles maintains that the film racked up more revenue through day-and-date than it would have with a traditional release.

“Bubble” didn’t rock the world; it didn’t have to. Paradigm shifts happen slowly and the day-and-date model is just one promising survival strategy being tried out by independents. This year Kino will introduce downloads on its Web site. Other distributors meanwhile are joining with Netflix — and its more than 5.7 million subscribers — to widen their reach.

Last year Netflix and the distributor Roadside Attractions combined forces on a tiny film called “The Puffy Chair” (Class of Sundance 2005). Netflix sent E-mail alerts to its subscribers when “The Puffy Chair” was in theaters, where it earned $200,000 after two months. And when the film hit DVD, 100,000 subscribers put it in their Netflix queue. “If those people were buying tickets, it would have made a million dollars,” said Howard Cohen, a co-president of Roadside Attractions.

Last March IFC Films, which is owned by the Cablevision Systems Corporation, inaugurated a day-and-date series called First Take. The idea was blissfully simple: Each month two films would open in theaters, including the IFC’s destination art house in Greenwich Village, and be made simultaneously available as video on demand available to subscribers of major cable companies like Comcast. Among the films released through First Take were such critically well-received titles as Patrice Chéreau’s “Gabrielle” and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Three Times,” voted the best undistributed film in The Village Voice’s 2005 critics poll. Cable subscribers in cities like Fresno, Calif.; Pensacola, Fla.; and Birmingham, Ala., could watch a film by the internationally revered Mr. Hou, whose work has been largely unavailable in this country.

“Every month our number of buys has increased,” said Jonathan Sehring, president of IFC Entertainment. “Right now I think there are 24 million homes out there that are digital-cable homes, and we’re probably, on a monthly basis, 1 percent of them, sometimes more, sometimes as high as 2 percent, sometimes as low as six-tenths of a percent. But that’s anywhere from 60,000 to 150,000 people buying a month. It’s fantastic.” All those cable viewers are watching six to eight IFC movies a month. But, as Mr. Sehring explained, “if you extrapolated it, a lot of movies would be doing a million or two million at the box office.”

Those numbers sound puny, but they are startlingly good in a climate in which even an American independent like “Half Nelson,” another 2006 Sundance favorite and one with a recognizable name (Ryan Gosling), earned only $2.7 million in theaters last year. For filmgoers a series like First Take means they no longer have to wait months for “Gabrielle” to come to their local art house — if they even have one — or wait even longer for the DVD. Instead they can read about “Gabrielle” or a documentary like “Drawing Restraint 9” on the day the film opens in New York and then watch it at home that night. “Gabrielle” certainly looks better on the big screen, but for many Americans this is a moot point because it will never show up at the local multiplex.

“I believe in the idea of the big tail,” Mr. Sehring said, invoking the title of Chris Anderson’s best seller “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.” In a nutshell Mr. Anderson argues that the Internet has allowed companies like Amazon to thrive from selling a little bit of lots of different things. Mr. Anderson cites Netflix as another example, but what works for a DVD rental company with 70,000 titles won’t necessarily work for a distributor like Zeitgeist Films, which releases five to six features a year. Much like the studio divisions, distributors like IFC and Magnolia are owned by companies with diverse holdings and are thus part of two “long tails.” That gives them a strategic advantage over small distributors like Kino and Zeitgeist.

Film critics wax nostalgic about the golden age of art-house cinema, back when Jean-Luc Godard was making news not specialty films. But releasing independent fare has always been a tough racket, and distributors were talking about getting out of the art-house business as far back as the 1960s when there was a perceived glut. To survive, companies are being forced to think outside the theatrical box with downloading and day-and-date, and that isn’t a bad thing. These days, intrepid cinephiles know that some of the best films are playing in one of the hundreds of festivals that have sprung up around the country; they also know some of those same films can be bought online.

In March IFC will release Ken Loach’s origin story about the Irish troubles, “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes last year, through First Take. I could buy that same film online from British Amazon or a video store that sells imported DVDs, but it will be cheaper to watch it at home through my local cable company, and my soda won’t be watery. For right now IFC has found a way to get interesting films to audiences that have long been radically underserved. Video on demand may not be the great savior of independent film, but it bodes well for those who will never go Hollywood and wouldn’t want to even if Harvey Weinstein himself signed the check.

The Media Equation


Dr. Media, says, Carr is on to something here, as is M.Dot, the upside is, he gets to spend his time in his basement being creative and gets a once in a lifetime premier at the Egyptian--way cool--the downside, no pay day. Thus the wheel turns, it's cheaper to make movies digitally, and it takes vision , but harder to get paid, or just as hard as it always was, that's why it's called the movie BUSINESS.

January 22, 2007
The Media Equation

M dot Strange Finds a Way at Sundance

PARK CITY, Utah — In the daunting hierarchy of the Sundance Film Festival, with its hype machine, big stars and indie royalty, a young movie maker named M dot Strange would seem to have little chance of gaining much attention.

A 27-year-old guy from San Jose, he gave new meaning to the term “studio apartment” by jamming eight computers into his place and producing “We Are the Strange.” The movie has a wide visual vocabulary borrowed from the far reaches of the Web, anime, video games and children’s nursery rhymes. And dolls. Lots of dolls.

But his film received a premiere last Friday night at midnight at the Egyptian Theater, a coveted slot at Sundance, and quite a few members of the audience left midmovie.

But what would have been crushing for another young filmmaker was no big deal for M dot Strange, who arrived at Sundance with a huge audience in tow. During the last two years, he has been posting a video blog on YouTube letting people know how the movie was coming along. And then two months ago, he finally posted a trailer, and almost immediately it was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.

While we were talking at the Kimball Art Center in Park City, he checked the site and showed me that over 648,000 people had already viewed the trailer for a film where he served as writer, director, animator and effects coordinator.

Kevin Donahue, vice president of content at YouTube, said M dot Strange has created an audience in part by talking to it. “The originality of the work is quite high, but he has also built a real rapport with his audience,” said Mr. Donahue. “He has an online film school and a very active community.”

And so what about his big fancy premiere?

“Well, it all felt very foreign to me, watching it in a room with strangers,” M dot Strange said Saturday. “Some YouTube kids came up from Salt Lake, which was cool, and they seemed to really enjoy it.”

Wearing a black stocking cap and sporting a wisp of hair under his lip, M dot Strange, whose actual name is Michael Belmont, looks more like a snowboarder who wandered over from the nearby chairlift than a big deal filmmaker (see for yourself at carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com), but he represents a new paradigm of filmmaking that could have a profound effect on the traditional models of film production, distribution and animation.

The money is not there yet — M dot Strange is doing a brisk business in T-shirts associated with the film — but the Web has proved that if you produce something the consumer wants, a business model might follow.

Another Sundance film, “Strange Culture,” premiered at the Egyptian on Friday, but will get a second premiere today on Second Life, the online virtual community, including a live Q. & A. with the director Lynn Hershman Leeson, and the stars Tilda Swinton and Peter Coyote, among others.

Ms. Hershman Leeson, an established filmmaker and artist, made “Strange Culture” to bring attention to the case of Steve Kurtz, an artist and professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who called 911 when his wife died of heart failure in her sleep.

The medics who responded to the call became suspicious of his art materials — his work centers on germ warfare and genetically modified foods — and called the F.B.I. Agents in Hazmat suits showed up immediately and began impounding his computers, books, his cat and even his wife’s body. Mr. Kurtz was detained as a suspected bioterrorist, eventually accused of mail fraud and is now part of an ongoing federal trial.

Ms. Hershman Leeson, 65, felt that the film needed to get out quickly by all means, and after working with the Stanford Humanities Lab to create a digital archive of her work on Second Life, building a theater there and premiering the film seemed like a natural step. Admission is by invitation only so that demand does not swamp the servers.

“These are important social networks that we could not have had before,” she said over coffee in Park City last week. “By having the film both here at Sundance and on Second Life, we have two streams that we hope will eventually become many. And that’s really exciting.”

In the past, a filmmaker had to throw a Hail Mary pass at a place like Sundance, hope for attention amid the clutter, and then against all odds, get a film picked up for distribution. For every “Little Miss Sunshine,” a breakout Sundance film that has been a critical and commercial success, there are hundreds of films that never found an audience.

But a number of digital commercial initiatives, including The Daily Reel, an online video site (www.thedailyreel.com), allow audiences and filmmakers to meet in new ways. Jamie Patricof, the producer of “Half Nelson” and one of the people behind The Daily Reel, said he wanted to create “a breeding ground for new filmmakers and a place to find them. It’s hard enough navigating a film festival like this one, let along finding the people who are doing great work online.”

Because of the limits of bandwidth and attention span, most of the film content online is short-form, but that will change. M dot Strange, who has a series of 10 films planned, already has members of his active, vocal community around “We are the Strange” weighing in on a proposed ending after he put up 18 minutes of the film. “It’s like a real-time focus group,” he suggested.

There have been talks about traditional distribution, but M dot Strange said he didn’t really care one way or the other. Other than attending his own premiere, he hasn’t been in a movie theater in six months.

“I’m already part of a big campfire,” he said. “We talk to each other all the time about what we are seeing and thinking. It’s a personal experience without anybody in between.”

The playing field between audience and filmmaker is shrinking as well. When M dot Strange blogged about his rather awkward pursuit of buzz at Sundance on Thursday, one of his fans made an animation overnight with a hilarious bee motif in response. M dot Strange laughed and called his colleagues over to look at it on YouTube. “This guy is amazing. He’s faster than I am,” he said.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Fakesters

Dr. Media says, watch this space, is Mr. Roush on to something, or just a techie wining about how his " dream" of real social networking has been co-opted by corporate America, in the demon form of Rupert Murdoch, no less. Murdoch is to Media as Gates is to Software, FYI. Dr. Media thinks that the kids will ignore ads on the net, in the same way their parents ignored them on TV, which means Madison Avenue will still be around.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Fakesters


On MySpace, you can be friends with Burger King. This is social networking?

By Wade Roush
Web users have created more than 116 million profiles on MySpace, the social-­networking site owned since 2005 by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. As I will explain in a moment, many of these profiles are fake. Still, 116 million is more than the number of people in Mexico and the number of cable TV subscribers in the United States.
Parents and members of the U.S. Congress have begun to take note--and they don't like what they see. Conservative groups fomented a media panic this year over the supposed rash of sexual predators on MySpace and pushed a bill through the House of Representatives--the Delete Online Predators Act (DOPA)--that would cut off minors' ability to access this and other social-networking sites from federally funded facilities like schools and libraries.
In the opinion of experts such as Henry Jenkins, a professor of literature and director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, the threat of sexual solicitation on MySpace is not as great as many fear. The company has indeed been hit with a high-profile lawsuit over an incident in which an adult molester allegedly met his underage victim on the site. But teens who use the Internet have said in surveys that online "solicitations" often come from people under 25--and are simply ignored. Furthermore, MySpace is likely to get safer: an October Wired News report that as many as 744 registered sex offenders have MySpace profiles will likely push the company to cull such members.
But while MySpace's bad rap as a haven for sexual predators is probably undeserved, there's good reason to be disturbed by the site: it is devolving from a friends' network into a marketing madhouse.
If any social-­networking company has found a way to rake in cash, it is MySpace; for example, Google recently agreed to pay $900 million for the exclusive right to provide Web searching and keyword-based text ads on the site. Of course, targeted advertisements distributed by Google and other companies provide the revenue that keeps many Web-based businesses afloat. But MySpace's venture into consumer marketing has gone far beyond traditional advertising. The site has given members the technological tools to "express themselves" by turning their own profiles into multi­media billboards for bands, movies, celebrities, and products. Think MTV plus user photos, bulletin boards, and instant messaging.
I realize that in criticizing a pop-culture mecca frequented by millions of people, I risk sounding just as out of touch as DOPA's supporters. But after spending the last few years chronicling the emergence of social networking and other forms of social computing for this magazine, I had higher hopes for the technology. To me, the popularity of MySpace and other social-networking sites signals a demand for new, more democratic ways to communicate--a demand that's likely to remake business, politics, and the arts as today's young Web users enter the adult world and bring their new communications preferences with them. The problem is that MySpace's choice of business strategy threatens to divert this populist energy and trap its users in the old, familiar world of big-media commercialism.
My biggest worry about MySpace is that it is undermining the "social" in social networking. The general expectation when one joins a social network is that its other members are actual people. On MySpace, this isn't always so. The movie Jackass: Number Two has a profile on the site, as do Pepsi, NASCAR, and Veronica Mars, the CW network's teen detective. The company interprets the idea of a "profile" so broadly that real people end up on the same footing as products, movies, promotional campaigns, and fictional characters--not exactly the conditions for a new flowering of authentic personal expression.
As a site organized around an enormous collection of profiles, MySpace was modeled on Friendster and other earlier online social networks. Users are given pages where they can post self-descriptions, photos, short videos, blog entries, and the like. Every profile includes a list of the other members its creator has "friended," and a comment section where those friends leave feedback. (Most comments are encouraging, casual, and shallow: "Love the new look! How are you not married yet?")
But one feature that makes MySpace different from earlier sites, and evidently more appealing to users, is its friendliness toward independent artists. Cofounder Tom Anderson, who has a background in the Los Angeles arts scene, has said that he and business partner Chris DeWolfe started the site in 2003 because the older social networks didn't give musicians, photographers, digital filmmakers, and other artists adequate ways to promote themselves and their work. From its beginning, then, MySpace has functioned as a public stage. It lets bands and solo musicians create profiles, publicize upcoming shows, and upload their songs, which other members can then embed in their own profiles. Filmmakers can upload video clips. Indeed, the site has become one of the main places where unknown artists go to be discovered by major studios, or at least to develop a base of fans who'll attend shows and buy CDs and DVDs.
In the early days at Friendster, only real individuals could create profiles. Bands were lumped in with other "fakesters," the term coined by Friendster users for profiles created by impostors or dedicated to someone other than the author, such as a pet or a celebrity. The company eventually relented, and fakester profiles became an accepted part of Friendster's culture, often taking on the function of fan clubs.
MySpace, however, has been hospitable to fakesters from the beginning--so much so that it's now perfectly kosher for a company (or one of its fans) to create a profile for a fast-food chain, a brand of soda, or an electronics product. Other MySpace members can friend these profiles just as if they represented people. As of early October, Burger King had more than 134,500 friends, and the Helio cell phone had 130,000.
The fakester phenomenon gives network members a way to declare their cultural affinities. These declarations are a huge part of a member's online identity, according to social-media researcher Danah Boyd, who is studying MySpace and other social-networking sites for her doctoral thesis at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Information. "It is important to be connected to all of your friends, your idols and the people you respect," Boyd writes. "Of course, a link does not necessarily mean a relationship ….The goal is to look cool and receive peer validation."
But profiles are about more than looking cool, in Boyd's view. She argues that social-networking sites are among the last unregimented environments for young people, places where they're free to explore issues of personal and group identity. Members of such sites "write themselves into being" through their profiles, Boyd says, trying out personalities and slowly coming to understand who they are and how they fit in.
Ideally, every networking site would be this liberating. Alas, MySpace tends to herd its users into niches created for them by the mass market. If MySpace members are writing themselves into being through the profiles they friend and the products they endorse, then today's 14-to-24-year-olds are growing up into a generation of ­Whopper-­eating, iPod-absorbed, ­Hollywood-­obsessed Red Bull addicts.
Take BillyJ (not his real handle), an 18-year-old high-school graduate and UPS employee in Louisville, KY. BillyJ smokes Kools, prefers Coke to Pepsi, counts X-Men: The Last Stand among his 393 friends, admires New Jersey Nets guard Jason Kidd, likes to work on car audio systems, doesn't have a girlfriend yet, and apparently covets a Ducati motorcycle (his profile features customized Ducati backgrounds, color schemes, and ads). BillyJ may have deeper, more personal interests, but you won't find them on his MySpace profile. It's unclear what he contributes to the network--but as a single 18-to-24-year-old male with his own income and lots of friends, he is a viral marketer's dream vector.
In fact, MySpace can be viewed as one huge platform for "personal product placement"--one different from big-media-style product placement only in that MySpace members aren't paid for their services. There's nothing new, of course, about word-of-mouth marketing. What's sad about MySpace, though, is that the large supply of fake "friends," together with the cornucopia of ready-made songs, videos, and other marketing materials that can be directly embedded in profiles, encourages members to define themselves and their relationships almost solely in terms of media and consumption.
This can't be all that social computing has to offer. Older Web-based social networks were launched with serious (or at least creative) missions: LinkedIn is about making business connections, Flickr and Fotolog are for sharing photographs, Meetup is for planning book clubs and campaign events. Of course, there's no requirement that a social network have high ideals. Like television and every other technology that started out as a shiny showroom prototype, social networking will inevitably accumulate some dings and scratches on the road to mass adoption. But if MySpace is to be the face of online social networking, it's fair to ask whether it's making our culture richer or poorer. To date, the only people who are profiting are Rupert Murdoch and his stockholders.
Wade Roush is a Technology Review contributing editor.

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