Naked Came I

Two big articles in this morning's "New York Times" discuss the independent movie industry and try toaddress whether indie film is dead or not.

Manohla Dargis' "The Revolution Is Dead, Long Live the Revolution" is by far the more thoughtful piece, although that isn't saying much. Dargis' argument boils down to this: So long as there's a Hollywood, there'll be a non-Hollywood, and that non-Hollywood will always be griping about how much money it doesn't have.

Dargis provides a mini-history of independent film (although you'll find a far, far better history in Peter Biskind's "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film"). The Independent Spirit Film Awards come in for special bile, as they opened their doors to big-studio pictures in 1994 and basically stopped giving awards to true indie films (every award-winner since then has had big-studio financing). The awards show is now nothing more than a low-rentier Oscar show, where people were designer jeans rather than designer gowns.

Dargis appropriately mourns the closure of major-mini's -- those specialty film divisions of the big studios (Warner Bros. closed all three of its divisions this year), and questions whether the majors have the will to stop seeking the almighty dollar in favor of producing real art again.

But that's as far as her analysis goes: One question. Why do the majors lack this will? What would enable them to regain that will? Is Dargis really arguing that New Line Cinema and Picturehouse were only releasing high-brow art films in the past five years? *cough*Lordoftherings*cough* No matter how good "There Will Be Blood" might be (and I think it's insipid), does it really reflect a true indie spirit? Or is it merely a good major studio release? I'd argue the latter, but Dargis seems not to agree.

Dargis also (briefly) talks about the "DIY" move current in independent film thinking. "Filmmaker" magazine has been promoting the DIY model for nearly five years now. In this model, filmmakers avoid using a distribution company to get their movies into theaters. Rather, filmmakers utilize the Web to build audience awareness -- posting on zillions of message boards, buying supported-links on Google or Amazon.com, using viral marketing, posting on Usenet and even relying on limited spam to get the message of the film out. It's a lot like "The Blair Witch Project," and the DIY model relies very heavily on building a Web site for the movie. Whether the DIYer should release DVDs of their movie (buy the DVD on the Web site) or permit downloads is an ongoing argument in the DIY community. Another problem is that filmmakers aren't viral marketers or PHP coders. A filmmaker who's barely scraped $150,000 together for a movie and whose whole life has been devoted to cinematography and film direction can't be expected to also learn how the long tail works, be an expert in viral marketing, and know how to find, create databases of, and post to hundreds of Web sites, Usenet groups and list-servs. Do do they? That's another part of the DIY debate, and probably the one raging most fiercely at the moment.

Dargis drastically mis-characterizes the DIY model. She thinks it's the old "do the art-house and film festival circuit" followed by re-creating a distribution company on the cheap. That's not the DIY model, and never has been. In fact, while the DIY model advocates doing the art-house and film festival circuit, that's never been considered part of the distribution model. That's been considered more of the "get your film noticed so a distributor can buy it" segment of the traditional distribution model.

Dargis' article is full of pithy, witty writing, and it's fun to read. It's certainly provocative and informative for the casual newspaper reader, but I question its real value. The business section of the "New York Times" doesn't dumb-down its articles this much; why did the Arts editor feel s/he had to dumb this article down?

A.O. Scott's "It’s Suddenly So Last Year, That Once Bold New Guard" is the companion piece to Dargis' article. Scott apparently is trying to analyze the market for indie film. "This time last year," he writes, there was a plethora of indie films atop the box office and the Oscar winners' list. Suddenly, the indie industry is crying that it is dying and there is a dearth of good indie films. What gives?

The problem is that Scott isn't really analyzing the market for indie films. In fact, his article is just a bitch-session, a Crawfordesque slap in the face of the indie-market Chicken Littles, a good glass of whiskey-on-the-rocks in the face of everyone who thinks the indie film industry is suddenly dead.

But just as Scott seems to be hitting his stride in the piece, he stops dead cold. He whines about how hard it is to market an indie film, how a glut of movies means that 90 percent of all films never make money, how expensive it is to get an Oscar campaign going, how timing is everything (must release in that golden window of opportunity from Labor Day to Thanksgiving, so Oscar voters won't forget your film), and how in the end you're just throwing good money after bad.

Bullshit.

Even if you buy his conclusions (and I don't), there's no analysis there. And there's certainly no hope, no recommendation for how independent filmmakers might break out of this Hobson's choice.

If nothing else, Scott misses the "law of averages" argument. Given that the average indie film is of medium quality, a year of hits means there is a higher probability of a year of low-quality films coming down the pike. (This is why you never buy a stock once it's soared out of its trading range, and why you never pay $15 million for a an average baseball player who just had an outstanding season.)

Scott also fails to see that movies take time to make. Filmmakers don't work on multiple films at once. If a director finishes a movie in April 2007 in time for a September 2007 release and appearance at the March 2008 Oscars, that filmmaker won't have another picture ready for release in April 2008. At best, that filmmaker -- if amazingly productive and needing no creative rest (e.g., psychotic) and having everything go perfectly (no script problems, no financing problems, no casting problems, no production problems, no post-production problems) -- will have a picture in release in October 2008. Realistically, that filmmaker will more than likely need at least two years, not 18 months, to release their next film. And filmmakers without good financing prospects will need longer than that! It's only reasonable to expect that after 2007, a year when most A-list indie directors released product, there would be few indie films of note in 2008.

It's not entirely clear what Scott wants indie filmmakers to do. He appears upset about how difficult it is for indie films to make money. Or is he? After all, he himself makes no conclusions. Read one way, you'd think Scott is advocating that indie filmmakers shut down and seek financing from major studios. Yes, he seems to be saying, that's not just whining: Indie film really is dead. Read another way, he's attacking the entire Oscar season/film marketing/film financing system (agreeing indie film is dead) while providing no alternative (just despair).

The problem is that Scott's is merely a bitch-piece. With any real numbers, analysis, logic or rationales, the reader really has no idea where to go.

Scott's piece lacks the wittiness and turn of phrase of Dargis' piece. But at the same time, it's just as dumbed-down and just as lacking in analytical rigor as Dargis' article.

Both pieces are symptomatic of the sort of poor writing with passes for journalism and film criticism these days. It's all about the critic's "feelings," rather than any appeal to internal or external consistency, existing standards of high-quality technical cinema, or creativity. Plenty of problems are identified, to make readers feel outraged and upset. But a closer look reveals that there is no analysis. Without analysis, we can't tell if the writer correctly identified the problems (are they even problems???) much less what any solutions might be. It's like a doctor getting an email that you have a temperature, and diagnosing cancer.

Nonetheless, if you don't know anything about cinema today, you might get something out of both articles. And that's a plus.

Labels: cinema