With the popularization of Dv, where does indie filmmaking stand.
In India, I believe...
Quote from: WitkacyWith the popularization of Dv, where does indie filmmaking stand.
Distributorship and the ever-increasing consolidation of the means of distribution is a huge factor. People can make all the movies they want, but what's important is that they land on the screens and have the promotional thrust they need.
Of all the "boutique" (majors-associated) distributors, my vote goes to Focus Features and Sony Pictures Classics. The actual media (DV or film) probably doesn't matter quite so much as far as the future of indie film.
No need to wonder about the future of it -- it's already here. The ease of filmmaking brought about by DV is a great thing for filmmakers, as far as making a film is concerned -- but when it comes to selling/getting distribution/etc., it's going to be a lot harder. There's more product than ever now, and eighty to ninety percent of it is going to either a.) be shit or b.) get unfairly lumped in with the shit and forgotten.
Basically, just consider this: the number of films submitted to Sundance every year has gone up almost exponentially, but you still have the same number of films coming out of it with distribution deals.
Most of the great indie films I've seen have been on DVD or Sundance or IFC, anyway. So for me, if I were in this situation, I'd just bypass any hope of theatrical release on my first few works and try to gain some recognition in the underground first. You can still do your art (although on a tiny budget).
You'd better believe that my documentary is going straight to video! :-D
DV's nice for cutting your teeth and learning the ropes, but at the end of the day, a DV movie made by someone on the cheap w/ their friends isn't really going to end up anywhere. Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but has there been a unheard of, fledgling filmmaker that's sold/made-it off of a DV film (and by that I mean, you've never heard of anyone involved with the movie)? The only ones I end up seeing in theatres are done by established writer/directors, or if it's a newb, they've somehow gotten a decent cast together.
Portable Sound and video equipment was one of the factors that allowed for the French New Wave.
I've been hoping that DV could do the same and allow for some sort of grassroots movement with the new digital medium.
I don't think theatrical releases are the way the above movement could start, but instead right here online.
they still have to be good
I've got this idea to make my own dvds and get a projector to run your dvd player into and get decent speakers and getting people to "host" showings of your movie or you can just "host" them yourself.
almost like if you were a band and you played at peoples houses as well
as long as there is a big enough wall. the only problem could be legal stuff that I'm not smart enough to know about.
but making and selling your own dvds sounds like the best way to distribute these days (using the internet is wise, of course)
Excellent article from The Los Angeles Times (although the author does make a mistake by saying "Punch-Drunk Love" was nominated for an Oscar). Not exactly on topic in terms of DV and indies, but more about current indie filmmakers.
Rebels inside the gates
The lions of indie cinema are making bigger and bigger movies. So how much has the movement changed American film?
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.calendarlive.com%2Fmedia%2Fphoto%2F2003-11%2F10217200.jpg&hash=b07e7992ba26e23c4f1e66a2d0696c98938785ae)
It came from a credit card, from a body sold to science, from the insurance payout on a car crash. Or so said the mythology.
Advocates of the independent film movement love to point out how its key movies emerged not from a studio machine but from scrappy young directors cobbling money together, bent on pursuing their visions and changing the way movies were made.
They were to be our home-grown Godards and Antonionis — or heirs to two-fisted American mavericks like Cassavetes and Peckinpah. The rhetoric behind the movement, fueling the film festivals that helped the movies get seen, was populist shading into utopian: These directors would explode genres, tackle taboos, democratize Hollywood.
The suits were out; in came video clerks, literature professors, guys who'd always wanted to make smart, character-driven films but never had the means until Steven Soderbergh's "sex, lies, and videotape" in 1989 showed that fresh, inventive filmmakers could come out of nowhere. Directors like the cocky Quentin Tarantino and the gawky Wes Anderson became cover boys and hipster celebrities.
Those same scrappy young directors from indie's early days are responsible for three of the fall's biggest pictures. "Once Upon a Time in Mexico," a bloody, extravagant epic that feels like Hollywood product, comes from Robert Rodriguez, whose 1992 "El Mariachi" was made for $7,000 he raised largely by leasing his body for medical experiments.
The comic "School of Rock," also a big studio film but with an unusually sweet sensibility, was directed by Richard Linklater, whose 1991 "Slacker" possessed an unhurried pace and coffee-shop-philosopher tone that supposedly defined a generation.
And the slick but still personal "Kill Bill Vol. 1" is only the third film Quentin Tarantino has directed since 1992's "Reservoir Dogs," a movie that redefined cinema violence and launched a thousand imitators. His "Pulp Fiction" is still the most emblematic "indie" film, known for its fragmented storytelling and lowlife poetry, even as its distribution — through Disney subsidiary Miramax — makes its indie credentials problematic.
Each of these three movies, with widely varying critical receptions, became the highest-grossing film the weekend it opened. Clearly this gang of Gen-X auteurs — directors who broke through with independent films in the 1990s, mostly through the Sundance Film Festival — has established itself as an important commercial force.
But did this generation that spearheaded the 1990s independent film movement do anything to change the way movies are made?
How many of them have lived up to the high artistic expectations that greeted their debuts? Can they compare to earlier anti-Hollywood movements, especially the 1970s mavericks?
A few years after the decade's closing, film historians and journalists are pursuing these questions in earnest. January sees Peter Biskind's "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film," and the New York Times' Sharon Waxman is writing a book about indie directors who brought their idiosyncratic styles to the studios. Historian Emanuel Levy is revising 1999's "Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film," the era's most complete record.
It's clear that these directors can work on a larger canvas and generate attention and ticket sales doing so. Their success with bigger budgets and more mainstream films, though, raises the question whether they can maintain their own, and their movement's, distinctiveness in the process.
Optimists point to this year's Academy Awards, in which films like "About Schmidt," "Far From Heaven," "Adaptation," and "Punch-Drunk Love" — from indie-bred directors Alexander Payne, Todd Haynes, Spike Jonze and Paul Thomas Anderson — won nominations and showed that they could produce distinctive films, with Hollywood casts, within the studios.
It's proof, they say, that the '90s indie generation has come of age. After working on the fringes, the best of them are now "trying to bring auteur-style filmmaking into mainstream Hollywood," Waxman says, "at a time when the studios are owned by big corporations not interested in risky or envelope-pushing work."
"It's no different from Hollywood importing European directors in the '20s and '30s, Murnau and Lang and Fred Zinnemann and Billy Wilder," Levy says. "Hollywood is a very shrewd system, and they realize there is a huge disparity between the people who give the industry its bottom line — Michael Bay, say — and those who give it its soul."
And those, of course, who give studios good seats at awards shows. Last winter Warner Bros. President Alan Horn told The Times' Claudia Eller, "Let's just say, with my tickets to the Golden Globes this year, they sent me binoculars." The studio recently launched Warner Independent Pictures, a name unimaginable in indie's fire-breathing early days.
(And now small studios are fighting for wide distribution of their films for Oscars consideration, fearful that their work will be marginalized.) The nomenclature itself has become tricky: In the '90s, Variety began calling "independent" distributors like October and Fox Searchlight "mini-majors." To skeptics, though, the indie movement was more about marketing than art and continues to be. "We're at a moment when 'independent film' has become part of a brand name," says Stuart Klawans, film critic for The Nation. "Literally, with the Independent Film Channel. What happened was a great raising of commercial expectations with 'sex, lies, and videotape,' and hitting a critical peak with 'Pulp Fiction.' But these commercial expectations weren't confluent with a movement."
According to United Artists President Bingham Ray, "the system hasn't changed a lick."
The achievement of these directors, though, is hard to dismiss and shows a great deal of range. Todd Haynes' career, for instance, began with the radical work of the New Queer Cinema, wound through "Safe," a detached but powerful reframing of the disease-film genre, and culminated last fall with "Far From Heaven," probably the year's best reviewed film.
Neither conventionally intellectual nor political like the Brown-educated Haynes, Spike Jonze found his way into cinema through retro rock videos and skateboard videos: His films, "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation," both written by Charlie Kaufman, are kinetic, surreal and Borgesian.
A COMMON IRONY
Directors like these have taken independent film beyond the "Reservoir Dogs" clones and callow coming-of-age films that limited the genre in the early and mid-'90s. Their subject matter is all over the place.
"What these filmmakers share is a certain irony and humor that's shot through with sometimes violent, sometimes very emotionally dramatic material," says Waxman, whose book is tentatively titled "The Rebels." "It's the note that I recognize in Tarantino, and in David O. Russell — two very different filmmakers."
"When I got involved in the business in the '80s, the studios and the producers had all the power," says John Lesher, an agent at Endeavor.
Filmmaking has changed immeasurably, he says, from the days when execs created films themselves and shaped them by committee. "These are all smart people; it's not an evil system. But there's something about the studio process that rubs down the edges."
And indie directors — who often acquire credibility by casting A-list actors who work cheap — have opened the door for foreign directors to work in Hollywood. Lesher calls "21 Grams," a coming film by Alejandro González Iñárritu ("Amores Perros"), a movie that would never have been made before the '90s' indies made Hollywood more flexible.
"It was a huge achievement to throw off the Hollywood yoke and make viable commercial art movies," Biskind says. "Especially considering what things were like in the late '80s. There was some stuff here and there — by John Sayles, the Coen brothers, Spike Lee — but at that point none of those pictures had made over $25 million. To go from that to over $100 [million] with 'Pulp Fiction' was a whole new world."
For all the successes, this generation of so-called outsiders produced its share of disappointments. One comes from their very self-conception: These directors typically see themselves as auteurs, writing their own material and working in distinct styles or subjects. Some do work so personal it becomes its own miniature genre, kicked off with a brilliant debut.
Often these first films remain their best, Biskind says. "A lot of them repeated themselves. But that's true of a lot of 'auteur' filmmakers. Scorsese certainly repeated himself. In exploring material you know best, you run the risk of repeating.
"And there's pressure on young directors, going into the studios, to repeat their first film as a studio film. Neil LaBute remade 'In the Company of Men' with 'Your Friends and Neighbors,' " he says of the director's acid takes on romance. "Kevin Smith remade 'Clerks' as 'Mall Rats,' as a studio film. And Rodriguez remade 'Mariachi' as 'Desperado.' The independents became so hot that the studios descended on them, and that's hard to resist."
Similarly, indies increasingly faced pressure to get name casts for their films, says Christine Vachon, longtime indie producer and partner at Killer Films. She calls it the biggest change since she produced Todd Haynes' "Poison" in 1991. The original indies, she says, were director driven. "It didn't matter who was in them; they were about visions particular to the filmmaker."
Things had changed by 1999. "It was only by the skin of our teeth that we were able to make 'Boys Don't Cry' with Hilary Swank," she says. "Some of our partners really wanted a name actor. I don't know if you'd get away with [an unknown] now."
Early indie advocates made a lot of noise about the need to bring women and minorities into filmmaking. But despite talk in the early '90s of the New Black Cinema — including the Hughes brothers and John Singleton — few of its pioneers maintained critically acclaimed careers.
One early hero of the Sundance crowd was Allison Anders, whose feminist-themed "Gas Food Lodging" found "desolate, low-key poetry," in one critic's words, in a New Mexico trailer park. But her career sputtered, and these days she works mostly in TV. It's telling that the hottest female indie director is Sofia Coppola, whose father's connections smoothed her way.
For many male directors who emerged in the '90s, Soderbergh was the model; enter through indies, move to the studios, and move between both worlds. But this can be dangerous.
"Some of them have not done well by going Hollywood," Levy says. "Neil LaBute's last three films have been disappointing."
"Or Doug Liman, who made 'Swingers' and 'Go' and then made 'The Bourne Identity,' " Biskind says. "They're making tent poles, and they don't have final cut, or much control at all. There's no question of them having any independent spirit at all — they don't."
Some question whether the independent films really have any independent spirit. These doubts became especially common when Miramax was purchased by Disney in 1993.
"What the `movement' is about is a commercial reconsolidation of the film industry," says the Nation's Klawans. "Because it used to be, when you had a studio system, you had a balanced program each year. So many super-productions, so many A pictures, so many B pictures, so many shorts. So the bets were hedged across the board."
These days, he says, films with A-sized budgets come out on Warner Bros., while B pictures come out on Fine Line, a Time Warner company.
Peter Rainer, critic for New York magazine, thinks too much was made of independent films. "There was such a thirst for a new direction in American movies that everyone cut the so-called independent movies a lot of slack," he says. "A lot of these movies are visually undistinguished, the acting is highly variable, and they really don't show anything besides a desire to create a résumé for studio work."
INFRASTRUCTURE
Part of what made the '90s independent movement different from earlier decades of underground film was a new infrastructure of funding sources, festivals, film magazines, award shows, cable TV stations, and boutique "indie" distributors that grew up after the success of "sex, lies and videotape."
Indies of the '90s found a receptive audience, says Dawn Hudson of the Independent Feature Project, partly because the VCR revolution had schooled a suburban and rural audience in underground and foreign cinema — and viewers craved new films in the same vein.
But the establishment of an indie network, with a cheering section in the press, made it easier for second-rate talents to break in. "In the '90s, Sundance and these places got going," Rainer says, "and the media began to take notice. 'Go to Sundance and bring us back the next 'Roger and Me,' the next New Wave, the next Tarantino.' It worked as an inflation, to pump up the independent movement to something bigger than it was."
Earlier directors had to fight harder, and it showed in the work, Rainer says. "When David Lynch began, with 'Eraserhead' and so forth, these films seemed to come totally out of a private place, a fully formed artist right out of the gate. While for a long time the independent movie was a kid maxing out his father's credit card, getting his friends together for sub-Scorsese goombah fests."
Klawans too is dubious of the indies. "There was an actual independent film movement in the '50s and '60s, with Cassavetes and Shirley Clarke and Stan Brakhage," he says. "It was really about content that couldn't get into the other movies — if you were going to do a film about racial subjects, like in 'Shadows,' or sexual subjects, like Jim Broughton's films." The term "independent film," Klawans argues, persists mostly out of nostalgia.
John Waters, a godfather to the indie generation, disagrees. "I don't think things were better in the old days," says Waters, whose first feature was "Pink Flamingos" in 1972. "I think it's better now. And it's harder for them: There were more taboos back then. There aren't any taboos now. But studios are now looking for what they call 'edge.' When I was young, they weren't even looking."
'90S VERSUS '70S
The period the '90s indie directors hark back to most often is the 1970s, from Martin Scorsese's friendship with Wes Anderson ("Rushmore") to Spike Jonze's marriage to Sofia Coppola. How do the new films compare? "All told, the films of the '70s were superior," says Biskind, whose book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" helped canonize the era. "The audience for those '70s movies, the counterculture audience that despised Hollywood movies, really disappeared."
The problem goes beyond film itself, Rainer says. "Movies were much more at the center of the culture decades ago," he says. "In the '70s there was a whole devotional aspect of going to the movies. And we don't have a body of work from the last 10 or 12 years that can compare to what Scorsese, Coppola and De Palma did.
"The '70s was a richer time, and it was the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era. There were very conflicted, roiling feelings shooting through. That gave a tragic sense, a kind of depth, to the movies that doesn't exist now."
The '70s mavericks began their careers in the studios, while the '90s generation fought its way in after several films. Will the infiltration of Sundance kids revivify American cinema?
Even enthusiasts like Waxman have their worries. "A lot of these movies performed very poorly and had huge studio marketing budgets," she says. "So you had movies like [Soderbergh's] 'Solaris' that could really kill things. It cost $47 million to make, something like $30 million to market." The film earned $15 million domestically. "That's a very dangerous precedent to set," Waxman says. Haynes may be the indie kid who's demonstrated the greatest range. After the Oscar nomination for his Douglas Sirk homage "Far From Heaven," you'd think he'd jump to another mid-sized project — proof that the studios are now open to innovation.
But Haynes is working on an unpredictable feature starring Bob Dylan and is turning down studio offers, according to Vachon, his producer. "They tell him how wonderful a movie he made," she says of his experience with studios, "and tell him, 'When you're ready to become a commercial filmmaker, to give up everything that makes you interesting, come talk to us.' " And as celebrated as "Far From Heaven" was, its domestic gross barely earned back its budget.
Peter Broderick, who helped fund low-budget films and now runs Paradigm consulting, says the sensibility of indie pioneers like Kevin Smith and Rodriguez inspires young directors working in digital video. "But as those opportunities for production have opened up, the channels of distribution have narrowed," he says. "No longer is the hardest thing making the film; now it's bringing it to the world. Filmmakers have to take more responsibility for that, the same way they once struggled to fund their productions."
The casualty in the explosion of indies, says Mark Gill, president of Warners' indie wing, was foreign films. "Those used to be the only places you could see serious themes and explicit sexuality. But no more. They're one of our last and best ways to understand other cultures and perhaps behave a little better in the world." Gill hopes to bring out a foreign film or two a year but adds that "the odds are so long these days."
Others say indie is a victim of its own success. " 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' is a big, fat, bad movie," Levy says. "It doesn't do any good for indie cinema, and what worries me about this and 'Blair Witch Project,' which is a much better movie, is that they are changing the definition of success." The films grossed $241 million and $141 million in the U.S. "In the past an independent movie that made just a few million at the box office was considered decent. I worry that there will be pressure on directors to compromise their vision, their integrity, especially when they work in studios."
To its fans, though, the movement has a lot to be proud of. "The evolution of American independent film as an institutional force, as a viable industry," Levy says, "is the most positive aspect in American pop culture in the last quarter-century."
Progress report
Which of the promising directors of independent film have lived up to their promise? Which ones haven't? And who's coming up next?
Successes
"Richard Linklater did something nobody expected with 'School of Rock': He held onto his humanity, his wry sense of humor and his idiosyncrasies," says Mark Gill, president of Warner Independent Pictures.
Critic Stuart Klawans admires David O. Russell, especially "Three Kings," his Iraq-based film from 1999. "He made the film of the year, of 2003, and he made it four years ago. And he made it for Warner Bros."
"When I first saw Paul Thomas Anderson's work," says Sharon Waxman, author of "The Rebels," "I felt I'd had the breath knocked out of me. I thought, here's a masterful, ambitious filmmaker shooting for something huge. And there's a humanity to the story."
"Todd Solondz made 'feel badness' a real art form," says John Waters. "Certainly his films are incredibly dangerous, in the best sense of the word, and make people really uptight, which I'm all for."
Disappointments
"James Mangold is a major disappointment," film historian Emanuel Levy says. " 'Heavy' is a very interesting movie, but then he made 'Copland' and 'Girl, Interrupted.' He decided to go mainstream."
Darren Aronofsky: "His editing gives me a headache," says critic Peter Rainer.
Gregg Araki: Waters likes the raw style of this pioneer of the New Queer Cinema but is let down by the amount of work he's produced since "Nowhere," from 1997. "I miss him — I liked his voice, an L.A. voice."
Faces to Watch
Levy likes David Gordon Green, who made "George Washington," for his "deceptively simple stories told in a nuanced, multilayered lyrical way. In the current climate of hyperkinetic mass spectacles, Green's work stands out."
Levy also looks forward to more films by Richard Kelly, whose "Donnie Darko" drew comparisons to "Blue Velvet." "In its metaphysical concerns with the inner workings of the universe and challenging notions about time travel, the film aims higher than most American coming-of-age pictures."
Dawn Hudson of IFP likes "American Splendor" directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. "The film is both ambitious in subject matter and sure-handed in its direction — and we know it's not easy to turn comic book material into good films."
Tom Ortenberg, president of Lions Gate, praises Michel Gondry. " 'Human Nature' was one of the more underappreciated films of the last couple of years. Michel has a keen eye that I look forward to seeing in next year's 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.' "
Quote from: Weak2ndActDV's nice for cutting your teeth and learning the ropes, but at the end of the day, a DV movie made by someone on the cheap w/ their friends isn't really going to end up anywhere. Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but has there been a unheard of, fledgling filmmaker that's sold/made-it off of a DV film (and by that I mean, you've never heard of anyone involved with the movie)? The only ones I end up seeing in theatres are done by established writer/directors, or if it's a newb, they've somehow gotten a decent cast together.
No, it's gonna happen with an unknown. He's gotta embrace the medium and not worry about making it "look like film". A DV movie made on the cheap, but with serious and passionate intentions is gonna be labelled a "great indie film". It's gotta happen. Just think of DV in terms of non-sync 16mm cameras shooting on mix-and-match short ends in the 60's. It's the cheapo medium, and after we sort through all the bandwagon jumpers, you're gonna see some good DV flicks on a yearly basis. I call for a return to the straight-up genre film. Especially in Canada -- we need to forget about hackers and government propaganda and cultural blah blah, and just make some fucking comedies, slasher pictures, road movies, and crime films. No time, no place, nothing specified, except character and the rules of the genre (bent to taste, if necessary). Fuck, ever since I've watched Fassbinder's Gods Of The Plague, I've been pumped on this. Fuck social issues or world problems, fellow on-the-cheap-down-and-outers I say make a movie on what we know: the movies. This has gotta be the way -- the ONLY way -- for our film lives to survive into the future. Like Xixax said, let's get an underground going. All well and good if we finally prove ourselves and are allowed to do a studio-backed picture, but let's keep making a shitty little DV movie every year. Experiment, dick around, retain the love and fun and urgency of this thing...
Quote from: SoNowThenQuote from: Weak2ndActDV's nice for cutting your teeth and learning the ropes, but at the end of the day, a DV movie made by someone on the cheap w/ their friends isn't really going to end up anywhere. Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but has there been a unheard of, fledgling filmmaker that's sold/made-it off of a DV film (and by that I mean, you've never heard of anyone involved with the movie)? The only ones I end up seeing in theatres are done by established writer/directors, or if it's a newb, they've somehow gotten a decent cast together.
No, it's gonna happen with an unknown. He's gotta embrace the medium and not worry about making it "look like film". A DV movie made on the cheap, but with serious and passionate intentions is gonna be labelled a "great indie film". It's gotta happen. Just think of DV in terms of non-sync 16mm cameras shooting on mix-and-match short ends in the 60's. It's the cheapo medium, and after we sort through all the bandwagon jumpers, you're gonna see some good DV flicks on a yearly basis. I call for a return to the straight-up genre film. Especially in Canada -- we need to forget about hackers and government propaganda and cultural blah blah, and just make some fucking comedies, slasher pictures, road movies, and crime films. No time, no place, nothing specified, except character and the rules of the genre (bent to taste, if necessary). Fuck, ever since I've watched Fassbinder's Gods Of The Plague, I've been pumped on this. Fuck social issues or world problems, fellow on-the-cheap-down-and-outers I say make a movie on what we know: the movies. This has gotta be the way -- the ONLY way -- for our film lives to survive into the future. Like Xixax said, let's get an underground going. All well and good if we finally prove ourselves and are allowed to do a studio-backed picture, but let's keep making a shitty little DV movie every year. Experiment, dick around, retain the love and fun and urgency of this thing...
Seriously...Amen.
EDIT: Check out this interview (http://www.empireonline.co.uk/features/interviews/donniedarko/) with Richard Kelly. It's not really about indie filmmaking but still inspirational.
dv is gonna be harder to sell just because something shot on dv is going to required that much more money in the post process to make it viewable on the big screen, gonna even more expensive than rodriguez' $107,000.
but with miniDV, at the same time, you don't have to worry about that shit, because you can just distribute it yourself via the internet and self-made DVDs.
I only use "DV filmmaking" (an oxymoron, by the way) to showcase my writing and directing skills... for real projects, i'd only work with film... anyways, the same rules apply to a DV shoot as to a film shoot... get good actors, get a good crew, have a great story, etc etc.
Quote from: TheVoiceOfNickI only use "DV filmmaking" (an oxymoron, by the way) to showcase my writing and directing skills... for real projects, i'd only work with film... anyways, the same rules apply to a DV shoot as to a film shoot... get good actors, get a good crew, have a great story, etc etc.
For these said "real" projects, would you only shoot on 35mm with professional actors and a card carrying DP?
Quote from: SoNowThenQuote from: TheVoiceOfNickI only use "DV filmmaking" (an oxymoron, by the way) to showcase my writing and directing skills... for real projects, i'd only work with film... anyways, the same rules apply to a DV shoot as to a film shoot... get good actors, get a good crew, have a great story, etc etc.
For these said "real" projects, would you only shoot on 35mm with professional actors and a card carrying DP?
lol.
sorry but this made me laugh.
i'm currently enrolled in a course on digital video. it's interesting. so.. uhh... i suppose i have some input if there's any more questions.
Quote from: SoNowThenQuote from: TheVoiceOfNickI only use "DV filmmaking" (an oxymoron, by the way) to showcase my writing and directing skills... for real projects, i'd only work with film... anyways, the same rules apply to a DV shoot as to a film shoot... get good actors, get a good crew, have a great story, etc etc.
For these said "real" projects, would you only shoot on 35mm with professional actors and a card carrying DP?
Of course... that's the only way to fly... to me, DV is play stuff... what you use when you don't have enough dough to use the real thing... DV and I have had many issues over the years... its a love/hate relationship... mostly hate, sometimes love...
Keep in mind i'm only talking about movies here... for TV, you can use pretty much anything you want... without DV we wouldn't have reality TV... that's one of the sides of DV I hate!
well, i'm speaking from the other side of the coin because i'm using DV every day. i only see it as a different paint for the painter, like acrylics and oils. DV has its flaws where film has its strengths, but it also has its strengths where film has its flaws. DV will definitely make it easier and less time consuming than film, less costly, and eventually DV will reach the visual quality that film has.
Quote from: meatballeventually DV will reach the visual quality that film has.
You're obviously talking about digital video in general here, not "DV"... "DV" is the crappy digital video format that is used by all consumer digital camcorders and "pro-sumer" camcorders... the 720x480 shit... digital video encompasses everything from crappy DV all the way to HiDef, 1080i, 24p, etc, etc... sure, digital video will get better, but DV will always be the shit we kids play with cuz we can't afford anything better...
What do you think DV stands for?
Quote from: RegularKarateWhat do you think DV stands for?
DV is technically a format... you don't call Digital Betacam "DV"... pros will look at you and say "ameatur"... there's mini-DV (the little common tapes), then there's DVC (the bigger tapes), then everything else is digital video... not to be used with the acronym "DV"
DV is a format, but it also means the realm of Digital Video, which refers to all digital formats, including HD.
I get a magazine called "DV"... this magazine has articles about HD, Mini-DV, Digi-Beta, etc... There are plenty of industry professionals featured in this magazine. People who are not "ameaturs"
haha now that's a good burn.
Quote from: Phaha now that's a good burn.
Is it a good zinger, though? I hear it's flat-out war between burns and zingers.
Quote from: godardianIs it a good zinger, though? I hear it's flat-out war between burns and zingers.
yes. the beauty is he included a zinger at the end, to finish the burn. very well done.
Thank you, thank you very much...
(btw, I liked that SNL skit, funny)
Breaking in from 'Edge of Outside'
TCM premieres a documentary that pays tribute to independent filmmakers, whose work is featured this month.
By Susan King, Los Angeles Times
The life of an independent filmmaker has never been easy. During the silent era, studio bosses would send out marksmen to shoot out the cameras of independent directors. The filmmakers quickly got wise and wrapped their cameras in blankets.
Orson Welles spent most of his life trying to obtain funding for his films. Robert Townsend maxed out his credit cards to make "Hollywood Shuffle." John Cassavetes was on the verge of halting production on his masterpiece, "A Woman Under the Influence," to take an acting job so he could get the money to finish the film — his star Peter Falk put up the money so Cassavetes could continue uninterrupted.
Despite the hardships indie filmmakers have endured over the decades, they continue to bring their visions to the screen. This year's best picture Academy Award nominees were dominated by indie films, with "Crash" winning and "Brokeback Mountain" picking up two major Oscars, for best director and adapted screenplay.
"Edge of Outside," a new documentary that explores the spirit, maverick attitude and sheer pluck of independent filmmakers, premieres tonight on Turner Classic Movies. Directed and produced by Shannon Davis, "Edge of Outside" doesn't actually cover new ground when it comes to the history of the indie film movement in America but features revealing interviews with such iconoclastic filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Edward Burns, Spike Lee, John Sayles, Arthur Penn and Darren Aronofsky.
The documentary also includes interviews with film critics and historians as well as producers, cinematographers and friends of such legendary indie directors as Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller, Sam Peckinpah and Cassavetes.
"Edge of Outside" kicks off TCM's monthlong salute to independent filmmakers. Three films by Cassavetes follow the documentary; 1968's landmark film "Faces," which brought Oscar nominations for Cassavetes for his screenplay and supporting nominations for Seymour Cassel and Lynn Carlin; 1963's underrated "A Child Is Waiting," which Cassavetes made for producer Stanley Kramer; and 1974's classic "A Woman Under the Influence," for which Cassavetes' wife, Gena Rowlands, received a best actress nomination.
On July 12, TCM will screen Charlie Chaplin's 1923 drama "A Woman of Paris" — the first film he made for United Artists, the independent studio he co-founded in 1919; Erich von Stroheim's notorious, incomplete 1929 drama, "Queen Kelly" (star and producer Gloria Swanson fired him); Frank Capra's 1941 political allegory "Meet John Doe," which he financed himself by borrowing money from the Bank of America and with a loan from Warner Bros; and Welles' 1952 "Othello," which took years to complete because of financial issues.
Other films to be screened during July include Nicholas Ray's gritty 1951 film noir, "On Dangerous Ground"; 1955's "Killer's Kiss," the last film Kubrick financed on his own; Sam Fuller's 1964 thriller "The Naked Kiss"; and Penn's seminal 1967 drama, "Bonnie and Clyde."
'Edge of Outside'
Where: TCM
When: Wednesday, July 5, 2006 - 8:00p ET/5:00p PT and 11:30p ET/8:30p PT
http://www.tcm.com/2006/edgeofoutside/index.jsp
Quote from: MacGuffin on July 04, 2006, 11:21:55 PM
Three films by Cassavetes follow the documentary; 1968's landmark film "Faces," which brought Oscar nominations for Cassavetes for his screenplay and supporting nominations for Seymour Cassel ("Stuck on You") and Lynn Carlin;
fixed.
I'm not surprised the initial reaction to TCM's new documentary is underwhelming. When I first saw the commercial, I was excited by what filmmakers TCM was finally taking notice of, but when I saw the guidelines for inclusion in the documentary, I felt they were too general to be interesting. This film will likely be just a short biography of filmmakers I already know.
yeah and i'm watching it anyway! it's already set to tivo.
also: hbo just aired some thing about Boffo! Box Office something or other i am also going to watch.
Quote from: modage on July 05, 2006, 11:46:09 AM
also: hbo just aired some thing about Boffo! Box Office something or other i am also going to watch.
Don't expect anything spectacular in that one. There's very little in it that won't make you say, "I already know this," or, "Who cares?"
Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on July 05, 2006, 12:55:21 AM
I'm not surprised the initial reaction to TCM's new documentary is underwhelming. When I first saw the commercial, I was excited by what filmmakers TCM was finally taking notice of, but when I saw the guidelines for inclusion in the documentary, I felt they were too general to be interesting. This film will likely be just a short biography of filmmakers I already know.
I sort of feel the same way -- I have a hard time thinking of Paul Haggis and Ang Lee as independent filmmakers at this point in their careers, though I suspect the documentary's coverage of earlier independent films may cover more... uh...
independent films.
Quote from: Split Infinitive on July 05, 2006, 01:22:34 PM
Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on July 05, 2006, 12:55:21 AM
I'm not surprised the initial reaction to TCM's new documentary is underwhelming. When I first saw the commercial, I was excited by what filmmakers TCM was finally taking notice of, but when I saw the guidelines for inclusion in the documentary, I felt they were too general to be interesting. This film will likely be just a short biography of filmmakers I already know.
I sort of feel the same way -- I have a hard time thinking of Paul Haggis and Ang Lee as independent filmmakers at this point in their careers, though I suspect the documentary's coverage of earlier independent films may cover more... uh... independent films.
In the technical sense, they are very much independent filmmakers. They raised their money for their most recent films from the ground up. Of course, it helps that they both have worked in Hollywood for years but, in the same way that George Lucas is an independent filmmaker, so are they. Independent doesn't mean you had to suffer to raise your money. You just don't have it thrown at you.
The problem is when we think of the term "independent," we think Stranger Than Paradise or Pi or She's Gotta Have It, movies that came from nowhere with no familiar names of any kind, funded by credit cards and grandmothers. But in reality, anyone who doesn't get their money from WB, Paramount, Disney, Universal or Fox is independent.
That all being said, the only production stories that will be of value to anyone like us are the ones from guys like Jarmusch or Aronofsky, which most of us know already. I'm looking forward to watching this but I think that it's going to be exactly what GT said. Interesting but nothing new. However, people in our parents' generation and older (the ones that aren't film geeks, that is) will possibly get something out of it.
Survival Tips for the Aging Independent Filmmaker
By JOHN CLARK; NY Times
JON JOST might be considered the epitome of the aging, alienated and aggrieved independent film director. He is sitting in a borrowed New York apartment in hand-me-down clothes, doesn't have a place to live and has no visible means of support, other than a coming arts residency at the University of Nebraska.
"Most people from my generation became teachers long ago," Mr. Jost said.
For the past four decades Mr. Jost, 63, has been making films on shoestring budgets with no-name casts that almost nobody outside of European film festivals ever sees. Perhaps the closest he has come to popular awareness was "All the Vermeers in New York" (1990). Since then he spent a decade in Europe toiling away in relative obscurity. From 1972 to 1976, he lived in Montana, where he scrounged from garbage cans and lived with a single mother and her daughter in one room with no heat or running water.
In 2004, he stayed in Newport, Ore., at the house of one of the actresses he cast in his most recent film, "Homecoming," which he is still trying to find a festival home for domestically — forget about distribution. His income, such as it is, comes principally from selling DVD's of his work on the Internet. He now lives in Lincoln, Neb.
"I can't say I'm happy not making a living after 40 years in the business," Mr. Jost said. "I'm not independently wealthy. I'm independently poor."
Mr. Jost's plight and perseverance constitute an extreme version of the mostly sideways career path followed by many of the generation of independent filmmakers who made a splash in the late 1980's and early 90's. When these directors, mostly now in their 40's and 50's, got started, the indie business was full of mom-and-pop operations with nickel-and-dime aspirations. Now the corner stores have been edged out by studio specialty divisions with far larger appetites and needs. Geoffrey Gilmore, the director of the Sundance Film Festival, said that in the early 90's an independent film was considered a hit if it grossed $1 million. Now it's $25 million.
These elevated expectations have proved to be a problem for many (though not all) of the filmmakers who chose to stay close to their indie roots, as opposed to, say, Bryan Singer ("The Usual Suspects" to "X-Men") and Christopher Nolan ("Memento" to "Batman Begins").
Today, to keep working, these filmmakers need stars.
"The biggest change has been the casting," said Mary Harron ("I Shot Andy Warhol"), 49. "We had a free hand until Hollywood stars became interested. It's a huge problem. We used to be able to draw from a large pool."
The producer Ted Hope ("American Splendor") seconded that notion. "Just to get above $2 million you have to cast certain names," he said. "Ten or 15 years ago you could make a film for $1 million and get a release. Specialized distribution has now become a science. They're not looking for singles."
Mr. Hope added that singles hitters like Hal Hartley ("The Unbelievable Truth") and Todd Solondz ("Welcome to the Doll House") have also had a hard time because their audiences have dropped away, though both have films coming up (Hartley's is "Fay Grim," Solondz's is untitled). They might be stars in the indie world, Mr. Hope said, but audiences just won't flock to a Jim Jarmusch film for an anomie fix or to a Solondz movie for a dose of discomfort (or disorientation).
"If I were starting out now, I would be a producer for the Internet," Mr. Hope said.
As he suggested, it's tough for longtime producers of indie films too. Christine Vachon, who has worked for years with indie filmmakers like Mr. Solondz, Ms. Harron and Todd Haynes ("Far From Heaven"), said the struggle to get money for three of her most recent films, Mr. Haynes's "I'm Not There," Tommy O'Haver's "American Crime" and Tom Kalin's "Savage Grace," was "soul deadening." She said that some of this agony is a consequence of a conservative cultural climate that resists experimentation, a thesis she elaborates on in her new book, "A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond."
Comparing the landscape now with the 90's, she said, "it feels like a different cultural environment."
The director Finn Taylor ("The Darwin Awards") pointed to a new aesthetic conformity. "I feel like the indie genre has developed the same predictable subgroups that the studios have," he said. "Screenwriters play it structurally safe: interconnectivity of stories, time shifts, following quirky characters."
Of course the movie business, no matter what the scale, is inherently unstable, and so are the people in it. Mr. Gilmore said that there is an indie equivalent of box office poison, "a person who takes a script that has sex appeal and turns it into something marginal, esoteric."
It's also true that a director's interests change as he or she gets older; audiences may or may not follow, but the filmmaker's vision is almost always guaranteed to require a larger canvas and more money.
"If you're in your 40's, you're going to do a movie that's more expensive than what you made in your 20's," said Mr. Taylor, who is 48. "The story you want to tell is bigger."
In some ways, then, independent filmmaking may be a young person's game. It is certainly easier when there is no family to support. And pulling together projects can be debilitating, especially now that budgetary thresholds, casting requirements and narrative norms must be met. Mr. Taylor said that one reason he has never had a family is that these demands are so all consuming.
"I've been engaged, had long-term girlfriends," he said. "But making films has taken a lot of my time. It's hard to maintain a relationship. For me it would have been difficult to pull off the nuclear-family thing. My crew is my family."
Mr. Jost said, "It precludes you from having a life so that you can make movies that might be of interest."
Mr. Taylor said he had managed to get by between projects with money he has been given by studios to develop scripts. The indie-film godfather John Sayles ("Return of the Secaucus Seven") takes frequent jobs as a script doctor for other people's films, just because they pay the bills. Other filmmakers, like the documentarian D. A. Pennebaker, eke out a living from the royalties on their earlier work. Mr. Pennebaker said that he and his partner Richard Leacock for years lived off the proceeds of their music documentaries "Don't Look Back" and "Monterey Pop."
"They kept us in business," said Mr. Pennebaker, now 81. "Still do. How we made it through the 70's is a mystery to me. I don't know how we survived."
Some filmmakers have managed to find work between work, notably on cable. Alan Poul, a "Six Feet Under" producer, used to troll Sundance for quirky talent, and has hired, among others, Ms. Harron, Lisa Cholodenko, Rose Troche, Michael Cuesta, Miguel Arteta and Nicole Holofcener. The producer Tom Fontana has cherry-picked indie filmmakers for his television projects, including "Homicide: Life on the Street" and "Oz."
"I like doing television," said Ms. Harron, who added that she didn't know where she would be without it. "I've learned so much from it technically. I enjoy doing something that isn't mine. And it's only a month."
Ms. Harron, who has directed "Oz" as well as "The L Word" and "Big Love" for cable television, said she enjoyed the process. Working within established aesthetic parameters, with actors who know their characters better than she does, is, she says, a "corrective" for director's ego.
Another filmmaker who has found both a lucrative and technically satisfying way to make a living outside his chosen profession is the documentarian Errol Morris. Over the past decade, in addition to winning a best documentary Oscar for "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara," he became what he describes as "an unlikely avatar of American business." In other words he directs commercials for Apple, Toyota, AT&T and Miller Brewing while making movies about mole-rat specialists and Holocaust deniers.
"It's indeed shocking," said Mr. Morris, 58. "I only wish I'd discovered advertising years earlier. I've gotten into financial trouble over the years."
Mr. Morris is one of the few independent filmmakers who have benefited from the turns the business has taken over the past two decades. When he first started out, in the late 70's, there was hardly an audience for documentaries and very few theatrical distributors of them. At one point he stayed afloat by working as a private detective in New York. Now of course, in part because of the success of his films ("The Thin Blue Line"), documentaries are the darlings of the indie world.
Still, they won't make Mr. Morris rich. Advertising may. It has also contributed to his skill set and the content of his films. On a Reebok commercial he got to indulge his interest in "shooting the world at alternate speeds" by playing with a high-speed digital camera.
"Will I use that in my next movie?" he asked. "You betcha."
Mr. Morris is also not above using locations required by his advertising work to further his documentary aims. He said that for "The Fog of War" he needed to shoot a B-29. The only one available was appearing at an air show in Rockford, Ill., so he asked his agent to get him a commercial in nearby Chicago. He did, for Quaker Oats, and the company has since become a steady client.
Some indie filmmakers also find advertising work in new media: Mr. Gilmore said he knew independent filmmakers who direct clips for cellphones and the Internet. Of course the indie business tends to attract the kind of people who do what they do precisely because they despise commercial filmmaking of any sort.
"I have thus far resisted taking jobs in those venues," the 57-year-old director Terry Zwigoff ("Ghost World") said via e-mail. "Directing something that is to appear on a cellphone or MP3 player?" he continued. "I would be hard pressed to come up with something more hateful."
Almost none of these filmmakers, no matter how hard up they are, are willing to be a hired gun on a studio project. Unlike actors, who can spend a few months on a film and then move on, a director must remain committed for years, and many indie filmmakers believe life is too short for that. At the same time, the 40-something director John Curran ("We Don't Live Here Anymore," the coming "Painted Veil") conceded that "as you get older, your definition of selling out changes." He added, "It's nobody's ambition to remain independent. It's to work with a major studio while keeping your project intact."
Obviously the ideal would be to make a big score on a small movie. Ms. Vachon, perhaps reflecting the view of many of her filmmakers, is looking for that score, but on her own terms. In the meantime she and Mr. Hope and others like them provide "constant motion," as she puts it, for aging filmmakers too stubborn, too proud and too passionate to give up.
"I've spent my life being left out," Mr. Jost said. "I'd like to stop, but it's what I do."
aw that Jon Jost. I was a big fan of him in film school. he's got something in him that makes his images more engaging than the rest of the experimental lyrical boys. however, he gets annoying sometimes with his alternating self-pity and self-love. I mean, I hate conventional narrative structures too, but this guy pretty much dismisses anything with a "plot" as cliched melodrama.
Sundance taps six for mobile film project
Source: Hollywood Reporter
NEW YORK -- Six Sundance Film Festival alumni directors have been commissioned by the Sundance Institute and mobile phone operator trade group GSM Assn. to create five short films designed for mobile phones, Institute president and founder Robert Redford said Wednesday.
Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris ("Little Miss Sunshine"), Justin Lin ("Better Luck Tomorrow"), Maria Maggenti ("Puccini for Beginners"), Cory McAbee ("The American Astronaut") and Jody Hill ("The Foot Fist Way") have been tapped to create three- to five-minute low-budget original shorts as part of the Sundance Film Festival Global Short Film Project. The films will premiere in February at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona.
"These will be big stories for the small screen," said John Cooper, Sundance Film Festival director of programming and Sundance Institute creative director.
The films are expected to be circulated by World Congress attendees, though later they will be available for download on the Sundance and GSMA Web sites.
"There's going to be a lot of viral sharing," said Bill Gajda, chief marketing officer of the GSMA. "Once you've got these on your phone, you're going to be able to share these. We want to see where they go, how widely they are distributed and what is the appetite for this kind of short entertainment."
There are no advertising tie-ins planned for the films.
Depending on the success of the venture, more films may be commissioned in the future, Redford said.
"This is a start," he said. "This is in part experimental. We don't want to go too fast, we wanted to test this. This is just one step of many more to come for Sundance's involvement with new technology."
The Trouble With Sundance
RICHARD CORLISS; Time Magazine
Everybody, I mean everybody who's anybody in movies, or hopes to be, is in Park City, Utah, this week for the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. In this Lourdes of independent movies, hermitty young auteurs will schmooze with Hollywood's BlackBerry set. From the ferment of high art and hype art will emerge new faces, new voices and, I can almost guarantee, at least one film that will figure in next year's Oscar race--just as Little Miss Sunshine, from Sundance '06, is being touted for a Best Picture Academy Award nomination.
The kind of indie film nurtured by Sundance has become the dominant non-Hollywood movie form for smart people. They're the ones who made Little Miss Sunshine a hit, and Ryan Gosling's turn in Half Nelson a must-see. The moguls have taken note too. In terms of product and talent, Sundance has become the crucial farm system for the major studios.
Problem is, indie movies are getting as predictable as Hollywood's. Sundance movies have devolved into a genre. The style is spare and naturalistic. The theme is relationships, beginning in angst and ending in reconciliation. The focus is often on a dysfunctional family (there are no functional ones in indie movies) that strives to reconnect. Within this genre are a few subspecies: the family breakup film (The Squid and the Whale), the finding-your-family-at-school movie (Half Nelson, Brick), the gay drama (Mysterious Skin). Way too frequently, the family goes on a trip. Given the typical Sundance pace, which is leisurely to lethargic, these road movies rarely get in the passing lane.
The predictability of recent Sundance films is a pity, because the fest used to discover original movie minds. The honor roll of those who introduced their early work there includes both the big fish of indie cinema (among them Joel and Ethan Coen, Jim Jarmusch, Kevin Smith and Darren Aronofsky) and some of the mainstream's champion swimmers (including Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Bryan Singer and Christopher Nolan).
What most of these directors share is a gift for bending, sometimes gleefully mutilating, film form: taking old narratives styles like the crime movie or musical or horror film and making them fresh, vital, dangerous. The subjects could be familiar--amnesia in Nolan's Memento, obsession in Aronofsky's Pi--but when the story was told in reverse, or turned into a weird thriller, the narrative ingenuity became bracing and delicious. They were different from Hollywood--and different meant better.
You don't find as much originality in Sundance films these days, and for a simple reason. In the beginning, the festival was a home for the homeless, for a rambunctious outlaw take on filmmaking. There was no need to be cautious, since indie films were rarely hits. But as Sundance became the showcase for a form of movie gaining marketplace pull, young directors naturally made films to fit the new mold. Sundance films weren't quirky; they did quirky. Quirky became another genre.
In fact, truly imaginative movies have always been anomalies at Sundance. The program is heavy with earnest studies of emotional accommodation. This isn't a supple form, and now it's become formula--creaky and calcified through endless repetition.
What's saddest is that the ersatz indie drove out the previously dominant alternative to Hollywood: the foreign film. Bergman, Fellini and Truffaut are dead, but there are still exciting, challenging movies being made in Europe, Latin America and especially Asia. Some of these films get theatrical release, but to see many top films from Japan, South Korea, China, Thailand and India you need to rent them. A good video store or a specialty DVD catalog is the new art house. Trying to get your intellectual fill with Sundance films is like choosing homemade popcorn over the concession-stand variety: higher quality, little nourishment.
Sure, there are good Sundance movies, with fine actors providing glimpses of behavioral truth. But in general the films are way too cozy. Instead of the high-budget sequels Hollywood deals out, the indie scene offers virtual remakes of earlier, more vibrant films, the rehashing of familiar feelings. Sundance used to be a daring, occasionally dazzling alternative to Hollywood; now, it's just a different sort of same.
Quote from: onomabracadabra on January 22, 2007, 12:33:10 PM
Quote from: MacGuffin on January 22, 2007, 12:01:38 PM
Bergman, Fellini and Truffaut are dead...
Perhaps he meant that the age of Bergman and new Bergman films is over. Or perhaps he's a dickfaced moron. Or both.
That article is so 2003.
and Superman doesn't even throw one punch!
Quote from: MacGuffin on January 22, 2007, 12:01:38 PM
Within this genre are a few subspecies: the finding-your-family-at-school movie (Brick). The predictability of recent Sundance films is a pity, because the fest used to discover original movie minds. The honor roll of those who introduced their early work there includes both the big fish of indie cinema (among them Joel and Ethan Coen).
What most of these directors share is a gift for bending, sometimes gleefully mutilating, film form: taking old narratives styles like the crime movie or musical or horror film and making them fresh, vital, dangerous. The subjects could be familiar--amnesia in Nolan's Memento, obsession in Aronofsky's Pi--but when the story was told in reverse, or turned into a weird thriller, the narrative ingenuity became bracing and delicious. They were different from Hollywood--and different meant better.
did he watch Brick? or is he just trying to make some point?