Soderbergh and the (current/future) state of cinema

[wilder]

Notes on Soderbergh's State of Cinema 2013 address

[wilder]

Some tweets from the event, which wasn't recorded.

[jenkins]

soderbergh (from a chill movie fest, that'd like to become a firecracker) was critizing the money peeps, and 'cause moviemakers were frowning:

@joe_swanberg: I can't believe so many of my indie filmmaker friends are in thrall of Soderbergh's doom and gloom speech.
@joe_swanberg: 2013 is the best time in the history of the world to be a filmmaker in America. Endless opportunities available, big and low budget.
@joe_swanberg: Soderbergh's own output over the last few years proves, to me at least, how open the system is and how possible it is to make great stuff.

[BB]

I'd put more stake in Swanberg's opinion if he had experience working with studios or made watchable films. Of course he feels that 2013 is the best time in history to be a filmmaker -- he is exactly the kind of filmmaker that could only exist in 2013. It's these counter-whiners, eagerly pointing to the fringe, who are the most dangerous in my opinion.

[polkablues]

In any other situation, I'd put the opinions of Soderbergh over just about anyone, but Joe Swanberg is totally right. The bar to entry for filmmakers is lower now than it has ever been in the history of motion pictures. Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience, and yes, even Behind the Candleabra are perfect illustrations of this. Sure, Soderbergh had a hard time getting his Liberace movie together, but he ultimately did, specifically because there are avenues of production and distribution that were unavailable or impossible until just recently.

If Soderbergh's point is just that the studio system is broken, then he's totally right. But if he's claiming that filmmaking as a whole need suffer as a result, he's way off.

[jenkins]

i'll drop swanberg 'cause that's not the point --

lowery is firing off, pete is doing great, matt35mm won a wonderful award, jg is hanging with audley, just withnail is cinematic -- sorry if i forgot a person, didn't mean to and you can remind me

edit: just read polka's reply

[BB]

I agree, polka -- the bar has never been lower.

Again, though, you're pointing at the fringe while the big picture crumbles. You're right in saying that all filmmaking need not suffer because the studios suck, but it may well mean that the good, smaller stuff (the singles, doubles, and triples) goes the way of opera. As far as a popular audience is concerned, these pictures hardly exist. The odd one might squeak through, and the avenues of distribution that allow that to happen are good and improving, but without the public interest that comes with studio support and marketing, the vast majority of these films will lose money and remain in their niche. It was not long ago that people actually wanted to see what Hollywood had to offer, whether that was The Godfather or The Poseidon Adventure. I don't know why or when exactly that changed, but now it seems you have to force them through the turnstiles, and it cost a lot to move that many people.

Now, that said, I think marketing production can be revolutionized in the same way as film production. I don't understand why we still employee massive agencies when individuals create incredible marketing material online for free. I mean, polka, with your photoshop skills you could be an art department unto yourself. And, increasingly, there will be costless online avenues to market, so maybe as those expenses minimize, studios will get braver. Fingers crossed.

Lowery is actually a real beacon of hope to me, and not just because he might read this. He's an example of a filmmaker who toiled in the fringe for a while, honing his craft, meeting people, and so forth, making gradual advancements towards the nucleus. And now he's made a picture with recognizable actors, it's been picked up by a known distributor, he's got work with the majorest of major studios, projects lining up (no pressure). That's the dream! He worked hard and it's paying off. I'm emboldened by that, I'm inspired! That Joe Swanberg can make a movie in his basement and have it play to festival audiences isn't all that inspiring to me.

EDIT: Oh, and I should add, this being the Soderbergh thread, that while you're right to an extent about Bubble and GFE (though arguably these were always destined to be little weirdo projects he was able to finance with clout), the fact that no studio would touch Behind the Candelabra with that cast and talent in place is INSANE. Sure, he got it made, but apparently it took a lot of work and a lot of time. The system would benefit by filmmakers directing such energies into their output.

[polkablues]

I see what you're saying. I think you're right on the money with what you wrote about revolutionizing marketing, and I do think that's going to be what ultimately forces a change in the way studios make and sell movies. But those changes will always start from the bottom up, with the little guys who who do it not out of a sense of innovation, but out of necessity. The studios are an entrenched bureaucracy. They're not spending triple the production budget of their movies on marketing because it's the best system, they're doing it because they haven't caught on yet that there are better ways. Collectable Burger King cups no longer have the influence they might have had back before everyone carried the internet around in their pocket.

It was not long ago that people actually wanted to see what Hollywood had to offer, whether that was The Godfather or The Poseidon Adventure. I don't know why or when exactly that changed, but now it seems you have to force them through the turnstiles, and it cost a lot to move that many people.

Our entertainment options have expanded exponentially in recent years, with cable, streaming, on-demand, etc. Sure, the demand for that one specific brand of content (big studio Hollywood movies in the theater) has declined, but the overall demand for content is snowballing. You can see that as a net negative, that we're losing these cultural touchstones where everybody is watching the same shows and going to the same movies, or you can see it as a positive, that every type of content nowadays has avenues available to find its market, and the cost of finding and delivering it to that market is dropping. That's what's inspiring to me, personally.

[Pubrick]

i think my issue is with the "trying to raise a family making things".. i don't think this should even be an expectation.

what i'm about to say applies to musicians too and other artists, it's a tough concession to make:

maybe making music and making movies and generally being a useless person who makes pretty things is NOT supposed to be a good career path if you want to raise a family. that is to say that musicians are now probably earning what they should have been earning all this time.. BARELY ANYTHING. maybe in the ideal past there has been an uneven and unfair redistribution of wealth between entertainers and the public, the waning of which, unfortunately, has befallen artists first when it should be affecting purely entertaining freaks like professional athletes and other overpayed dickheads.

this first distinction is between an artist and an entertainer. the industry sodonebergh laments is all about the latter, he calls this distinction as that between Cinema and Movies. that's kind of well known but the implications are simply not being understood by those like him and up-and-coming independent filmmakers who expect to be making spielberg money. if you want to entertain then you have to make SMART financial decisions like the slew of "artistic" filmmakers we've been seeing making blockbusters lately. you have to play that Movie game. but if you want to make the same film over and over again (with increasingly complex motifs and difficult themes) then get ready for a life in the wilderness like Terrence Malick. that's an artist's life.

the problem of course is that there is a LOT of money to go around in these industries, and the share is not fairly distributed within its own grotesque framework. if general revenue falls due to piracy i'd be fine with that, but everyone should be making less money across the board, and of course the system currently in place that supports unequal distribution of trickling wealth should naturally collapse. i'm not talking about communism, i mean studios and CEOs and other people who make more money than actual creators.

obviously this issue is bigger than cinema. and it has been around for much longer than internet piracy or DSLR auteurs. we can see it anywhere from DW Griffiths to Orson Welles, to Kubrick to Bresson. the subject of kubrick's last speech is extremely relevant here, there's a lot of wisdom in what he chose to talk about. what all those artists have in common is they were all, to varying extents, burned severely by the industry they slaved so hard for, and the impossibility of working outside of it ultimately kept them from realising some of their greatest dreams:

when kubrick talks about building better wings, apart from what i've elucidated in an earlier trance, the more apt connection we can make here is to new distribution methods. the lesson from the greats (even quitters like sodey) is not to stop believing in art because the Power will always squash it, but to give greater power to art, and artists. so we can draw from this that the emergence of new popular technology is absolutely a positive development, albeit whose power is virtually unexplored.

to add a myth on top of another, i feel like what we have been given in this golden age of consumer electronics and interconnected media is an Excalibur of sorts. the frustration we all share currently lies in our inability to wield this sword in a way that unleashes its full potential, eventually returning power where it belongs. whether this means it will take a single King Arthur to come along and show everyone how it's done, or perhaps, in a different telling the saviour will need help from some lady of the lake, i feel a major eschatological transition for cinema or for movies is nigh.

[jenkins]

makes sense that this conversation heated up. the internet is heated up about it

i'm simply on the moviemakers' side, proud of them, proud of the ones here. disagree with nothing here, you may want to email soderbergh, idk. related to my first post but not a matter of debate:

lowery worked with swanberg
swanberg makes movies for the internet and for the theater/all his theater movies play in la
swanberg's latest movie stars olivia wilde, anna kendrick, and jake johnson

but everyone should say what they want to say, you feel better i know. lotsa conversations like this through la, sure

[Just Withnail]

The complete address, AKA "in this day and age you can't keep a secret"

[jenkins]

soderbergh is so likable would be another great thread

[wilder]

Video version

This event not being recorded was a giant house of lies.

soderbergh is so likable would be another great thread

Soderbergh's greatest talent is his sense of humor. I'm gonna miss it.

[wilder]

"How Do You Get Anybody to See It?" Paul Schrader on Taxi Driver and 21st Century Filmmaking
via Filmmaker Magazine

Paul Schrader presented a screening of Taxi Driver in Toronto last weekend and spoke to the capacity audience of 450 at the Royal Cinema for an hour afterwards about his career and the changing state of filmmaking. As part of the Seventh Art Live Directors Series and presented by The Royal, he also showed a scene from his forthcoming The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan.

Many in the audience watched Taxi Driver for the first time on the big screen, since many were not even born when the film shocked audiences in 1976. A major critical and box-office success, it launched the careers of screenwriter Schrader and director Martin Scorsese, and turned Robert De Niro into a superstar.

"Darkness was taking over," Schrader recalled to the audience. It was spring 1972 and an affair had wrecked Schrader's marriage. "I was drifting, living in my car and having dark thoughts." A chronic pain in his stomach was diagnosed as a bleeding ulcer. He was 26. "When I was in the hospital, the metaphor of a taxi came to mind, this metal coffin that was floating through the open sewers of the city and this young man was trapped inside this metal coffin who seemed to be surrounded by people, but in fact was desperately alone in prison. It became a metaphor for the life I was living."

Though a respected film critic, Schrader didn't see his first movie until he was 17. His parents were strict Dutch Calvinists who forbade movies, TV and even Pat Boone in their household. When Schrader moved to Los Angeles in 1968, he encountered culture shock: "I was right in the midst of all the counterculture. I was involved in radical politics and the drug culture." However, he felt out of place, a condition he channeled in Taxi Driver: "When I wrote the screenplay, it was about a person who...wanted to be part of the crowd, but can't get through this pane of glass."

Anti-hero Travis Bickle, he explained, became his "exorcism voodoo doll." "I had to write this thing in order to not be this thing." From the sofa of his ex's unheated house in Los Angeles, Schrader knocked off two drafts one right after the other in 10 days. "I wrote this thing in a kind of fever." After returning to his day job as a film critic, Schrader was interviewing Brian de Palma about his 1973 movie, Sisters. Over a chess match one day, Schrader said, "Brian, I wrote a script. Maybe you'd like to read it." De Palma did, then handed it to his friend Martin Scorsese. "One thing led to another," explains Schrader, "and three years later it got made. That was my journey."

Remarkably, little changed from page to screen as Schrader avoided the development hell of endless rewrites. "I think rewriting in some ways is overvalued," he said. "When somebody says to me, 'I want you to read this script. I've been working on it for three years,' my hearts skips. If somebody says, 'I just wrote pieces of stuff over the last few weeks. It's just an idea,' I want to read that one. I want to read what just popped out of your head and you didn't think about too much. Screenwriting is overvalued, because how else do screenwriting teachers justify their existence?"

One of the few scenes that Schrader left open to De Niro's improvisation was the infamous "You talkin' to me?" In his memoirs, Clarence Clemons claimed that De Niro lifted the line from Bruce Springsteen. Schrader heard a different story: "Bob was in a deli downtown and there was a Jewish comic whose routine was to go from table to table and say, 'Hey, you talkin' to me?'"

Schrader couldn't write Travis Bickle today: "As you get older, it gets harder and harder to do films about male loners." The film industry itself has evolved beyond recognition: "I had begun at the end of the studio era, then the industry changed to independent films. Then, the industry changed again." The Canyons, due to be released this summer, was a DIY project. Schrader and two partners chipped in $30,000 each and raised more off Kickstarter. "We cast on the web and got 600 auditions from around the world," he explained. "We crewed up on the web." Remarkably, screenwriter and novelist Bret Easton Ellis connected to leading man and real-life porn star James Deen by blindly tweeting.

Schrader has mixed feelings about the process. "The new technology allows people to make films very, very cheaply, but it also unhinges the vital connection that has existed for over 100 years between capitalism and motion pictures." Filmmakers are now free, he explains, to "make movies the same way you can make poetry, songs, paintings. You can make it for no money." However, the disconnect between supply (audience) and demand (filmmaker) inherent in capitalism means that "we are in an era when you can make a film for nobody."

He soberly noted that of the thousands of films submitted to Sundance last year, only 100 or so were chosen and of those only a handful landed distribution deals. "The entire dilemma of filmmaking has changed. It used to be how you get the money to make the film. Now it's how do you get anybody to see it?"

Schrader even questioned the value of film festivals, adding that the rejections by Sundance and SXSW to The Canyons was "fortuitous." "If we had gone, we would spent a bunch of money it wouldn't have helped us at all." Instead, he sold The Canyons to IFC. In fact, Schrader is growing more interested in making multi-hour TV series. He considers the ritual of an audience sitting in a dark room and watching projected images to be an outdated 20th century concept. "We watch relatively little filmed entertainment in that context anymore. I'm like the next person. I watch films on my iPad or my phone. I've seen most of Mad Men on my phone. If I were your age, I don't know if I would be thinking of theatrical films anymore."

When he started in films in the late '60s, the industry was in a creative crisis, grappling with the anti-war movement, the drug culture, women's lib, civil rights and gay rights. "Out of these new themes, we needed new heroes," he explained. "My generation created new heroes and new movies. It was very exciting for about 10 or 15 years. Now we're in a deeper period of crisis, only it's not a crisis of content, but over form....we don't know what movies are anymore."

Due to technology, he worries that the film industry doesn't know how pay for movies anymore or how to collect revenues. "YouTube is a movie and so is Mad Men and so is Oblivion," he said. "Some people think we are in the era of transition, but I don't even think that. I think we're in a period of permanent change now. Whatever you believe about filmed entertainment will be morphing for the rest of your lives so fast that it will never really settle down."

[BB]

Sorry to re-hash this topic if everyone's already moved on, but I've been thinking and talking about this -- especially what Pubrick wrote -- a bit over the past couple weeks.

i think my issue is with the "trying to raise a family making things".. i don't think this should even be an expectation.

You're taking this to mean making art, in which case you could be right. Art, and even entertainment, is generally useless as far as survival is concerned and as survival (whether physical or economic) becomes more and more pressing of a concern, naturally frivolous activities will fall by the wayside. I don't think this is really all that much of an issue as far as filmmaking goes. Should push come to shove, technological advancements will allow costs to come down on all sides. Production, firstly, by embracing digital technologies that simplify workflow and minimize the crews and materials required, but also by lowering salaries all around. There's no reason that anyone need be taking home tens of millions of dollars for making a movie -- other than that tens of millions are the expectation for artists of a certain strata. I mean, you don't need millions to raise a family. Yet. As for marketing, I'd imagine you could effectively advertise even the biggest blockbusters with a crew of, like, ten talented people. Then it's just a matter of carefully picking your ad spaces. And, lastly, the executive level, obviously, top-heavy, dispassionate, over-paid. We all know this. Both movies and cinema will probably weather whatever storm is looming. For a while, anyway.

However, I think "things" means more than just art -- it's soon to include the whole of human industry. With increased automation, our economy has become increasingly information-based. I think we're already at a point where the financial well-being of many, many, many blue-collar and retail workers hinges largely on their employers' sympathies (or good PR sense) and the fact that people born before 1970 are not necessarily comfortable enough with computers and machines. Once that generation starts to die off, it won't be long before entire sectors are replaced with devices.  Even white-collar, certainly lower-level data-entry type jobs could probably have been done by computers five years ago. And, as blue-collar jobs disappear, so too shall white-collar. Now, I'm aware that this is the Luddite fallacy and all that, but hear me out.

If in an information-based economy we decide that information should be free, the economy ceases to be. I mean, doesn't it? So, it's not simply a matter of the arts being effected, but intellectual property across the board. And that has tangible consequences, particularly when paired with increased automation. Jobs vanish for all but a few. Wealth concentrates enormously. As we move away from industry, we need to ensure that information remains monetized. It's either that or we need to allow people to be able to raise a family making things, whatever they may be. Really, as far as survival is concerned, a movie is no less valuable than a couch, y'know? In either case, Soderbergh's right. People have gotta pay for shit.