Art vs. Industry

There was an article in the New York Times this week about Hollywood's ever-diminishing investment in independent film distribution.

This is something I've been conscious of for years now - I came of age as a filmmaker in the era of Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino, but the idea that it's still possible to be discovered at a film festival and parlay your debut feature into a Hollywood career is pure mythology, promoted by the studio PR departments as a way to keep cheap labor and cheaper product (in the form of direct-to-DVD movies and late-night cable programming) available in abundance.

In my opinion.

The good news, as mentioned in the article, is that there are other methods emerging for making films sustainably, using the power of the internet and niche-marketing. Niche-marketing, of course, is just a fancy way of saying, "finding a community that cares deeply about the story you want to tell."

This development makes me optimistic that filmmaking will ultimately come back around to an archetypal idea of storytelling that's been largely neglected by the intensely industrialized film production process - an archetype based on mastery of narrative and character, rather than mastery of the art of procuring venture capital and schmoozing semi-famous b-list actors.

We're pretty confident, with this project, that we know our niche - we're still going to need money to get the film finished, but it's mostly going to go toward things like paying our rent while we work, half a dozen plane tickets, and several hundred tapes (at $7 a pop).

I'll share more on our fundraising efforts as they develop.