Mark Gill’s talk at the Los Angeles Film Festival’s Financing Conference has been causing a right old kefuffle in the independent film community. It was read nearly 100,000 times on indieWIRE in 4 days. Here’s an upbeat nugget to wet your whistle:
Here’s how bad the odds are: of the 5000 films submitted to Sundance each year– generally with budgets under $10 million–maybe 100 of them got a US theatrical release three years ago. And it used to be that 20 of those would make money. Now maybe five do. That’s one-tenth of one percent.
Put another way, if you decide to make a movie budgeted under $10 million on your own tomorrow, you have a 99.9% chance of failure.
Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir wrote a follow up piece with this final, positive-ish conclusion:
The indie booms of the ’80s and ’90s crested and collapsed in their turn, but the best filmmakers always survived — and without fail every year moviegoers turn some totally unlikely release into a big hit. As far as the old-fashioned movie experience is concerned, Gill is probably right that in a few years we’ll have half as many films released in half as many theaters. This will be a sad transition for many of us, sure. But the movies weren’t killed by television, they weren’t killed by VHS and DVD, and they can’t be killed by whatever’s happening now.
The New York Times’ David Carr concluded thus:
Some of Mr. Gill’s peers in the industry told me he was more Captain Obvious than prophet. Still, he got people’s attention because by the time he finished talking, it sounded as if he were pitching a particularly gruesome horror movie: “The strongest of the strong will survive and in fact prosper. But it will feel like we just survived a medieval plague. The carnage and the stench will be overwhelming.”
Brian Newman, CEO of the Tribeca Film Institute, doesn’t disagree with Mark Gill but argues that most truly independent filmmakers are not remotely affected by the fate of Warner Independent, Picturehouse, New Line, Paramount Vantage et al:
Mark Gill’s analysis, even the parts I would debate, is fairly accurate, but pretty much meaningless to 99% of the indies I (and you) know. For most of us – those making truly indie films, and those watching them – not one of Gill’s thirteen disaster points mean anything to us.
Nothing.
Picturehouse, Warner Independent, etc and all – wouldn’t distribute most of the films that I’ve seen and/or supported this year, have nothing to do with what we call Indie, and are for all intents and purposes meaningless to us. I’m not saying I haven’t liked any of their films, or that they haven’t been important to the movie business. I am saying that few of these companies would ever pick up 99% of the films accepted to Sundance (or any other fest) anyways, and that whether or not they tank has no real impact on the majority of indies I know. For them, they haven’t truly had a distributor for their films since perhaps the early 90s, if ever. And they’ll keep making their films, their audiences will keep finding ways to see them – be it at festivals or online or through a hand-me-down VHS tape. So, for the rest of us, points 1-13 add up to possibly one thing- less parties to try to get into at Sundance, but not much more in terms of indie film.
Newman adds:
Bottom line- very few people are doing well in the film business. Kinda like in America in general, but that’s another blog post. It’s about time that filmmakers wake up to this fact collectively, and come up with their own models. No one can afford to keep making films per the usual model. People are spending a lot more making their films than what they are earning back.
Producer Ted Hope sent out an email to friends and colleagues saying that we are at a cultural crossroads and that we need to step up as a community and fight the good fight :
We are between things and the old model no longer works and the new one is undefined. But I see some real hope nonetheless.
This change has been much discussed for the last fifteen years, but the digital revolution is very slow in coming. This slow trickle has, in my opinion, allowed for a withering away of what truly made the indie film world unique, which is the glue that kept it a community and not just a demographic. Digital downloads won’t be anyone’s salvation, but the internet can truly rebuild what has collapsed — but it’s time to look at the infrastructure first.
Time and time again, films emerge that define a community and the community comes out to support in droves. Similarly, it truly feels to me that we are at a cultural crossroads, where we — as a community of filmmakers and film lovers — are in real danger of losing access to a dynamic range of personal cinema, unless the various communities start to take steps to unite and speak up for the world they want. We can’t keep settling for the crap that is hoisted upon us.
There are new models emerging as people and organizations experiment and try new things. Just look at the work of Lance Weiler, Matt Hanson, Brett Gaylor, Liz Rosenthal, Peter Broderick, Four Eyed Monsters, Withoutabox, B-Side, Breaththrough Distribution, IndiePix… and Shooting People!
Are we feeling optimistic? Well, there’s a lot of testing and inventing and experimenting to be done and there’s a lot at stake but hell yeah! We’re not going to stop making films (and we know there is an audience out there thirsty for innovative, creative and visionary work – and for work that isn’t as prescriptive as the solution for successful films that Gill proposes, go make your dark, rambling Western if you can pull it off!) so we’re going to have to figure this out. Together.
