More room at the bottom.

So you blow out the savings, you max out the credit cards, you make your movie. Then you take it on the festival circuit, you score some good reviews, maybe nab a few prizes. And then there is a dull thud, and you realize, despite every effort, your film has died on the vine. You made a movie, and nobody wanted it.

Well, not nobody. Just not the usual suspects - the niche distributors that signify success in industry terms. But isn't the very point of indie film not to speak in industry terms? With that in mind, filmmakers are now loudly, proudly not taking no for an answer and embracing unconventional means to find their films an audience.

Kimberley Jones's Austin Chronicle cover story checks in with the teams behind four struggling features - Melvin Goes to Dinner, The Gatekeeper (trailer), My Name Is Buttons and Funny Ha Ha - to flesh out the outline right there in those two short paragraphs.

Very interesting stuff. A couple of thoughts:

One thing I notice right off, naturally, is that the whole idea of going straight to DVD is written off in a single sentence. John Carlos Frey, who made The Gatekeeper, is offered $40,000 by an unnamed "direct-to-DVD outlet" - "'not a slap in the face,' he's quick to say, but he thought his movie was worth more than that." It could well be, but one of the reasons he probably thinks so, among other possible reasons, is that he seems to have sunk a lot more than that into making it.

But for Courtney Davis, John Merriman, and David Layton, who've evidently spent a total of around $10,000, post-production and marketing costs included, making My Name Is Buttons, would quadrupling their investment really be so bad? And what goes completely unconsidered is what might happen for the film and its makers once it's released on DVD. Via rental outlets, online and off - but particularly online, where word-of-mouth promotion can be several times more effective than it is off - the audience is potentially a lot larger than that of all the festival screenings a film might see combined. If, as Jones writes, "what we really want is for our work to be seen," the DVD now (and years down the line, video-on-demand) ought to be an increasingly tempting alternative, as I argued nearly a year ago. And since then, too, the numbers of DVD players and quite decent home systems (especially relative to some screens at some festival venues) have ballooned, only strengthening the argument.

More power to microcinemas and all that, by all means. There is a lot to say, obviously, for the instant real-life community of a theatrical screening, for the lights going down, for celluloid, etc. And Jones is certainly right to admire Frey for taking his film directly to the audiences he wants to reach, for example, to the maximum-security penitentiary in New Mexico.

One historical footnote might have been mentioned, though (and granted, you can never get it all in). And that would be the long tradition in indie film, particularly in the US, of filmmakers taking their movies on the road, city by city, hustling and bustling throughout film history as long and as hard as these filmmakers are now. But filmmakers today actually have many more options, and frankly, I'm surprised that there aren't at least as many of them aiming for the straight-to-DVD market as there are aiming for, say, a one-off screening on the Sundance channel or, if things are really going splendidly, getting the film picked up by HBO.

The final hope for many, of course, as Jones notes, is that the completed first film will serve as a calling card for getting the second one made. Now, with DV making it possible to keep production costs relatively low and a greater variety of ways available to reach audiences, there is more room at the bottom, not less, and it's not unreasonable to hope for a modest profit. And that's a real calling card.



Posted by dwhudson at July 11, 2003 6:11 AM