The reason some of you think there are too many movies is because TheFKATheFilmBiz is designed wrong.
Can there ever be too much blue sky? Dance in your step? Love in your eye?
Once a business has matured, can it evolve and address the problems that stem from errors in the original design?
We better hope so. Right now, people are more confused than they even know.
Are they really just shadows on the wall? Can we see the ruts we are walking in? Do the fish know how the water they are swimming in is today?
A lot of folks in the cinema industries complain that we make too many movies. We overwhelm consumers and cannibalize each other’s business. No one can watch everything that gets generated. No one would even want to. All that is true, but it doesn’t we mean we make too many movies.
In fact, to look at this way misses the real problem. Or rather, it misses several real problems.
Our current business is not to make great films, or even connect the right audience with each film that somehow gets made. We built a system that’s primary goal is to extract the value we perceive as being inherent in talent; the goal is not to enhance the value that the talent embeds within a given work. Our system is meant to capitalize on perceived value and not actual value.
The first error comes from grooming the young to believe in a hierarchy of power, worth, and desire. We are taught that there is a Platonian form — that one chair is better than another. This thinking infects our behavior and our desire, forever comparing and contrasting, eager to see one prove “better than” another.
And then we think the “winner” deserves some award. Our appreciation of something does not need a ranking. No one is better than another, and the same holds true to all objects and creative products. Yes, we may value objects more than others, but that is a construct.
It is this ranking though that drives many to become a director or an actor, be it subconscious or otherwise. Why do you want to be a director? So that you can be in control? What makes you think you can ever be in control, or really would want to?
We all have stories to tell. Many of these stories can be told in a manner that will delight many too. But most will never be heard or seen or felt. And when we have such stories that need to be told, the answer is not to try to turn us all into directors either. Many of us will do a lot better, working in a support capacity for others, as those stories percolate.
Most film schools are set up for directors primarily and this is what most graduate hoping to be. Our support orgs in turn reinforce the same. And to service this tsunami of directors-to-be we’ve learned to celebrate the first feature — the one that gets them started, but not the one where they learn to make that voice sing.. We have a system where it is acceptable to finance first features, even if it is rarely much more than philanthropy. Film festival after festival serves up the latest harvest from the new crop. This is not about excellence. This is about novelty. And ultimately about conformity too, unfortunately.
It is sort of funny. All of our America’s film support organizations are focused primarily on the director class, but real directors — the kind you can build an industry on — are few and far between. These support orgs do a pretty good job now sourcing these potential directorial talents. We know how to help them get that first one made. Or at least we know how to for the ones that do like the ones that are willing to do just like the ones before them did. But we haven’t put much effort in building things to lift the good into the great. Or even how to sustain a career after launch.
There once was money to be made for each season’s new line of films but the novelty wore off such roses after thirty years, didn’t it? Don’t shed any tears though, the focus pivoted from the films itself, to the talent that helmed them. Maybe that’s why what we still absurdly call America’s film biz has been built as a business often seen as “chewin’ ‘em up, and spittin’ ‘em out”.
But what happens after that? These directing hopefuls rely on their representatives for the next stage of career — the kind that comes after the festival premiere. Maybe a dev deal at a prestige division — to the degree such divisions still exist... More likely a whole bunch of hopeless meetings until the client is begging to just do something, even if it has a number in the title. Series will buy some time. This is the design of the system. It is not an accident.
That is, that is how it is unless you are a self-starter — but few can afford to be that sort. There is not a model that allows for one to stay humble in this business. You need a real score somewhere early on in the story to make the whole thing click. They expect you to keep growing. Do what you did before, only this time for a few dollars more. Rinse, dry, repeat. Hopefully you’ll become a flavor or be the sort that cavorts with the other happening sprouts and the magic in the bottle is there to turn such opportunities into gold. Gold for them that is. Not really for you and not for us lovers of cinema.
Is there really an industry built somewhere to help nurture such nascent talents? Not really. You have to deliver the goods PDQ or you get to understand that that what were once welcoming doors swings both ways just as fast. Maybe much faster on the exit mode?
But does it have to be that way? Could we trade in the present for a better model?
For thirty-five years now, the SC-Indie Film infrastructure has been generating the wanna-be director like there was no limit on opportunity for them after Film #1. It works — or rather “worked” — because there seems like we’ve tapped an endless supply of wanna-be directors (actors too for that matter). But if you ask me, not building a system that allows more talent to mature more fully instead of just an in-the-door, out-the-door manner of today is sort of like running a shoe lace company in the land of loafers and slides.
We are not focusing where we should be, chum. And I would suggest to those that say there are just too many of them, to please stay mum. You’ve got it wrong.
Put me in the camp of those that feel that just like we can never have enough new music, books, or art, we can never have enough new cinema and the new directors who create it. But put a really large asterisk next to that statement too, please.
Our new cinema needs to be targeted to do certain things and the existing cinema infrastructure needs to be built to handle that sort of cinema. We currently fail on both counts. And do we need to find someone to fault with it? Or have we finally just come to the point where we are ready to deal with it?
Let’s admit it: we don’t have the infrastructure to support all the movies we make. Once, maybe? Today? No way, no how. The 90’s Indie film boom was supported not just by the emergence of a new consumer-based technology (home video); it also was managed by hundreds of film execs that came of age running their college film society — a training ground for virtually every distribution exec over the age of 55 (and that’s probably 85% of them!).
Our industry has neglected to devise a plan to train the film lovers who aren’t going to elbow their way behind the camera. These are the folks who could build the better mousetrap that most of upstart wannabes are desperate to have delivered to them. Granted training them isn’t going to be the lucrative boondoggle that many a film degree program is for our once great educational institutions. And film societies left the campus soon after the home entertainment system became as ubiquitous in a door room as a turntable once was. And then we put all those same goodies into phones and computers, and done is done and gone baby gone. We lost a lot more when lost those film societies though. We lost a necessary training ground.
