The State of Things

Yes, another blog post about THE F-ING STATE OF THINGS.  

This one will attempt to tease out some good comments made by some friends, whom I hope will continue the discussion here.  My email box is getting filled.  

If you are just tuning in, the discussion began at sxsw this year and concerns the difficulty for film makers have getting a low budget indie feature to an audience these days while still having food to eat, in a changing market where "cars aren't free, and toasters aren't free, but everyone expects content to be free," to quote one wag.    

One solution seems to be, stop expecting to make a living doing this thing, and get used the fact that it is now a DIY world not unlike the scene that the music business found itself in circa 1982.  Just "get in the van," eat top ramen, sleep on people's couches and don't expect for it to get ANY better for quite some time.   But produce your art and enjoy your life anyway.  After all, "the man who wants nothing has everything. " 

In some regards, this is happening via You Tube and low-fi features such as those so called mumblecore films, which might actually be startign to make it onto the radar screens of mainstream cinema.  David Denby wrote a column about Mumblecope in a recent issue of the New Yorker.  Look it up yourself, I forget how to embed links with html... (i'll get better at blogging, I swear) 

Friend S.P. said this about distribution, regarding the films that are getting picked these days for "release" such as it is:

"for all these folks who complain that the "mumblecore" movies aren't sufficiently ambitious or that all the kids are white, I'd answer that the point's well-taken, but the myth of the $2,000 movie is something we've gotta get over.  It's not a myth that you CAN make a movie on that kind of money.  certainly you can, but it involves a huge adjustment of expectations on both sides about what a movie is.  a good $2,000 movie isn't hollywood minus cgi and explosives because you don't have money for those things.  it is a movie where you get the labor of friends to make it...and if you're young and white and from a well-to-do family, thus providing sufficient leisure time for going around planning and making $2,000 features, the people helping you are quite likely also to be young and white and fairly well-to-do.  DUH"

To which I would say ( and I did, elsewhere, which is why I'm trying to gather these thoughts here) 

To me, mumblecore films and their ilk are simply signs that a younger generation is happily busy re-inventing the wheel - they did not grow up in "cinema-church" and are less aware of how the films are possibly echoes of Rohmer and Antonioni all over again, just as many punk rockers had little awareness that Iggy Pop was merely chanelling some rebellious drummers in Congo Square circa 1869. The impulse is the same - make art about and for those who are like yourself. And don't quit your day job, unless you can't help it, and are willing to live like a survivor.

Which bring me to the next level of pondering, and that is, how do you make a GOOD movie and also a marginal-to-good living?  To me some of the best films of recent days have been slyly addressing poverty and marginalization as subject matter, and they seem to be catching the zeitgeist a lot better than anything out of Hollywood or the slackavettes underground.  I'm talking about CHOP SHOP, WENDY & LUCY, BALLAST, FROZEN RIVER, et al.  (Oh, please let there be some "et"s and some "al"s to add to this list.... what have I missed?  Are there more like this?  TELL ME NOW!) These films are what I'd be proud to call decent cinema, not just movies you have to make excuses for but are still relevant.  I wish however they looked a little better sometimes, but they seem to all make a great balancing act out of art and commerce, ie, low budgets.   To me these are the case studies of quality film making worth examining - will these directors get to make more movies, or not?  How did these films fare with exhibitors and DVD sales, etc?  Inquiring minds want to know.

BS has this to say about the parallels of film and the music business, beginning with the observation that perhaps there are "too many movies," which is a quote by a certain festival director who is probably already sorry he said it.  

B.S. speaking:

"Yes, there are too many movies. I remember well the first time we met, at SXSW in 1992, when I interviewed Linklater (cassettes of which still exist somewhere, the great "unpublished" interview, post Slacker, pre Dazed). "Searching for the next
Nirvana" was the theme that struck me then. How punk rok had suddenly been "discovered," after an entire generation of minutemen in a van had gone unnoticed by the so-called "mainstream" and it was as if Seattle was Eden and had somehow given birth to something that of course had been living for years (and of course Patti Smith and Lou Reed and the Stooges and the MC5 and on, could rightfully say Mpls and Austin and LA, etc hadn't birthed anything either).  Anyway, it was clear to me then that being in a band had moved from a community of outsiders to a frat house commodity.

Subsequently, along with movies and the rest that makes up US "culture," it all became (perhaps with pot) this country's most profitable export. My sense of that movement, where what I dug was concerned, is that there was more great stuff out there than ever, perhaps because the money-to-be made drew greater numbers of truly creative people creating something substantial. But that there was also a heckuva lot more shit out there to slog through to find the pearls. That the gold rush sea of oyster shit and pearls, crossed paths with the technology explosion and increasing access to information, creative tools and communication, is to me, what hath now wrought My Space for You Tube's Twittering Facebook.

That this is shaking out to include an element of art becoming free-of-charge, I think in part, is marvelous. Or maybe someone who studied something different in college would call it "a market correction," which is kinda how I feel about the entire economic situation. Too many people here organized their actions around a smoke and mirrors approach to money, and now the day has come when no one can ignore the fact that when you believe in the invisible, the day comes when you see its really not there. And in this country, when what’s not there is money, people pay attention.

But I digress. Yeah, “free-of-charge” is making it harder to have "a career" as an artist, but is the dinner party you describe really the community we want to build?  (ed's note: I was speaking about the phenomenon of goign to someone's house and everyone ends up gathered around a CRT looking at an hours worth of You Tube random humor and vintage Soul Train clips)  What that dinner party scene illustrates to me, is the choice we need to make about whether we try and climb out of the cultural dumpster we made for ourselves, or dive to the bottom and suffocate in our own shit." 

He's making some good points here, I feel.  But then he gets to the meat of his essay, and I hate to make this post so long but you have to bear with me, it really nails something for me here when he continues:

"I trace the dumpster's birth (though surely, there’s a good argument to be made that it started whenever life began) back to Reagan’s election.  I remember vividly, in the summer of 1980, being in high school and watching to my 84 year-old, vodka-drinking, Russian émigré, Grammpa Isadore, stomp around the fire circle at his cabin in northern Minnesota, as he ranted on about how if Ronald Reagan got elected President that fall, it was the end of any leftover vestige of meaning and substance in US life.  He was convinced that the idea we would elect “a got demn actor” as President would debase any standard of excellence and cause a lowering of expectations of performance and ultimately a disappearance of care and compassion from which we, as a society, would never recover.

Isadore died that October, a few weeks before Reagan won."

(ed's note: BS comments on something I plucked from a comment indie producer Ted Hope said he heard from his 8 year old kid, who told his dad he wanted to be a "movie designer," by which he meant he wanted to come up with vertically integrated concepts like Pokemon: the movie, the game, the toy, the cartoon, the trading card, etc.)

BS concludes:

 
"And I don’t know Ted Hope or his son, but that the boy’s dream to create a
product line featuring some cultural commodity of his creation, is sad to me.  
Don’t get me wrong, more power to him flexing his creative self, but either
we’re truly living at the end of the age and it’s a zero sum endgame in which we
all might as well throw up and create the best 30 second fart joke we can, before time’s up, or we gotta reckon with the work that needs to be done, so young Hope can hope to have a vodka fueled rant with an grandson of his own.  One good thing is that people are paying attention, it is “a window of opportunity” as someone else is saying right now about something.   "

And so we arrive where we began - on the precipice of something new, some possibility, and a lot of danger surrounding.  I ask, dear reader - which way from here?