Steady Diet of Film

Why the financial collapse is good for documentary film

Inspired by the recent fury directed at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner we here at Steady Diet of Film have elected to take a brief break from dwelling on the misfortune and anxiety of the present economic climate. Instead, let us examine some of the good news for documentary/independent film-makers within the crisis.

1a. Venture capital removed from the financing process

Back when the economy was (artificially) good and there were millions of dollars in hedge fund proceeds with nowhere to go, many independent film producers found themselves on the receiving end of no- to low-strings attached investments. This money came from people with little to no interest in long-term careers in the film industry but who were excited to see their name listed as an Executive Producer on the big screen and the VIP treatment they received when visiting a film set. Unfortunately the projects that were most likely to attract this kind of investment were the ones generated from the odious and rapidly failing "Sundance model" of attaching A-list actors and actresses to projects imbued (not always legitimately) with credibility due to their lower budgets and quirky subject matter (thereby insulating the actor's reputation when they chose to follow up by doing movies with talking dogs). Films produced under these circumstances were unofficially dubbed the Sundance model because producers hoped their films would springboard from the annual Park City film festival to plush studio distribution deals.

In recent years, the viability of this model weakened. Fewer films were recouping their enormous purchasing prices. A few examples of spectacular Sundance failures are chronicled by the Onion AV Club here. As the Sundance model began losing steam in the narrative film market it was being applied to the documentary form with mixed results. A-list celebrities began doing voiceovers, on-camera appearances and promotional tours for documentaries with which they seemed to have little conceptual involvement.

Distribution is an incredibly lop-sided business tilting towards DVD sales. Very few films recoup their production, print and marketing costs theatrically. Yet they are forced to have some kind of run in theaters in order to garner press attention and avoid the stigma of going straight to DVD. Smaller films work with even tighter margins to ensure successful DVD sales. Ancillary revenues (such as television rights, pay-per-view as well as the embryonic but generally optimistic world of digital streams) pay out a much larger proportion of a film's final proceeds.

In the mid-aughts celebrity involvement was being courted more heavily to bring more immediate attention to documentaries. Theoretically, the hope was to elongate the theatrical runs and create more interest in follow up sales. In practice it proved somewhat effective for Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen's environmental documentary 11th Hour featuring Leonardo DiCaprio which took in just under $1M at the box office. But this strategy fell flat for Nicole Kidman with I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal, Don Cheadle with Darfur Now and Joan Allen with The Rape of Europa. While celebrities are human beings, perfectly entitled to personal investments in social and historical causes the present climate of celebrity culture is inextricably enmeshed with crass commercialism. This makes it difficult for the public to distinguish between an endorsement of a social issue and a line of Louis Vuitton handbags.

1b. No new social networks.
According to a recent report from the BBC Facebook's user base is up 25% from last year. The user base of Twitter, the recently en vogue micro-blogging startup is up 1689% (the only services with that kind of growth in this economic climate are food banks). Without venture capital money at the ready to be poured into new and exciting (but completely profit-adverse) social networking ventures, it's safe to say that already exisiting sites are going to continue to be the main online avenues people use to connect with friends, meet people and learn all about your awesome film.

Independent film-makers having been sternly lectured to by distributors, festival panelists and filmmakers from the trenches that their MySpace/YouTube/website presence is the troika of their (necessitated) internet presence. Having a closer relationship with your audience will also give film-makers a greater stake in how the embryonic but generally optimistic world of digital streams will take shape over the coming years.

2. Newspapers are on their way out and people need to get information somewhere.

As print journalism dies a slow and painful death, news consumption is actually soaring in the United States. The Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual State of the News Media report earlier this month. They found that not only are audiences gravitating towards individual journalists (and away from institutions of journalism) but that cable news networks have become perfectly acceptable venues for political discourse. Audiences have become too cynical to expect objectivity from reportage, but with increased access to their own universe of fact checking they are willing to give smaller outlets the benefit of the doubt. This creates a climate of receptivity to informative, thoughtful documentary work that critically engages its audience.

3. Audiences still pay to see movies

People are responding to economic uncertainty by cutting back on a lot of non-essential expenses like dining out and elaborate cell phone plans. But they're not willing to be bored no matter how bad it gets. The number of movie tickets sold dropped slightly last year, but it's worth noting that the gross revenues increased because movie-goers were willing to pay higher ticket prices than they had in previous years. The online movie rental giant Netflix hit 10 million subscribers in February 2009. In their 4th quarter for 2008 (when housing, insurance and stock markets hit crisis status), they posted profits up 19% from the previous year. Even Sony's pricey gaming console the Playstation 3 (starting at $400) trounced its top competitor the xBox360 (which starts at $250) in large part due to its built-in BluRay player.

4. Ken Burns is out of a job

No offense to the Emmy-winning documentarian who re-invented the slow pan of the still image, but the news that floundering auto giant General-Motors was ending their 22-year commitment to the film-maker signals great opportunity for film-makers down the food chain. Consider that Burns's previous films (covering the subjects of Jazz, WW2, Baseball, the formation of the West and the Civil War) have a combined runtime of 76.5 hours and have been PBS staples for the last 20 years. After Burns' six-part series on the national parks system airs this fall there will be an enormous gap in public television programming nationwide. Some of the larger PBS affiliates may respond by following in the steps of HBO Documentary and acquire more films from the festival circuits. Smaller affiliates may see this situation as an opportunity to work with more local filmmakers. Which brings us to my final point...

5. Film-makers will be forced to focus on their own backyards.

We do not need more western gonzo filmmakers heading to warzones to make documentaries  about the experience of being a western gonzo documentary film-maker in a warzone. These films are at best shallow, slight works and at worst self-congratulatory. They shamelessly exploiting the suffering of others for the sake of adding more mediocrity to the world. It's the film world's contribution to cultural imperialism and it simply needs to stop.

In a perfect world, these films couldn't get funding. In today's troubled economy, they might not, which might allow for film-makers indigenous to these regions and conflicts to speak for themselves. But really the chief concern needs to be the cessation of crappy gonzo docs.

Far be it for me to make light of events that are causing anyone anxiety or suffering. But in a time of chaos, when the systems we know are quickly eroding, there is opportunity for us to seize upon, adapt and destroy what doesn't work for us.

Watch the Gits documentary online

The Gits, Kerri O'Kane's documentary about the life and murder of punk singer Mia Zapata, is streaming ad-free for two more days as part of Pitchfork Media's One Week Only series.

The film started at a time when Zapata's murder was still unsolved, through the course of production a suspect was apprehended, tried and convicted. O'Kane focuses the most attention on the Gits' creative process and the impact Zapata's death (specifically the investigation) had on the Seattle music scene in the mid-90s.

RIYL: The Times of Harvey Milk, Hype! (from which the film borrows live material), Kurt Cobain: About a Son, the Staircase.

IMDB was a UGC before you was a UGC.

A story that's being reported with a sweeping sense of exasperation: the Internet Movie Database has finally entered Web 2.0 and will now be streaming full-length tv shows, movies, short films and movie trailers largely hosted by Hulu.

But this vexed coverage fails to take into account that imdb.com has been a user-generated content site since before the term "user generated content" even existed. Since 2002 the site's 17 million registered users (monitored by a staff of about 20) have created a site that has become as much a professional resource for producers, casting directors and writers as well as a popular destination site for movie discussion. And really, if the word "database" appears in your company's title, web trendiness probably isn't be a top priority.

However, today's launch was an extremely necessary upgrade in the arena of movie trailers. Whereas before imdb.com relied on a series of partnerships with sketchy third party video sites (that often didn't even direct to the right footage), the site will now host more trailers on their own site with a 15-second advertising pre-roll. 

Fifteen seconds of ads for two minutes of content might feel like a bit of overkill now, but with Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently declaring 2009 to be the year YouTube becomes profitable, inline advertising will undoubtedly become standard soon enough.

The imdb.com video deal also includes a yet to be defined partnership with Sony Pictures Television and CBS.

Summer angst in "dumb" Antarctica

While struggling to write a review of a horror movie on a painfully rare sunny day in San Francisco, I was delighted to stumble on this love note to director/writer/composer John Carpenter from Benjamin Strong for the Moving Image Source four day tribute to the B-movie auteur:    

Halloween (1978), the indie $400,000 ur-slasher classic that established Carpenter in Hollywood (and launched Jamie Lee Curtis’s stint as a virginal scream queen) was so coolly efficient in per capita goose bump production—it also grossed $47 million stateside—that even the disapproving Pauline Kael had to admit that “maybe when a horror film is stripped of everything but nightmarish dumb scariness and sudden shocks it satisfies part of the audience in a more basic, childish way than sophisticated horror pictures do.”

Her sneering aside, Kael’s “stripped” and “basic” are apt for Carpenter’s minimalist, unapologetically pop style. His movies almost always run between 90 and 100 minutes. They are heavy on atmosphere, but the spaces depicted are typically empty (Carpenter’s murky, underfurnished sets are the prototypes for Inland Empire’s interiors). Even the synthesizer scores, many of them written and performed by the director himself, are spartan. And yet for all their apparent simplicity and directness, the genre pictures Carpenter made during the 1980s are among the most radical readings we have of morning in America, as evidenced by BAMcinématek’s four-picture retrospective.

Though I was a little disappointed to see Carpenter's amazing Assault on Precinct 13 only mentioned in the context of Jean-François Richet's unfortunate 2005 re-make, it's great to see a journeyman film-maker whose work can be read as both a "smuggling" (as prescribed by Martin Scorsese) and wildly entertaining be celebrated in the last few weeks of summer.       

Michelle Pfeiffer goes straight to hell on a dvd.

A recent issue of Entertainment Weekly featured a story titled "Would You Dump This Woman?" (beside a full-page close up photo of Michelle Pfeiffer) to open an article detailing the twisted saga of how I Could Never Be Your Woman was made.  The film started out as a modest romantic comedy with two bankable stars (Pfeiffer and Judd Apatow go-to, Paul Rudd) from a well-known director (Amy Heckerling of Clueless and Fast Times at Ridgemont High) but through an alarming number of bad producing decisions and ego plays wound up being declared a failure before it ever opened theatrically and sent to dvd.

EW's Missy Schwartz, while not giving producer Phillipe Martinez a pass on his bad choices, accepts MGM's excuses that a film centered on a middle-aged woman simply cannot be marketed and without the dvd and television sales (Martinez had parsed all ancillary rights to Miramax) to cushion the inevitable box office blow, the $15M production budget as well as any marketing costs would be completely lost.

Schwartz also blithely states that Pfeiffer has "been MIA since 2002's White Oleander", uhm don't tell that to anyone who saw Hairspray or Stardust (totaling $335M worldwide).

This "Dumped" article is also published just one week after the New York Times ran its piece "Direct to DVD Releases Shed Their Loser Label" about how lucrative the dvd market can be for films with budgets around $10M. 

But writers like Schwartz would also do well to remember the critical duds like Crash and Must Love Dogs that became enormous commercial successes ($156M worldwide) bolstered by women Michelle Pfeiffer's age. Each of these films' successes were followed by a crush of news articles about what a surprise it was that women over 30 go to the movies. All the more audacious considering the article is run in the same issue that declares that Juno heralds a return of the "girl anti-hero" (hinting that every striking writer is going home at night and working on a script to hit the moody, pregnant teenage girl rom-com jackpot). Tacitly telling women, "enjoy these stories now because as soon as your clock strikes thirty you go back to being a pumpkin."

I Could Never Be Your Woman will be available on a bare-bones dvd February 12th. See the trailer. 

Sound bites

Francis Ford Coppola pulls a classic, overcompensating straight dude-move while promoting his new film, Youth Without Youth on the Leonard Lopate show. Lopate mentions that Matt Damon (who has an uncredited cameo in Youth) was recently voted "the Sexiest Man in American" to which FFC responds: "Well I wouldn't know anything about that!"

Katherine Heigl's recent comments about her role in Knocked Up have riled a lot of already hopelessly angry celebrity gossip commenters.  I tend to agree with EW's PopWatch, but for different reasons: 1. Heigel is spot on. The truth hurts, suckers.  And 2. It's not like the Judd Apatow cabal consists of any women.

While he continues to direct, write and produce vehicles for the male stars of his failed television shows the women in his productions (save for Leslie Mann, Apatow's wife) rarely get a second appearance and never a repeated lead role. Apatow generally opts instead to cast increasingly younger actresses.

And worry not angry commenters, having just been voted Entertainment Weekly's Smartest Person I think Judd Apatow can take a little ribbing from an actress he specifically cast because she was capable of holding her own against his comedic muse Seth Rogen.

Awards Daily readers have compiled an early best of 2007 list.  Of the top 10 I've only seen 3.  Damn you, Oscar-baiting release strategy!

And finally, E! Online's Answer Bitch made yet another reference to HP Lovecraft on today's podcast. And my love for her is now in cement.

Review: King Corn

After a battery of lab tests two college boys learn that due to their fast food diets their bodies have a higher concentration of fructose, maltrose and dextrose than blood. They embark on a road trip of the cornfields of the heartland to figure out how so much of it got from the cob into their bodies. 

That co-stars Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis coincidentally both have great-grandparents who farmed in Greene, Iowa blunts some of the exhaustion a viewer is legally entitled to when they hear the words "personal documentary".  Director Aaron Woolf sets up King Corn so that when the fish out of water laughs come they are at the (good-natured) expense of the fish and not the water.  Cheney and Ellis learn about subsidies, planting and nutrition by relying talking to local people, farmers and nutritional experts instead of heavy-handed voiceover. 

The duo plants an acre of corn and then attempts to follow where their acre winds up but find out that one acre (approximately 10,000 pounds) is such an insignificant amount in the vast sum of American corn production that it would be impossible to trace.  Using stop animation (to much less hokey effect than it sounds) they demonstrate how little corn grown in this country is directly consumed by humans. Instead massive amounts of low quality corn (genetically engineered beyond recognition and soaked in pesticides, natch) are used to feed cattle, create ethanol and as artifical sweeteners. 

The film does a fine job of illustrating the sheer absurdity of corn production in this country: it depletes soil, it's unhealthy (for both people and animals) and if not for vast government subsidies farmers wouldn't make a profit selling it.  And maybe not so coincidentally, the more large corporations have taken over farming the greater the subsidies have become, creating a system where generational family farms are going belly up while tax payers are subsidizing corporations to make increasingly unhealthy food. 

The scenes where the protagonists retrace their family tree is a bit of a weak point but the film's minor sins are forgiven when Cheney and Ellis track down Earl Butz, the influential economist of the Nixon administration who drafted the farm policies that still exist today. Butz, who was a young man during the Depression, now sees how little Americans spend on food as one of his greatest achievements. He's an economist through and through and Cheney and Ellis opt to not challenge his ideas (he's elderly but still quite sharp) on whether this savings is serving the greater good, no doubt thinking of how terrible Michael Moore came off haranguing a Charlton Heston-beseiged with Alzheimers in the final scene of Bowling for Columbine. 

King Corn is made with intelligence, humor and a sincere respect for people and the work they do.  Aaron Woolf has pulled off the unimagineable, making a documentary about nutrition and government subsidies that contributes to a larger discourse without being didactic or boring. 

King Corn is currently playing at the Red Vic Moviehouse in San Francisco and in limited theatrical release around the US. The film will also broadcast on the PBS "Independent Lens" in April 2008.

See also: Supersize Me, Hybrid, Darwin's Nightmare, Sicko.

And once again, "wtf" is redefined.

Sarah Brightman, Anthony Head, Paris Hilton, rock opera, sex, blood, weird, drugs, cult, forcible organ removal and all brought to you by the auteur who brought us the Saw franchise. 

My Buffy fandom will not allow me to be as glib as I truly want to. 

The power of BACN compels you to go see crappy movies.

This week I've received automated letters from Sen. John Kerry and the ACLU encouraging me to see In the Valley of Elah and Rendition respectively.  Kerry writes:

You can't help but remember those words when you watch this movie. It's not an "anti-war" film; those words are too cheap and easy and clichéd. 

No, this is a film about soldiers and families -- and a family's search for the truth, and a nation's responsibility to be there for our troops not just when they're sent into battle, but when the boots come off and they come home.

I reviewed In the Valley of Elah very briefly in a recent episode of Show Me Your Titles.  I thought the film was terrible overall but the near hateful depictions of military families  and PTSD were especially galling.  I understand the desire to be a booster for films that address topics that are woefully misunderstood in our larger culture but getting behind films that portray soldiers with PTSD as bloodthirsty psychotic killers is not a productive step towards getting people the help they need and deserve.   

And FYI Hollywood, I grew up in a military family and I spent my entire adolescence around other military families. I've never met a single person who made their bed (with extra the tight corners!) the way every single military person in a movie does. And while we're on the subject, the only neo-Nazis and/or wifebeaters I've ever encoutered were all civilians.  Are you writing this down, Sam Mendes?

Then a few days later I received another e-mail blast from the ACLU telling me that the Reese Witherspoon/Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle Rendition is "all too real" and that it's my patriotic duty to go see this film.  Once again, rendition is a horrible practice that warrants much greater examination and discussion than is currently happening in our national discourse. But is forcing a bunch of soft-minded political melodrama down the throats of the American populace really the mode that ACLU wants to take to inform people about this very real danger?

Hats off to the film-makers who take on politically explosive topics (even when it's cloaked in Oscar-baiting histrionics) but films are supposed to convey emotional truths and possibilities, not necessarily facilitate education.  Political leaders and progressive non-profits should be focusing their efforts on outreach to make these topics more accessible to people, not working as cheap guerilla marketers filling my inbox with half-witted movie reviews.

See also: BACN is better than Spam.

One small step forward for my portable information, one giant leap backwards for television.

In this week's issue of Entertainment Weekly CBS and Cadillac have a partnered ad that includes a thumbnail flash drive containing a flash-based presentation of CBS's new fall line-up and Cadillac's new sedan that apparently CSI: Miami's Adam Rodriguez enjoys leaning up against.

The tv shows were a massive snooze fest (Johnny Galecki in a laugh-tracked sitcom, why?!) and the video ran extremely poorly on my computer so I re-formatted the device and am now the happy owner of a snazzy new 130 mb drive.  Thank you, CBS and Cadillac!

Also this week, after a much publicized fallout with Apple iTunes, NBC has rushed into a partnership with Amazon's Unbox to make their new fall line-up available online.  You might remember Unbox from what had to be the most negative review CNet's Tom Merritt has ever written and it doesn't look as though the service has made much progress (although it does now allow itself to be uninstalled, which I suppose is technically an improvement).

NBC choosing to partner with Amazon was a good enough start. Amazon receives much credit for getting many casual computer users to feel comfortable putting their credit card information online, but tech and innovation have never been their strong suit (their patented 1-click technology has not exactly setting the woods on fire nor has their online grocery store).

NBC is offering many of their new shows' pilot episodes two weeks before their broadcast dates and free on Unbox, plus Amazon is throwing in a $1.99 credit.  This can be used to download another episode of a show you're more familar with to try out the service.  But Unbox is still an unmitigated disaster and I can summarize why in one word: JANK!!! 

Unbox still gets an F- in the "Could my mom install this?" department and not just because my mom has an iMac and Unbox has zero-Apple compatibility, zero useability and extremely intrusive DRM.  Simply put, this app sucks and should've been scrapped and re-built from the ground up the day after it was released to universal jeers.

But even though these shows all look terrible to me I appreciate that television networks are finally wrapping their heads around the idea of putting the first few episodes (or in ABC's case, all episodes) online to give their new shows a fighting chance at finding an audience.  Fox is still failing big-time at this.  With 75% of its season already shot and in the can they cancelled Anchorwoman after airing one episode.  And then in an extremely baffling move, made all the discarded episodes available online. 

Sigh, and yet Arrested Development was not permitted to live?  When it was just earlier this year that the Nielsen's ratings board decided to start counting what DVR users are watching and realized that the Office and House are two of the most popular shows in the country when previous data placed them in the gutters?

I've said it before and I'll say it again, if these corporate wanks put half as much time, money and resources into innovation as they did prosecuting bullshit lawsuits and squabbling with each other over ego and parent company encroachments there might actually be something worth watching on their schedules delivered in a way that kept up with the public's enthusiasm for emerging technologies.

But don't listen to me, listen to Conan!

Update: Vindication! Buzz Out Loud's opening story today, NBC ruins "free".