Obviously, I loved it. And indeed, there is something about Soho that calls out to anyone with an ounce of poetry in their noggins. It’s something to do with the mix of enslaved Eastern European prostitutes, drug-runners, errand boys for madams, gangsters, snakebite-swigging lads, high society heroin-addicts, jazz men, fashion students and television people, not to mention more than all the permutations of the gay scene that you could possibly try to imagine.

Anyways, it seems fitting that that particular neighborhood should have been so wholeheartedly adopted by one of the many cracking attendees of my Alma Mater- the great British eccentric and self-described dandy Sebastian Horsley.

Sebastian Horsley died at the age of 48 on June 17, and every time I see some Los Angeles suckling walking around with a two-bit Hot Topic accessory kit and an ‘addiction’, I will sneer at him in Horsley’s honour, and scream “KNOW YOUR REFERENCES, ANKLEBITER!”

Read his obituary by clicking here, and read his book ‘Dandy in the Underworld’ by buying it from an independent seller here.

With the recent BP oil spill — quite frankly — freaking me the hell out, I am lending my support and donating my money to these activists by supporting their most recent crowdsourced fundraising campaign.

They are raising funds for The Yes Lab, which is a series of brainstorms and trainings to help activist groups carry out Yes-Men-style projects on their own. There are four Yes Lab projects already in production. With your help, there could be a lot more. The goal is to raise $30,000 by the end of the summer, and they’re already just shy of $12,000.

If you help out, they’ll thank you with some seriously weird things, anything from a thank you issued ‘in a form that may scare your mother’ to ephemera from around the office, to  ‘a thrift store suit worn by The Yes Men in one of their actions, or underwater.’

I feel like it’s a good time to take this mess the world is becoming into our hands. To do that we need to take action, and support those who already are. Donate today.

4/5. How to sustain without selling out: An exercise in ego management.

In the last several posts I’ve argued that film festivals should take a step away from the commercial approach and should adopt a community-centric view in their strategic direction.

Maslow's pyramid, as applied to film festivals

However, if we apply Maslow’s taxonomy of human needs to film festivals, it becomes quickly apparent that it’s all well and good for festivals to try to better serve their communities, but when they’re barely surviving, simple basic needs end up perforce taking precedence.

Most independent festivals function at the ‘safety’ level of the pyramid—trying to securely retain theatre space, staff, volunteers, film submissions… It’s hard for these hard-working people to discuss the philosophical approaches towards how they serve filmmakers (the top of the pyramid) in these tenuous circumstances.

Running & funding a film festival

Consider, the BARE mimimum needed to run a festival:

• Theatre rental
• Projectors, seats & screens, if you use alternate spaces
• Special decks (beta decks, for instance)
• Liability insurance
• A marketing budget for banners, festival programs, lanyards and passes, any further visibility needs, and a budget for the design thereof
• A publicity and advertising budget to garner submissions and audiences
• Transportation
• Online operations (email, url, web design & maintenance, submissions tracking)
• Staffing: Fest director, programming director, submissions manager, volunteer manager, ticketing manager, print traffic manager & runners (if more than one venue), sponsor liaison, filmmaker liaison, venues manager… etc.

Festivals are, in short, pricey. Looking to fill these basic needs without going out of pocket, most festivals survive through four options for revenue sources: Public funding, ticket & merchandise sales, submission fees and sponsorships (private and corporate).

Unfortunately the United States happens to be a government that has piss-poor public funding for non-profit arts institutions, so the European model of public funding is, for the most part, out of reach for US based festivals.

Similarly, ticket and merchandise sales are helpful, but usually provide a tiny financial drop in the big bucket of need. If you take an average independent festival—7 days long with 3 screenings a day in a 100-seat house, selling tickets at an accessible $9 each- the festival stands to bring in $18,900 IF EVERY SCREENING IS SOLD OUT. More realistically, they can probably hope to bring in about half that.

Looking at submission fees- say a small independent festival gets 800 submissions in (it’s usually less for most festivals) and charges an average of $30 per submission, it stands to make an income of $24,000. Though distasteful to many, submission fees nonetheless become the bulk of the funding.

In this climate, then, it is not surprising that most festivals immediately turn to sponsorships, which have proven in some instances to be very helpful. However, this is an approach that is problematic on many levels, not the least because it turns festival directors into glorified salesmen. Further, still, corporate sponsorship is a double edged sword.

Both support and interference in the arts, corporate sponsorship, when done wrong, turns an inherently let’s-talk-about-art sort of experience into a hyped-up advertising vehicle, potentially void of substance. Also, in today’s world of ‘branded content’ and ‘online properties’, it DOES bears reminding: Corporate Sponsorship is cheesy. Nothing says independent film more than a miniskirt-clad alcohol-wielding would-be actress imploring you to try her company’s vodka. Right?

Though there are many examples of sponsorship deals that do not force the festival to scream “AUDI!!!” from the rooftops, it remains a fact – to me – that corporations should not be our answer to the Medici. One might correctly point out that ulterior motives existed from time immemorial (the Medici were really into self-image, after all- a sort of precursor to the obsession with branding and corporate image), but the ulterior motives of late are just too base. Neither lofty, nor profound, our experience of philosophy and thought evolves into an experience of commerce. ‘What do you think he meant by his reference to Nietzsche in that one piece of dialogue?’ turns into ‘Oh, shit! They’re giving free Nikes away down at the filmmaker lounge! Do you have the right pass to get in?’

So: How can festivals survive without selling their souls?

I believe the answer – the way to survive without selling our souls – is in a crowd-sourced / crowd-powered film festival – a no/low sponsor film festival that is small, community-driven, and community-funded. This is possible to achieve, and would additionally be a solid step towards empowering the festival’s audiences and participants through transparency and involvement.

This would require a few action steps:

1. THINK about what you want to accomplish with the festival—what you think you should provide to the arts community and how you can best provide it.
2. Band together with local community groups as partners to share expenses or trade assets, band together with other festivals to create larger incentive and reach
3. Create comprehensive, community-based micro-donation strategies to meet goals, as they arise.
4. Maintain your relationships with your community through transparency, accessibility, invitations to curate/ host screenings/ participate in whatever way it sees fit.
5. Embrace your role as a community-based organization by lowering the klieg lights, ditching the red carpet and toning down the ego.

Festivals taking ownership of their small part of a bigger whole means that they allow themselves to expand more organically and buoyed by bigger better support systems. Not trying to be the next Tribeca implies a level of humility and restraint that many festival directors would probably rail against, but one must ask oneself, how does raising $500,000 for an exclusive red carpet premiere of the latest Big-Studio schlockfest really help independent film? Is the ‘visibility’ one gains from this type of event more helpful for the festival and its filmmakers, say, than that gained by having a series of smaller open screenings in venues that are invested in the success of the film they are showing?

Festivals with high overhead are festivals that are forced to toe the line- spending the lion’s share of their time wooing and maintaining sponsors. Smaller festivals – I would argue – actually have it a lot better than they typically think. Their overhead is controllable, and they can focus on programming and their community.

There’s this ‘marketing guru’ called Seth Godin who wrote:

“Big used to matter. Big meant power and profit and growth. [...] Today, little companies often make more money than big companies. Little churches grow faster than worldwide ones. [...] Small is the new big because small gives you the flexibility to change the business model when your competition changes theirs. [...] A small church has a minister with the time to visit you in the hospital when you’re sick. [...] Small is the new big only when the person running the small thinks big.”

(Seth Godin, ‘Small is The New Big’, Portfolio, 2006).

Provided of course that the festival director is OK with slow (and I mean slooooow) growth, small fests are in a position of power vis-à-vis the increasingly irrelevant behemoths. Enjoy!

This was made in support of Reboot‘s National Day of Unplugging: 24 hours of turning off the old laptop, starting at sundown, Friday, March 19. That’s today.

In January, I attended the Slamdance / Sundance extravaganza in Park City, Utah, helping produce the Slamdance, WorkBook Project & Open Video Alliance Filmmaker Summit.  While there, I participated in and listened to a lot of conversations about the shifting role of film festivals, particularly as those shifts apply to a mid to high-level independent festival such as Slamdance. What follows here is the third of five four thoughts that came to me about the functionality of film festivals (and in no particular discursive order).

3. What festivals should do to better serve their communities.

The motivations that guide independent film festivals vary wildly: Whereas some were founded solely to develop industry in a second-city environment, others take radical stances against the industry altogether, shifting their focus towards serving their local creatives instead. Others, still, strive to function as arts-based businesses, leveraging sponsorships and ticket sales in an attempt at joining the ranks of corporatized culture-hawkers.

It is hard to generally classify the purpose of pre-existing film festivals, then, as their needs and motivations are often so divergent. One can nonetheless begin to make an attempt at creating a sort of style guide outlining some pragmatic ways that festivals can better serve independent filmmakers and artists, their contradictory purposes notwithstanding.

Based on several conversations had with such luminaries as Lance Weiler, Brian Newman, Paul Rachman, Peter Baxter, Lisa Vandever, Roger Mayer and others, here is the beginning of a list of how festivals can better help independent filmmakers.

NB. I see the following 5 points as responsibilities, not suggestions. I believe that arts organizations, due to their very nature of being the cynosure of dialogue and thought, have the responsibility to guide that discussion in the correct, honest direction.

I. Manage Filmmaker Expectation (No dangling carrots)

Too often festivals obliquely play into a system based on false promises and permission-based access. In this, they encourage and fail to manage filmmaker expectations, and inevitably end up with some seriously disappointed filmmakers on their hands.

It is crucial for independent filmmakers to understand how the system actually works, and to understand, also, that there are alternatives. It is therefore crucial for a festival to actually explain what they are to expect – from an industry point of view- from inclusion in the festival.

Action point: Clarify what will and probably won’t happen at the festival with your filmmakers along every step of the way, from the call for submissions to the acceptance letter.

II. Be transparent:

If a filmmaker, however naively assuming that his independent festival of choice has scads of dollars to throw at promoting his screening, throws up his hands and lets the festival do all the work, imagine the shock and dismay he may feel when finds his big premiere empty. Conversely, if a filmmaker is aware that the festival has no marketing budget, he might be inclined to engage in a little marketing of his own, and in so-doing will support the festival’s efforts (with the happy accident of helping ticket sales, to boot).

My point is this: Anyone who’s worked a festival knows that they are damn hard to run, and are often on the verge of collapse. BUT: Most filmmakers and attendees do not realize this. In order to – again – temper expectations and ensure a good experience for all, it is simply a question of a festival engaging in a little transparency in its affairs. Open books and open access (within reason, of course) can be positive for several reasons, most saliently in helping people know what to expect of you- what you are capable of providing as a festival. It also allows a community to help where they see problems or deficiencies.

Action point: Clarify and publish your budgets, be clear about shortcomings and explain how your community (including your filmmakers) can help fill them.

III. Educate:

With transparency in festival affairs and transparency about the reality of what to expect, festivals also have a responsibility to provide their filmmakers with information about alternative solutions for independent film. This can be done simply by shifting the focus away from old-industry panels towards realistic, functional and educational seminars centering both on the ‘art’ side of the filmmaking process and, of course, the business.

There are several areas that are drastically changing with the advent of new(ish) technologies:

• New fundraising stratagems (crowdsourced)
• New storytelling techniques (transmedia)
• New production processes (crowdsourced)
• New distribution strategies (online, VOD, etc)
• Open culture

Action Point: Taking a cue from The WorkBook Project’s DIY Days, and Slamdance/WorkBook Project/ Open Video Alliance Filmmaker Summit, create open access educational seminars around the new models in distribution and fundraising. Make the information available online.

IV. Develop access to new distribution models

In addition to educating filmmakers about new models for film production and distribution, festivals should also provide optional distribution solutions for its filmmakers in new media platforms, VOD and theatrical. These should allow filmmakers to exploit their rights piece-meal, monetize their films and gain new audiences, with the appui of the festival’s curatorial credibility behind them.

This is a hugely lengthy topic to go into, but for examples of festivals that are attempting to do this, take a look at a few examples:

• Slamdance’s deal with Xbox (which has made money for both Slamdance and the filmmakers)
• Sundance’s deal with YouTube (which has not made money for the filmmakers, as far as I am aware
• Tribeca’s recent VOD deal (which is, as far as I am aware, NOT optional for the filmmakers- which if its true, totally sucks)

Action Point: Use your festival’s organization cachet to broker deals for your filmmakers, and offer those deals as optional systems to complement their distribution strategies.

V. Share resources and organize year-round community screenings

Imagine a scenario where the audience winner at Nashville FF is given a 15 city theatrical run through community screening programs run by Nashville FF partner fests.

In line with the previous point, festivals could increasingly work together to further four-wall film exhibition through year-round screenings, and by combining marketing and local resources with other festivals.

In turn, by leveraging partnerships with other arts organizations and venues worldwide, festivals can help their filmmakers reach wider audiences, and also provide them with a de facto theatrical release. Of course, the benefits of partnering reach beyond only helping filmmakers, as these sorts of partnerships can help spread a festival’s brand, vision, and curatorial voice- in turn allowing for higher levels of sponsorship or- better yet- more participants in its next crowdsourced fundraising campaign.

Action Point: Organize year-round screenings in your community. Make friends with your colleagues and organize film exchanges. Share resources and programming.

A Conclusion!

All these points, to me, demonstrate one overarching fact: In order for an independent arts community to thrive, it must take a conscious stand to stop trying to emulate a corporate business methodology of exclusion, competitiveness and opacity.

In copying a system that, really, has little to do with how we as independents actually work, festivals are unwittingly incorporating all the nasty little habits that are anathema to thriving collaboration and creativity: Status-based ranking systems for humans (‘VIP’ passes, for instance), one-way payment systems, the obsession with celebrity attendance, fearful and covetous business practices. In following this approach, of course, we effectively stop innovation and discourage the development of new collaborative systems altogether.

In servicing the arts, a festival services the arts community in all its forms – even those it sees as its competitors. One will never exist without the other.

Next installment:

• #4: How to sustain without selling out: An exercise in ego management.

2. Money-making should not a successful small festival make. Culture-defining should.

When I was co-directing the Silver Lake Film Festival in Los Angeles with Greg Ptacek and Kate Marciniak, we didn’t invite host any distributors at the screenings. Those that did attend never cut a deal with any of the festival’s filmmakers. I’m pretty sure that the Cucalorus Film Festival in North Carolina has never immediately helped filmmakers pay off their credit card debts.

In these two instances, there is no commerce involved, and no one’s making any money to speak of. Are these festivals then to be seen as failures?

The answer, of course, lies in how one defines the purpose of a cultural event. I believe that if we put aside commercial functionalities for a minute, we see that though the utility (and success) of smaller festivals becomes inherently value-based, it is nonetheless inherently of value.

Here are some points, then, on the value and purpose of film festivals, above and beyond commerce:

• To curate, provide imprimatur and thus help shape culture;
• To create access to independent voices and new stories within specific, underserved geographic communities;
• To educate filmmakers;
• To grow independent film communities and foster creative collaboration;
• To help create de facto four-wall releases for filmmakers through festival-run programs and partnerships above and beyond the event itself;
• To assist with DIY distribution by offering access to distribution tools through festival-run partnerships with emerging content platforms

These last two functionalities are becoming more important as filmmakers and festivals realize that the old system – the permission-based system – is falling apart. So, to reitirate: Festivals should increasingly focus on helping filmmakers sustain and exhibit their work through various non-traditional methods such as digital distribution deals (see Slamdance’s recent deal with Microsoft Xbox), DIY distribution education, and, of course, festival run four-wall programs and partnerships that allow greater visibility for the participating films.

From experience I know that acknowledging an alienation from the mainstream film industry implies owning up to a radical shift away from ‘the system’, and has big repercussions for festivals and filmmakers alike. Silver Lake FF, for instance, with all its focus on working outside the system was unable to harness the sponsorships that festivals so drastically need for survival, and died a fiery financial death in 2007 (the results of which I am feeling to this day).

With that all said, it still feels successful in that it spoke to several of the points I believe to the inherent in a fruitful arts organization- points that have nothing at all to do with (immediate) economic exchange. The organization focused- largely- on what we thought should be the primary goals: Empowering a community and its artists through coherent promotion; leveraging its name to garner publicity and opportunity for our participants; facilitating radness in general– Art for art’s sake, as it were. The efforts were mostly spent on promoting and advocating for micro-communities through programming decisions, and fostering creativity and creative collaboration in our neighborhood and beyond. Mainly, though, Silver Lake FF focused on curating a very cool and forward-thinking festival (under the benevolent expertise of programming director Roger Mayer, as well as a plethora of special guest curators), the results of which are still bearing fruit in the continued existence of some of its former programs in the form of special screenings and ongoing collaborative output.

So do these artsy, community-driven, low-budget, no-commerce festivals like the still-thriving Cucalorus, Nevada City or Slamdance still have value? My conclusion would be that yes, they do. These festivals’ value (and purpose) lies in providing an imprimatur – an edge – for its filmmakers, and a strong platform for community-empowerment. This value, to me, supercedes the worth of some crappy distribution deal.

At the end of the day, sometimes being part of something amazing and cultural is worth more than being paid a grand to have your documentary air once or twice on TV.

** NB: Kate Marciniak, one of the co-directors at SLFF, makes this note: “[We] slogged many long and arduous hours for SLFF’s festivals trying to reel in distributors to attend and trying to get films with name stars to entice them. It was not through a lack of our wanting or trying [that they didn't attend].” So, I guess the rebellious stance was assigned post-fest, by me. I still think it’s cooler without the distributors.

—

I will address the inevitable next question (the ‘how the hell do we avoid the Silver Lake debacle and sustain our arts organizations?’ question) in subsequent posts.

Next installments:

• #3: What festivals should do to better serve their communities: An exercise in managing filmmaker expectations.
• #4: How to sustain without selling out: An exercise in ego management.

Learn more about the summit and register to attend: http://www.slamdance.com/summit/

Logo by Michael Beynart

SLAMDANCE, WORKBOOK PROJECT and OPEN VIDEO ALLIANCE present the FILMMAKER SUMMIT, 2010

• Saturday January 23rd, 2010
• 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM (US Mountain Time)
• Treasure Mountain Inn, Park City UT // Online at http://www.slamdance.com/summit

Thanks to the generous support of IndieFlix, XMission, Flumotion

STATEMENT FROM THE PRODUCERS

The mission of the Slamdance, WorkBook Project and Open Video Alliance Filmmaker Summit is to jointly craft a new charter for filmmaking, storytelling and content distribution, with and by the global filmmaking community.Our collaboration is born out of reaction to an independent film industry currently in a state of change and how, as a global filmmaking community, we can better understand and find greater success afforded by new technology and the democratization of new tools and processes.

We believe sustainable independent filmmaking is no longer about the production itself. Instead, it’s about how filmmakers must now expand their role and take charge of reaching and engaging worldwide audiences across all viewing platforms. In this direct approach, the viewer is now collaborative, less passive and more connected then every before. New business models will emerge as a direct result of experimentation and transparency around process, the Filmmaker Summit is an attempt to chart a course towards sustainability one that is by filmmakers for filmmakers while at the same time being inclusive of the audiences that support them.

We are inviting the DIY filmmaking-loving public to pick topics to discuss through an online voting up process. These topics will then be thoroughly examined by speakers Steven Soderbergh, Brian Newman, Christy Dena, Jamie King, Timo Vuorensola, Khavn de la Cruz, Lance Weiler, Peter Baxter and Jon Reiss in a one day summit – on site in Park City (and, of course, online).

—-

The Filmmaker Summit was made possible thanks to the support shown by IndieFlix and Xmission, and to a large collaborative production effort:  produced by Saskia Wilson-Brown, programming by Lance Weiler (WorkBook Project), technical assistance Ben Moskowitz (OVA), overall support Peter Baxter (Slamdance), streaming services George Chriss (openmeetings.org) with additional support from Greg Urich, Megan MacLeod, Zak Forsman and Kevin Shah (SABI Pictures), Josh Levy, and Paul Rachman. Logo design by Michael Beynart, and program design and consultation from Micah Hahn at Autumn Seventy.

With all that said, the benefits are tangible: In its first few days of existence, this new brainchild of filmmaker Jamie King has already proven to be very effective.

So what is VODO? Simply put, it’s an additional distribution option for filmmakers, one that utilizes and consolidates existing file-sharing systems -- as they put it: ‘a distribution system for the post-copyright age’.

What VODO proposes is that P2P filesharing services (such as The Pirate Bay) can be utilized by filmmakers to reach an unprecedented amount of potential viewers. What makes VODO’s service special is its use of the ‘Distribution Coalition (DISCO)’–  a coalition of the P2P/filesharing sites. VODO acts as a pipeline of content, populating the various P2P services with the films it represents. This, in turn, allows filmmakers to get their content released in the P2P universe in a cohesive way, with the chance of an income through crowd-sourced donations. The purpose, then, of  VODO is to harness the filesharing world and distribute content in it in a way that benefits filmmakers (and, eventually, creators of all stripes).

What this means – in layman’s terms – is that if your film gets selected for VODO, it will get a cohesive release across across a wide selection of filesharing sites and services, complete with an actionable donation capability which will allow people who watch your film to support you with money.

So, my ask to you is that you go support this new tool for independent filmmakers today. Here are several ways you can help:

• By checking out Ivo Gormley’s documentary: US NOW (don’t forget to donate some cash back to the filmmaker)
• By subscribing or donating to VODO
• By spreading the word to your independent filmmaker friends
• By submitting your own film for this.

If you doubt the reach of filesharing, note that VODO launched a few days ago (on the 14th of October, specifically) with the documentary US NOW, and, at the time of writing, has already obtained 100,000 downloads for filmmaker Ivo Gormley.

That, my friends, is a hell of a lot of downloads.