Spent most of the afternoon today listening on and playing audio tech to Michael Nickles and Nadia Dajani, the director and one of the leads, respectively, of Long Tail’s first release, This is Not a Film, as they recorded a commentary track for the film. Which, while time consuming, was also a great warmup for the less fun work I’ll be doing through the rest of the evening: harassing our cadre of potential investors about Cyan’s next production.

And while I normally dread having to, yet again, pass around the hat, hearing Michael and Nadia talk about the ins and outs of their guerilla filmmaking reminded me that making movies, actually getting down and dirty with on-set production, is enough fun to make it almost worth that painful hat pass.

Dan Berwick, one of the most influential thinkers in healthcare, is fond of telling the story of Wag Dodge, the commander of a Montana firefighters parachute brigade:

In 1949, Dodge and his men land a jump too close to the edge of an unexpectedly fast-spreading forest fire. With the blaze bearing down, the crew makes a run for a hill nearby, hoping to clear its 76% grade, getting over the crest before the fire engulfs them.

Dodge, however, realizes they aren’t going to make it. So, thinking quickly and way outside the box, he pulls matches out of his pocket and sets the tall grass ahead of him on fire. The small new blaze quickly spreads and dies out, and Dodge steps into the middle of the burned out clearing, lays down, and calls for his men to join him.

Obviously, the men think he’s nuts, and keep running. All but two of them die in the fire.

Dodge, on the other hand, survives unharmed. He’s unwittingly invented the escape fire, now an industry standard in wildfire fights.

Most people, when asked, are sure they’d have joined Dodge in that burnt clearing. But, with the heat of the flames on our backs, I suspect we would all have had an awfully hard time evaluating such an unusual new idea. Instead, we’d panic and run, unwilling and unable to think through something that just might save our lives.

Which, essentially, is what my movie industry colleagues are doing today. Studio execs are scrambling for the crest, terrified to death of the blaze of digital technologies and innovative thinking that’s changing the film industry and threatening companies’ core businesses.

But, as you readers doubtless know, it’s far too late. We movie folks can’t put out a fire so readily embraced by our customers. We can’t even make it safely past some legislative crest. Instead, we have to use that same fire ourselves. Only by leveraging technology, by tearing down the assumptions about how the movie business works, about how movies make money, and starting from scratch, does a film company have any chance of making it through.

So, to that end, and as a fitting start at the beginning of 2005, I give you the official launch of Long Tail Releasing, Cyan Pictures’ new distribution arm. Our first film, This is Not a Film, will be released later this month. And I give you the official re-launch of Cyan itself (with corresponding new site), as we ever more tightly hone in on what sort of films we’re trying to make, and how we’re trying to make them.

Stay tuned. This should be good.

My best intentions to the contrary, it appears there’s no way in hell I’ll be able to run this shoot, blog about it on Cyan’s site, and blog about it here.

So, to minimize the insanity of this week’s endeavor, I won’t be posting here until I return from Israel next weekend, focusing instead on hitting the daily post mark at www.cyanpictures.com.

Head on over and take a look; I’ll do my best to make it worth your click.

When I was in middle school and high school, I hated, hated, being assigned group projects. Inevitably, someone (or multiple someones) would drop the ball, and I’d be left frantically trying to cover for them.

I’m having that same feeling this week, as, despite there being ostensibly two other producers on this Israel documentary, all of their work seems to be eventually ending up in my lap. And though that’s somewhat detrimental to me sleep schedule, sanity, and week-focused-on-jazz ambitions, it’s probably for the best. In the same way that I’ve always preferred individual sports to team ones, there’s something oddly comforting about knowing that if it all goes to shit once we head out to shoot, there will be nobody to blame but myself.

Related addendum:

“There is no monument dedicated to the memory of a committee.”
– Lester J. Pourciau

A pleasingly busy week here, as a wide array of pieces continue to fall into place. After much delay, it appears we’ll have a distribution deal for I Love Your Work locked in the next two weeks, in time to announce at Cannes. Posts for The Best Web Writing are piling up, and should be going in front of the editorial panel shortly. And, on my own book, I just passed the forty page mark, with a strong outline in place for the rest of the (likely distressingly long) volume.

With enough work under my belt, I’m likely to sneak out this evening to the first meeting of a Yale alumni group for theater, film, writing and other artistic types. Most of the other invitees have been emailing with amusement about the event, as the organizer blithely named the group the Creative Yale Alumni Network (or, CYAN – sounds familiar, no?). Imitation, I’m trying to assure myself, must be the sincerest form of flattery.

This coming Sunday, we’re screening I Love Your Work at the Tribeca Grand for a New York filmmakers group. The Grand’s screening room is only set up to use DVDs, a format to which we’ve yet to convert the film. We have copies on analog film, as a High Definition D-5 master, on VHS and on DigiBeta. Or, rather, had the film on DigiBeta; now, nobody seems to know exactly where the tape of the film in that format is. Which is problematic, as it’s the only one from which we can easily burn a DVD. As a result, my colleagues, our film lab, and our sales rep are all running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to track down the DigiBeta in time to cut the DVD for Sunday’s showing. I’m trying to coordinate it all from Denver by cell, silently chanting my Cyan mantra: filmmaking is fun, filmaking is fun…

Update: DigiBeta has been found. Now I just need to find a way to get it DVD-ified overnight.

Blah blah blah Cyan Pictures’ site blah blah.

Yet more Toronto fun on Cyan’s site.