We open production offices this week for both Keeper of the Pinstripes and Yelling to the Sky, as it looks like both will actually be shooting late this summer. More details on the two soon, especially once we lock down final actor contracts, but suffice it to say they’ll be getting Cyan 2.0’s production slate off to a very, very strong start.
My friend James Ponsoldt once said to me that the measure of a successful film is whether it becomes somebody’s favorite. Which, I still think, is a great perspective.
But if there’s no special achievement in creating a ‘safe’ film, something unremarkable yet commercial that plays it straight down the middle, is there some magic at the opposite end of the spectrum? Consider, for example, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, a film that’s garnered a cult following by dint of being really, terribly, amazingly awful.
If that bottom-of-the-barrel status holds some merit, then kudos to Baby on Board, a film I haven’t seen, but that’s garnered perhaps my favorite review on all of IMDB:
I WAS AN EXTRA IN THE MOVIE AND I WENT TO THE CHICAGO PREMIERE LAST NIGHT. I HAVE A DEEP SENSE OF SORROW FOR EVERY PERSON THAT WAS INVOLVED IN THAT PROJECT. THOSE CLAPPING AT THE END OF THE FILM ARE EITHER SUFFERING FROM SELF-DELUSION OR SELF-DENIAL. SURELY ANYONE TRYING TO ENTER THE FILM BUSINESS CAREER TOOK A STEP BACKWARD. NOT SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY WERE INVOLVED IN CREATING BABY ON BOARD, BUT BECAUSE THEY VIEWED IT IN ITS ENTIRETY. I LIVE IN CHICAGO. I AM ASHAMED THAT MY FAIR CITY WAS RAPED BY THESE “FILMMAKERS”. MY DOG ATE A ROLL OF FILM THE OTHER DAY AND THE CELLULOID THAT CRAWLED OUT OF HIS ASS WAS PRETTIER THAN THE *beep* YOU’D SEE ON THE SCREEN IN BABY ON BOARD. SO MY DOG’S INTESETINES IS A BETTER CINEMATOGRAPHER THAN WHATEVER MOFO SHOT THIS P.O.S. IF SOMEONE TOLD ME IT WAS SHOT ON A HANHAH MONTANA CAMERAPHONE I’D SAY “YOU’RE RIGHT, MAN.”
“We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.”
– Walt Disney [See also.]
For people in the film industry, people who know people in the film industry, and people outside of the film industry who’ll nonetheless be braving the cold and crowds of Park City:
I will be at Sundance this Saturday through Thurday, looking for:
– Excellent projects in need of production funding; Cyan can now fund up to 30% of the budget of films sized between $500k to $10m.
– Excellent finished films looking for distribution; Cyan can now throw down real P&A commitments, backed by an innovative best-practices release infrastructure tailored to indie films.
– Excellent parties with open bars.
All leads appreciated.
Also, as my points from last year still hold, allow me to repost:
“This Thursday, I head off to the Sundance Film Festival, during which I will not be blogging at all. Before each such film festival, I usually say that I’ll be covering things online, day by day. And then, I get there, post once or twice, stop posting completely, and end up guiltily summarizing the rest of the fest after the fact. So, lest it be said I never learn from my mistakes, this year, I make no such promises. If I post something during, consider it icing on the self-aggrandizement cake.
But, to set the stage for any possible though certainly not promised posts, allow me to repeat an observation I make yearly: by most counts, Sundance, Slamdance, and the other concurrent festivals bring some 80,000 people to Park City, Utah. And while that’s not far off from the numbers the Toronto or Tribeca festivals attract, dropping 80,000 bodies into New York or Toronto barely makes a dent. Whereas with 80,000 people added to a city of 7,882, like Park City, the infrastructure is completely overwhelmed, everything starts falling apart, and life more or less grinds to a functional halt.
That, along with countless other factors – certainly not the least of which being the nature of all too many of those 80,000 attendees – similarly leads me yearly to the same conclusion about Sundance: it’s everything I love about movies, and everything I hate about the movie industry.
Should be ‘fun’.”
A month or so back, I was having drinks with one of the founders of Napster, discussing the future of the movie business.
In the parallel world of music, things look fairly gloomy – CD sales are down, digital revenues don’t make up the gap, and piracy runs as rampant as ever. Yet thus far in the movie world, the problems have been far less severe.
Most analysts, like my Napster friend, credit the difference to technology – from bandwidth issues (stealing a movie takes way longer than a song or album) through to how media is actually consumed (computers and iPods have quickly become where most people choose to consume music anyway, whereas the average viewer would still prefer to see a film on their television, and doesn’t have an easy way to get the digital download across those last twenty feet).
I, on the other hand, contended that movies’ relative success stems from a deeper cause: people think movies are worth the money, and think albums are hugely overpriced.
Yesterday, I ran across a recent study that backs my claim. Consumers, asked about perceived value for their money, placed movies in the next to highest position – second only to chicken. Albums, on the other hand, essentially fell off the bottom of the list.
In the world of music, some percentage of people already pay for downloads (hence iTunes’ success), and others never will. The dividing line, I suspect, is whether each believes a $9.99 price is too high for an album.
In the world of film, then, where a vastly higher percentage fall on the ‘worth the money’ side of that line, I’m increasingly convinced digital download revenue models can make sense.
Sure, the same technology problems that hold back film piracy equally hold back legitimate sales. And figuring out what those digital download revenue models actually look like is probably three or so years of ugly trial and error away. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
At which point, all we’ll need to do is to find a way to download chicken.
“If you want to survive this brutal climate, you’re going to have to work a lot harder, be a lot smarter, know a lot more, move a lot faster, sell a lot better, pay attention to the data, be a little nice (ok, a lot nice), trust your gut, read everything and never, ever give up.”
– Mark Gill, former president of Warner Independent and Miramax, on the film industry today
For the past month or so, I’ve been spending a lot of time reading first round applications for the First Cut Film Series, our competition to find the top five film students in the country, then to finance, produce and theatrically release each of their first feature films.
And, to be honest, I’d begun to have some doubts. Not because of any problems with the applications themselves, but because of how much they, in this first round, still leave to the imagination. A short synopsis, a couple of bios (director, writer, producer), and a few pages of screenplay isn’t a lot to go on.
Of course, that was the point of the round: an attempt to initially separate the wheat from the chaff. Still, without any of the directors’ work to screen until round two, I’ve had no real idea whether any of them can make movies that feel like real movies, rather than like student theses, and I’d started to fear the worst.
Today, however, I spent several hours screening graduate student shorts as one of the judges for NYU Film School’s Wasserman Awards, their top honor for outstanding achievement in film*. And, in short, I was blown away. Sure, some of the stuff was exactly the sort of amateur-hour crap I’d feared. But at least two or three of the films were so astoundingly good that the judges actually clapped once they ended.
When the lights came up after one, another of the judges said, ‘shit, somebody needs to give this guy a million bucks and tell him to just go make a feature.’
Which is good, considering that’s basically what we’re about to do.
*[Side story: as past Wasserman winners include Ang Lee and Spike Lee, I went in looking for any other Lee’s who might have a leg up. There weren’t any, though there was a Jennifer Li, and while I won’t give away anything before NYU announces the awards, I will say her short was definitely in the top five.]
Caucuses? Primaries? No, no. In the film business, January means something far more ‘important’: Sundance.
Yes, in just a week and change, the Cyan team and I (and Jess, who’s bravely jumping into the fray) head off to Park City, Utah. The countdown begins.
This morning, I’m thrilled to announce the official launch of Cyan’s next big project: The First Cut Film Series.
The idea is simple: find the top five film students in the country, then produce and theatrically release each of their first feature films.
I’m excited about the Series for a lot of reasons, but first and foremost because of all the great people involved. For example, we have some heavyweight indie producers attached to each Executive Produce one of the five films; the lineup includes Jeb Brody (Little Miss Sunshine), Rene Bastian and Linda Moran (Transamerica), Scott Macaulay and Robin O’Hara (Raising Victor Vargas) and Michael Roiff (Waitress).
There’s a lot more info, as well as an application – open to any current graduate or undergraduate film (or related major) student or alum of the last two years – up at www.firstcutfilmseries.com.
Help us spread the word!