Looking Through The Rubble, Ending The Silence, Celebrating The Risktakers, Hoping For A Few Good Leaders

This entry was originally published at Hope For Film

You’d think with all the collapse in the “Film Business” we’d have a whole lot more experimenting going on.  Or at the very least the encouragement for experimentation.  Why is it that everyone wants to keep doing it “business as usual”.  It’s broken!  Those days are over!  The sky has fallen!  Dust yourself off and let’s begin something new!  Stop sniveling.

It is a different business now than what it used to be.  There is no U.S. acquisition market for films, even if the movies are good.  Library value as an asset is a thing of the past (or at least libraries being something you could base easily predictable cash flow or resale on is over).  People don’t want to pay to see movies — unless they are the sort of culture (including niche culture) unifying event film.  It is truly hard to get people’s attention when they are overwhelmed with the plethora of choices — we are a world of distraction and rapid attention shift.  It is even more difficult to get people to talk about good stories, even when more are told and made than ever before. Everything requires more work and more thought than it used to.

Which is not to say that the art and industry of film is over.  Far from it.  It is just a different business. And I believe there is great work to be done and substantial money to be made.  Particularly if we all accept a little experimentation along the way.  Trying something new does not warrant a “FAIL!” stamp.  There is more value than just monetary (and some of that is actually lucrative, or potentially).

Are the only conversations about it happening behind closed doors?  What’s with all the eerie silence?  Spooky….  There’s certainly a lot of discussion going on in other related industries.  But what is with ours?  From what I read, it sounded that around the proclamations of demise and change at the PGA “Produced By” conference there was very little imagining of new ways forward — particularly methods that might support the creative community.

Can we start to celebrate the experiments?  The brave thinkers?  The risk takers?  Can we at least talk more about them? Could we ever have some sort of supportive structure that actually encouraged experimentation? Could we look more to the future, than we discuss the past or present?