vhxtv: We’re very proud to announce that VHX is powering the worldwide release of Indie Game: The Movie on June 12. Indie Game has come a long way since their ambitious Kickstarter project. Two years later, they’re armed with an amazing film, a basket of accolades, and an eagerness to redefine what indie distribution truly means. We could not dream of a better fit for VHX for Artists. You can pre-order it now and you’ll get high quality streaming and DRM-free downloads. If you want to find out more, you should watch the trailer! Filmmakers, film execs, and film lovers: pay close attention. This is where the film, video, and television business is going. It will start with the crowd-funded and self-funded films by artists on the bleeding edge of technology, appealing to the early adopters. The musicians and comedians will embrace it, as they’ve always been the closest to their fans. It will creep into traditional independent film, as the pipeline for a well-supported self-release proves to be more lucrative and stable than gambling on traditional distribution. And finally the studios and networks will be dragged into the future kicking and screaming, left with no alternative as the market shifts under their feet. But this is it. This is where we start. Crowd-funded on Kickstarter; self-released on iTunes, Steam, and VHX. Our Edison is Steve Jobs, our Chaplin is Louis CK, our multiplex is VHX, and our Warner Brothers is Kickstarter. I hope you can be our Hitchcock, our Curtiz, our Méliès, or our Griffith. Movies are still young. It’s just the system that’s getting old. High-res

vhxtv:

We’re very proud to announce that VHX is powering the worldwide release of Indie Game: The Movie on June 12.

Indie Game has come a long way since their ambitious Kickstarter project. Two years later, they’re armed with an amazing film, a basket of accolades, and an eagerness to redefine what indie distribution truly means. We could not dream of a better fit for VHX for Artists.

You can pre-order it now and you’ll get high quality streaming and DRM-free downloads. If you want to find out more, you should watch the trailer!

Filmmakers, film execs, and film lovers: pay close attention. This is where the film, video, and television business is going. It will start with the crowd-funded and self-funded films by artists on the bleeding edge of technology, appealing to the early adopters. The musicians and comedians will embrace it, as they’ve always been the closest to their fans. It will creep into traditional independent film, as the pipeline for a well-supported self-release proves to be more lucrative and stable than gambling on traditional distribution. And finally the studios and networks will be dragged into the future kicking and screaming, left with no alternative as the market shifts under their feet.

But this is it. This is where we start. Crowd-funded on Kickstarter; self-released on iTunes, Steam, and VHX. Our Edison is Steve Jobs, our Chaplin is Louis CK, our multiplex is VHX, and our Warner Brothers is Kickstarter. I hope you can be our Hitchcock, our Curtiz, our Méliès, or our Griffith.

Movies are still young. It’s just the system that’s getting old.

Mr. Beaks Takes Issue With The Coverage Of JOHN CARTER

The autopsy began before the corpse was even on the slab.

Mr. Beaks takes the film-journalism world to task for how they covered JOHN CARTER leading up to its release.

I’ll add an insight of Jean Cocteau’s from 1948, those quaint times when tentpole movies only cost a couple million dollars:

The main danger confronting [film], not only in France but in all the countries of the world, is the amount that it costs and the fear of taking risks imposed on us by the money that producers invest. This deprives [film] of those contrasts, experiments, flights of daring and marvelous failures that allow art to overcome inertia and to break with habit.

I’m holding off on writing my thoughts about JOHN CARTER, as it’s the first film of 2012 that made me want to immediately watch it a second time.

But I will say this… None of us see a financial loss or gain if JOHN CARTER does well or poorly at the box-office. The financial success of the film has no impact on the quality of the film, as the film was made and finished long before any revenue was generated. Let the people who are actually invested in the success or failure of a film worry about its financial prospects. Why can’t we just celebrate the contrasts, experiments, flights of daring and, yes, even the marvelous failures?

Surely we have much more to gain from encouraging a conversation about film that ignores financial success and failure. No one comes out of a film saying “I really love the part where the studio made a lot of money releasing it” or “I really liked the film until I realized the studio lost money on it.”

How Stanley Kubrick Invented the Modern Box-Office Report (By Accident)

“Well, what about The Ritz in Philadelphia, Leo?” Stanley would say. “Midnight Cowboy ran for six months and ended its run at $10,000 in its last week? Nothing looks better than that.”

“And in Columbus, The Wild Bunch had a great engagement at The Paramount, which is perfect for our audience.”

The calls would go on for nearly an hour as Stanley, knowing Leo was dumbfounded at the other end of the speakerphone, moved around the office with a wry smile on his face, hitching up his pants and winking at me as Leo, already in awe of Stanley’s reputation for thoroughness, promised to get back quickly after he checked out the preferred cinemas and their availability. It was classic Kubrick, winning the chess match through perseverance and ingenuity.

I highly recommend reading this article about how Stanley Kubrick invented not only the modern box-office report, but also a system for choosing theaters based on prior box-office performance.

I think film geeks and scholars tend to forget that many of the past great film artists are also the great film business minds. It’s hard to get more “auteur” than Stanley Kubrick, and his obsession went beyond the art and into the business side of film. This doesn’t sound too different from the type of obsession you see from James Cameron, who certainly micromanaged the release of Avatar.

Louis CK: Live at the Beacon Theater

I’m sure you’ve seen this already, but for the people who haven’t, here is my sales pitch for Mr. Louis CK.

Louis CK is selling a standup special “Live at the Beacon Theater” for $5 via his own personal website storefront. He paid for the recording of the special, and is paying for the distribution and the marketing of the special. For its first wave of distribution, he is eschewing every traditional distribution method (including the new distribution models of iTunes and NetFlix) in order to reach his fanbase directly.

He’s also providing the special with no DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology. This essentially means that he is letting people download the special, and watch it wherever they want whenever they want for as long as they want. He isn’t creating artificial digital rules on how the content can be viewed. This is exciting, and shows that Louis is trusting his audience to be good people.

The result of this trust is that Louis has grossed over $500,000 in sales in just four days. He’s well into profit on the venture, and I suspect is going to have a model that he can use for the rest of his career as a comedian.

As an independent filmmaker, this is something I want to support. Louis made an independent film (albeit a comedy concert film) and is self-releasing it online. This is a model that I hope can be successful for a wide variety of filmmakers, and allows them to grow a direct relationship with their fans.

So I suggest buying Louis CK’s new stand up special for two reasons:

  1. Support a fan-friendly and positive model for artists to generate revenue.
  2. Louis CK is hilarious, and the stand-up special will make you laugh.

Mosaics

[This is a message board post I made in 2002. Seven years later, I still think it’s an apt analogy not only for screenwriting, but also film in general.]

In some ways a screenplay is like a mosaic. You construct a larger picture by arranging small parts: scenes, sequences, dialog, and characters. Now it’s very important to be able to work with these small parts. To be able to have them play off each other to affect the viewer. However, no one is going to give a damn unless the mosaic makes a picture they want to see.

When you want someone to pay you to make a mosaic you don’t show them how well you can form the tiles. You give them a sketch of what the mosaic will look like. The picture. That’s the high concept. It’s the picture. When you pitch a screenplay, you don’t tell people how wonderful your characters are. You don’t tell them how witty your dialog is. You give them a sketch of the picture. If they like the picture, then they pay you to make it.