Recently I received the message below from a member of my family. I've watched over the years as she has slipped further and further into a morass of fuzzy-headed nostalgia for a world that never existed, and fear of a future she can't even understand. It saddens me.
But my sadness is mixed with anger. I am tired of the unending Baby Boomer Civil War. I am tired of watching the same old arguments grow and ossify into edifices dedicated to causes that have been superseded by events. Dogma threatens to flatten practicality at every turn.
We live in a world of such enormous potential, yet there are people in the year 2012, in the most powerful nation on earth, who insist on turning off their brains, favoring instead to recycle other people's culture war target lists. I understand that this message isn't a serious proposal. I get that it's venting, a means of dressing pent-up frustration in a cloak of humor.
I get all that, but I'm still pissed off. I am so weary of this kind of brain-dead nonsense. That adults read and enthusiastically spread it drives me to respond, even though I know it will not change even one person's opinion.
THIS IS SO INCREDIBLY WELL PUT AND I CAN HARDLY BELIEVE IT'S BY A YOUNG PERSON, A STUDENT!!! WHATEVER HE RUNS FOR, I'LL VOTE FOR HIM.
You don't seem to have much faith in your own country if you are surprised that a young person (or at least someone purporting to be young) could write something well? Or is it that you are surprised a young person would agree with you, who ostensibly see yourself as old? I do like the bolding, though. It says, "Hey, look at me! I'm serious about this!"
Dear American liberals, leftists, social progressives, socialists, Marxists and Obama supporters, et al:
I see what you did there. You dropped the entire left wing of American politics in the same bucket, and for good measure you put President Obama in there, too. You even went so far as to include Marxists. All 15 of them are probably happy just to be noticed. Anyway, it's obvious that this is going to be an Us v. Them thing, which is why you aren't including centrists and Independents. What about the few remaining moderate Republicans? I know, all this thinking gets in the way.
We have stuck together since the late 1950's for the sake of the kids, but the whole of this latest election process has made me realize that I want a divorce. I know we tolerated each other for many years for the sake of future generations, but sadly, this relationship has clearly run its course.
Wait, what? Everything was going peachy until the late 1950s, then everything started going downhill? Wasn't there a big tussle at the end of the 19th Century? Something about slavery? Whatever. Anyway, what happened in the 1950s that created the need for a divorce? What started the ball rolling? Was it the publication of On the Road? Was it the Civil Rights Movem... oh, now I get it. The relationship was going just fine, give or take a brutal Civil War, until the Civil Rights Movement reared its ugly head.
Our two ideological sides of America cannot and will not ever agree on what is right for us all, so let's just end it on friendly terms. We can smile and chalk it up to irreconcilable differences and go our own way.
Two ideological sides? Has the entirety of American politics come down to two monolithic entities? Is America now embroiled in a tussle akin to the Cold War, in which two irreconcilable ideologies face off for complete domination? And what's this about smiling and going our own way? I'm going to go out on a limb here and infer that the writer of this message considers himself to be politically conservative, which would imply alignment with the Republican Party. There is some irony in the fact that the first Republican President fought rather vigorously against dissolution of the Union, which is where this friendly little message seems to be headed.
Here is a model separation agreement:
Our two groups can equitably divide up the country by landmass each taking a similar portion. That will be the difficult part, but I am sure our two sides can come to a friendly agreement. After that, it should be relatively easy! Our respective representatives can effortlessly divide other assets since both sides have such distinct and disparate tastes.
Both sides. To paraphrase an old movie actor, "There you go again!" On which side is a fiscally conservative, social liberal supposed to land? What about senators from Maine? In which camp does a confused soul like Joe Lieberman belong? Who decides? Do individuals get to decide, or is there a Grand Arbiter? I'm sort of worried about the logistics of all this.
We don't like redistributive taxes so you can keep them.
You haven't really read up on how taxation in American now compares to taxation in the Halcyon Days of the Eisenhower years, have you? Nobody can keep what doesn't exist.
You are welcome to the liberal judges and the ACLU.
What do you mean by "liberal judges"? I think you mean judges that disagree with you on social issues. But which ones? I mean, judges rarely amass records that conveniently fit Left/Right political categorization. Perhaps what you really want is for all judges who do not have records that perfectly conform to a Republican ideal (I'm still not clear on where centrists and independents fit in here, but it's your world, I'm just living in it), to be rid from your new Republic. At the Appellate level and above, that would be pretty much all judges. What about the judges who came down on the Republican side of an issue that the Republican Party later changed its mind about? OK, OK, I'll stop asking questions. As for the ACLU, they can be annoying as hell, but a democracy without people standing up for individual rights isn't a democracy.
Since you hate guns and war, we'll take our firearms, the cops, the NRA and the military.
Hey, that was a neat trick. You just lumped everyone who isn't a Republican into a single camp again. But what does that mean for all the soldiers, marines, airmen, and sailors who don't vote Republican? What about cops who don't? I deployed to Somalia during Operation Restore Hope, and eventually left the Army as a Captain. I voted for Bush Sr., and since then have voted Democrat in every Presidential election. I do hate war, and I think the world would be better without guns, but I served my country. What does that make me to you?
We'll take the nasty, smelly oil industry and you can go with wind, solar and bio diesel
I'm guessing you don't want geothermal or hydro, right? What about nuclear? I'm sure you want coal. It is the cleanest fuel, after all.
You can keep Oprah, Michael Moore and Rosie O'Donnell. You are, however, responsible for finding a bio diesel vehicle big enough to move all three of them.
Hah! That's a fat joke, right? You're so awesome, dude. Oh man, I have to regain my composure. Still laughing. Whew.
We'll keep capitalism, greedy corporations, pharmaceutical companies, Wal-Mart and Wall Street.
Sorry, you don't get capitalism, greedy corporations, Big Pharma, or Wall Street. Here's why: They're all chock full of non-Republicans. You've heard of Apple, right? They make computers and stuff. They are headquartered in Northern California, heart of the Vast non-Republican Conspiracy. Most of the Big Pharma companies are located in San Francisco, which is the heart of the heart of the Vast non-Republican Conspiracy. And though I'd love for you to keep Wall Street, the truth is that there are truckloads full of greedy hedge fund managers who put their money behind Democrats and other non-Republicans. You can keep Wal-Mart.
You can have your beloved lifelong welfare dwellers, food stamps, homeless, home boys, hippies, druggies and illegal aliens.
We'll keep the hot Alaskan hockey moms, greedy CEO's and rednecks.
We'll keep the Bibles and give you NBC and Hollywood.
It is telling that you lumped homeless people, drug abusers, welfare recipients, and long-haired counterculture folks with "home boys". I'm guessing you mean urban minorities when you use the term. What you're saying is that you have no tolerance for those who are less fortunate, those who have made different lifestyle choices, those who have become hooked on drugs, those who have fled dire poverty for a shot at a reasonable existence, or those who are urban and not white. Not only that, your scornful use of the term "beloved" makes it quite clear that you find it despicable that anyone might have sympathy for them is worthy of nothing but contempt. Then you talk about the Bible. It sounds like the Bible you're reading is full of bile and hatred. More importantly, without Hollywood, how will Chuck Norris make movies?
You can make nice with Iran and Palestine and we'll retain the right to invade and hammer places that threaten us.
Your blood started stirring when you wrote that part, didn't it? Come on, fess up! You can certainly invade Iran if you'd like, but you'd be going against precedent. Carter (he was a Republ... uh, Democrat) tried a raid in Iran and it went wrong, so Reagan (the badass Republican who kicked the crap out of those dangerous... um... Grenadians) gave Iran weapons. That seemed to work better. Since then three terms of Bush Presidents haven't lifted a finger at Iran. As for Palestine, would you "invade" or "hammer" the area, and if so, who would you target? Would you kill only the "bad" Palestinians, or would you kill them all and let God sort it out? P.S. - How did the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan go? Also, does your brain turn to Silly Putty at the thought that invading Afghanistan was a good idea, but we jacked that up by diverting enormous resources to a stupid and wasteful Iraq mission for several years?
You can have the peaceniks and war protesters. When our allies or our way of life are under assault, we'll help provide them security.
"Peaceniks"? Now I know this wasn't written by a college student, at least not one from this century. Our way of life is directly threatened by the war in Mexico. Should we invade? If so, when? Should we nuke first, or only as a last resort? I'd like to suggest that Cancun would be an excellent location for a Green Zone. Also, if you think America is somehow less bellicose after Dubya's departure, you haven't been keeping up on current events.
We'll keep our Judeo-Christian values.
You are welcome to Islam, Scientology, Humanism, political correctness and Shirley McLane. You can also have the U.N. but we will no longer be paying the bill.
What is it with you and ancient history? Shirley McLane? Is she still alive? Anyway, you want to keep the Judeo-Christian values. Gotcha. But does that mean you keep the actual Jews and Christians, too? All of them? What about the liberal ones? What about the dreaded New York liberal Jews? What about Latino Catholics? What about the Westboro Baptist Church? If you keep the values but leave the undesired Jews and Catholics, do they still get to keep their Judeo-Christian values, or do they have to cast them aside? If so, how does that actually work? What about Muslims who fight in the US military in places like Iraq? I'm getting really confused. Again, will there be a Grand Arbiter?
We'll keep the SUV's, pickup trucks and oversized luxury cars. You can take every Volt and Leaf you can find.
You can give everyone health care if you can find any practicing doctors.
We'll continue to believe health care is a luxury and not a right.
We'll keep "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "The National Anthem."
I'm sure you'll be happy to substitute "Imagine", "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing", "Kum Ba Ya" or "We Are the World".
Small point of order: If you leave the Union, shouldn't you do what you did the first time, and select a different national anthem? I mean, it's only right, given that you're the moving party. As for health care being a luxury, if that's what you want, that's what you'll get. As an anthem, we'll be using the Chuck D./Anthrax version of "Bring the Noise".
We'll practice trickle down economics and you can continue to give trickle up poverty your best shot.
You do know that David Stockman, the architect of "Trickle-Down Economics" in the Reagan Administration, has discussed at length just how far Republicans have gone off the deep end on tax policy, right?
Since it often so offends you, we'll keep our history, our name and our flag.
You did that clever thing again, where you pass off a redonkulously broad assumption as fact. American history belongs to all Americans. It's not yours to take, or mine to take. What you really want to say is that you'll keep your interpretation of American history as series of unvarnished triumphs, and you'll let everyone else maintain more nuanced interpretations. That sounds like a good idea to me. As for the name and the flag, no. You don't get to keep the symbols of the political union you want to destroy. Talk to the folks at the statehouse in Jackson, Mississippi. They can hook you up with some appropriate symbols.
Would you agree to this? If so, please pass it along to other like-minded liberal and conservative patriots and if you do not agree, just hit delete. In the spirit of friendly parting, I'll bet you answer which one of us will need whose help in 15 years.
No, I won't agree to it. I also won't "just hit delete". This kind of insidious crap deserves a rejoinder. As for which party in your hypothetical will need the most help in 15 years, your Us v. Them game has gone on long enough. We'd all suffer from such a sundering.
Sincerely,
John J. Wall
Law Student and an American
Sincerely, Erik J. Schmidt (actual name of actual, identifiable person), American
P.S. Also, please take Ted Turner, Sean Penn, Martin Sheen, Barbara Streisand, & Jane Fonda with you.
Who are all these people? Is Martin Sheen related to Charlie Sheen?
P.S.S. And you won't have to press 1 for English when you call our country.
Hey, that was clever! You are really subtly saying that you don't like it when people speak languages other than English in America. Damn, that's funny. Oh man, that's awesome. I guess that means we get all the immigrants, right? P.S. - It's actually P.P.S., at least in American English usage.
Forward This Every Time You Get It!
Uh, no.
Let's Keep This Going … Maybe Some Of It Will Start Sinking In.
Putting it in mangled title case Doesn't Mean It Makes A Lick O' Sense.
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Apple's Q1 2101 revenue and profit results were astounding by any yardstick. A company with $13B in net profit is obviously doing something right. You don't haul in over $46B in revenue in one quarter through slick marketing; customers are rewarding Apple for constructing an interlocking system of products and services that people enjoy using. Apple fans are justified in lobbing a hearty "I told you so" to those who doubted the Apple approach.
Yet there is something unsettling about all the celebrating in the Mac blogosphere. We're losing sight of what's really important.
I've been using Apple products since the late 1980s, and I've forked over thousands of dollars to the company over the intervening years. I fought to use a Mac when I ran the website for a government agency, and had to go all the way to the CFO to gain approval. I created a blog devoted to helping Mac-using law students, back in the days when such a blog was necessary. You could say Apple is in my blood.
That said, I think it's important for those of us who use Apple products to be mindful of what we're celebrating. Are we celebrating the fact that Apple has a staggering $97B in cash? Or is it that the company has a higher valuation than every other company on the planet? Are we rooting for the football team that got pummeled for years and has finally become unbeatable?
In a sense, we are. After years of hearing about how I was a bit weird for using a Mac, there's a certain satisfaction in watching friends switch from Windows to Macintosh. I get a kick out of going to parties and noticing that even the Apple naysayers now have iPhones. The little band of outcasts has become a globe-enveloping swarm, and I was there in the beginning.
This sort of tribal affiliation should come as no surprise. We are, after all, just humans. I'm sure there are some people who are happy to use Apple products because it helps them feel hip and sophisticated. But in my experience most people fork over their hard-earned cash to Apple because they want their personal technology to work in a way that is comfortable and reliable.
For a time, if you wanted that kind of ease of use and quality, Apple really was the only game in town. Apple still holds a strong lead. By building the hardware, software, and cloud services themselves, Apple can maintain a strategic advantage that is difficult for competitors to overcome. As long as Apple stays on its game, no mix-and-match set of hardware, software, and services can provide a comparable user experience.
But Apple's success has forced even the most sluggish of its competitors to realize that the total user experience is of paramount importance. Android v4 marks a leap forward for the mobile OS in style and polish. Windows Phone demonstrates that Microsoft is capable of producing an exceptional user interface without mimicking Apple. Nokia continues to ship hardware of outstanding quality. There is no shortage of companies learning from Apple's success.
One could argue that Apple came first, and that Google, Microsoft, and Nokia are mere copycats. But that discussion invariably devolves into a useless tit-for-tat comparison. The big players in consumer technology are all busy innovating. They're all learning from each other's successes and failures. That's the nature of any market, and that's as it should be. What matters is not that one company succeeds or fails, but that I am well served.
If Apple continues to deliver an intelligently designed, well-implemented array of products and services, they'll get more of my money. But at the end of the day, the reason I have supported Apple for so long is that they have made my life better by producing tools that are valuable to me at work, at home, and on the move. If Apple loses its focus and stops delivering value to me, and another company is able to step in with a better approach, I'll gladly turn coat.
Steve Jobs wouldn't have it any other way.
Ω
A friend of mine uses the term counterpunchers to describe those people who wait for you to make the first move, to expose yourself, to make a statement or perform an action. Then they bash at you, not with reasoned criticism, but with ad hominem attacks and snark.
Trolls are a different breed. While counterpunchers actually seem to believe they are performing a beneficial service, trolls revel in disruption for its own sake. They know they're providing nothing meaningful, and that's the whole point. Annoying, disturbing, and (if they're really good) angering strangers gives them a thrill.
Every day we spend online we put up with counterpunchers and trolls. They infest the comments sections of news sites and blogs. They lurk in discussion boards, ready to pounce. Like the slow drip of a leaky faucet, they're ambient noise. We've learned to accept them, to tune them out, to go about our online lives as if they did not exist.
But they do exist. And we, the people who build websites, keep them alive. We build houses for them by creating websites with social features that don't include robust reputation and moderation systems. We feed them by writing linkbait content that is designed to score eyeballs and create controversy. We get them into a frenzy by responding to them.
There would be far fewer counterpunchers and trolls roaming the highways and byways of the Intergoogle if we stopped building them houses, if we stopped feeding them, if we stopped coddling them. Reducing their numbers simply requires that we step back from the social features flypaper for a moment and recognize that giving every participant the ability to add their $.02 to the conversation is not necessarily a good thing.
I believe that in many if not most cases the addition of comment functionality does more harm than good. I say this having run sites with and without comments enabled. There's a way to do comments right, but it takes ongoing effort. In the best case scenario most comments are still chaff, and readers will still have to work to find the meaty bits. In the worst case scenario, which is far more prevalent, the inmates quickly overrun the asylum and comments sections become spleen-venting areas where the hostile, the ill-informed, and the self-righteous take center stage.
The nice thing about running your own website is that you can do as you please. But when clients are paying you to build a site, they call the shots. And these days most publishers want social interaction because they've been told over and over again that it's the right thing to do. Hey, everyone's doing it, right?
Unfortunately social features have also been sold as a fire-and-forget exercise. Spray on some social and you'll get that genuine interactive flavor without the hassle of creating inherently compelling content! Publishers have also been sold on AdSense and affiliate links, so they can't help but equate time on page to increased revenue. If visitors are commenting, they're staying on the page longer!
When taken to its logical extreme this approach leads to sites like the execrable Business Insider, which treats its readers as if they were Pavlov's dogs, clicking from one inane story to the next and occasionally hitting an ad link along the way.
With ad revenue firmly lodged in the minds of site owners as the only way to make money, or at least as a means of making money that is worth ruining the user experience for, how do we get out of this mess?
John Gruber, who writes Daring Fireball, has built a dedicated readership and brings in revenue from three primary sources: a syndicated RSS feed sponsorship, a single ad spot from The Deck, and t-shirt sales. He may not be getting rich off Daring Fireball, but he charges $6,500 a week for RSS feed sponsorships. He's doing all of this without employing any social features on his site.
Gruber is able to pull this off because he is an excellent writer who puts in the work. He produces a great deal of original material and provides commentary on a larger stream of linked content. There is no foolproof get rich quick scheme at play, just a guy showing up every day and creating something he believes in. Whether you agree or disagree with his opinions, the way he has structured the reading experienced makes it obvious that he respects his readers.
Unfortunately the Daring Fireball approach is the exception to the norm. Social features have increasingly become tools that are cynically deployed against site visitors. Instead of helping, they hinder. Instead of making the Web a better place, they are have become just another manifestation of the manipulative, lazy attitude that so many online publishers have adopted because of reliance on the AdSense/affiliate links shell game, rather than on great writing.
Joe Wilcox takes Gruber to task for his no comments policy, and Gruber responds.
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Freddie deBoer's The Resentment Machine is a scathing critique of the current Internet as a vehicle for the aggrandizement of consumption, driven by the competitive forces inherent in our society. It is well-argued and worth a careful read.
DeBoer's analysis focuses on the "postcollegiate, culturally savvy tastemakers" of the Internet and the ultimate triviality of their online discourse. It's easy to agree with him that "buying an iPad does nothing to delineate you from anyone else." That said, I think he's missing the larger context.
When the popular Internet arrived I was already an adult. I can testify without reservation to the fact that competitive consumption was already a way of life in America well before Internet hipsters showed up.
It can be difficult to remember now, but in the 1980s the television reigned supreme. It told you what to wear, what to eat, what was cool, what was out of style, and how to act. And people wanted so badly to do what their televisions told them to do. Most of the people who bought K-Tel disco albums had never set foot in a dance club, but they'd seen plenty of disco on TV, and they knew they were supposed to like it.
Before the television, radio told Americans how they should think. Before that it was newspapers. Now we all just tell each other how to think and what to consume. We argue about it. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than simply being told what to consume and how to consume it by broadcast boxes.
Are we unable to create meaningful self-identity because we are too busy blogging, tweeting, linking, and liking? In those musty pre-Internet days we didn't assemble our identities online, but we didn't create them from scratch either. DeBoer seems to believe that you can either be a consumer and critic, or you can engage in some sort of artistically meaningful and authentic endeavor of your own.
But authenticity is a will-o-the-wisp. Every time you think you've got a handle on it you realize you've just grabbed hold of a nascent trend or reconfigured artifact from the past. Today's earnest striving is tomorrow's ironic nod, and today's irony is tomorrow's deeply held conviction. The pieces from which we assemble identity are not unique; it's the manner in which they are assembled that defines us.
DeBoer does an excellent job of laying out the grim reality of an unexamined life. He merely misses the larger truths: The Internet did not create nor did it necessarily magnify competitive consumption, and the quest for an authentically-constructed self has always been and will always be difficult.
Ω
Judas Kiss has been taking the film festival circuit by storm. It's an audacious film in many ways, and it sprang forth from the imaginations of Carlos Pedraza and JT Tepnapa. The success of the movie comes as no surprise to me; I've marveled at Carlos's ability to get things done since the late '90s, when we were both humorless Washington bureaucrats.
It's been 2 1/2 years since our last interview, so I asked Carlos if I could get his thoughts on bringing any indie film to market and the larger movie industry. Calling him a road warrior is like saying Lance Armstrong is a cyclist. I caught up with Carlos as he and JT zoomed up I-5 en route to a Judas Kiss screening in Salem, Oregon:
The last time I interviewed you it was May of 2009. At the time I asked, "In 2012, Carlos Pedraza is doing what? And this nascent industry of independent video producers is where in relation to that?" Here's the money part of your answer:
"I would like by 2012 to have figured out at least one avenue for that talent to be harnessed, and to have done that successfully one or two times, so that people say, 'Here's a system. Let's buy into it. Let's refine it.' Let's have some examples of how that's being done effectively, and share that knowledge, because it shouldn't be secret."
Well, I feel like I'm still on schedule, even with so much of the economic landscape having changed since then. Not just in terms of the recession but in how business models around independent film distribution are changing even as we speak. That conversation you and I had 2 1/2 years ago informed the way we negotiated all our distribution contracts for Judas Kiss.
What is changing?
Revenue streams, ancillary products, and how to structure new media venues for distribution. For example, YouTube now offers downloads and rental for films, majors and indies. Hulu is doing the same thing. Netflix's shift from DVD distribution to instant streaming and its attempt to divest itself of its DVD distribution business then retrenching.
So not only did you have to be forward thinking about distribution, you had to be agile enough to adapt to changes.
Yes. Things are changing so fast, even within the time frames in which we've been negotiating our contracts with various distributors here in North America and overseas. For example, we see iTunes as a big potential revenue source for us, and we are fully capable of making the film available in that venue without having to rely on a distributor as a middleman. So we've retained iTunes rights for ourselves.
But we also planned on piggybacking the marketing and promotion of our iTunes version of Judas Kiss on top of the DVD marketing and promotion that's being paid for by our distributors. Because, of course, the challenge for an indie filmmaker isn't merely making your film available online, it's getting people to know it's there, and whether it's good enough to spend their money to download it. iTunes also gives us the opportunity to offer the film for sale in parts of the world where there isn't a reliable distributor to really take the film under its wing.
This requires, of course, our having to take on a lot of the work a distributor would normally take care of, like translating and subtitling. All our marketing and promotion is designed to dovetail between what our distributors — especially in the US and UK, as well as Germany and France — are doing with the social marketing we've been doing for years now via our own website, judaskissmovie.com, and Facebook.
That's one thing I've been really impressed with — your engagement with your audience up front has been targeted and seemingly very effective, even well before production started.
The secret to independent film success is branding and relationship-building with existing and new fans.
Problem is, most indie filmmakers just wanna make movies. We don't live in an economy anymore where you can simply do that, and hope that distributors take care of the rest. We're lucky in that we've been able to merge the old-school distribution models with new-school social media.
It seems that a huge amount of your work is what a traditional filmmaker would consider as ancillary, stuff that is handled by someone else.
We were able to raise the critical development funding for the film, early in conception, thanks to the fans we had built relationships with during our days with our Star Trek web series. They followed us to this new project and have stuck with us right up to purchasing their Judas Kiss DVDs.
Major studios know that there are plenty of other revenue streams for a film beyond the film itself: merchandising, adaptation into novel or comic formats, and so on. The Internet offers marketplaces for all these kinds of products to independent films, too, now. For example, we are planning on publishing the shooting script for Judas Kiss as an ebook, along with annotations, embedded video files, and so on. We've also talked to a traditional publisher about adapting the script into a novel.
None of these things by itself, including even the film, turns the project into a huge moneymaker. But taken together, the long tail can in fact offer revenue that eventually positions us to make our next film, to further build on our brand, to offer new products to the people who believe in our work, to encourage them to recommend the work to others.
It's definitely like running a marathon, whereas I think most filmmakers think of their work as wind sprints.
It seems that the start point doesn't really matter any more. Whether it's a book or a comic or a movie initially, the story is the thing. You're telling the story in film, and there is potential for others to help you tell the story in other forms. The trick is to think of it as a much larger fabric than the movie itself.
That's so true! And isn't it ironic that story seems to be the thing that Hollywood films are given short shrift to these days? I think I remember reading a recent interview with a Disney executive who said story wasn't important, branding is. I thought, "Bullshit! Story is how you build and extend your brand. It's at the heart of what your brand means!" I mean, look at the difference between Pixar's original Cars and the pathetic sequel. Clearly, Disney took a turn there toward the cynical — "Think of all the merchandise we can sell the kiddy-poos!"
I get that big films make the most money, and minimizing risk is prudent, and going with "known quantities" is prudent. But that's ultimately a losing proposition. It's a stopgap measure from a creative standpoint. All the studios are doing is creating a niche for more nimble, more innovative and more creative people to tell new and more engaging stories. The key thing is keeping costs down. Which of course is the thing that has painted studio pictures into a corner.
Hollywood studios, who are in the business of storytelling, are abandoning it in favor of gimmicks like 3-D and incessant remakes of old properties. Frankly, the studios are totally at sea when it comes to the delivery vehicle. They've bungled every new delivery technology, from TV to VHS, to DVDs, Blu-Ray only a little, and now digital delivery. They have to learn to stop relying on gimmicks.
The studios' dirty little secret is that most adults rarely go to the movies any more. Rather than thinking, "Hmmm, our audience is consuming our products in other venues, maybe we should make it easier for them to find us there," studio instead say, "The only people at movie theaters now are teenage boys. So let's make all our tentpole movies for them!"
Now that I've made my first feature film, I'm confident that there are ways to make films that people will buy that don't cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. There will always be a place for big tentpole movies, for sure. I'm not against them, but that shouldn't be the only economic model for filmmakers to follow, or even to aspire to. Smaller projects, more creative ones, well-targeted to narrow demographics offered in multiple venues with a focus on user-friendliness: That's actually the formula to independent filmmaking success in the digital world.
Smaller films entail less risk. Keeping costs down minimizes that risk, but it maximizes creativity. There are things need to change. The actors' unions, for example, offer breaks to indie filmmakers who want access to their talent but at lower cost than studios and TV pay. Lower pay has to become the new reality for a lot of film professionals. But more projects mean more work, and isn't that what we really want to be doing — making more movies?
Would you say that the funding approach you used for Judas Kiss could be considered a patronage model?
To some extent. But like most everything we've done so far, it's a mix of traditional and new. We raised development money from fans and friends we made through a Web series. But our financing for production and post-production has largely followed a traditional model, with an LLC as the legal entity behind the film. The structure of the investment model is pretty textbook for indie films. The difference is that many of the investors are people with whom we built relationships over time.
Even though the old ways may be changing or dying, they may still be with us in some form for quite some time. In the meantime, new technology and social media offer new venues to find support for a film and to make it available for sale.
We're also seeing some potential legislative changes that may make crowd funding for indie films a more tenable financial proposition. The SEC has rules designed to keep small investors from being fleeced by unscrupulous "film producers" seeking to deprive them of their life savings. Things like Kickstarter prove that by spreading financial risk around to a much larger number of people, producers don't have to rely on a small number of investors for a large amount of money. Small investors can pitch in on financing a film without having to take on a big financial risk. The talk in Congress from both Republicans and Democrats is that a change like this is necessary in order to free up capital that would otherwise stagnate. And we need capital moving toward innovative projects to jumpstart our economy.
Over the course of the last five years or so, as you've worked on Judas Kiss, what portion of your time would you estimate has been working on licensing, legal matters, and all those things that in the old era would have been handled by someone else?
Just in dealing with licensing and promotion has been a full time job for me since we wrapped the film in September 2010. Most filmmakers turn over that kind of work to a distributor, but distributors don't do it for free. Believe me, they take their cut. The reality is that most independent films don't make their money back. So the traditional model, where a filmmaker hands everything over to a distributor is not tenable.
In that scenario, the distributor makes money guaranteed. Filmmakers don't. But filmmakers mostly aren't business people. They want to be artists, so they don't always make the best business decisions.
So your advice to filmmakers is…?
Learn to be strategic about what aspects of the business you need to remain involved in. Learn enough of the business so you know what to negotiate away and what you should retain. Think of the brand you're trying to build – your brand, not your distributor's.
That brings me to the marketing of Judas Kiss. Obviously there's a core audience you're going after, but it's also clear that the film is not confined to that audience.
We knew what we were selling was a story with broad appeal, but we also knew that targeting a market is the best way to make money. At this stage in our careers, we need a track record that says: 1) We can tell a story, 2) we can sell that story, 3) people want to see more stories from us. That's what attracts new and more diverse investors.
I think of it as a form of inkblot strategy. Hit that well-defined target, and you'll likely also have the impact grow beyond the initial audience as people spread the word to friends who might not otherwise be exposed to the film.
Yes. An inkblot strategy. I like that metaphor. May I use it?
Use it!
Thanks!
A good story is a good story. The challenge is not to tell it in a way that says to potential customers, "This isn't for you," but still allows you to tell specific markets, "This is your story, too." That is a big challenge, but good films should be big challenges.
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