• Social Media Vacation

  • Posted on 9th Aug
  • Category: Newsletter

  Whoa, August caught up with me something fast. I usually take the month of August off from all social media. I’ve just realized that I broke that rule by nine whole days, yikes. Time to get off these interwebs. Why am I telling you this? Well, as I said last year, I don’t want anyone to be offended if I don’t answer them on Facebook or Twitter for awhile. I’ll be back after Labor Day and I’m sure I won’t miss much (things slow down in August, that’s why I picked it for this kind of vacation). If you know me well, or are a client, you can find me on old fashioned email until August 18th, when I disappear for about ten days from all communications while I take my real world vacation.

  Last year, this little experiment led me to abandon FourSquare altogether, but I missed Twitter a little bit. I imagine that this year might cause me to go ahead and abandon Google+ early and will likely kick me off Facebook, as I get less value from that place daily. We’ll see.

  I am never one to blog super often anyways, but if you miss me, I suggest you spend some time reading Donald Whittington over at “The Automat” for awhile. I just discovered him when he wrote a stellar review of a film I’m a fan of, and now I’m a huge fan of his blog. He wrote my quote of the year regarding General Orders No. 9: “This movie is a plea to everyone to start thinking, now, about what you want from living. What do you want from the day? Surely there is more to existence than scrambling back and forth in our cars like maddened human tumbleturds trying to figure out where to push all our shit. “

  I’m going to spend the next month thinking about what I want from the day, without asking the internet to help me out. I suggest you do the same sometime.

• Edinburgh and the Future of Film Fests

  • Posted on 21st Jul
  • Category: Newsletter

  

  For my money, there’s no better reading right now in the film world than David Cairn’s excellent series of interview posts on the Edinburgh Film Festival. You can read the latest one here, and part one and two here. I think this is essential reading for anyone who cares about film fests, the film industry, the state of and future of film going…or about the state of culture generally.

  Why are they so great? Well, there’s been a lot of griping about this year’s Edinburgh Int’l Film Fest, but David’s series is going beyond the gripe. He’s interviewing several people involved with the festival, promising to also run an interview with this year’s artistic manager, and he’s not concentrating on the bad. For example, he starts by asking them to talk about their favorite moment’s from their history with the festival. The stories he hears are great, and tell us a lot about what makes a great film fest, as well as why people keep working at them. A few gripes do get shared, but what comes across the most is a great discussion about why festivals matter, what they mean to their local community and the film industry, and how that might evolve. I’m finding them a fascinating and much needed discussion.

  What is most striking to me is the fact that I can’t imagine anyone in the US film news/blog scene doing anything remotely as important as this. Seriously. No offense to my friends in the film news space, but what has happened and is happening in Edinburgh is worthy of some serious reporting. Not just from the current perspective of “oh shit, this was a bad year,” but from the perspectives of: there’s great change facing many film festivals, what can we learn here?; Edinburgh has a glorious history, what did it use to do that we can learn from by examining the past?; How is film going changing?; What does it mean to run/be a film festival today?; and yes, Who is at fault and what can be done??!!

  On that last note, can I just say publicly, since no one else is doing so:

  Give me a f-in break people. Quit blaming artistic director James Mullighan for all the woes of Edinburgh this year. He may be a friend, but even if he was an enemy, I would point out that he only took the job some four months before the festival, he inherited many problems and the buck doesn’t stop with the artistic director. He had no time to do much of anything, and even less budget. As much as I loved Hannah and her predecessors (and am not pinning the blame to them either), I have attended the festival for the last few years, and there was a lot of (less public) griping going on about many of these same issues. The problems didn’t just start this year. He also seems to have experimented with some cool new programming that actually worked, as well. And last, and to my mind most importantly – the problems facing the Edinburgh Film Festival are arguably completely in the realm of the management level, not the artistic one, and I’d be willing to bet that ANY artistic director with less problems on this front could experiment more and honor the past more than was possible here. Let’s face it – if the festival is losing money, bringing in an artistic director too late and losing both big name support and street cred, the buck stops at a higher level. Without having met the CEO or board of the festival I am quite certain that’s where the blame should be placed.

  Yep, them’s fighting words, but no one I’ve read yet has convinced me otherwise.

  In the meantime, every film festival director and their board chair should make this series of posts a must-read for their entire staff and board. There should be a staff/board retreat dedicated to thinking about what can be learned from this debacle, and if you happen to run a film conference attended by many festival people, or maybe a conference for festivals…ahem…perhaps you should consider a panel about this as well.

  In closing, so it doesn’t seem I’m wallowing in anyone’s failures and changes – I have loved the Edinburgh Film Fest since I first attended it. I’ve liked every staff person there that I have met, and think they are doing an excellent, hard job and took too much criticism this year. I think it can and will become an important festival again. Its problems can’t be pinned on any one person, but can be linked to leadership failures. I can’t wait to attend it again in the future.

  What do you think?

• On Gettin’ One Over: Food Trucks and the New Ethos of Quality

  • Posted on 12th Jul
  • Category: What We Do

  
  Like everyone else in NYC (and SFO and many other cities), I’ve been enjoying the recent explosion in Food Trucks and pop-up restaurants. Near my office in Midtown, I can often hit up any number of random food trucks, with my favorite indulgence being the Daisy Mae’s BBQ truck near Rockefeller Center. On the weekends, I love hitting the Kelvin and Kimchi Taco trucks, usually at the Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market, and I really miss Veronica’s Kitchen near my old office downtown.

  There’s all kinds of ways to look at this phenomenon: too many rich people in NYC and the hipsteryuppification of NY; entrepreneurial business endeavors; menace to existing restaurants and old style water-dog and pretzel stands; or proof there’s not enough real jobs for college graduates. I like all of these simultaneously, but what is most striking about these to me is how different the ethos of these trucks is to what we’ve gotten before.

  If you look at the recent, say 50 year, history of food trucks/carts in the City, they’ve been about one thing, really – ripping you off. Getting one over on someone who needs a quick lunch for not too much money. Give em a f-in dirty water dog. Or a crappy pretzel. Or a stale bagel that’s more expensive and worse tasting than the one at any corner deli. The customer has nowhere else to go. F-‘em

  Now, not every vendor actually felt/feels this way. Many were/are struggling entrepreneurs, often immigrants, who were/are just trying to make a living, renting their cart for way too much money from another boss. It was what you did, what was expected. A way to make some cash. The history of the food carts, and how the City (from the bureaucrats down to all of us) have dealt with them is too complicated to explore here, but I think we can sum it up as – barely tolerable food, barely tolerated by the authorities and served up to suckers of either the tourist or harried worker variety. But whatever the motivation, giving a customer something good, decent, that had real value has not been a top priority.

  The new food truck phenomenon is completely the opposite. Good, usually awesome, food that people will not just eat when they are desperate for a meal, but that they’ll hunt down via Twitter and follow obsessively. The vendors are usually quite serious about making high-quality food and giving you value for your money. Many are overpriced – yes, I could never eat at Rickshaw Dumpling knowing that I can get a better deal in Chinatown at Prosperity, but here’s the thing – at least they’re making quality food and you can tell they enjoy doing it. They’re also, by the way, not limited to hipsters – the food truck phenomenon is remarkably diverse, with the annual Vendy awards consisting of Red Hook vendors alongside Belgian waffles. Most importantly, regardless of the truck, you don’t get the sense they’re just “gettin’ one over” on you.

  This to me is not just a defining attitude of food truck vendors. I think it’s something bigger and it might even qualify as a generational divide. Up until recently, we’ve been willing to live in a world of “getting one over.” Everyone was doing it – from the food cart vendor, to the McDonald’s franchisee, all the way up to MoMA. Yes, even MoMA. Every frickin’ museum in this City, including MoMA, has always had a crappy cafe where they’d sell you horrible, overpriced food created with not one ounce of love. It was endemic and accepted. “Eh, that’s what you get” we’d say. “Suckers” they’d think as they served up another steamed soy burger. Gettin’ one over.

  Yes, the new food truck scene is sometimes overpriced, but I don’t get the sense I’m being ripped off by a scam artist every time I visit one of these trucks. I usually have an actual conversation with the owner, who is sweating it out right alongside his/her employees. I get quality food I’d actually recommend to someone else, not something I’d tell my visiting relatives to avoid.

  It’s not just the food trucks. I rode my bike this weekend to the Morningside Park Market to buy sausages from “Brooklyn Cured,” my favorite food vendor in the City (he also does the New Amsterdam Market). The guy is working his ass off, and selling a quality product at a fair price because he loves doing it. I’ll keep going there because of this difference.

  It’s very easy to knock this all down and say – just a bunch of rich people trying to find a new version of “authenticity.” I know all the arguments, but I’m putting them aside for now because I do think there’s an underlying ethic of providing quality goods to the consumer that we haven’t seen for some time. Oh, we’ve seen lip-service to it, and marketing to it, but not much of the real thing.

  We’ll see it copied too. It’s already happening across the board, and you do see it in all the “authenticity” marketing going on, as well as in the move to “high-quality” in other places. My favorite example is, once again, MoMA. They’ve gone upscale with their cafe and their restaurant. They have a fancy chef instead of someone more used to school-cafeteria cooking, some craft beers and what not, but they’re still “gettin’ one over.” The restaurant is under-staffed, the feeling is still one of getting ripped off and the quality of the artisanal snacks (and entrees) reeks more of “how do we suck another dollar out of this jerk’s wallet” than “how do we make this a better, more valuable, experience.”

  Contrast that with a place like the Rerun Gastropub Theater. The seats and environs are decidedly less fancy than at MoMA, but I’m getting food, beverage and a movie all of which have been created by someone who gives a flying fuck about the quality of what they’re giving me.

  That attitude is relatively new as a mass phenomenon. It has its problems, but I like it more than the status quo. I see this same attitude in many of the newer galleries I respect, the filmmakers and film festivals that I tend to like, and that, to me, is something I hope to see more of.

  I’m sure people in the worlds of food, film, art, etc will continue to get one over on us (I’m lookin’ at you, 3D), but I also think many of us will want something better, and demand it. Artists who take this to heart will have to work harder, just like the food truck vendors, and have a more direct connection to their customer/audience, but the experience will be more rewarding for both of them.

• Future of Film at Karlovy Vary

  • Posted on 1st Jul
  • Category:

  I was recently invited to the Karlovy Vary Film Festival to give a talk about the future of film with Ted Hope. He and I spoke about this once before at the Vimeo Festival, and we decided we wanted to try something new, and make the panel a bit more participatory. So, we have jointly written a blog post laying out some of our thoughts about the future of film and are encouraging people to respond in advance of the festival with their comments. As we say in the post:

  “As we put our thoughts out there for you to consider, ask yourself: “are these the trends that will most effect content, production, and consumption?” Did we leave something out? Is one not important? Join the conversation and let us know. Similarly, consider that these five suggestions may be the preeminent factors in shaping the next few years, but the real question is always “how?” As creators, facilitators, and consumers, what must we do to confront these issues? Are there models and best practices already emerging? Have there already been noble failures and/or arrogant efforts attempting to address these factors? What would a vision look like that might address these key elements? We all must share our thoughts, our hopes, our failures, along with what we learned from our successes if we are going to build something new, something that truly works for everyone.”

  We hope to hear from you in advance, and yes, we’ll be incorporating feedback from here and the festival organizers will be selecting some responders who are attending the festival to participate in the discussion in person. I don’t believe it will be live streamed, but we’ll circle back with some conclusions, or at least further thoughts.

  And yes, by the way and because I’ve been part of these discussions before, we did take note in our essay that the future of film is more diverse than two white guys prognosticating about it. So, give us your input, but don’t do it here. In order for us to track the comments, it’s best to leave yours here. Thanks.

• China Solves Piracy

  • Posted on 29th Jun
  • Category: Newsletter

  I’m willing to bet that the future of film won’t be decided in the US or Europe, even if that’s the framework most of us begin with (us being my readers and me, most of whom are in the West). I think we’ll be learning a lot from China, where the business is booming, like everything else. I was speaking with some people well-versed in the Chinese film business lately, and they told me something interesting.

  Piracy is rampant in China, so much so that the majority of their profits come from theatrical, because soon after it opens, the film is on every pirate network so there’s no ancillary business to speak of. This is the opposite of the US, for example, where the box office is largely a loss-leader for the ancillary revenues (its marketing).

  This is a big concern to all of the producers here trying to crack the market there, but my friends told me it isn’t such a concern for the producers in China – they’ve come up with a model that uses piracy to their advantage – product placement. As much as 30% of their budget will often now be made up from product placement by brands who just want to have their product seen by consumers. The brands don’t care if the film is seen legally, or via piracy, because they just want eyeballs. Win, win for everyone.

  I know a bit about the arguments against branding, consumerism and yadda yadda, but I think this is a business model we should start following more closely.

• On territorial licenses and geo-restricting

  • Posted on 28th Jun
  • Category: What We Do

  We do a lot of stupid things in the film business to keep our old business models working, but to my mind lately, the dumbest one is the continuance of territorial licensing and geo-restricting. I know the reasons why these persist, and I also know that right now, we’re in a time where we can’t completely change the system overnight, but…

  I recently went to Tel Aviv to be on the DocAviv Jury and give a masterclass. In advance of the workshop, the organizer sent me a stack of Israeli Docs to watch on DVD, ones that he received legally from the rights-holders by asking them if he could get them and send them to me. Ninety (90) percent of them wouldn’t play in my DVD player here in the US. I had recently traded my region-free player for a gifted Blu-Ray and didn’t think to check about the region encoding, but I shouldn’t have to do this. About half of the discs that wouldn’t play in my DVD player, would play in my Mac (oddly, I usually got an error message saying they couldn’t be played, but then they started up five seconds later).

  This is insanity. I should be able to buy a DVD anywhere and play it anywhere. The inability to do so drives piracy, of course, because all of the films could be found on pirate networks with no hassle. I could go on and on about the idiocy of this system, but luckily someone else already has – over at his excellent Transmediator blog, David Wilson has summed up the problems nicely. I recommend reading the entire post, especially as to how this is now creeping into digital downloads and streaming (lesson learned???). What is his solution? Pretty simple, but I doubt we’ll see much progress anytime soon. From David:

  “Here’s the mantra again: anything, anytime, anywhere.

  If you don’t give people what they want, they will find an easier way. And, I’m sorry to say, pirated content is by far the easiest way. It’s easy to find with search. It’s one-click. It’s generally pre-formatted to the widest common denominator. It doesn’t have licensing restrictions. And, it’s free.

  I don’t want movies to be free. But, it makes me angry to see them so difficult to get my hands on. Why can’t I simply Google a film that I’m interested in, click ‘rent’ or ‘buy’ and – boom – watch it straight away on any device I own? Why is that beyond comprehension?

  I get angry when I think about this – not least of all because of all the time I wasted with region-restricted content – but because of all the money that the industry is losing to piracy when it’s within their control to do something about it. Studios are actually CONTRIBUTING to the problem. Their inability to collect revenue results in a shortfall to filmmakers. That makes me mad. It should make us all very mad, indeed. We are being shortchanged by their shortsightedness.

  If we want to stop piracy, we’ve got to make it easy to get, easy to use and offered at an attractive price. Nothing else is going to work.”

  Agreed.

• Possible Media Futures…Redux

  • Posted on 24th Jun
  • Category: Newsletter

  In moving my blog over to this new site, I looked back at my very first blog post on Springboard Media, way back in January of 2006, and was surprised to see that almost everything I wrote back then could be written today without much having changed. It’s also a pretty long post, it had been written originally as an essay for a Foundation, and it kinda set the tone for all of my future posts – long.

  You can read the original in its entirety here, which includes the state of affairs as I saw it then and still see it now. But here, I’m going to cut straight to the solutions I thought we should focus on then, and I still agree with them now:

  POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS
  This is a pivotal moment in the history of media arts, a time filled with possibility and uncertainty, but most of all, promise. To address these challenges and to have the greatest societal impact, the field needs to think of innovative, transformative ideas.

  Research, Policy, Advocacy and Education
  There is great need for continued research, mapping, convening and policy work. The field needs the data to show the problems (such as lack of diversity), and the advocacy to ensure good policy decisions. There is also a need to convene around the multiple issues facing the media arts: What can be done collaboratively to broaden the reach of socially important media? «Note: This is largely being done now, one good thing.»In light of new developments, what directions are most central? Who is not being served? What can be learned from other fields? Last, there is still a need for education — of gatekeepers, of artists and of general publics — in the importance of media arts; in the value of media artists’ contributions to society; in the craft, technology and business of media arts; in its distribution and in media literacy. Through such work, the field can encourage broader support for and public understanding of the value of media arts.

  Distribution
  There are new models for dissemination, including alternative distribution and marketing strategies, new exhibition avenues, direct video sales and ever-increasing home video markets. Systemization of festival screenings, web-based networks and new distribution strategies could get the work to broader audiences than ever before. The field needs knowledge sharing — strategies, stories, case studies and experiments focused on distribution and dissemination. Citizens need assistance in building communal media experiences where individuals and groups can connect, learn from and utilize media for social change or educational purposes. Leaders in the field must think of what the public wants and deserves, and work together to make that happen so that audiences can find and use this important media. As a result, media artists will prosper, by finding new audiences for their work.

  New Financing Models
  The media arts need innovative funding models that validate artists, help them attract new sources of funding, and help them find and reach the broadest possible audiences. New strategies could be found in novel approaches to the venture capital model, or with open source and social networking advances. For example, an online, audience-driven fund for progressive media arts could enable individuals, foundations and investors alike to support a variety of work «We’re getting there». The Internet provides great potential to encourage individuals to become art patrons rather than mere consumers. Most of all, funders need to support creative experiments, where new knowledge and thinking may help expand the field. Many funders are experimenting with ways to get money, services and advice into the hands of artists. Such funds may come from multiple sources, but collaboration could be encouraged to leverage investments to most benefit artists and society.

  Furthermore, boundaries between commercial and noncommercial media are disappearing, and are increasingly irrelevant to creators and consumers of content. Many people theorize that successful future strategies in media arts will come from combining the assets of the for-profit and non-profit sectors to realize both financial and socialprofits. This new space, perhaps called with-profit (as in social goals with profit potential), promises a rich field for exploration. What if with-profit organizations funded socially important work that will receive commercial distribution, thus reaching broader audiences that aren’t commercially attractive to the for-profit community? What if a with-profit developed a rights-licensing system that allowed creators and rights-holders to be compensated based on actual usage while simultaneously increasing public access? Perhaps the greatest potential for increasing the impact of media arts lies in with-profit ideas.

  Conclusion
  These potential solutions, while not all-inclusive, suggest some of the work that remains to be done. Society will benefit most from a multi-faceted strategy that considers these options alongside methods that are already working. Most of all, the field needs to continue to discuss the “big picture” and imagine possible futures for society. Every new technological advance in the arts has brought us closer to realizing the ideals of a civil society. Each time, there has been a chance to realize dreams —of technology allowing everyone to share and build knowledge, of a more democratic society where everyone could be producers, not just consumers, where multiple viewpoints could be shared and, in general, where the world could be a better place. Each time, such possibilities have been squandered due to a lack of vision about the future, the forces of greed, the power of the few over the many and the simple fact that technology never quite realizes its potential. Once again, society has been given a set of tools, none perfect, that can help realize our dreams, if we are willing to imagine the possibilities and act soon to ensure their success. All that we need is in front of us. Will we act upon it, or let this chance slip away once again?

• Karlovy Vary Follow-up

  • Posted on 11th Jun
  • Category:

  ’m just back from the fantastic Karlovy Vary Film Festival. It was my first trip there, and I had a great time, saw some great films, met incredible people and learned a lot. Karlovy Vary is a beautiful spa town in the Czech Republic, about a two hour drive from Prague. The KVIFF is one of the oldest film festivals around (at 46 years), but its spirit is very young.

  Literally. It was amazing to see thousands of young Czech and Eastern European film-lovers in line for each of the films. People love their cinema in the Czech Republic, and rumor has it that in addition to filling up the hotels, people fill up campgrounds all around the area, spending the week watching arthouse films. Theaters were packed for every show, no matter how obscure, and audiences were enthusiastic in their appreciation.

  While the festival is not the marketplace of a Cannes or Berlin, it wasn’t short on industry attendance either. Buyers, sellers, directors, programmers and critics were in abundance, and while many would admit they weren’t swamped with business, that was the charm – having an opportunity to watch great films with great audiences, and to linger a little longer at each meeting and really get to know people better.

  I was there to speak at a masterclass on “The Future of Film” with Ted Hope. We tried to change the format a bit, and make it more participatory by posting our thoughts in advance and by encouraging feedback in the comments before the panel, and to encourage more input from the audience. We didn’t fully succeed – Ted and I didn’t shut-up enough to really make it an open dialogue with the audience – but we did get great feedback and commentary from the audience.

  We received one excellent email from Brendan Fletcher, the director of Mad Bastards, playing at KVIFF and in theaters and on VOD now, and we asked him to post it to the comments, which he did. I recommend reading that and the other comments, and I hope you’ll add your comments as well over at Ted’s blog. KVIFF Industry Head, Andrea Szczukova told us, and Screen International, that the panel “was such a success this year that there could be more sessions in 2012 devoted to ideas about the film industry’s changing future.” We hope so, and we hope to continue the dialogue between now and then.

  I was also lucky to see some great films, especially my co-panelist’s film (Ted produced it) Collaborator, by Martin Donovan. Like most film buffs of my age, I’ve been a fan of Martin Donovan since the Hal Hartley days, and was excited to see his feature directing debut. He did an excellent job, both as a director and lead in the film. David Morse stars as well, in an outstanding role that won him best actor honors at the festival, and the film also won the Fipresci Critics award, which is quite an honor. I highly recommend the film.

  I also highly recommend visiting the festival next year. The Karlovy Vary Film Fest is a blast.

• A brand new website, a brand new blog

  • Posted on 6th Jun
  • Category: What We Do

  Yessirree, I’ve finally gotten around to updating my online life a little bit. Just under two years ago, I left my day-job for more independent pastures and launched my new company sub-genre media. But, I had many years worth of blog posts over at Springboard Media, which was never a company, just a blog, and I kept blogging there. Every single time I give a lecture or do a consultancy, this leads to confusion. On top of that, I never really liked the Springboard Media name. I had actually just grabbed that name for a project I was working on at the time and it stuck around. But lately, I’m getting tired of the Blogger platform, and figured that when you couple it with the fact that it was confusing…there needed to be a change.

  Well, I’ve decided to finally launch the new sub-genre website using tumblr as a backbone. I’m still making improvements, and I’ll be adding a lot more soon, so please hold back on the critiques until I figure out how to make this look prettier. In the meantime, if you’ve ever liked reading my blog, please update your RSS feeds, etc to here. I’ll keep Springboard up as an archive of my past writing, and will refer to it via links here and there, but from now on, all of my writing will be from sub-genre, where you’ll also be able to follow more about my consulting (as I get around to adding it).

• What gives?

  • Posted on 3rd Jun
  • Category: Newsletter

  Which would you buy?

  

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