April 7, 2021
Documentary film producers are so beaten down that they formed a coalition just to beg that people stop stealing their credit, stop asking them to work for nothing, and to pretty-please invite them to the festival parties. I’m only half-joking, because the work the DPA is doing is important, but it always shows just how desperate the situation is for producers, and while they represent documentary producers, a lot of what they advocate for impacts all producers.
One could always gauge the value of producers from their treatment at film festivals, but this year, festivals took it to a whole ‘nother level. It used to be festivals would just leave your name out of the short credit list they publish, and invite the director but not producers to the fest, unless they were desperate for a panelist or jury member. But if you showed up, a fest would usually give you a free badge so you could see some films. And maybe let you hang around the stage come Q&A time. Not anymore. In the virtual festival world, producers have become something more evanescent, as most festivals give only one “virtual” badge to a film, and just to the directors (a few fests like Sundance, DocNYC, Tribeca and SXSW have done better). You’d think a group of people toiling out of the limelight for the love of film would have one another’s backs, but I guess festival directors see themselves more as auteurs than workaday producers. (Come to think of it… are there any two jobs more romanticized in the sector?) I’d say fixing this was something for some group like the PGA to address, but I ran out of laughing tears already. (note: the above paragraph was written in mid-2020, but I’m finally using it now).
Luckily, the DPA has come to the rescue, with their “Producers are Filmmakers Too” campaign. While the list is long, you literally couldn’t be asking for much less:
“To recognize the “day-to-day” producers who receive the “Produced By” or “Producer” credit at the time of submission, we ask festivals to:
- Include producers in all festival publicity and programs
- Extend producers festival passes and include them in their films’ Q&A’s
- Include producers in travel and accommodation budgets
- Invite producers to speak on panels
- Organize producer events during festivals
- Include producers in awards announcements like Audience Award and Best of Fest, and consider adding awards specifically for producers
I agree with all of this, but as a former festival director, I’d quibble a little bit with the demand to include producers in the film’s Q&A. Sure, let them get on the stage, but let’s all admit the obvious – the audience wants to hear from the director and the cast and/or subjects of the film. Show them a producer and you might as well be showing them some guy you pull in off the street, because that’s how much the audience cares about their involvement in the film. But use them on panels, and juries – you bet. Anyway, if you head over to the campaign site, you can also learn about a panel they’re hosting with the Film Festival Alliance – who supports this campaign –
On Wednesday, April 14, 2021, at 2pm EST/1pm CST/11am PST, the Film Festival Alliance and the DPA are co-hosting a joint panel - “The Festival Experience: Documentary Producers Are Filmmakers Too”. DPA producers Sabrina Gordon (Quest), Chris Renteria (Whose Streets?), and Rebecca Stern(Tre Maison Dasan) will speak, along with Thom Powers (Festival Director, DOC NYC). Barbara Twist (Associate Director, FFA) will be moderating. We hope you will attend. An archived recording of the panel will also be made available. Link to register: https://bit.ly/3u9ZkdI.
Meanwhile, if there’s anyone feeling less love right now than producers, it’s exhibitors in NYC. Governor Cuomo has been opening up NY in ways that defy all reason – case counts are up, but he’s increasing capacity at indoor bars, restaurants, weddings… everywhere it seems but movie theaters. I am fully vaccinated as of next week, and I still won’t step foot in a movie theater, but that’s a personal decision based on my rational fear of the variants – and a lack of many films worthy of the big screen being on offer right now. There’s no actual scientific evidence that should make Cuomo’s rules harsher on a movie theater than a restaurant (which I also love and won’t go into yet), so theater owners are starting to wonder just what happened to Cuomo in a darkened cinema to make him hate them so?
Deadline reported on the issue this week, but of course NATO had to turn what could have been a decent argument for some general easing of the restrictions into an absurd argument that NY must open theaters “at 50% capacity or more by Memorial Day, for Cruella and A Quite Place Part II, and 75% or more by July 4, for Top Gun Maverick and Black Widow.”Taking his case further into the absurd, Joe Masher (president of NY NATO and CEO of Bow Tie Cinemas) said: “A majority of auditoriums in the city have been retrofitted with oversized luxury recliners that already eliminate up to 60% of seating. So an original 200-seat theater now seats 80 people and, at 25%, 20 people. It makes no sense. We need to be able to survive.”
I’ll tell you what makes less sense than Cuomo’s hatred of cinemas… that argument, Joe. You need 75% capacity based on what science? The science of box office? And have you seen restaurants or anyone else arguing that because of the size or spacing of their chairs, they should have extra accommodation for attendance? I’m all for being rational about this stuff, but you can tell who is winning this argument when you read the comments of the Deadline article – a trade publication, mind you – and 7 out of 11 of them not only are against NATO, but seem to hate movie theaters more than our Governor does, if that’s possible.
Maybe we need a new covid-relief program that pays film producers to attend movie theaters. The owners can join them in the seats and commiserate over what covid has revealed about their status in the cinema value chain. And maybe if that program helps put documentary films on the screen, they’ll have something to watch, while giving those films a place to be seen, since SVOD doesn’t want any of them.
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Branded Content
Capitalizing Your Content Costs: ICYMI - Dan Fricker of Shopify has a great article in BrandStorytelling about how brands can capitalize their content costs across multiple years to turn that marketing cost into an investment in an asset. Pretty obvious, but something I've not seen anyone else write about, or talk about in my brand/film discussions.
The Big Slick - When Branded Content Meets Big Oil: I've seen lots of bad brand funded entertainment, and I've debated the ethics of it with many people, but this is the first time I've actually run across a piece of brand funded content- in this case a doc series - that makes me want to puke. I've not watched the series yet, so I won't comment much further until I do, but according to this article in Gizmodo by Dharna Noor, the new Discovery+ show with Mike Rowe (Dirty Jobs), Six Degrees, is a big propaganda piece for big oil. The show is "funded by the American Petroleum Institute (the oil and gas industry’s biggest trade group) and Distribution Contractors Association (a lobbying group for fossil fuel pipeline contractors)." It is essentially trying to argue that everything depends on oil, so don't get too crazy about changing things too fast (apparently). Read more about it here, and I'm sure I'll be chiming in on this one more soon, as it raises a lot of questions about what makes good and bad branded content, the ethics of not just branded content, but what gets commissioned and how it is (no longer) fact checked by anyone, and why Discovery, you know the channel with the planet as their logo, would show what sounds like a pile of oil soaked garbage. And last, I remember a controversy where the Dirty Jobs show was accused of ripping off an old indie short - which we played in the Atlanta Film Fest - does anyone else remember this back story? Please email me if so.
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Miscellany:
 Book: The Holly, by Julian Rubinstein - I had the great pleasure of meeting Julian Rubinstein, author of one of my wife's favorite books (and now mine too), Ballad of the Whiskey Robber, through this newsletter years ago. He read something I wrote about the future of news media, and at the time, was working on a news related start-up. We had beers at the Oyster Bar - man, just typing that, I sooo miss times when we could do that on a regular basis - and a few years later, we reconnected over a project he was working on that has now turned into this new book - The Holly: Five Bullets, One Gun, and the Struggle to Save an American Neighborhood. You can read the reviews via his website, and I haven't read this yet, but the book is about a shooting in Denver, that became a years-long investigation into the many forces that led to that shooting, and many secrets people didn't want told. I know from his previous book, and some of his journalism, that it will be a story well-told, that probably leads down paths one doesn't expect. It's in my GoodReads queue, and I recommend you add it to yours.
NFT's Carbon Footprint: I get new inquiries from film folks about NFTs, and whether they should be doing something in this space almost daily now. The answer is probably not, but if you're considering it, you should also go into it aware of the biggest issue around them - the crazy size of their carbon footprint. It's bad, and while there are potential solutions, there isn't really a good one yet. The Verge has a good breakdown on the issue, and it's also not a bad primer on the subject. (h/t to Jon Reiss for sharing this on LinkedIn).
Fair Use Mess in the Courts: What a weird couple of weeks it's been for Fair Use in the courts. As I mentioned last week, an appeals court ruled that Andy Warhol's Prince portrait was not fair use. As the NYT reports this week, that was pretty absurd, and you can bet the Warhol Foundation will be taking this to a higher court. The piece, by Blake Gopnik, is a pretty good summation of the history of these fair use arguments in the arts, and is worth a read if you care about this stuff. Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, they made the correct decision in saying that Google's use of the Java API is fair use. But if you've made it this far, you really care about fair use, and need to read TechDirt's analysis of the case, because Mike Masnick breaks down Alito and (particularly) Thomas's dissent as being utter nonsense, and explains why the Court should have decided the API usages weren't just fair use, but that APIs are not even copyrightable in the first place.
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