May 25, 2008

Scene Stealer

Indie Films, Coming to a Small Screen Near You

By BROOKS BARNES

MORE than 3,600 independent features were submitted to the Sundance Film Festival this year, a record driven by inexpensive digital equipment and an abundance of film financing. But only a couple hundred of those movies will ever be distributed in theaters. Does that mean that almost 90 percent of indies have zero value?

The movie business has been grappling with that question as the number of specialty films soars but the number of screens stays roughly the same. The two big puzzles nobody seems able to solve are how to have more of these films seen and how to make money doing it. As it is, several thousand films produced each year — ranging in cost from a few thousand dollars to a few million — are just eating capital.

One of moviedom’s savviest executives thinks he has a solution.

John Sloss is one of the top sales agents for independent films. Mr. Sloss, 52, has handled the sale of such diamonds in the rough as “Little Miss Sunshine,” the perky 2006 film about a family traveling to a children’s beauty pageant. He sold the $8 million project to Fox Searchlight for $10.5 million, setting a festival price record that still holds.

Now Mr. Sloss and his New York company, Cinetic Media, are rolling out a new business called Cinetic Rights Management. The executive and his team — he just hired Matt Dentler, the highly regarded director of the South by Southwest film festival — will act as sales agents for filmmakers who have been left on the sidelines. And here is the twist: The goal is not exhibition in theaters but rather distribution via the Internet and other growing delivery routes like cable on-demand services.

The idea is to create value for that other 90 percent of independent movies, or at least for a good chunk of them.

“We’re going to make it our business to go to every portal, every mobile provider, every video-on-demand service and make the most aggressive deals we can,” Mr. Sloss said last week in a telephone interview from France, where he was working the Cannes International Film Festival.

The company will charge a commission that will vary depending on the type of film. (Mr. Sloss would not reveal his planned cut, but Cinetec takes between 7.5 percent and 15 percent on traditional deals.) While no single title is likely to deliver a windfall — unless it breaks through as an unexpected hit — the company is betting that the “long tail” of niche content on the Internet will, in aggregate, produce meaningful income.

The company has raised outside capital to help pay for the venture. To sign up clients, it has already gone back through five years’ worth of films that did not make it to theaters.

His new unit won’t focus only on cinematic obscurities. Distribution in new media is equally important for the upper echelon of indies — Cinetic’s primary business — and companies or individuals with film libraries, Mr. Sloss said. For instance, the company will shop the 1994 movie “Hoop Dreams” to Internet portals. “This will appeal to library holders who don’t want to employ a legion of people to go out and make deals with the 100, 200, 300 portals,” he said.

It’s an idea loaded with challenges, starting with how films deemed unsuitable for an art-house theater will gain notice online. Standing out among the hundreds of options on an on-demand menu won’t be much easier. So far, Web sites that offer movies have failed to gain much traction with consumers. And do people really want to watch an arty movie on a cellphone?

Cinetic Rights Management also isn’t the only game in town. Other players are sniffing around the area, including a couple of major Hollywood talent agencies. Niche companies like Without a Box, a Web-based service intended to help independent filmmakers submit their work to festivals, are also trying to change the way people obtain movies.

Mr. Sloss and his lieutenants also intend to help market the films that they sell to portals like Movielink.com. But Mr. Dentler, who will oversee this effort, gave few specifics.

“There are viral ideas and more traditional marketing ideas, tapping into the blogosphere and navigating traditional media,” he said.

The approach may sound sprawling, but some experts in online distribution think that the company may be onto something. Amazon figured out a way to bypass stores and take a boatload of books — some good, many awful — to the masses, letting consumers hunt and peck for what they wanted. Film snobs may hold their noses at “The Hamster Movie: The Director’s Cut,” but as YouTube has shown, the interest in such offerings can be shockingly high.

“Some films that didn’t get entry into the marketplace the traditional way might turn out to have some real artistic and commercial value,” said Brent Weinstein, a former talent agent who is chief of 60Frames Entertainment, a studio that focuses on short videos. “I suspect a good number of films that didn’t find fans in the community of cinema experts would be able to find an audience in this new digital media world.”

A shift in the way people consume media is forcing Hollywood to evolve. As more people have high-speed Internet access, and as technology companies like Apple work to make it easier to watch video on phones, and as cable giants like Comcast roll out elaborate on-demand services, movie theaters and DVDs are increasingly looking like just two of the many niches.

“Delivery is changing very rapidly,” said Robert Nathan, a Cinetic partner.

At the same time, the machinery behind the two-decade boom in independent film is starting to break down. Breaking through has become harder as more independent films are made and distributed. In 2002, about 450 films were released theatrically. Last year, the total jumped to 600, mostly because of independent films.

More films are making it onto a limited number of screens because their total time on the marquee is shorter than ever. This means that independent films must find an audience at lightning speed, which requires heavier marketing. In March, the Motion Picture Association of America said the average cost of advertising a specialty film in 2007 had risen 44 percent over the previous year, to $25.7 million.

ALL of that marketing overhead makes studio specialty divisions look a lot like the mainstream divisions, prompting some companies to retrench. Earlier this month, for example, Warner Brothers shut down two of its specialty divisions, Warner Independent Pictures (“Good Night and Good Luck”) and Picturehouse Entertainment (“Pan’s Labyrinth”).

But Mr. Sloss is sticking with his trademark confidence. “This is going to be a very labor-intensive business,” he said, “but we think that in 5 to 10 years it could be the most significant revenue source of all.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/business/media/25steal.html?ref=business&pagewanted=print

At Cannes, a mix of high expectations and inevitable frustrations

By A. O. Scott

Saturday, May 24, 2008

CANNES: On Wednesday morning festivalgoers - or at least the hordes of journalists who stumble into the Salle Lumière every day at 8:30 after a few hours' sleep and a hasty café au lait - were given a bit of a break. In a departure, there was no competition press screening on the schedule, which provided some of us with an opportunity to glance at the trades, have a second café au lait and rest our eyes in anticipation of a long night of revolutionary struggle.

Starting at 6:30 in the evening there would be two almost simultaneous screenings of "Che," Steven Soderbergh's nearly four-and-a-half-hour exploration of the life of Ernesto Guevara, the asthmatic Argentine doctor who became a leader of Castro's revolution and, posthumously, a boon to the T-shirt vendors of the world.

The expectations surrounding "Che" could hardly have been higher. Soderbergh, surprise winner of the Palme d'Or in 1989 for "Sex, Lies and Videotape," has emerged since then as one of the most protean and interesting of American filmmakers, exploring an astonishing range of genres and styles with consistent skill, intelligence and audacity. Not every movie has been great, but they have all been different. And not many directors would follow commercial froth like "Oceans Thirteen" with a digitally shot, Spanish-language epic about a Marxist militant.

In the weeks before this year's competition slate was announced, "Che" was the center of much speculation. It was in; it was out; it wasn't finished; it was two pictures; it was one. The version shown in the Lumière was a single movie, without opening titles or closing credits (so maybe not quite finished). There was an intermission, during which sandwiches were passed out to the hungry audience.

The halves of "Che" are mirror images. The first, though it flashes back to Guevara's early acquaintance with Castro in Mexico and forward to his visit to New York for an appearance at the United Nations in 1964, is essentially the chronicle of a successful insurgency. It follows Castro, Guevara and their comrades from 1956 to 1959, through the stages of their war to overthrow the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and it dwells less on their motives and personalities than on matters of military procedure. With impressive coherence and attention to tactical detail, Soderbergh shows how Castro's initially tiny army fought its way down from the mountains of the Sierra Maestra and ultimately routed Batista's forces.

The second half, devoted to the guerrilla campaign in Bolivia in 1967 that ended in Guevara's death, is equally rigorous in its depiction of a failed revolt. Though Guevara tried, in a new context, to apply the strategic lessons of the Cuban revolution - concentrate on the countryside; cultivate popular support; maintain discipline and cohesion in the ranks - everything went wrong. And it turned out that Guevara's adversaries, the Bolivian Army and its U.S. advisers, had learned a thing or two about how to wage an effective counterinsurgency.

There is a lot, however, that the audience will not learn from this big movie, which has some big problems as well as major virtues. In between the two periods covered in "Che," Guevara was an important player in the Castro government, but his brutal role in turning a revolutionary movement into a dictatorship goes virtually unmentioned. This, along with Benicio Del Toro's soulful and charismatic performance, allows Soderbergh to preserve the romantic notion of Guevara as a martyr and an iconic figure, an idealistic champion of the poor and oppressed. By now, though, this image seems at best naïve and incomplete, at worst sentimental and dishonest. More to the point, perhaps, it is not very interesting.

But "Che" itself is interesting, partly because it has the power to provoke some serious argument - about its own tactics and methods, as well as those of its subject. Whether American audiences will have a chance to participate in that argument is, for the moment, an open question. The mood here among buyers has been extremely cautious, and as of this writing, distributors have balked at spending $8 million to $10 million (the reported asking price for "Che") on a 258-minute movie to be released in two parts, with subtitles.

This is one of the frustrations of Cannes, for American critics at least. We see lots of fascinating movies - not all good, but very few completely worthless - and then wonder if we, or our readers, will ever see them again. I'm not in the movie business, and not inclined to speculate with someone else's money. I do hope, however, that sometime in the near future I can take part in the long and contentious conversation that "Che" deserves, and also see how my own initial ambivalence about the film resolves itself.

I have a similar hope for Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York," a movie about which I am not ambivalent at all. Puzzled? Yes. Unsure of its commercial prospects? As I said, that's none of my business. ("Synecdoche" is another competition entry looking for love in a marketplace of commitment-shy distributors.)

But Kaufman, the wildly inventive screenwriter of "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," has, in his first film as a director, made those efforts look almost conventional. Like his protagonist, a beleaguered theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, he has created a seamless and complicated alternate reality, unsettling nearly every expectation a moviegoer might have about time, psychology and narrative structure.

But though the ideas that drive "Synecdoche, New York" are difficult and sometimes abstruse, the feelings it explores are clear and accessible. These include the anxiety of artistic creation, the fear of love and the dread of its loss, and the desperate sense that your life is rushing by faster than you can make sense of it. A sad story, yes, but fittingly for a movie bristling with paradoxes and conundrums, also extremely funny.

Nothing in Kaufman's film happens as you might expect it to, even if his previous work had conditioned you to expect surprises. Cannes, meanwhile, has a way of disappointing expectations even as it confirms them. After last year's robust 60th anniversary edition of the festival, which yielded so many great movies (and quite a few sales), this one feels like a bit of a letdown.

It's not that the films are bad, but rather that many of the directors in competition have, with their previous work, set such a high standard. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, with two Palmes d'Or already on their résumés, arrived this year with "Le Silence de Lorna," an engrossing movie about the moral struggle of a young Albanian immigrant in Belgium. It's very good. Not a masterpiece, though, which is what the Dardenne brothers have conditioned us to expect.

And many of us were anticipating masterpieces from the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan and from the Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, whose second feature, "The Holy Girl," was a discovery of the 2004 festival. Many critics insist that "Three Monkeys," Ceylan's new film (acquired for U.S. release by New Yorker Films), fulfills the promise of his earlier work, which includes "Distant" and "Climates." But in trying something new - using his austere, exacting sense of form to tell a ripely melodramatic story - he seems to have sacrificed some of the wit that made those earlier films so memorable.

Martel, in contrast, errs on the side of consistency. The obliqueness that made "The Holy Girl" so haunting feels coy and mannered in her new film, "The Headless Woman," the point of which seems to be to pass the mental dissociation of its main character on to the audience. But if Martel is in a rut, she may be planning to break out of it. An announcement came earlier this week that her next project, "L'Eternauta," will be a science-fiction movie involving an invasion of Earth by aliens.

If it comes to Cannes, such a radical departure will surely encounter some grumbling. How come these filmmakers can't stick to what they're good at? But then again: Why don't they ever try something new? You may get the Palme d'Or, but you still can't win. There's no pleasing some people. Which may be why we keep coming back.

Source: http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=13179125

All You wanted to Know About Bheja Fry! (and its technicalities)..

Ranjeet Thadani (Rajat Kapoor), a bored, arrogant music company executive hurts his back the night he has found a prize catch for a weekly bring- your-idiot talent dinner hosted by his friends and him. He ends up spending the evening with this idiot, Bharat Bhushan (Vinay Pathak) who tries to help him get his wife (Sarika) back who left him earlier that day. The result is utter chaos let loose by the idiot, who cannot do a single thing without messing it up further. The plot turns around to be a series of mini disasters that leave Ranjeet's comfortable life in ruins. Call it the idiot's revenge!

From the Director Sagar Bellary

I watched The Dinner Game by Francois Weber at an international film festival in the year 1999 and I was floored by its dry wit and exemplary story of an idiot. I was quite impressed with the contemporary French cinema standards and felt ashamed at the level of comedies that were being made in the Hindi film industry. Little did I know at that time that my debut film would be majorly inspired by it! After working on two low budget films like Raghu Romeo and Mixed Doubles both directed by Rajat Kapoor, I was quite convinced that the only way to make a film without any strings attached is to make it within an amount which the producer is confident of recovering, irrespective of the commercial success the film enjoys in the cinema halls. With Rajat I had learnt the art of executing low budget films without compromising much on technical quality. To make a film as such you need a fine screenplay that justifiedsthe money rather than money justifying the screenplay. And yes, a good film needs great technicians and great performers, who would be ready to work for peanuts! Fortunately I was breeding in an environment where many talented people - actors and technicians really wanted to do something different! Thus interacting with marvelous actors like Vijay Raaz, Sadiya Siddiqui, Saurabh Shukla, Ranvir Shorey, Konkona Sen, Vinay Pathak, Rajat Kapoor and great technicians like cinematographer Rafey Mahmood, audiographer Resul Pookutty and editor Suresh Pai, I realized I would be a fool not to utilize this pool of talent. Mixed Doubles was a great hit and it was very close to my heart as I have worked on every little stage of its making. While watching it in with an audience, the experience of people laughing at exactly the right points as planned by the director mesmerized me. I knew that people just wanted to laugh. Everybody was too stressed out and they needed a vent. It was also that time of the year when the Indian Idol singing competition had reached a new crescendo. Anybody and everybody was a singer! Even the Hindi film industry was only churning out sex comedies or “bhankas” genre films that relied on slapstick humour, double entendres and flesh show. It was also that time of the year when many new directors made their debut films which were really bad. It was as if art had been held hostage by media savvy individuals wanting to be celebrities using the power of a medium. I was burning to make my film as somewhere I had this idealistic belief that I would set things right!When we decided to adapt the French story I was looked down upon by everybody with the same contempt that I carried for DVD-directors. My task was uphill! Thankfully Sunil Doshi, the producer was quite convinced. But he was more convinced with me rather than the screenplay. He told me that he is putting his money on the jockey not the horse! Bheja Fry was originally called Ding Dong Baby Sing a Song and was initially conceptualized and planned for television and to be shot on 16mm but I am happy that finally not only could I make it on 35 mm but also the film is soon to get a full-fledged theatrical release. Suresh Pai the editor was the first person to receive the concept note in order to get a reaction. He was quite impressed and that encouraged me that I was on the right track. I really wanted to adapt the story rather than copy a film. A few understood me, the others, well I simply did not let them bother me. I had a film to make!I always knew that my idiot was a singer and that his name was Bharat Bhushan. I had a friend in college who was a bad singer but always broke out into a song without realizing that he is making a fool of himself. Also, in Raghu Romeo, Vijay Raaz sings a song looking at the moon while Maria has gone to the toilet. All these factors assimilated to create Bharat Bhushan who was planted in the plot of the French story. Situations changed and so did the dialogues. Of course, the French story did not cater to Indian sensibilities. So we doctored the entire plot and began to weed out the weak links the story had. Arpita Chatterjee and me would have hours of telephonic conversations on the screenplay. She wrote the initial draft which became the basis of all method. Initially Anurag Kashyap was supposed to write the dialogues but he was burdened with Guru and his own films. He did not manage to find time. But I did have a great session with him and was enlightened by many of his perspectives to the story. He liked my choice of cast and it was he who suggested me to think of Sarika as Rajat’s wife, a masterstroke in retrospect. Anurag also contributed a few brilliant script based nuts and bolts that enriched Bheja Fry. But the credit of the actual mad dialogues must go to first timer Sharat Kataria – also assistant to Rajat on Raghu Romeo, a Jamia graduate. He brought in much of the whacky humour of words and turned around a few situations to new scenes. A lot of contribution also came from Vinay Pathak and Rajat Kapoor. So each shooting day was a workshop where everything was assessed to as it is basis and scenes were rewritten keeping in mind the improvisations. The assistants had a tough task. I was always at top of the things and not even a single word could be altered without my consent. I was very sure of what I wanted. I was very clear of the rhythm of my shots, where to pause and hold and when to speed it up. Sharat came to the shoot everyday. That made things a little easier. All my actors were such good performers that I never went more than three takes. But I shot extensively. I covered the same scene from various perspectives and camera angles almost making it a two camera shoot setup. Many mistook that for my insecurity of being a first time director. Parixit Warrier the director Of Photography who is also a batch mate from the film school and a very good friend made this magic possible for me in the shoot. Every shot was ready in 20 minutes. Gauging the amount of time given to him and the results delivered I am amazed at his craft. I wanted to get out of the gamut of Long shot, mid-shot and close-up and was tired of the usual boring over the shoulder shots. So we created a different pattern of lensing and extensively covered the scenes, gave full freedom to actors and devised shots according to their movements rather than make them move according to the shots. The result as expected was very good.

Bheja Fry was shot within seven days, twelve nights over sixteen locations consuming exactly just 101 cans of 35mm raw stock. Though the film was shot with an extremely, extremely modest budget, its major challenge was being not looking like one that was! Which I would like to say, we have achieved.
When Suresh Pai edited the film the first cut was 95 minutes and he was extremely happy because the film had 'arrived' in its totality correctly. Suresh has always apprehensive about overly shot films which are butchered at the editing table to chart out a meaning. So in short, he felt that Bheja Fry had utilized its resources correctly! I met Sagar Desai when we were desperately looking for a good music director for Mixed Doubles. I have been actively involved in the production of the entire music score of Mixed Doubles. Sagar Desai is a genius. He has been there throughout the conception of Bheja Fry and through most of the screenplay discussions because screenplay writer Arpita Chaterjee is his wife. He knew the story well and had an excellent rapport with me knowing just knew what I like and what I wanted. The entire film was dubbed in Mumbai at Aradhana studios. But the entire sound post-production happened at Real Image Studios in Chennai. Tapas Nayak, the audiographer of the film, was a batch senior to me at SRFTI and had a great understanding of his medium. In the given budget we just could not afford Dolby surround. DTS offered us an excellent package deal and the dream of having 5.1 sound materialized. All the sound tracks were sent over to Chennai and the film was finally mixed and the exposed sound negatives and DTS discs were dispatched to Adlabs, where the film was finally printed. Bheja Fry is today ready to be served!A cinematographer friend and guide - Sanjay Kapoor told me right at the start of my film that it was going to be a journey of discoveries on every level – mental, emotional, physical and spiritual. It did sound like a platitude then but now that the film is ready I can surely say that it has been one hell of a bheja fry and yes, I have thoroughly enjoyed getting my brains fried making my first film!

Sagar Bellary is an alumnus of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), Kolkata with specialization in Screenplay Writing and Direction. He has directed a short film X and Y, been Chief Assistant Director on the feature film Raghu Romeo and Associate Director on the featurefilms Mixed Doubles and Mithya. Bheja Fry is his first feature film

Source: http://www.upperstall.com/bheja_fry.html

From the Official blog of Photographer & Artist Dave Thompson

Friday, May 2, 2008

A rant
I’ve got to address this.
I hear way too many people mis-using the term "Footage" when talking about video. The term “Footage” when applied to digital stock video is wrong. “Footage” as it is properly used, applies to film, usually 16mm or 35mm, and is expressed in lengths, eg. 10 feet, 50 feet, one reel or two reels, etc. A reel of film is 1000 feet, or 11 minutes. Older movies, made from the beginning to the 50s, were timed in reels. If a movie was released at 10 reels, it was about 110 minutes long. I know this because I not only worked in film during the 80s, I also have a degree in film making. Video, either analog or digital, is expressed in units of time. Such as Hours:minutes:seconds:frames (Hence the term, SMTP Time Code for video editing) Film is expressed as footage, in the following units, reel:feet:frames For example, a film clip in 35mm, running 33 seconds at 24 frames per second, is 50 feet. A video clip of 30 seconds is just that, 30 seconds. When I took a video class in college, we were fined each time we used the term “footage” when we referred to tape. When shooting film, the camera operator advises the director he has 120 feet left, this means the director can only shoot up to a minute and 20 seconds of the next scene. If they’re shooting HDTV, the camera operator can report “only a minute left on the tape”. I just had to address this….

Source: http://dtphoto12.blogspot.com/2008/05/rant.html