Independent Filmmaking and Digital Convergence

Transmedia and Beyond

Vladan Nikolic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317383444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Independent Filmmaking and Digital Convergence: Transmedia and Beyond offers a comprehensive analysis of the technological changes of the past few decades in independent film and media-making, and explores new strategies and practices in media production, exhibition and distribution for independent producers and content creators. The book examines how independent filmmaking concepts have merged with digital and online technologies to create new hybrid multi-platform content creations. It explores key questions like how to reach an audience at a time when media conglomerates and their products dominate the market, and simultaneously, there is an overabundance of content competing for viewer time. The book investigates what kind of stories we tell and why; how the audience has changed, and what their expectations are; what the various niche markets are for independent producers and creators in new media; and new models for media financing and distribution.

The content found in this book:

• 
  
  

• Bridges the gap between professional media-makers and amateurs by focusing on new and emerging media models and practices.
• Provides a holistic view of the new media landscape, and practical advice on producing content in the new multi-platform media environment.
• Demonstrates how to create financially sustainable models for independent producers and creators in a shifting and unstable environment, providing many challenges, but also opportunities for independents.

The author's website (http://www.filmconvergence.com/) supports this book with case studies, news and updates.

Section 1
Independent Media and Digital Convergence

1
Introduction: Independents vs. the Mainstream

The traditional definition of independent film by Roger Ebert is that it is a film made outside of the studio system, with independent financing, which remains true to the director’s vision. So, you have three areas: financing, production and artistry. There have been a lot of cycles within independent film, what it meant throughout the last couple of decades, until 2001, when the bubble collapsed.

—Anthony Kaufman, film writer, teacher and festival programmer¹

In 2012, the young filmmaker Benh Zeitlin made his first feature film, Beasts of the Southern Wild. The screenplay was adapted by Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar from Alibar’s one-act play Juicy and Delicious. Made in the style of magical realism, the film tells the story of a six-year-old girl in a forgotten but defiant Louisiana bayou community, cut off from the rest of the world by an expansive levee. The film was financed through a grant from Cinereach, a non-profit film funding organization, at a reported budget of $1.8 million.² Zeitlin made the film with a close-knit group of artists and collaborators, who call themselves “Court 13,” shooting on 16mm film, and using non-professional actors.

The film won numerous awards and accolades, including the Camera d’Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and the Grand Jury prize at the 2012 Sun-dance Film Festival, and was nominated for four Academy Awards. The one award it did not win, however, was the Independent Spirit Award. That award—which, according to its organizers, the Los Angeles–based non-profit organization Film Independent, is dedicated to independent filmmakers—went to the film Silver Linings Playbook, a $21 million production, starring Hollywood celebrities Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and Robert De Niro. Film Independent even raised the budget level eligibility in order for Silver Linings Playbook to qualify for the award. All this created considerable controversy: “Silver Linings is an Oscar movie, a big crowd pleaser featuring three major movie stars, and it accordingly posted up eight Oscar nominations. It shouldn’t have been at the Spirits, where its Best Picture prize could’ve gone to the far more traditionally independent Beasts of the Southern Wild.”³ The Independent Spirit Awards were established in 1984 to celebrate independent filmmakers, but, as many commentators observed, over the years they have increasingly become indistinguishable from the Oscars. This once again prompted the discussion about what makes a film truly “independent.”

Historically, it has been difficult to define “independent filmmaking” and, by extension, the now broader term “independent media production.” Film-making as a business in its structure does not differ much from other types of business. The centralization of capital and power, and their contestants, the “independents,” run throughout its history. At various points in time, independent has had different meanings, and still has diverse implications among theorists, the industry, and practitioners. The term usually implies, “work different from the dominant or mainstream, whether this relationship is defined primarily in economic terms (production and distribution) or in aesthetic or stylistic terms.”⁴ However, this definition is often problematic. Many films with ten- or hundred-million-dollar budgets are named independent by the industry. These movies were made not inside the studios but through contractual arrangements with large, independently owned companies. The films feel and look like studio movies and are distributed by the studios. Recent examples include films such as The Matrix (1999) or Lord of the Rings (2001), which had sequels and were big box-office hits. Many low-budget independent films, on the other hand, are often genre or exploitation formula movies: escapist entertainment without any artistic aspiration or merit. If the difference is aesthetic, independent cinema should depart from the conventions of the mainstream, such as common, clearly defined traditional narrative structures with causal relationships and narrative closure. There have certainly been numerous independent films that have challenged some of these mainstream conventions, but the vast majority is still firmly grounded within the traditional model.

Factually, independent film is as old as its first industrial infrastructure, dating back to the beginning of cinema. Ironically, the first “independents” actually created the Hollywood film industry. In 1908, Thomas Edison and the Biograph Company formed the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) in order to monopolize film production, distribution, and exhibition. Through Edison’s patents on various film equipment and raw film stock, they tried to control all aspects of early filmmaking and distribution. A number of companies, however, refused to abide by the MPPC’s rules, and continued business through “illegal” means either by building their own cameras and projectors and importing film stock or by eventually relocating to Southern California. The physical distance to MPPC’s New Jersey base made it difficult for Edison to bring legal action against them.

The term “independent” here signifies purely the economic business model, where a variety of companies refused to accept the monopoly of the MPPC, but there was almost no distinction in terms of content or artistic merit of the films. The exception to this was that the independent companies did experiment with the introduction of multi-reel films, leading up to the feature film format, and tailoring stories to popular performers, whereas the MPPC considered content to be irrelevant, charging fees according to feet of film used rather than substance.

This model of market consolidation and dominance by one company, and the challenges from outside competitors, is, of course, not unique to the film business. At this time, however, as film was an emerging new business, this struggle resulted in a power shift, and the laying of the groundwork of the studio system. Once the studio system was firmly established, the companies comprising this system became the new monopolists, while other nascent companies were struggling to compete with them, now becoming the new “independents.”

By 1915, the Supreme Court struck down all MPPC patents, and by 1920 the outlines of the classical Hollywood studio system began to emerge. A few of the successful film companies matured into conglomerates, integrating horizontal and vertical aspects of the business. They had their own studios, where they could film the movies; their own distribution divisions, through which they could market and distribute those films; and their own theaters, where they could screen them. Actors and filmmakers were employees of the studios, working under contract. The top studios were 20th Century Fox, RKO Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, known as the “Big Five” or the “majors.” The other three smaller studios, dubbed the “little three,” were Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and United Artists.

The remainder of the movie business at the time consisted of a slew of smaller film companies, such as Republic Pictures, Monogram Pictures, Producers Releasing Corporation, Grand National, and others. While they occasionally tried to compete with the studios’ high-concept productions, for the most part they produced “B movies”: comedies, western, or action movies, which had low production values, lesser known actors, and fast turnarounds. While they could be considered independent of the studio system, they still had to use the same horizontally and vertically integrated systems for distribution, which the studios controlled. In this sense, independent film production became an “umbrella term, defined negatively, to denote any production practice that is not under the aegis of the major studios of a given period.”⁵ Some US independent filmmakers with unique voices did emerge during these early years (such as Oscar Micheaux, who is generally considered the most successful African-American filmmaker of the first half of the twentieth century) or visual artists working with film, such as Man Ray, but due to the prohibitive cost of filmmaking and film distribution, experiments and alternative approaches to filmmaking within mainstream cinema were mostly peripheral.

United Artists, formed by actors and filmmakers Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, and Mary Pickford in 1919 eventually became a prime distributor for high-concept independent producers and their films. These producers were unwilling to work within the major studios, because they either wanted more creative control or disagreed with the studios’ practices. They were able to produce commercially successful, high-concept movies on their own. Their films were often pushing the boundaries of the practices established by the studios, including narrative and technological confines, as well as the decency rules formulated through the moral guidelines set by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA)—known as the “Production Code”—defining what is morally acceptable to be shown in a motion picture and what is not. Examples of such breakout films were Samuel Goldwyn’s Best Years of Our Lives (1946), directed by William Wyler, Howard Hughes’ The Outlaw (1943), or the top box-office hit of its time, David O. Selznick’s Gone with the Wind (1939), which was supposed to be a United Artists release but ended up being distributed by MGM. After 1940, high-concept independent productions became more accepted by the majors, which eventually led to United Artists losing its unique standing.

Figure 1.1 Charlie Chaplin signing a contract with United Artists⁶

Although the big five studios did not control the majority of all movie theaters, they owned most of the first-run and second-run cinemas. This monopoly, and the practices of “block booking” and “blind-bidding,” ensured that the studios were maximizing their profits, while at the same time controlling the market. Block-booking forced all theatres, with the exception of the studio-owned ones, to buy the studios’ films in large blocks, sometimes as many as fifty; blind-bidding forced independent theaters to buy a studio’s films without having any information about the film, its actors, or the quality of the production.

By 1941 some of the leading film producers and filmmakers of the time (Orson Welles, Samuel Goldwyn, Walt Disney, Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, David O. Seltznick, and Alexander Korda) formed the Society of Independent Motion Pictures Producers (SIMPP) in order to challenge the monopoly of the five major studios. The SIMPP filed an antitrust suit against Paramount in 1942, which eventually resulted in the 1948 US Supreme Court Decision to break up the studios. The lawsuit’s primary intent was to stop the studios’ distribution monopoly, but it also aimed to separate film production from distribution and exhibition in order to foster competition. This opened demand by the theaters for a variety of new movies, many of which were produced by the smaller companies comprising Hollywood’s “Poverty Row”. Low-budget films became more popular, prompting the majors, as well as the large independent production companies, who now no longer needed to rely on the studios for distribution, to start producing them as well. All these changes eventually put an end to Hollywood’s Poverty Row.

The year when Hollywood and the film business started to fundamentally change is generally considered to be 1948. The difference between “mainstream” and “independents” in these first decades of filmmaking w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Section 1 Independent Media and Digital Convergence
• Section 2 Storytelling across Media Platforms
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Index