Writing in Slate, Charles Taylor says quite succinctly something I have been thinking for some time:
Except for a few remaining truly independent distributors, the major studios’ specialty divisions-the arm that releases foreign films and what has been dubbed the “mid-size” movie (i.e., Lost in Translation, Sideways, et al.)-now virtually determine what audiences see of what we still think of as American independent movies. In other words, the studios nearly control the system that was supposed to represent an alternative to them. If an American indie movie doesn’t have a name filmmaker or stars who have taken a smaller paycheck to work on it, if it doesn’t create a buzz at Sundance (or is rejected by Sundance), its chances of getting a distribution deal are pretty much dead.
Taylor is writing about Kwik Stop, a movie I haven’t seen. But I certainly understand his point. The vaunted American independent film movement is close to dead in the water while studio filmmaking is at its most mundane. Alternative film distribution on the internet has not kicked in in any serious way. We are not at a high point in the history of the cinema, to say the least. The subject of yesterday’s discussion — that film stars mouth off excessively about politics — is only, at best, a minor aspect of this decline. Actors and writers were doing that when movies were great too (the 1930s and 40s). Much more important is the rise of other distractions – computer games, cable television, even blogging. [No, not that.-ed. Okay.]
UPDATE: Ed Driscoll writes of the hopeful signs from new cheap and easy technologies. He’s right. But unfortunately, you still need distribution and, er, a good script.
MEANWHILE: When it comes to distribution, don’t mess with Treacher.
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30 Comments
1. Moses Wine:Why can’t new distribution companies form? What is the barrier to entry?
Now knowing much about the business myself, is it because there is a lock-in between the theatre companies and the distribution companies, or the cost of distribution, or what?
How do you see the (presumably much smaller) costs of a digital distribution system changing things? That is, when a distribution company can take a digital film and just put it on their servers, and take an analog film and transfer it to digital and put that on their servers, and no longer have to put film reels on trucks, what will that do to the barrier to entry?
Is there an opportunity for iFilms, Google, Yahoo, PajamasMedia?
Jul 18, 2005 - 8:17 am 2. Charlie (Colorado):I dunno, when Roger’s characters start posting on Roger’s blog, along with the guy in the bracketed asides, I start to freak out.
That said, though, it’s a good question. It would seem like the big impediment to new distributors using digital is that there’s a gigantic investment in the conventional-film-cassette distribution to the n-plexes. But what about direct to DVD?
Jul 18, 2005 - 9:06 am 3. RBMN:If the playing times were more flexible, I think the general quality would improve naturally. There are lots of 110-minute movies out there with only about 70 minutes of storyline. There are also some movies, based on books usually, that could benefit from less scene-cutting and maybe getting split into parts 1 and 2, along the lines of “Lord of the Rings.”
Jul 18, 2005 - 9:08 am 4. Paul Snively:I think not enough attention is being paid to computer games.
Yes, you read that right. Consider that the personal computer has only been around since 1975. Realistically, that means that computer games today are roughly where Edison’s Kinetophone was at the time. While their visual quality has benefited from the outrageous pace of Moore’s Law, there’s unfortunately no Moore’s Law for software. Software today is still being developed the way software was being developed 25-35 years ago. Yes, it’s being developed faster thanks to the transition from punch cards to what, tellingly, used to be called “glass TTYs,” or “glass teletype machines.” But the stuff being manipulated, and how it’s manipulated, isn’t fundamentally any different from how the first FORTRAN or COBOL programs were created (and unfortunately these processes stilll aren’t as powerful as developing Lisp software 35 years ago or Smalltalk software 25 years ago were, but that’s another rant).
This last point hasn’t stopped the game industry from having greater revenues than movies and television, even at this unbelievably early stage. So if I were in the entertainment industry, were interested in independent distribution, and were concerned about the overweening political bias in the movie and TV industry, I would strongly consider getting to know some talented modelers and animators, sound engineers, and programmers, and try to come up with a modest game or two.
Jul 18, 2005 - 9:59 am 5. Charlie (Colorado):Paul, I’ve got to say that having recently gotten into Second Life (warning: don’t follow that link!) it’s certianly taken up a lot of my recreation time. Not to mention eating and sleeping.
Jul 18, 2005 - 10:37 am 6. Doug S.:I agree with Paul Snively’s overall point that the importance of video games in today’s entertainment marketplace can’t be underestimated. However, precisely because there is so much money to be made in video games these days, the industry is becoming a bit more like the movie business in that a small number of large publishers exert a great deal of control over distribution. They’re all fighting for a small fixed quantity of shelf space at Fry’s or Best Buy or CompUSA. So risk becomes a major issue, and the video game industry has it’s share of sequels and imitations, too.
But on the other hand, Paul’s on target in that barriers to entry are probably a lot lower than in movies. Internet distribution is fairly popular as a means of delivery, especially among small publishers with niche products. Plus, the cost of production is a lot lower; it takes fewer people to develop a big-budget video game than to make a big-budget movie. And War of the Worlds cost, what, $250 mil to make? You could develop a pretty good video game for 1% of that budget (and if you’ve got a couple million to invest, I’ve got some ideas for you
).
Jul 18, 2005 - 10:49 am 7. WichitaBoy:Paul Snively,
I think you’re being way too harsh on software engineering. Lots of progress has been made since the time of punch cards. We’ve switched to a Python/C++ model, and let me tell you, programming in Python is the philosopher’s stone as far as I’m concerned. Improvements in software engineering are occuring desultorily in small piecs, not exponentially, but they are real.
Jul 18, 2005 - 1:59 pm 8. chuck:programming in Python is the philosopher’s stone as far as I’m concerned.
Now, if only it had strong typing we’d have it made
Seriously, I wonder how it compares to Lisp or Smalltalk, neither of which I have used. My impression of Lisp is that it is overburdened with parenthesis, which I find very distracting. There must be an easier way to describe a functional program. Anyway… what I would really like is a language that made describing finite state machines easy.
Jul 18, 2005 - 2:30 pm 9. lindenen:Charles Taylor thinks Memento was lousy? Do lots of people think Memento was lousy? Eh? I read the whole article and then at the very end I begin to wonder, if Taylor thinks Memento was lousy, how valuable is his opinion about Kwik Stop?
Jul 18, 2005 - 3:43 pm 10. jeff:All the better for direct-to-consumer distribution. Netflix could do for movies what Amazon did for books, hell Amazon could do for movies what they did for books.
But herein lies the complexity with the multiyear distribution agreements that studios have signed that provides exclusive, time triggered distribution rights for the movies they distribute. With these agreements, many running through the end of the decade, it will be difficult to do any kind of hardcopy distribution, much less on demand, until a cable network gets it first, or at least the option for it. Who knows, maybe the very business model the studios have implicated themselves in could be there undoing.
One thing is very clear, with movie theatre experiences being as bad as they are and home theatre systems becoming as mainstream affordable as they are, fewer people want to go to a movie theatre. Combine that with kids having a wide array of entertainment options and I’d wager that things get a lot worse before they get better.
Jul 18, 2005 - 3:58 pm 11. Barry Dauphin:Isn’t this one of those cyclical things? Hollywood has a few bad years, and so the sky is falling. The talk will die down when Hollywood makes a “comeback” (just like in the pictures). The movies do seem pretty bad, but I don’t think there is a straight line decline since the good old days. There’re more movies put out period, including bad ones. We have more to compare movies with, such as quality TV series on cable and networks from time to time, as well as other forms of entertainment.
The great movies of yesteryear are great, but yesteryear also had klunkers too. But people didn’t have much else to do for visual enteratinment in the good ole days, and homes were not equppied with plasma TVs either.
Movie executives worried that TV would kill them. They were right to some degree, only its been more like infecting them with a terminal illness rather than killing them. TV gave the movie industry emphazema, only the effects didn’t show up right away. Now the computer gaming folks have given the movie industry dementia. Theme parks gave them arthritis. And bloggers are giving them….a swift boot to the groin.
Jul 18, 2005 - 4:33 pm 12. timmah!:Chuck, Python is strongly typed: all variables are bound to a specific data type (object.__class__). So we are in business!
WB, woo-hoo!
Jul 18, 2005 - 5:14 pm 13. Doug S.:Barry, I gather that your argument is that Hollywood will be okay if it figures out what it can provide that other forms of entertainment can’t, as it did during the early days of television. Which is true, but I think it’s far from certain that it will succeed.
Theatrical films survived the initial challenge from TV because the could provide a visual spectacle that TV couldn’t. But with the advent of affordable home theater technology, it’s not obvious to me that the theatrical experience has any serious advantages over the home experience. The drawbacks of the theatrical experience are more obvious: rude crowds, overpriced tickets and concessions, relative lack of convenience.
The only advantage I can think of that the theatrical experience still has over the home is community; it was a trip to go to Phantom Menace on opening night and see the kids staging a light sabre duel before the movie, and it was fun to go to the Lord of the Rings premieres to see the costume players dressed up like elves. But that’s about it. And those sorts of spectacles are few and far between.
Home theaters also make the video game experience more theatrical, combined with the leaps forward in graphics quality that Moore’s Law makes possible, as Paul Snively notes upthread. Video games are now more like interactive movies than they’ve ever been before– movies that not only offer you many more hours of entertainment, but allow you to determine the course of the story according to your own skills and decisions. How are movies going to respond to that?
Jul 18, 2005 - 5:31 pm 14. chuck:timmah,
True, but you have to write the code to check. There is actually a PEP out to add typechecking. I think this will make large programs easier to debug. A common error, for instance, is using / on a passed integer in the expectation that it is a float, the result being truncated. I know this was supposed to change with / replaced by // for the standard integer division case, but it doesn’t seem to be the default yet.
I do like Python, I have even contributed some code to numpy, numarray, and scipy. But Python ain’t perfect.
Jul 18, 2005 - 5:32 pm 15. WichitaBoy:But Python ain’t perfect.
Ain’t much that is.
P.S. I *love* the numpy, sciypy, etc. stuff. Good on you.
Jul 18, 2005 - 5:50 pm 16. Brian:This rhetoric about games replacing movies baffles me. Admittedly I haven’t played a computer game since PacMan, but I see no connection between playing a game and going to the movies – other than both take place on a screen. Instead of watching The Shining or Glengarry Glen Ross I’m supposed to move a little graphics man around and shoot monsters and pick up ammunition? I honestly don’t see much overlap between the two experiences.
Would The Shining be a better experience if I could chase Scatman Crothers with an axe over five increasingly difficult levels? Would Glengarry Glen Ross be better if I could accompany Jack Lemmon on a sit and type in the sales pitch for him to use? (”Grace, what was that figure?”) I don’t get it.
Dramatic stories center around a main character with an internal dilemma that must be resolved. The player of a game has no such dilemma – at least none which playing the game can solve – so games aren’t really competing with dramatic stories except perhaps at the level of action and spectacle. Are they?
Jul 18, 2005 - 5:57 pm 17. Eric Akawie:I think there’s a simple way for an independant distributor to get more theatres to take their movies – take a smaller piece of the ticket price, allowing theater owners to either make more money off of the movie, or lower the ticket price for that movie, and get more people into the theatre.
Jul 18, 2005 - 6:19 pm 18. Avatar:“Are they?”
Not always, but yes. Video games reached this level of sophistication years ago.
It’s not a perfect fit. Video games and movies have a completely different level of interactivity, and the two don’t mesh easily. If the player spends too long viewing events happening passively, he’s likely to get bored and play something else. But if you emphasize immersion and constant action, it’s very difficult for the player to identify with the characters – they’re just obstacles in the way of the next action sequence.
The game “Xenosaga” has the first problem. In this role-playing game, there is a deep and involving story that plays out throughout the course of the game in various movie sequences, and there are times where the game can proceed for an hour or more with absolutely no input from the player. You can get away with this in an RPG – that’s not a genre for action junkies anyway – but at the same time, it’s quite inconvenient for a gamer that’s used to being able to stop a game and pick up where he left off later. The game’s good in the sense of a movie, but at the cost of what makes a good game.
The game “Half-Life” (and its sequel) have the second problem. Fantastic gameplay, interesting and involved world, quite immersive and keeps you busy and involved, sure. But at the same time, there’s a certain superfluousness to the entirety of the story. It’s there, it’s not bad, but there’s little to make you care precisely what happens to the other characters; in the sense of the story, it would make little difference if any given person you met was torn to death by wild dogs a few minutes after you leave their presence.
There are also the Metal Gear Solid games, which do an excellent job of both. The second one is marred somewhat by a somewhat incoherent plot (not just bizarrely Japanese, but bizarre even if you are Japanese.) But all three of the games do a good job of immersing the player into a role, and then making that role interesting in a sense greater than merely moving from one action sequence to the next. It helps that it borrows shamelessly from both American and Japanese cinematic styles…
Of course, there’s also a time element. A short video game has to be longer than even the longest movie, or people won’t be satisfied with it (at the least, they won’t pay forty bucks for it!) A game plot either has to move pretty slowly or be very complicated in order to last the length of the gameplay. (Or both, especially with modern RPGs, which take -dozens- of hours to play through!)
Jul 18, 2005 - 6:22 pm 19. Paul Snively:This is a bizarre place to be discussing this, but: Python programming offers zero advantages over Lisp programming circa the late 1970s. Lisp was one of the first programming languages to become object-oriented and was the first to arrive at an ANSI standard with respect to it. Lisp has always been interactive, like Python, but unlike Python to this day, Lisp has also been compiled to native code for decades now. As Peter Norvig from Google said in his blurb for Practical Common Lisp:
By the way, a “statically-typed Python” sounds an awful lot like IronPython.
As for progress in software engineering, don’t take my word for it; read this interview with Alan Kay, the father of uniform object-oriented programming and Smalltalk. Better yet, watch the videos of his O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference presentation from 2003, which you can find here. It’s hard to grasp just how much hasn’t happened in the last 30 years or so unless you’ve watched the Sketchpad and Augment videos, honestly. Then watch Kay’s Croquet video, which deals with a distributed 3D virtual world… written in Smalltalk-80, with bindings to OpenGL, apparently using no features that weren’t in 3D toolkits from the University of Utah circa the mid 1970s, and implementing a distribution/replication framework that was first described in David Reed’s Ph.D. thesis of 1978. They intend to implement capability security, a set of guiding computer security principles dating to Carl Hewitt’s work on Actors at MIT in the 1970s and commercially implemented in the KeyKOS operating system in the late 1970s-early 1980s, and that solves security problems that all currently popular platforms (UNIX, Windows, Classic Mac OS) suffer from. And so it goes.
I stand by my original observation that software engineering today isn’t done in any fundamentally different way than it was 35 years ago: the success of C++ and Python haven’t resulted in fundamental changes in how we construct software. At best, they’ve allowed us to do what was done back then faster, although having written a lot of C++ for a living, even that seems like a questionable assertion, frankly.
Jul 18, 2005 - 6:24 pm 20. Paul Snively:Brian: thanks for reinforcing my point that computer games are at the Edison Kinetoscope stage.
But even with that said, games are definitely starting to explore some of the themes that make certain passive entertainment forms compelling, e.g. you could employ torture, or not, in “Spycraft: The Great Game.” “Deus Ex” allows you to sneak, hack, subvert, or attack, and the gameplay changes somewhat depending upon the choices you make in playing it. As has already been mentioned, just when the industry seemed to have given up on the story-driven game, Half-Life came along and not only single-handedly resurrected the genre, it put your character’s name in the public consciousness even among a number of non-players. So yes, it’s early days, but it’s progress, and I still maintain that a forward-looking perspective is going to be focused on interactive entertainment rather than passive entertainment.
chuck: Seriously, I wonder how it compares to Lisp or Smalltalk, neither of which I have used. My impression of Lisp is that it is overburdened with parenthesis, which I find very distracting. There must be an easier way to describe a functional program.
Peter Norvig’s got an excellent page, Python for Lisp Programmers, that you may find interesting. He notes “Although it wasn’t my intent, Python programmers have told me this page has helped them learn Lisp.”
With respect to better ways to describe functional programs, sure: consider my current favorite language, Objective Caml, for example. It’s imperative, functional, object-oriented, has an interactive toplevel, bytecode compiler, native compiler, and lotsa libraries. Highly recommended. For the most complete mind-blow I know of, though, head to Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming and the Oz language, which is a concurrent-constraint/logic/object-oriented/functional/imperative language. I know that sounds like a mess, but it really isn’t at all, as the book makes crystal clear. If this doesn’t change the way you think about programming, nothing will.
chuck: Anyway… what I would really like is a language that made describing finite state machines easy.
Why? Unless you’re writing device drivers, finite state machines are mercifully going the way of the Dodo. Having said that, if you know C++, check out Boost Statechart.
Jul 18, 2005 - 6:43 pm 21. chuck:This is a bizarre place to be discussing this…
Thread hijacking is a time honored way to have a bit of fun.
By the way, a “statically-typed Python” sounds an awful lot like IronPython.
I sat next to Jim Hugunin at a conference dinner shortly after he went to work at Microsoft. I do wonder what he is up to now, as the ironpython list stalled out shortly thereafter. ISTR that he remarked that if he were writing numpy now he would do it for C# or something to that effect.
Lisp has always been interactive, like Python, but unlike Python to this day, Lisp has also been compiled to native code for decades now.
I keep hearing these tales and they make me think that someday I will have to learn something about Lisp.
Jul 18, 2005 - 7:21 pm 22. chuck:Paul Snively,
Why? Unless you’re writing device drivers, finite state machines are mercifully going the way of the Dodo.
Hmmm… I find they turn up in algorithms that have an adaptive flavor or that are driven by input streams. Perhaps there are better ways… programming isn’t my profession, I just like to keep in touch. Thanks for the pointers.
Jul 18, 2005 - 7:30 pm 23. Barry Dauphin:Doug,
I do think the “Hollywood is dying” chant has been made before only to see Hollywood go on to make lots of money. I do think there’s a role for regular Hollywood movies, albeit in a less dominant way. Meaning it will be a smaller player in some ways. It could still be a successful model.
Also some of the Hollywood talent will surely find its way into videogaming. There may be a role for good scripts and directors and other technicians in the video game world. I accept what you and Paul are suggesting vis a vis videogames, as I think this form of entertainment will continue to improve and be accessible to everyone in one form or another. I also agree that its future success cannot be taken for granted.
I wonder if Hollywood will blend or merge with the videogaming gaming world in more formal ways (sort of like AOL Time Warner-admittedly an imprecise analogy). There’ll be talk of synergies, etc. Maybe Hollywood will come to be seen as where the games (if that’s what they’ll still be called or forms of entertainment that blend gaming and movies could emerge gamo’s or mogam’s) emenate from, while Silicon Valley, etc. will be the technical people. Hollywood would have to reinvent itself, but in some ways that’s what it’s in the business of doing.
Jul 18, 2005 - 7:42 pm 24. timmah!:Brian, I like how you put the point about the two media being different: I wish people would stop making boring video game movies and unplayable movie games. I think it’s a question of displacement rather than replacement: there are only so many eyeball-hours, and the idea is that gaming has taking a big enough portion to cut into Hollywood’s share.
Jul 18, 2005 - 8:45 pm 25. Doug S.:Timmah! is quite right: The amount of time that one has for leisure is finite, so to the extent that various media compete for our leisure time, it’s a zero-sum game for all involved. No, video games will never be exactly like movies, but the point is that the generation coming up right behind mine, given 40 hours of leisure, is more likely than my generation to spend them playing a videogame instead of seeing 15 movies. Good for Electronic Arts, bad for Paramount. A wash for Sony, as long as they’re using a PS2 or a PSP.
Barry, Hollywood talent began applying itself to video games years ago. “Fallout” was published, what, 8 years ago? A wonderful interactive story-type game, and among the voice cast were Richard Dean Anderson, Tony Shaloub, and several supporting cast actors from “The Simpsons.” One of the sequels, “Fallout Tactics,” made extensive use of R. Lee Ermey. Videogames tied in to movies or TV shows very often use the original actors; Ian KcKellen recorded voice-overs just for Electronic Arts’ Lord of the Rings videogames.
10 years ago (jeez, has it been that long?) I took a UCLA Extension course on writing for video games. One of our classmates was a screenwriter, not a wannabe, but someone who had some credits under his belt. He obviously saw a possible alternate career path here. Sound thinking on his part, but he seemed to have more trouble than anyone grasping the concept of story trees, rather than a single story arc.
Jul 18, 2005 - 9:46 pm 26. Doug S.:Before I forget, here’s another sign of the times: LucasArts’ most recent Star Wars video games are, by many accounts (including my own) more enjoyable and satisfying than George Lucas’ most recent Star Wars movies. Go figure that.
Jul 18, 2005 - 9:50 pm 27. triticale:Now, if only it had strong typing we’d have it made
With the recent improvements in keyswitch technology, strong typing is nowhere near as important…
Jul 19, 2005 - 4:49 am 28. Patrick Tyson:lindenen—
I had my doubts when I read this…
While I don’t want to sound churlish to iFilm, it’s a sad state when DVD is the only available forum for a new movie.
…and this…
Indie success is now when a lousy movie like Memento enables the director to make a bigger, even lousier movie like Batman Begins.
…confirmed them.
Once upon a time, before video, Roger Ebert campaigned on his TV show to get this movie, which he wanted to see, released. I put Kwik Stop in my Netflix queue. Product availability is not the problem it once was.
Product quality is a different story. However, dissing a movie like Memento and failing to discuss why Sundance rejected the movie you’re praising is, I think, a poor way of making your case that the product you’re flacking is a quality one.
Jul 19, 2005 - 7:22 am 29. Duke:Everybody forgets that movies became successful, actually a “must see,” because they showed audiences things they had never seen before, only heard about or dreamed about. Alligators in rivers, tigers in jungles, volcanic eruptions, dramas set in exotic settings (meaning anything taking place more than five miles from where they lived), and great stories that were fresh. WWI planes dog fighting, soldiers fighting, and GIs coming home to new lives—gangsters were very big.
Well that’s all over now. We’ve all seen all there is to seeand all there is to imagine; we have experienced every story under the sun. Who wants to see a “great performance” by the latest Hollywood slut of some old clunker we’ve seen a hundred times?
The only chance for a revival is IMAX, a technology controlled by some of the least competent businessmen on the planet. They have built a better mousetrap and cleverly placed it on a raft in the middle of the river, the one place the mice can’t get to. Without new technology, you are looking at a medium that is as dead as live theatre, a medium it took 4,000 years before a more effective alternative became available. Movies lasted a hundred years before video games. Time flies.
Computer games is where it’s at. Face it.
As an opinion, studios cannot buy the IMAX corporation because of the old “consent decree” whereby studios were stripped of theatre ownership. Unless and until this technology can be harnessed for the general good….fuhgedaboudit.
Jul 19, 2005 - 8:18 am 30. lindenen:Speaking of Imax, here’s an article about said company in the LATimes.
Jul 19, 2005 - 11:04 pm