21st-Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation

CHAPTER FOUR: The New Auteurs

124 A CHAPTER FOUR The New Auteurs The concept of the director as primary creator of a film or video has changed in the 21st century. While some cling to the old idea of one person directing an entire production and being principally responsible for the project’s visual and/or thematic content, a new generation of filmmakers is creating mash-ups by working in groups on the web, turning out films stamped with multiple cultures and multiple visions. In addition, the idea of making a film for theatrical distribution as the primary point of sale is also rapidly changing; in the 2009 Toronto Film Festival, for example, an unusually large number of feature films with major stars failed to find a distributor in the conventional sense and must now compete with truly independent, do-it-yourself videos in the marketplace of the web, DVDs, pay-per-view, streaming video, and other distribution methods. Peter Broderick, who has been working in cinema distribution since the 1990s with his company Next Wave Films, knows this all too well. Broderick distributed Christopher Nolan’s first film, Following (shot in 1996, generally released in 1999), which was shot with a zero-level budget of $6,000 in 16mm black-and-white on weekends during the course of a year. At a lecture at the University of Southern California in November 2009, Broderick introduced the uninitiated to how exactly film marketing works in the 21st century. Dividing film distribution into the Old World and the New World, Broderick 125 THE NEW AUTEURS read a “declaration of independence” for indie filmmakers as part of his PowerPoint presentation, which he delivered while wearing a tricorn hat, emblematic of the American Revolution of 1776. As Manohla Dargis, witnessing the presentation, wrote, In the Old World of distribution, filmmakers hand over all the rights to their work, ceding control to companies that might soon lose interest in their new purchase for various reasons, including a weak opening weekend. . . . In the New World, filmmakers maintain full control over their work from beginning to end: they hold on to their rights and, as important, find people who are interested in their projects and can become patrons, even mentors. The Old World has ticket buyers. The New World has ticket buyers who are also Facebook friends. The Old World has commercials, newspaper ads and the mass audience. The New World has social media, YouTube, iTunes and niche audiences. (“Declaration”) It’s harder than ever to break through the Hollywood distribution monolith, Dargis argues, with the closing of niche-picture divisions of the major studios, such as Paramount Vantage and Warner Independent Pictures. For every event indie that breaks through the studio ceiling—for instance, Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity (2009)—there are at least 10,000 other films that will never see the light of day. Broderick , who has been helping independent filmmakers find their audiences for years, and other distribution experts, such as Richard Abramowitz, specialize in helping filmmakers distribute films themselves, sometimes with spectacular results. As Dargis points out, it’s particularly ironic that theatrical distribution should remain such a barrier in an age in which production has become somewhat inexpensive. Paranormal Activity cost roughly $10,000 to make but required an additional ad push of $12 million to get it before the public. The odds against a repeat of this pattern are immense. Not that Hollywood itself is doing all that well. Runaway film productions , shot throughout the United States to save money, are sapping Hollywood’s production strength. Gary Credle, until recently the chief operating officer of the Warner Brothers studio, noted in 126 21ST-CENTURY HOLLYWOOD March 2009 that it had been nearly 2 years since a full-length motion picture had been shot at the facility and that television production had also dropped precipitously. The cost of maintaining a “full service studio on 110 prime acres in the heart of Southern California” has become prohibitively expensive; for as Credle put it, “certainly if this didn’t exist, we couldn’t afford to build it today. The models for this business are being challenged every day in every imaginable way, and nobody knows where it ends up. . . . What you see here is going away, and it’s not obvious what is going to replace it” (as quoted in Pearlstein). In Pontiac, Michigan, for example, a former General Motors (GM) auto factory is being...