poster

My film, Blanc de Blanc is going to have 2 posters. This is the first one, courtesy of Matt Croyle:

Vote

I don't tend to get into politics all that much here, even if my political views aren't exactly a secret.

But, because I'm from Maine, there's a sizable number of readers from there. As you may have heard, Maine is voting to overturn a civil rights bill tomorrow. There's quite a lot of support for this referendum (sadly, among my own family), but if you ask me, there isn't a single valid reason to vote for it.

The civil rights bill doesn't require anyone to do anything. No one's going to make you talk to a gay person, much less marry one.

To deny someone a right that you freely hold is not only un-American, it violates the Constitution.

Regardless of what you may have heard, there's no chance the Jesus portrayed in Matthew would ever, for one second, support this type of discrimination. Never. To suggest otherwise, is to misrepresent everything Jesus stands for. It's sickening.

Really, it has nothing to do with you and what you may or may believe. It's about denying the rights of your fellow citizens. Your religious views have nothing to do with what should be the law of the land. Nothing. If you think otherwise, you desperately need to take a civics class.

Do the right thing. Think of someone other than yourself.

great, you got it, now earn it.

There's a really great article up at MovieMaker on how to maximize your return at a film festival.

During every festival, one or two movies emerge as “it” films with a life and buzz all their own, and it’s usually not the token star vehicles which open and close the event. Want your indie to be an “it” film? Then make sure you do the following:

Why, yes, I'd love for Blanc de Blanc to be that film. I'm glad you asked.

Basically, it confirms what I've long said: no one cares about your movie as much as you do, so no one's going to sell it better than you can. Hell, chances are no one's gonna promote it at all if you don't. Long gone are the days where you can just be an artist who doesn't think about promotion. If you're not pushing your film, it'll die on the vine.

Blanc de Blanc teaser #3

Enjoy.

the indie world as i know it, as of today

It's been an interesting couple weeks in the indie film world, and as I get ready for a couple days off in the great state of Maine, I thought it might be worthwhile to point out some valuable stuff...

++ The big news, of course, was Josh Olson's diatribe I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script in the Village Voice.

Some thoughts: Olson, while failing the asshole test, makes some good points. In fact, he's almost entirely correct. There's an influx of people who think that surely they can write a script, when all evidence says that they cannot write something as simple as a 1-page term paper. Some of them aren't really willing to, you know, learn their craft. And they don't really see that as an issue. So they press on, and that's fine. They should press on.

The thing is, in skipping the craft of writing (or filmmaking), they've also skipped the part where one learns how to handle constructive criticism. This is almost as important as learning how to write. For their entire lives, they've been encouraged by friends and family (as they should be), but no one's really sat them down and said, "look, you aren't God's gift to film" (to borrow my father's phrase). It's a shock to their system, I guess, and they lash out, which is a terribly rude thing to do when someone spends a lot of time they don't have trying to help you out. They aren't out to crush your ambitions, but someone needs to be honest with you. Calling them an asshole doesn't help.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, that's what killed the uber-indie project. It just wasn't worth it anymore.

++ ...many people think tv programming should be widely available for free on the internet. Of course the content is never free. Someone has to pay to create it and we purchasers of cable and satellite services pay the subscription fees that pay the content companies and allow them to create all that content. Someone always must pay for free. Its unfortunate that there are some incredibly greedy people who think their entertainment needs should be subsidized. We aren’t talking healthcare, we are talking The Simpsons. No one in the country has the right for their Simpsons to be subsidized. -- Mark Cuban on TV Everywhere

++ In case you missed it, Anne Thompson is now over at indieWIRE. So, update your bookmarks. Her summary of the marketplace at Toronto is a grim one, but contains a glimmer of hope: The old independent market is over. A new one will take its place.

We can only hope.

++ About that new one...One of my favorite producers, Ted Hope, has been trying to rally the troops over at the must-read truly free film. There's two recent posts especially worth a read:

++ I have been a beneficiary of others' slack behavior. I got full advantage of an inefficient, lazy, inbred, elitist system. I have gotten to make over 60 films in 20 years. It gets much harder from here. I am doing what I can to help and there are some others that are out there doing the same, even a few doing more, but it is not enough. We have work harder to increase the reach of our web, to shrink the holes in our net. We have to get our comrades to adopt and utilize the tools before them. -- DIY, DIWO, But Just Do It.

++ The time is now. If we don't fully own the absolute necessity to change how we've all been working, we won't be working -- and we won't have the illuminating, inspiring, transforming films that we now enjoy. It's your choice, but action is required.

There is the capacity for many more of us to create and prosper from creative media work. This capacity can also close up and vanish along with our audiences. The canaries are now the size of Big Birds and we somehow are able to ignore them (but that is a subject for a different posts).

SO YOU SAY YOU WANT A SUSTAINABLE & TRULY FREE FILM COMMUNITY AND CULTURE? Time to take some action. -- 18 Actions Towards A Sustainable Truly Free Film Community

So that's it for now. Go. Read. There's a way to make this work for those of us who make films outside the studio system (and with no money). One of us will crack that code, and probably soon. But we'll never do it if we don't think outside the box, if we don't try pretty much everything.

1,000 words (#7)

champion of the sun

I can't help it. I love this show.

what's so great about that film?

One of the more frustrating aspects of the festival submission process is the seemingly arbitrary method by which films are selected. Since no one person has the time to watch the hundreds or thousands of films a festival receives, fests have to parcel out the preliminary aspects of screening to, at minimum, get the list down to a manageable size so the core programmers can make the final decisions. Often these people in the first line of defense are volunteers and, let's face it, they may or may not know what the hell they're doing.

It's not surprising, then, when good films don't make the cut and bad films do. It's just one of the hazards of festivals.

Some say the answer to that is for festivals to give feedback to the films that didn't make it, but isn't that just making the situation more volatile by giving the already over-taxed screeners more work? How does help?

Enter the Festivus Film Festival, a 3rd year festival out of Denver geared toward "the guy that pawned his car to make a film." They're a very filmmaker-centric festival (and one that programmed my film gravida back in year one) named after a Seinfeld episode. This year they've added something interesting: videos of the screeners talking about what they like in this year's crop. Here's Johnathan McFarlane (also the festival director) on Jeremy Dehn's Miracle Investigators :



Does this add more work for the festival? Yeah, sure. But it also puts a face on the festival and shines a little bit of light on the process. I think we can all appreciate that.

See the rest of the videos

1,000 words (#6)

in the UK

In case you haven't already heard on Twitter or Facebook, the still to be color-corrected #2wkfilm Blanc de Blanc will be playing in the Video Cafe of the Portobello Film Festival in Swinging London[1]. What's the Video Cafe? Well, I'm not entirely sure, but I think it's pretty much a screening room where they have a bunch of films on-demand, and you can watch whichever one you please. It's kind of cool, but it's a Screening Out of Competition thing, so it's not, you know, fantastic. But, for a film that hasn't been color corrected, we'll take what we can get. Plus, we've been rated by the London Film Board or something as 12A. So, we need to spice in some nudity or something to get that higher.

That's pretty much it for now. If you'll excuse me, I need to figure out which moving box contains the hard drive with the film on it.

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[1] London may or may not be swinging