How Many Times Must A Good Idea Fail?
EE#2: (...before you can call failing part of a "normal process")
Ecosystem Examination #2 (aka EE#2):
If #IndieFilm failed (or at least that ‘90’s dream of it), does that mean it is dead? And do we who love it really have the strength to make it work well this next time?
If the origin spark for me to write a blog or newsletter wasn’t what I initially said it was here, then it was probably when I first wrote “Indie Film Is Dead” in 1995. And yeah, I have been writing versions of that initial post ever since.
The “Dead” in that title was the clickbait of the sentence (even if it was before there was clickbait). I didn’t mean “dead, dead”; dead was just meant as the recognition that if we had lost that game, we still had the whole series to play (how come when I hate sports analogies I can’t stop using them?). It was a plea, a call to action. Or at least it was meant to be. But that didn’t ever sound the alarm now did it? We never really tried to save it. Indie film failed. It failed to stay truly indie.
Vonnegut wrote that “Everyone wants to be a builder, and no one want to do the maintenance.” When it comes to Indie, even that is too kind. But to be fair, it’s particularly hard in any cultural enterprise to do the things that are needed to make such an enterprise work well. Cultural enterprises attract those that want to express themselves through the creation of their work. It attracts those focused more on improving their own product and not the process. We are forever moving on to the next movie and not addressing what went wrong the last time.
To make something work better, you need to interrogate and innovate within that process, and that’s usually called “business” and there are a lot of safer ways to make money than the business of indie film. No wonder it never really takes that great leap forward.
The thing with any ecosystem is those on top are not usually vested in making it work better for any others. Sad, but true. The opportunity costs of investing in operational improvements are such that it is “wiser” (in terms of short term profit) to spend the money elsewhere than bettering the process or ecosystem. It is generally more profitable to launch a new product than it is to improve the process of the prior product — even when you can use that process over and over again. There may be 100’s of things that could be improved in the film biz (and if you read the appendix of my book, you know of a lot of them!), but whose interest will it be to address them? Why all of ours, of course!
Another thing with any ecosystem though is if a single entity went and actually addressed a significant number of those possible operational improvements then the majority of the other participants would become dependent on those that took the time to fix the shortcomings. In some ways you could say that this is what Jeff Bezos (and yes I used to work for him) did with the consumer marketplace; he solved many of the challenges needed to make an online sales, fulfillment and delivery marketplace work, and although many people benefited, and the scale of everything increased, he benefited most.
Fail better — seemingly the consensus takeaway on Beckett’s Godot — has become the start-up community’s mantra, but doesn’t seem to be yet embraced within the Indie Film Ecosystem. It is generally acknowledged in most fields that it takes serval iterations to find the way. To get to Facebook, we needed to pass through MySpace, Friendster and Global Village.
But Indie is still in v1.0 or close to it. Is it just we don’t want to spend the time? The money? Is it that we just want to move onto the next project? No one wants to do the maintenance. And few even want to do the innovation that may actually help us fail better. If we accept our failures as part of the process, a human badge of courage, perhaps we could at least move the Indie Film ball down the field a bit (there I go again…). Let’s not have be another 50 Years Of Building The Wrong Thing!
Just think of what better we could build together if only we were willing to fail as part of the process!
Failing has costs though, mentally and financially, so there needs to be a cushion that allows filmmakers to fall softly from failure and rise back up again with more vigour.. also to recognise that marginalised filmmakers when/if they get a shot at the limelight, then have a multiplicity of loads on their backs from expectations that makes a fall even harder. communities of filmmakers to support development, production and exhibition with benefactors who support the ART of film as well as access to government federal and state incentives etc and how to use them, all needed all over the world and to be based around local cinemas, not necessarily big releases, could be community filmmaker screenings on a saturday mornings to claim the theatrical spaces - new ideas are needed - also to look at South Korea and how their industry history, quotas and taxes and govt intervention allowed S Korean filmmakers to fail again and again until auteurs emerged like Park Chan Wook and Bong Joon Ho that big local investors such as CE Entertainment (a division of a huge food company ) came along to invest in these artistic genius filmmakers, masters of their craft by this time, true artists of film - who had years to learn from their mistakes and to gauge audience reaction to their films and develop their skills, and to become so commercially viable at home in Korea and so make sense for their film companies to build and own cinemas! imagine 15 million people going to see a movie in South Korea - 1/4 of the population in cinemas! This is also the way in Nigeria now! Govt giving sub-prime loans to the producers, some of whom were DVD pirateers to run cinemas doubling the number of theatrical screens in just the last few years there.. more local first films and more cinemas with a global pathway and independent cinema will boom in Nigeria , so whether the independent filmmakers are bouncing up in the USA surely they will do, but watch out in the rest of the world !
I like to approach (some aspects of) indie film like an engineer. And the first step to engineering is asking "What are we trying to solve?" What are the actual problems in indie film?
For me and most of the people with whom I converse, most of it's about access:
1. To gear;
2. To talent (the time it takes to learn the craft(s), and/or famous people);
3. To funding (paying everyone involved a living/thriving wage).
How do we solve those problems?
What are other problems that aren't listed above?