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Monday, November 13, 2006

`Digital do-it-yourself': From The Hollywood Reporter's Leadership Issue

The last piece that I wrote for The Hollywood Reporter (before moving over to Variety) appears in their annual Leadership issue this week. It's headlined `Digital do-it-yourself,' and the byline is mysteriously missing. From the piece:

    [Director Caveh] Zahedi is one of a far-flung group of digital pioneers who regard technology as an opportunity -- not as a threat to established ways of doing business. While this year's headlines have been dominated by the studios' tentative experiments with downloadable movies, there is a portion of the independent filmmaking community engaging in far more radical research and development. They're exploring new and innovative ways of using the Internet not just to make their movies available as legal downloads, but to find new ways to finance them, to cast and edit them, to get feedback from the audience, to market and promote them and even secure theatrical playdates.


    "Maybe we're a little ahead of the curve," says Adam Shapiro, producer of the horror film "Incubus," which made its digital debut on AOL in late October, ahead of its eventual DVD release. "We could fail miserably, but at least we're trying. And even if this does fail, I'll take what we've learned and tweak it and make it work. Eventually, there will be a new model."


For the piece, I also spoke with Jonathan Marlow at GreenCine, Susan Buice and Arin Crumley of `Four Eyed Monsters,' Ben Rekhi of `Waterborne,' Leone Marucci of Steelyard Pictures, `Iraq for Sale' director Robert Greenwald, and Brian Terwilliger of `One Six Right.' (A longer interview with Rekhi appears in `The Future of Web Video.')


There are some other fine pieces in the Reporter's Leadership issue:

1 Comments:

  • i find it telling that 'four-eyed monsters' wasn't picked up after doing the festivals. some movies don't need theatrical distribution.

    and i say this as one of the people in los angeles that signed up and got the screening here. after driving downtown on a week night, paying $14 for a ticket and $8 for parking, i can confidently say this is a movie that would have been fine to watch on my tv, or better yet my laptop.

    i think filmmakers sometimes forget that there's a certain kind of experience we've come to expect with theatre-going, especially since the advent of dvd.

    something like this, or 'tarnation,' doesn't really need the big screen, and in some ways isn't better off for it.

    By Blogger deepstructure, at 9:39 PM  

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