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Ray Pride

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Howard Rodman: “Independent film is in a very paradoxical place right now.”

From an extended exchange between screenwriter, WGA board director, professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and Sundance lab advisor Howard A. Rodman at the film blog “No Meaner Place.”

Neely: So Independent film is not dead.

Howard: Umm, no. Independent film is in a very paradoxical place right now. I can make a movie with my telephone, and in fact, I could download an app that would enable me to edit it on my telephone. Given the internet, the barriers to the physical image capture and production of a film have never been lower in the hundred-odd years of cinema, nor have the technological barriers to distribution ever been lower. You don’t need this big heavy film can that you basically have to physically carry. You can stream, you can download. Those two barriers used to be almost onerously high, and now you can now leapfrog over them with a telephone and a laptop.

But the barriers to traditional distribution in an effective way have, in some ways, never been higher—in terms of what it takes to cut through the noise of the larger culture; what it takes to find that small audience and make them aware of what you’ve done. I’m not just talking about theatrical distribution. There’s this weird paradox where I think Independent film is more available for more people than it ever has been; but the difficulty of making Independent film has multiplied in certain other ways.

Neely: The platforms seem to be shrinking, but the numbers seem to be growing.

Howard: Right. And if you’re intent on theatrical distribution as the spearhead of your distribution program, that’s never been harder. The amount of money it takes to market a film doesn’t change whether the movie was made for $5 or $50 or $500 or $5,000. As Karl Marx once said, “Despite fluctuations in the price of beef, the sacrifice remains constant for the ox.” [More here. Photo by Ray Pride.]

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon