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.]