Ray Pride

It's all a conspiracy.

You probably don't realize it, the conspirators probably don't realize it, but it works out as surely as a missing reel from an Alan Pakula thriller: if you go to movies outside of the first-weekend the-carnival-sideshow's-in-town tentpole pictures, but never, ever attend a film festival, your choices in the months that follow are still defined by the concatenation of people and taste and tastemakers and cash and grubby little practices by canny accountants. (Capitalism is simple.)

There are writers who sometimes use the journalistic shorthand of finding some sort of dynamic or dialectic between dissimilar movies that happen to be released on the same day in the same city--J. Hoberman in the Village Voice and Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Reader, or far too many articles in the New York Times' Arts & Leisure section, for instance. (The wily mass mind of commerce plots all.) And then there are the journos who attend the festivals in Cannes or New York or Toronto or Park City, Utah, who are beholden, whether by customs or editorial fiat, to track the choices of a festival like Sundance and divine Where We Stand Now and produce the kind of dreaded "trend" piece, the limp ilk of crystal-ball-gazing that older journalists known as "thumbsuckers."

Before leaving for this year's Sundance film festival, which ended on Sunday, I was scanning lists of releases planned by smaller movie distributors before summer. In many cases, the cupboard seemed bare. I did some research on films and filmmakers on their way to the land of Mammon (um, Mormon), checking out where they came from, quirky statements of intent, gossip. Industry pundits chattered about the changes in studio management. Would Miramax be silent, the Weinstein brothers seemingly headed for the door? (The first pre-festival purchase was a near-$5 million purchase of "Wolf Creek," an Australian horror film for Miramax's Dimension label.) Would the shaken-up Paramount be looking for poppy product to synergize across its horizontally disintegrating distribution arms (which include Paramount, Paramount Classics, MTV, VH-1, Nickelodeon and BET)? Would there be a "Napoleon Dynamite," an "Open Water," a movie that would inspire not critical encomiums or life-changing epiphanies, but the kind of shapely and imaginative marketing and advertising that is more the art form than the "product" the "artists" have made in a shed out back or the meadow down the road.

While the gatekeepers of culture do "tracking" on projects in various stages of development, one of the little-commented facts of this whole film festival/indie biz is that, in effect, the filmmakers are subsidizing the film industry, working on "spec" through the production process of creating a feature film, rather than, say, a screenplay or novel. Rather than finding a way under the umbrella of their corporate structure to make small, smart, terse, aching, intense, beautiful, idiosyncratic pieces of art, the larger companies are getting their R&D for free. There's a notorious statement from a studio head in 2002, saying that certain kinds of stories require "perfect execution," but, as the quote goes, "we're simply not in that business anymore." Paying a million or two or five or nine (avoiding, of course, the notorious $10 million watershed price paid for the duds "The Spitfire Grill" and "Happy, Texas") is a small sum to pay for an already-completed piece of work.

A possible Screen Actors Guild strike also loomed, with an increasingly sensitive subject irritating the non-animated ranks of performers: international DVD sales. While studios want to replicate the almost $50 million gross of last year's "Napoleon Dynamite," an end run around the SAG in case of a strike was considered another factor in a potential supermarket-sweeps.

Like the era when the record industry cleaned up on CDs but shafted consumers and artists, the current distribution system is taking advantage of the glut of DVD sales and keeping the cash for themselves. The Times also quoted an agent at ICM: "International home video is the last great profit center for the studios, and they are going to keep those numbers as smoky as they can for as long as they can."

On Saturday, after many of the sales at Sundance were completed, cupboards restocked, marketing campaigns in the works, the SAG's board approved a contract with movie and television producers, getting a nine-percent pay raise and a record level of employer contribution to pension and health plans. Changes in DVD residuals? Nada. (As Focus Features president James Shamus told the Times' Tony Scott, "We are not in the business of making movies. The movie experience you have when you buy a ticket is subsidizing an ad campaign for a DVD and a cable show. You are legitimizing that by letting us pretend that it is a movie.")

The words "Sundance Award Winner" aren't always seconded by later audiences. For instance, 2004's innovative, haunting prizewinner, "Primer," flopped, but you can catch it on DVD shortly, the aftermarket of both good and bad. The most meritorious (and only sometimes meretricious) movies I caught in Park City in 2005 will be coming soon to a theater near you, with mixed reviews in their wake. After a few days, the slopes turned into a giddy tradeshow. Look for Viacom-Paramount-MTV-BET's pimps-and-whores drama "Hustle and Flow"; Viacom-Paramount-Nickelodeon's "Mad Hot Ballroom"; Warner Independent-National Geographic's "Flippered Migration" penguin anthropomorph-fest, "The Emperor's Journey"; Lions Gate-Discovery Channel's "Grizzly Man," an eye-opening Werner Herzog doc that finds the master confronting a dead man over the nature of death.

And after death? We'll be gone, the movies will live on, the legal boilerplate will withstand. Someone else will be for always counting the residuals, forever and throughout the world, in all media, whether now known or hereafter devised, through the universe in perpetuity. Conspiracies are simple.

(2005-02-01)

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The heart is a lonely reader
Shainee Gaibel's endearing "A Love Song for Bobby Long" is several things, but memorable mostly for being a shamelessly overstuffed, lingo-laden slice of Southern chitchat, zinging with literary citations and bibulous banter
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Tip of the Week
Oscar-winning documentarian Jessica Yu spent five years, off and on, working on her latest labor of love, "In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger."
(2005-01-18)

Morpheus descending
John Carpenter's 1976 "Assault on Precinct 13" is one of the grubbier movies to be beloved by a couple generations of film fanatics
(2005-01-18)

Nixon Antagonistes
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Tip of the Week
(2005-01-11)

Tip of the Week
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Predator vs. alien
(2005-01-04)

Big mack
(2005-01-03)

DVD Tips
(2005-01-03)

Tip of the Week
(2004-12-21)

DVD Tips
(2004-12-21)

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