Whither Hollywood? Various size frogs in ponds

Having grown up in the film industry in New York, I always had a low opinion of “those Hollywood types.” I felt more like Woody Allen than Woody Allen did, I suppose.

At a certain point in my career, however, I found that I was traveling out to LA a lot to work here. I’d be on a film that shot and edited in New York but was finishing in Hollywood. There was one film (HAIR) that shot both in New York and in LA area, returned to NY to edit, but did all of its sound and completion work our in LA. There was even one film (FAME) that shot in New York, edited in London (where I did not go), returned to New York to do its music finishing work, and then mixed out in LA.

And the more I worked out here, the more I liked it. There were a lot of people out here who really knew what they were doing. So many projects (both film and television) were done here that there was a wealth of experience for me to sop up.

Of course, eventually, I moved out here and it’s been fun ever since. (Well, not all the time, but…)

Now, of course, sometimes I wonder what use Hollywood has. I know that it still is the corporate center of many of the major entertainment companies — though if you take a look at the percentage that those companies contribute to their parents’ bottom lines, I wonder if it will stay that way. Sure, there are a whole bunch of lots out here (a few less after Sunday’s fire) but there are more and more opening all across the globe now. In fact, as we build new facilities at USC, some of our advisors are telling us that the days of big studios are over — thanks to mocap and visual effects shooting (as well as location work). Then there is the ubiquitous “democratization of the media” (about which I’ve talked all too much) which is spreading shooting all over the world, in much cheaper venues than ever before.

Then there is this article from today’s Los Angeles Times – “New York’s film, TV incentives could tax L.A.’s economy” which talks about how many states, including New York, are now offering huge tax incentives for shooting (New York’s tax rebate is 30%; in New York City that rises to 35% of the below-the-line budget). Meanwhile, the California legislature spent weeks, in the last session, arguing over taxing the porn industry.

It’s my guess that you only call it “runaway production” when it’s running away from you, not towards you. But it seems to me that, in a world where media production doesn’t have to be centered around one locale anymore, that you’d do your best (if you were a state official) to make sure that your industries stayed in the state, rather than driving them away. It’s pretty exciting that someone in Michigan can pick up a camera and start creating content, without having to fly to Hollywood for all of the talent, but that’s not so great for people who are living in Hollywood.

I am often asked if it’s important to come to Hollywood to “make it in the business.” I usually stammer out an answer that is something like “It depends what business you want to be in.” If you want to make Hollywood films there are only a few cities you can live in to be a success — Los Angeles, New York, and perhaps London, Paris and Mumbai (I know I’ve left out a few — please submit your nominations below). The reality is that it is a lot easier to get films made if you’re in the middle of the action — the business is social above most everything else. If you want to write for films, it helps to be where the buyers are.

But it is also true that there are a lot more movies being made than Hollywood films (read “Bigger budgets, with bigger stars and other talent”). It’s not a big frog in a small pond kind of thing, it’s that there are a lot of desirable ponds.

Still, I wonder why the California Legislature is out fishing when it comes to their pond.

Moving Backwards In Time

Only in Hollywood.

The Hollywood Reporter, in an article by Shannon L. Bowen, called “What Women Want,” talks about the organization Women In Film, which is handing out awards this week for… well… great women in filmmaking.

But here was the leading paragraph, excerpted for my sanity:

“Of the 176 nominations for the 80th Annual Academy Awards, 43 (24%) went to women [Norman aside -- presumably this includes the Best Ac t... Women In Film celebrated the accomplishments accordingly. [It] threw its first Oscar party in February.

Now, aside from the cliché if Hollywood throwing a party whenever someone sneezes, the truly astounding thing for me about the article is that an organization entitled Women In Film, which I assume represent the 50% of the American population with two X chromosomes, is happy when less than half of that percentage is given awards.

The truly scary thing is a study that accompanied the article, and which you can download from the website of TRACTION — which bills itself as “The magazine for and by women in the ‘industry’.” The study compares the percentage of women in various film professions over the last ten years.  The results are not good.

The chart, which you can see by clicking on its min-version up on the right-hand side of this post, shows that among the six categories — directors, writers, executive producers, producers, editors and cinematographers — not a single one showed an increase in the percentage of women receiving credits on films since 1998. At this stage only 2% of cinematographers are women, 6% of directors, 10% writers, 17% editors, and 14% and 22% were executive producers and producers. This is down anywhere from two to four percent per category since 1998.

What the hell is going on here?

I’ve heard so much about the “democratization of the media” but that seems to be only for men, and white men at that.  In the Digital 100 in the Hollywood Reporter a few weeks ago, you had to dig down to number 20 or so before you found a woman.

Perhaps it is the sample that the Reporter uses — mainstream media (the study I mentioned analyzed crew lists from the top 250 domestic grossing films of 2007). And we shouldn’t be surprised that the mainstream is more sexist.

But, as small as the percentage is, it’s the downward trend that freaks me out.

I look around in the editing world and realize that I’m surrounded by mostly white males. Then I look at the student body at the USC film school which is about 40% women.  Where are they all going to do?  I have had hopes that they would begin to push up the employment numbers, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.

Three weeks ago, I ran a panel at the USC Women in Cinematic Arts on the future of media. One of the panelists mentioned that there are more women in the New York digital world than out here in California. Perhaps that is part of it. We can certainly point to great women editors — Margaret Booth and Dede Allen are legends in the field.  I’ve worked with Lynzee Klingman, an amazingly talented woman who cut HEARTS AND MINDS and a few of Milos Forman’s films. Anne Coates has cut LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and OUT OF SIGHT.  Sally Menke has cut all of Quentin Tarentino’s films, if I remember correctly.

There are a lot of women in television editing (which is not included in the report, consigning television, as well as women in television, to a back room). It doesn’t seem like editing would only have 17% women.  But, obviously, I’m wrong.

How can we move past this, in the political climate today, where people are losing jobs, not making them

I’d like to know.

Cell Phone Content Creation

Tomorrow morning, I’m off to Atlanta to take part in a very very cool project with Nokia, Verizon and the Center For Disease Control (CDC) and it makes me think of Robert Scoble.

Whoa, let me explain.

At this year’s World Economic Conference in Davos, Robert Scoble took his Nokia N95 camera and combined it with qik.com software to create a live Web stream that could be seen by anyone on the web. In a discussion with John C. Dvorak on Tech5 on January 31, 2008, Scoble talks about how streaming the interviews that he did there live, at a remarkably low cost, enabled him to field questions from his web viewers that he could turn around and ask his own interviewees. He wasn’t breaking news live (though it would have been possible) but he was certainly creating more democratized interaction between the attendees at Davos and Scoble’s own viewers/listeners

That’s actually one small use for the technology. What I’m doing in Atlanta is more akin to news gathering.

I’ll be working as a remote producer with a group of students who will be out in the streets of Atlanta, creating content for a PSA (Public Service Announcement) for AIDS Awareness Day. The three students in my team (there will be five teams altogether) will have spent Tuesday in an all-day session with representatives from the CDC, as well develop a few PSAs for them to shoot on Wednesday. Then, as they shoot them, they will send them back to me and a student editor, who will begin editing them together. By 7pm that night, the hope is to have 2-3 PSAs from each of the five teams, that will be complete and ready to put onto Verizon’s network, so everyone in all of the groups can see them.

We’re calling them Personal PSAs (PPSAs) because of the intimate nature of their capture and their cell phone distribution mechanism.

Stabs At New Distribution

Arin Crumley, who has created (with a few others) From Here To Awesome, has a video out which talks about what is wrong with the present distribution models. This video, which is available here from Arin’s site or on YouTube, uses panels from the last Sundance Film Festival to prove the point about why film festivals just don’t work.

Only about 2% of the film’s getting made get into the festivals.

Then he discusses what the distribution deals are like — how they take worldwide rights for 22 years and promise nothing in return.

His solution is From Here To Awesome, an alternative distribution site, in which people can post their own films and raise awareness for them. While many of the film clips on this site are, frankly, not very watchable (translation — not my type of filmmaking), it’s a start in the quest to figure out just what the hell the democratization of media production is doing to the realities of marketing and distribution.

[Thanks to Adam Martin over at The Interactor, for cluing me into Arin's video.]

How Do YOU Decide What Movies To See?

Anne Thompson, in last week’s Daily Variety, has a column about the recent spate of firings of newspaper and magazine film critics. She makes some valuable points about how her students at USC can’t name any film critics besides Roger Ebert (thanks to his television show). Contrast that with the era when names like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris were known for their reviews and their theories.

While I don’t disagree with her facts (and, as a former film reviewer, I have a certain sympathy for those people who have to sit through five or six horrible films a week and then write about them) I find her conclusions both obvious and unregrettable.

Younger moviegoers are fickle; they’re just as likely to play Guitar Hero or download episodes of “The Office” from iTunes. And the studios, for the most part, continue to bank on short-term, wide-release youth movies vs. riskier, execution-dependent movies for adults.

Thus, as boomers age and their subscriptions expire, the increasingly desperate economics of newspaper publishing are forcing aging movie critics out the door. And younger ones too.

We hear the same lament from studio heads and a plethora of old media types. The democratization of the media also applies to critics as well.

These students — and today’s youth auds in general — more often get their movie info straight from the studio marketing departments, who couldn’t be happier. These kids go to YouTube, Yahoo Movies and Apple to find trailers. As they surf the Web, bits of movie flotsam and visuals planted by the studios on MSN Movies or IGN or JoBlo eventually cross their eyeballs. But they also listen to their friends more than any authority figures, and distrust obvious studio hype.

I don’t know about you, but I find that holding up Sarris and Kael as examples of all film critics is like pointing to Hank Aaron and Mikey Mantle as examples of all baseball players — both major and minor leagues. In fact, I’ve only once found a daily film critic who could tell me anything about a film that was illuminating — and Art Murphy is no longer with us. I also find Elvis Mitchell’s interviews/critiques of films on his KCRW show “The Treatment” to be amazingly insightful and educational. Most film critics are really no more than reviewers, rehashers of basic plot and opiners on whether they liked performances, cinematography or direction.

I’m not saying that I don’t like reading newspaper and magazine critiques of films. In rare cases, I can also use them for viewing decisions. But, in general, I have never used reviews (printed or otherwise) as a guide to help me decide whether I should see a film or not. I didn’t when I was 18 and I don’t now that I’m 108.

So, how do we decide what we want to see?

If you’re like me, it’s a combination a number of factors — subject matter, my mood at the time, the proximity of the theater, the creative factors behind the film (I’ll go see most any movie that Scott Rudin, Sam Mendes or Robert DeNiro is involved in), and how well the film’s and my schedule overlap. And, perhaps most importantly, what my friends and colleagues are saying about it.

I will sometimes see a movie before any of my friends, and then the other factors become prominent. But the so-called water cooler effect (in which a group of office buddies grouped around the water cooler creates buzz about any particular subject) is biggest in my mind. For years, publicity departments at the studios, have spent millions of dollars trying to create that water cooler buzz, to greater or lesser impact. I remember that buzz boosting BORAT but look what it did to THE POSTMAN.

The obvious point here is that the Internet, in general, and social networking, in particular, has become this decade’s water cooler. Reviews of films that I used to get from my neighbor, have now moved onto Facebook and Rotten Tomatoes. That’s no different than it used to be, it’s just larger and more ubilquitous.

Thompson makes two very cogent, and somewhat depressing points, later in the article.

Over the years, critics helped audiences appreciate the likes of Orson Welles‘ “Citizen Kane,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris,” Brian De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill,” Robert Altman’s “The Player,” the Coens’ “No Country for Old Men” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood.” Where would we have been without them? It will soon be up to Pajiba or Cinematical Indie to influence readers to seek out small releases once heralded by critics.

and

There’s hope for critics at well-funded magazines: John Powers soldiers on at Vogue, Anthony Lane and David Denby compete for space at the New Yorker, Gleiberman and Lisa Schwarzbaum are well-read at EW, and David Edelstein writes and blogs at New York Magazine, which has invested heavily in an improved — and well-trafficked — website.

So, the issue of the problems of distribution of independent films, off-the-beaten track films, small niche films, continues to raise its ugly head. Now that we’ve got YouTube, how do those films get noticed? And, now that we’ve got the “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” philosophy, how do those films get reliably reviewed?

Of course, it’s all well and good to note that Thompson talks about mainstream films. Virtually no larger circulation newspapers reviewed Stan Brakhage films that I’m aware of.

But, in my mind, what Thompson is talking about, fits squarely in the middle of the same argument that we’ve all been having — how are the Internet and socialized media changing the world of old media, and what can old media do to keep relevant in this new world.

Training and Lack Thereof

Scott Simmons has a pretty powerful posting over at studiodaily in which he talks about a decided lack of basic training for editors and assistants, some of which he attributes to the DIY nature of Final Cut Pro.

He talks about the idea of doing everything yourself (I have railed against that as well, though more from the director/writer/editor syndrome) and how that has decreased the feeling among many that there’s no need to do an online, for instance.

What used to be the online process of taking low resolution footage (AVR 3 anyone?) and recapturing to high resolutions isn’t necessary with P2 media, Pro Res, and even DV. But there’s more to an online that high-rezing footage. There’s quality control with video levels, color correction and color grading, formatting, graphics, masters and sub-masters, audio lay-back, and SD down conversion among a lot of other things.

As someone who has a much greater story sense than a color sense, it never made sense to me that I should rely on my own talents to color correct something that I had worked on. I’m really good with music (having been a music editor on such films as THE COTTON CLUB and SOPHIE’S CHOICE) so I trust my own instincts in editing the music for my films. But, I’d much rather someone with more talent than I actually mix and sound design the films I edit.

The expression “jack of all trades, master of none” is a cliché for a reason. It is true. And I’d rather have someone else, with greater talents than I, write the music, color correct, split tracks and smooth out backgrounds, shape motion graphics, etc. etc. etc. There is a panoply of things that I cannot do as well as others. For those things, I’d rather that others do them. My films will be so much better.

Along another line, Scott complains about sloppy assistantship.

If the young editor does know how to generate an EDL (it is only a menu pull down after all) they very often don’t know how to check its integrity or even read the numbers that the EDL generates for that matter. Continuing in the offline to online vein, there is often no knowledge of why you would want to collapse your video layers down to a single track to avoid capturing a lot of unused media that is never seen on video track 1.

I tend to agree. The number of times that I’ve walked through the editing rooms at USC and seen student editors who have their cuts in the same bins as their footage, who have their edits named “Untitled Sequence.01″ and “Untitled Sequence.02″, who have named their clips “WS flowers opening” instead of 23A-1 (even when they’re going to do an EDL or a cut list), who have…. oh, never mind, you get the point.

I have to admit, I accidentally encourage some of this. I find that the hardest thing for DIY filmmakers to grasp is to think like an editor. As a result, I have spent countless hours trying to help student editors to see how footage needs to be re-molded to tell the story better. And that requires that we talk about identifying story (my upcoming book, THE LEAN FORWARD MOMENT is all about this, by the way). In the process of attempting to teach the grammar and the thought process of editing, it’s all easy to leave media management and workflow issues aside. At USC, we’ve tried to deal with that by having separate Avid or Final Cut modules. But most people in our profession learn by doing, and so the real teaching can only come when they’re working on a project. And, frankly, there’s not enough time in the world to teach every detail of the NLE interface and assistant editing practices.

I don’t have the answers, of course. Everyone learns at a different pace and has different requirements. So, we do the best we can. But Scott’s blog does properly point out some of the downsides of a culture in which the democratization of media doesn’t come along with a Best Practices Manual. (That is, ironically, the book that I want to write after LEAN FORWARD, sort of the fourth edition of my first book — THE FILM EDITING ROOM HANDBOOK. But that is another story.)

In the meantime, surf on over to Scott’s blog. And don’t forget to read the many fascinating comments on the entry. This is all excellent reading.

The Democratization – and Danger – of Content

Talk about confluence. On Friday night, I had a conversation with a music producer/engineer about lowering the entry price for musicians and filmmakers. It’s what is fashionably called the “democratization of media.” Just Google that phrase. I did and got 875 hits without even looking for alternative spellings or phrasings.

Let’s couple that with another, though less momentous, fact. When I look at the tags for this blog’s postings, aside from the obvious tag of “Editing,” the largest number of entries fit under the tags “Business,” “The Future” and “Distribution.”

This points to the obvious conclusion that, at least in my mind, the future is going to be less about the creation of media but about its selling and distribution. I’ve said for years (including right here on this blog) that the majors are getting increasingly inept at creating media on their own. Big, bloated record albums that used to be shoved down our throats are now attracting 10% of the audience than they did ten years ago. At the same time, it’s possible for your average music fan to record a song for under $100 (the cost of labor being free in these cases). But you try and find something you like on MySpace. You might as well go trolling at the Rose Bowl Flea Market.

In movies and television, that trend is just beginning. Movie studios will still turn out their $150 million dollar tent pole films, and people will still go to see it. But attendance is going to start taking a hit — especially now that it costs more for a family of four to see a film than it does to stay home and order in really good Chinese food and watch something on television or a Netflix film.

But go try and find something on YouTube. Try and sift through that hulking mass of short films to find anything worth viewing for fun (I do enjoy finding tutorials — Avid, Final Cut, other Pro Apps, et al, but I don’t think that those short films are ever going to become mass audience pleasers).

So where does that leave us?

Editing For You – 2.0

The Web 2.0 is as loosely defined as can be. But one thing that everyone seems to agree on, is that it uses a cool, slick AJAX type interface, which brings drag and drop to web pages.

Read/Write Web has this posting about eight web sites that use 2.0 interfaces to create video editing applications of sorts. Some of them really seem like remixing sites (download films from YouTube and then mix and match them), rather than real editing, but if we’re going to talk about the democratization of the editing room, we need to take more than a passing nod at these sites.

They include:

Jumpcut

Eyespot

Movie Masher

Cuts

Mojiti (which is actually an annotation tool, not an editor)

Vidavee Graffiti

Muvee Mix

None of these are going to take over from FCP or Avid (or, for that matter, iMovie) but they do speak to an interesting use of the web.

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