Things I learned at the IFP Filmmaker Conference: Day 1

OK, last month's post was nonsense, but I was too busy to write anything more meaningful.

This month has been busy too. I went to IFP's annual Filmmaker Conference this past month, and learned a hell of a lot. While I don't know if I'll have time to write up the depth of coverage I gave last year – and you can read someone else's notes anyway – I'll share with you some of the more memorable lessons I learned on each day of the conference.

We'll start with six things I learned Day 1 ...

#6. Comedy can be challenging to sell internationally, because it's culturally specific. That's why depressing or violent films sell internationally.

And you thought foreign audiences were just these gloomy snobs.

#5. There is a film festival devoted to Internet cat videos.

It's called the Internet Cat Video Festival, or CatVidFest for short, and it's based at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Its curator, Scott Stulen, spoke about the festival, which has drawn huge crowds.

Here's their Facebook and Twitter, and their website (they're coming to Rochester in December!) and at some point I would love to listen this SXSW seminar with the amusingly alarmist headline "Is This the End of Art?"

#4. If the storytelling is good, we feel the characters are like us. If the storytelling is poor, or has an agenda, we feel the characters are inscrutable.

That's actually a quote (or paraphrase) from George Saunders' book The Braindead Microphone. I confess to being unfamiliar with Saunders or his book, but a panelist dropped that quote during a panel about Call Me Kuchu, a documentary about LGBT issues in Uganda. I'm sure the panelist brought up the quote for its relevance to documentary filmmakers, but to me it seems even more relevant to fiction writers and narrative filmmakers.

At a different panel, this one on web comedy, moderator Todd Sklar said something not entirely different. He said that a key to a successful web series is having relatable characters, so that viewers who know people like that will want to share the series with other people.

#3. There are still new stories to be told. Just not in Hollywood.

A “New Black Voices” panel of African-American indie filmmakers brought up some interesting issues. One of the panelists, director Terence Nance (An Oversimplification of Her Beauty) said: “Even white films have trouble getting made. Nothing gets made out there unless it was on a lunchbox ten years ago.” Another panelist, director Shaka King (Newlyweeds) made a seemingly opposing observation: “There's been a shift where people don't know what happened ten years ago.”

But the moderator, writer Tambay Obenson, made what I thought was the most memorable remark as the panel ended. He commented on an article he'd read somewhere (after some Googling I think it's this Guardian piece by Paul Schrader) that complained about “narrative exhaustion” resulting from every story having already been told. Obenson said that his thought when reading this was “Maybe for you, white man. You've seen the complete breadth of your experience. But our stories haven't been told.”

I laughed loud and long at this, to the point where a black woman sitting in front of me turned around and stared at me in bafflement. But it wasn't mocking laughter. I was laughing because he was absolutely right.

I've always hated people who say “there are no new stories to tell.” Without exception, they are always people who have no ideas themselves, who have nothing to say and no stories they want to tell, and they are seeking some cosmic excuse for their own lack of talent or imagination.

But just because Hollywood keeps disinterring dead franchises, doesn't mean you have to be as dumb as they are. Tell the stories that haven't been told.

#2. People are still making original work. Just not at the movies so much.

Because I went to a big-name film school at a time when NYU- and USC-trained directors were still lionized, a part of my subconscious has been clinging to the old “get noticed by the system” model. And film buffs love to mourn the lost golden age of the film-brat 1970s and Indie-wood 1990s. But several panelists talked about the Internet and web series the same way people used to talk about independent film – as a venue for original and personal work.

It's strange. Hollywood seems more dependent than ever on old properties that, as Terence Nance put it, have already been on a lunchbox. Yet in the constantly-shifting indie world, I sometimes feel like my training in older formats and traditions can be liabilities.

At the web comedy panel, Todd Sklar said that he was always losing work to people who just made a short, or do web comedy. He said losing a feature directing job to someone who's only done shorts and web series, when you've done two features, is frustrating … but it makes sense, because shorts and web series can be watched more easily as samples of someone's work.

Sidenote: The week after the conference, I drove to Squeaky Wheel in Buffalo for a screening of the new indie film Computer Chess, a comedy-drama set in 1980 and filmed with vintage black-and-white video cameras from the era. During conversations after the screening, I overheard a film student say that he's studied big Hollywood movies, but now realizes he's probably never going to make big Hollywood movies and so he should study more indie films.

I'm glad that guy learned that lesson at a younger age than I did. And I'm glad I'm finally learning it too.

So stop complaining about how scripted cable TV shows have made people stop caring about movies. Make your own online movies … or series.

#1. It's all about the audience … or is it?

Listening to the advice given by the various panelists this year, I sensed a tension between the more traditional view of filmmaking (especially of the indie variety) as a vehicle for personal expression, and the idea that content really needs to have an audience in mind that can be expected to engage with that content. I guess that's the big difference between old and new media.

But the day's closing keynote speech by producer Jon Kilik seemed to suggest that filmmaking is – and has always been – full of contradiction. Responding to the famously pessimistic speeches made by Steven Soderbergh, and by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, about the imminent death of Hollywood cinema, Kilik said such end-of-industry predictions have been made before, but that there are now more ways to make movies and to get people to see them.

“For every tentpole,” he said, “there's a young filmmaker with a small cast and crew to create a uniquely personal vision. For every sequel, there's something fighting to be born. It's never been harder and it's never been easier – and it's probably always been that way. … Don't take yourself too seriously, and take yourself as seriously as death itself. Have both confidence and doubt – it keeps you awake and alert.”

As if trying to reconcile the needs of the audience with the needs of the auteur, Kilik also stated: “The only way to truly connect with an audience is to be as personal as you can be, and share that vision onscreen.”

To be continued ...

Escape to New York

“How many times have you heard someone say,
If I had his money, I could do things my way?
But little they know that it's so hard to find
One rich man in ten with a satisfied mind.

Once I was winning in fortune and fame,
Everything that I dreamed for to get a start in life's game,
Then suddenly it happened, I lost every dime,
But I'm richer by far with a satisfied mind.”
-Johnny Cash

I spent this past weekend in New York City, visiting my old college friend Greg. It was the first real vacation I'd given myself in quite a while, and I needed it.

I've had a love/hate relationship with New York City since my NYU days, but I think the balance has finally toppled into the “love” category. I love Rochester too, but life in a smaller city does sometimes have its limits. You can reach a point where it feels like you've done it all; you're always doing the same things and seeing the same people. (As the “You know you're from Rochester” Internet meme list put it, “You can go to any mall on Saturday and see at least 5 people you either work with, went to school with or dated.”) Whereas New York City is bottomless. There's always someplace you haven't gone and something you haven't done. Your horizons are constantly expanding.

I enjoyed NYC as a student for that same reason, but I also instinctively hated its snobbery, hostility and aloofness. But either those aspects of NYC have faded over the years, or I'm secure enough as an adult not to be so sensitive to it, or both.

Greg and I assisted with the shooting of a documentary that a mutual college friend was directing. We also went to a Rooftop Films screening. I'd submitted Saberfrog to Rooftop Films and was rejected, but anyone who submitted got to attend a Rooftop screening event for free, and Saturday was the closing show of their summer series so the timing was right. The show was a collection of short films, introduced by live music. The films they showed were a little on the heavy side, and I would have preferred to see more films of shorter length (they showed just six films, two of which were about 25 minutes), especially since the show ran late and we chose to leave before the end (we're gettin' old, Jake). But it was still an enjoyable experience, and I particularly liked It's Me, Helmut, a 12-minute dark comedy from Germany that consisted of a single elaborately choreographed shot.

Sunday morning we had brunch with another friend, an RIT student who had directed me in one of her student films and was currently home in Brooklyn for the summer. After that we hung around Greenwich Village, reminiscing about our college days and revisiting old haunts. I was pleased to discover that Kim's Video was still around; I'd heard they were going out of business, but in fact they had merely consolidated and moved to a smaller location on 1st Avenue.

Walking past Theatre 80 on St. Mark's Place brought back memories of the days when it showed cheap double features of classic films, before it reverted to a local stage venue following the death of its owner. It was at Theatre 80 that I first saw Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Walkabout, and Monty Python's Life of Brian, among others.

I mention these particular films because it was at Theatre 80 that I discovered the golden age of 1970s cinema, an era that NYU film classes strangely avoided while I was there. The professors seemed to have a strong bias towards foreign-language and experimental work from the 1960s or earlier, and to even be shown a film made in color was extremely rare.

There were other aspects of NYU film school that frustrated me at the time. I was a sci-fi freak who wanted to make adventure stories and comedies, whereas NYU was more of the “Lucas and Spielberg ruined movies” school of thought, and seemed to prefer films that were long on realism but short on storytelling.

But like most college kids, I was a work in progress and had a lot to learn about the world, and I think both NYU and NYC provided an experience that benefited me in the long run. I wish I'd been more mature at the time, and able to take better advantage of the rich environment around me. But I guess that's how you learn and grow – by having experiences you weren't quite ready for.

Actually, now that geek culture has become so dominant and omnipresent, I find myself yearning more for indie films and dramas, and for art that is about something more than just pop culture references.

We also passed the legendary Strand Book Store that Sunday, and whatever other plans we had for that day quickly went out the window. I felt like a college kid again, roaming the endless aisles of books for something that would further expand my horizons. Among the books I picked up was Steven Soderbergh: Interviews. I'm not actually that familiar with with this filmmaker's work (I've only seen Schizopolis and Gray's Anatomy, two of his least-known films) but I'd enjoyed other books in the same series devoted to other directors, so I grabbed it.

Which brings me to one of the most satisfying aspects of the trip. In addition to all the other fun we had that weekend, I somehow managed (thanks to all that time spent on trains and subways) to read three entire books. All three were related to filmmaking, and all three replenished me in different ways.

The first was DSLR Cinema by Kurt Lancaster, which described techniques for getting a cinematic look from modern digital cameras. Cinematography used to be my weakest area as a filmmaker, but I've made strides on more recent projects, and now feel prepared to do even better work in the future.

The second was Think Outside the Box Office, a book about indie distribution (and self-distribution) by Jon Reiss, whose seminar of the same title I once attended. As an indie filmmaker, I know there's not much point in making more films if I can't figure out what to do with the films I've already made, so this book also filled a gap in my knowledge.

The third was the aforementioned Steven Soderbergh: Interviews. This book of published magazine interviews, spanning 1989 to 2000, almost reads as an avant-garde novel with Soderbergh as its self-loathing protagonist. Perhaps because of my limited knowledge of the films themselves, the book really seems to be about Soderbergh as a person, struggling to avoid the one-hit-wonder trap of his successful first film (which, like Saberfrog, was a product of the writer-director's own personal problems); stumbling into that trap anyway because of the perverse career choices he made over his next few films; and finally achieving a well-earned winning streak of mainstream successes while making peace with himself at the same time. It seemed like the perfect note to end the weekend on.

After this trip, I feel like I've regained the enthusiasm and optimism that inspired me to become a filmmaker in the first place. I'm no longer mourning bygone eras and missed opportunities. I feel like I've finally shed the burden of the past. I feel rejuvenated, and ready to move forward with future projects.