Things I learned at the IFP Filmmaker Conference: Day 3

Sorry it's taken me a while to get to part 3. I've been (you guessed it) busy. Catching up on work, and on my own writing, since returning from this trip.

Anyway, after the heaviness of Day 2 of the conference, with its emphasis on the real world and how we're all being screwed by larger forces, it was good to hear about things that are more fun. Such as …

#5. Alec Baldwin is a real person.

As I walked to Lincoln Center that morning, I passed a poster promoting a series of film screenings at the center, for which the music would be played by a live orchestra. (One of the films in the series, fittingly enough, was 2001: A Space Odyssey.) I lingered at this poster just long enough to notice that the artistic director of the series was Alec Baldwin. “Hmm,” I thought. I continued to walk around the corner toward the entrance … and happened to see the man himself getting out of a car, carrying a duffel bag and looking dog tired.

No, I didn't bother him. I figured he was on his way to work and didn't need to be hassled. And thanks to the wraparound sunglasses I was wearing, I was able to pretend I didn't recognize him. Frankly, I was surprised he was by himself. I didn't think someone that famous would have the luxury of being able to walk around in public unaccompanied.

There's not much point to this story, except I just wanted to say … I saw Alec Baldwin.

#4. Humor is still good.

The first panel of the day was basically an interview with Derek Waters, creator of the short film that became the Comedy Central series Drunk History. The moderator, Brent Hoff, had previously given an award to that film (which had already been on the Internet) instead of one of the “films about Cambodian children with diseases caused by corporations”, a decision that apparently still makes people angry to this day.

If you haven't seen it, the premise of Drunk History is simply that a (genuinely) drunk person tells a story from the history books, intercut with actors solemnly acting out the drunkard's crude account. Waters said he got the idea from noticing that drunk people always want to tell stories. So he thought of something that people would never tell when drunk – in this case history, which is often told seriously and with no passion. His theory was that there are three stages of being drunk:

1. You're my best friend, life is great!
2. Have I ever told you the story I just told you ten times?
3. I'm a terrible person, life is terrible.

(He said that the second and third stages are when you need to be recording.)

He said that a brand new idea made out of something people are familiar with is what tends to be popular. Slightly contrasting this, he also advised the audience to “make stuff you believe in” and said that any time you put your voice out there it's a success, even if only ten people see it.

This panel helped buttress my belief that it's OK to do what you believe in, and that it's OK for indie cinema to be silly.

#3. You should make more material than just the film.

In a panel on building “buzz”, one panelist pointed out that “your audience has an insatiable desire to watch short clips.” Another panelist, Marc Schiller, said that filmmakers should be developing more original content for the web, but that they aren't doing this because they're just trying to get their film finished. (Though he did point out that for documentary filmmakers this is easier, since they already have more footage than they can use in the finished film.) He said that you can't make this stuff at the last minute, when the film is finished – it needs to be part of the process.

This isn't a new idea. Way back in the day, I remember reading somewhere that during the making of Jurassic Park, they filmed extra material for use in a CD-ROM. And I think they shot extra scenes during the making of the Matrix sequels for use in the tie-in video game. But I guess indie filmmakers are still catching up to Hollywood in this area.

This gets us into the area of that familiar buzzword “transmedia”. Instead of just having the film, you can have added material providing additional character development.

#2. Apparently, there are still reasons for an indie filmmaker to shoot on film.

Even as a native of Rochester, and as the child of a father whose 29-year career at Kodak put me through film school, I approached the “Want the Film Look? Shoot Film” panel with skepticism. Although I'm starting to miss the experience of watching actual film in public, I don't miss it much as a filmmaker. To me the rise of digital video cameras is the greatest thing to happen to indie filmmakers since the invention of the Bolex. When you shoot on video, you don't have to check the gate, you don't have to worry about the camera scratching or eating your film, you don't have to hope that the lab doesn't wreck your footage. As a film student, I had to worry about all of these things. Then I got my grubby mitts on a miniDV camera in 1999, and never looked back. And neither did nearly everyone else.

But the panelists had plenty of reasons not to give up on film. One is that it simply has a higher resolution than even the best video cameras. While high-definition is taking the leap from 2K to 4K, film is more like 6K, is still a reliable basis from which to create master copies, and lacks the compression issues that occur with high-definition video.

The panelists also approved of film because of the discipline it imposed. For them, the short time limit of a film reel and the unwieldiness of film equipment requires crews to be more organized and efficient.

I personally can do without the unwieldiness of film equipment – I'd rather be able to shoot quickly, and spend more time working with the actors rather than being muzzled by technical restrictions. But I can't argue with the fact that film looks better, and has remained a stable standard even as video renders one format after another obsolete.

One more point that did surprise me – the panelists said that the “video village” separating from the directors from the actors was actually slowing the process down. The ability to instantly review your footage has apparently interfered with the filmmaking process, allowing everyone to look at the last take rather than allowing the DP to maintain autonomy.

I've personally never been on a set with that kind of setup. But about a year ago, I did see a documentary about the making of David Cronenberg's recent film Cosmopolis, and was kind of shocked to see my hero Cronenberg entombing himself in a video suite in a completely different room from the actors, rather than being on the actual set when the cameras rolled. He appeared to be entirely happy with that working method, but where's the fun in that?

#1. The making of the story can be the story.

“There's an audience not just for your product, but for how you make your product,” said moderator Ward Emling on a panel about local film offices. In the earlier “buzz” panel, the documentary Our Nixon – made of old home movies from the Nixon administration – was cited as an example of how the creation of the film can be the story that interests people. The narrative of you creating the film, with you as the central actor – that has the power to gain free exposure and get audiences to identify with the film's journey.

I wouldn't have thought that that kind of auteurism was still in fashion at all. But as Marc Schiller put it, “you can only say 'go see my movie' so many times.” You have to get the audience to identify with something, and if they haven't seen the film yet, then I guess it makes sense that the filmmaker him/herself has to be the warm-up act.

While Day 3 gave me a lot to think about, Day 4 would turn out to be the real crash course.

To be continued …

Making sense of it all

It's been a busy two months. I sent out some screener copies of Saberfrog, and have gotten a couple reviews – a very positive one from a German site called Search My Trash, and a rather more mixed review from Film Threat.

Getting that kind of public feedback for the movie has been a big shot in the arm. In the years since I started this blog, I've sometimes filled the slower months with blog posts about semi-related topics about filmmaking, discussions of movies that had some indirect kinship with Saberfrog, and the occasional flat-out rant about things that were bugging me about my generation and/or modern culture in general.

In hindsight, it seems like the plot of Saberfrog, and the writing, production and release of the movie, has been part of a larger effort to make sense of, adapt to, the world that's very different from the one I knew in my 20s. Over these past few years I've witnessed the rise of transmedia, the demise of Borders and classic Final Cut Pro, and a general shift from a world of sensitive artsy loners who were philosophical about art and filmmaking to a slicker, snarkier, hyper-social, on-demand world where there's more competition for attention and eyeballs.

I think the biggest shift of all has been the shift from a culture of analog media to a culture of digital media. People my age learned to embrace the scratchiness of a 16mm film screening, the grubbiness of a VHS bootleg, the mustiness of a used paperback. I remember “watching” scrambled pay channels that still let you listen to the sound even if the picture was garbled. I even remember fiddling with a TV aerial to try to pick up snowy, distant transmissions from stations in faraway cities.

It's not that those days were better, necessarily. It's just that we folks of a certain age learned to associate those kinds of analog artifacts with authenticity. Knowing that a work of art had some miles on it, or survived in only compromised quality, made it seem more rare and valuable somehow. Every counterculture aesthetic – from the hippies to the punks to the grunge slackers – embraced the idea that dirt and distortion and rawness made things cool.

But that was an analog attitude, and we're in a digital age now. There are no garbled or snowy TV channels – either you get a channel or you don't get it at all. People still like movies, but they're not held on a pedestal anymore. Movie theaters aren't these sacred cathedrals where you go to worship the art of cinema – they're just one of many possible outlets where a piece of “content” will become available. You can still make a low-budget movie, but you're no longer a one-of-a-kind hero for doing so, and if you do it's not supposed to have the bedraggled Clerks aesthetic – now it has to be shot on a DSLR and look like an Oscar-winning Hollywood cinematographer shot it in order to stand out as a professional production amid all the kittens playing piano. As a fellow producer recently put it, when you submit a movie to a festival nowadays, “you're competing against high school kids with cell phones.”

Saberfrog didn't seem like that weird a movie when I wrote it or shot it, because my head was still in the analog era, when people reached into their soul and pulled up something strange and raw and personal because that's what they had to do and because that's what independent film audiences were looking to see.

But perhaps it's a good thing that I didn't know any better, or I might not have made the movie. No matter how much the world changes, I think there will always be a need for people who see things differently, who have the guts/craziness/courage/foolishness to do what other people aren't doing. At the very least, it shows other people that such things are possible.

Sometimes, like Josh in the movie, I have an internal debate raging in my head. I wonder whether making low-to-no-budget movies is still worth the trouble, what kind of movies I should be making in today's world, whether there's a big enough audience for the kind of movies I believe in, and whether I have enough of the huckster instinct that it seems to take to promote yourself nowadays. But somehow I always end up coming to the same conclusion: Just do what you believe in.

And every effort opens doors. You end up going places you otherwise wouldn't have gone, and meeting people you otherwise wouldn't have met. And as easy as it is to get confused about where our online culture is headed, with all that crowding and diversity, you have to remember that no one is consuming all of it, that there are still niches, and that if you're smart and persistent then you can find the folks who get it.

I've been doing a lot of writing in the past couple months, and I'm plotting what my next project will be. It might be connected to Saberfrog in some way, or it might be something new with completely different characters. There's life in Saberfrog yet, but I'll probably be switching my energies to a new project in the next couple months. And I hope that those of you who've followed the Saberfrog journey this far will join me on the next journey as well.

Stay tuned …

Festival premiere, and time to reflect

It's been a busy week or two in the world of Saberfrog, but first another flashback:

Three years ago today, I met Liz Mariani, the Buffalo-area poet who played Laurel. This was the most difficult role to cast, and I'd sent casting notices out through my filmmaker contacts in Rochester and Buffalo. Liz responded, and also mentioned in her email that she would be performing some of her poetry at the Merriwether Library in Buffalo. This was a Sunday afternoon, so I decided to simply attend the reading to get a sense of what she looked and sounded like (though I think she'd sent some photos by email). She struck me as a good fit for the role, so I introduced myself and we arranged to meet at a future date to discuss the project and role in more detail. We met up at a couple weeks later at a restaurant called Kuni's To Go, where we went over the character and some scenes from the script and she said she was interested. And the rest is history.

Back to the present …

On Monday of last week, I got hit with a massive cold (possibly stress-induced) that laid me out flat. However, I was scheduled to be interviewed for the film for a public access show, and this had already been rescheduled several times, so I managed to suck it up just enough to take part. I tried hard to disguise my lack of energy as modesty and restraint, rather than the illness it was.

Saberfrog has been a huge part of my life for the last few years (I started working on the script around this time in 2006), so after all that time I don't have much trouble answering off-the-cuff questions about what the movie was about or how it was made. I must have performed well, because a member of the TV crew told me afterwards that the interview was good and that she was very interested in seeing the film.

Six days later, this past Sunday, Saberfrog was screened at the Buffalo Niagara Film Festival. This was the first festival to accept the film, and I'd been looking forward to this big event for two months. I had planned to do much more publicity this time. I'd even hoped to have merchandise to sell; I'd started to write the first of the fictitious books mentioned in the film, hoping to have it completed in time.

Once again, though, I completely ran out of time and energy. Although the film was finished, the workload at my day job prevented me from expending much creativity on anything else. Although this should have been the most important screening yet, I found myself doing less publicity than ever. I did at least manage to get news coverage, which is a first.

Attendance at the screening was modest – the people who came to see the film were all friends of people who'd worked on it. I'm fine with this, since this was the third showing of Saberfrog in the Buffalo area and anyone who really wanted to see it had probably had their chance. (And the couple other BNFF screenings I've attended so far were no better attended than mine.)

But every time there's a public screening of Saberfrog, it always seems to come at the end of a big struggle. As a result, the film's final scene always gets to me, because it marks a point when the protagonist has survived a painful crisis and is ready to move on.

About nine years ago, I had an unpleasant experience that forced myself to reexamine how important filmmaking was to me and whether it was worth jeopardizing other aspects of my life. At that time, I decided that the world of film was taking too great a toll on me and that it was time to focus more on the career path I'd stumbled into in my day job – a life in corporate America, developing software and other products. And for a while, I was happy, believing I'd escaped a life of instability and madness. Suppressing my old artistic ambitions eventually took a toll, though, and that's how Saberfrog started forming.

Saberfrog is about many things, but one of the big themes is the conflict between a worldview based on emotion and intuition and doing what you feel like, and a worldview based on knowing what the rules are and learning to work within them. On one level this is a conflict between youth and maturity, but on another level it's a conflict between my dreams of being an artist and my efforts to survive economically in the digital age.

I've felt myself shifting back and forth between these two states, like a werewolf. And Saberfrog reflects that internal struggle. But one side or the other has to win, and I'm starting to feel that history has made that decision for me.

As a filmmaker, I'm a 70s kid at heart. All of my artistic heroes saw art as a means of self-expression, a way to exorcise their demons and to communicate with the outside world. In their day, making art wasn't something that everyone did; it was something you had to go to school for (as a filmmaker, that might be the only way you could even get access to the tools). You had to get away from the boondocks and head for urban areas that had a better concentration of people who shared your interests. Art was put on a pedestal; you experienced it in galleries or darkened movie theaters, and people who were capable of artistic creation were regarded with admiration.

Obviously, the culture now is very different. For better and for worse, there's a much more irreverent attitude towards the arts nowadays – partly because the last twenty years have seen so many pompous snake-oil salesmen in the art world as well as in Hollywood, and partly because modern tools allow pretty much any self-willed person, anywhere, to make a film or self-publish a book or write a blog.

While I've been chasing the dream of being a filmmaker since I was a kid, up until recently my dreams were always based on the old standard – get the film shown in theaters, and get a distributor to pick it up and make you famous. I've known for the last couple years that the distribution part of that dream is dead, but I'm started to think that the theatrical part of it might be dead too. Showing the film to an appreciative public audience is the filmmaker's dream, but I'm no longer sure how interested people really are in the theatrical experience when it comes to indie films by unknown directors. People seem content with watching films at home on their computer. And the love of full-length indie features may not quite be there anymore either. Maybe shorter work is the way to go.

Also, to make yourself stand out in a crowded marketplace, you really need to be a relentless self-promoter, which I really haven't been so far. Digital tools allow the indie auteur to be a one-man band, but sometimes you do need help from other people whose strengths are different from your own. Any future project I embark on will have to be more of a team effort.

Which brings me to one other challenging aspect of the modern digital culture. When I first started to go to indie film conferences and hear about “transmedia”, I understood this as a fancy term for “franchise.” But I've read essays and blog posts from people disputing this; the sexy aspect of transmedia seems to be that it is interactive. It's not just an artist dispensing material from on high; the audience is invited to take part as well. That's where my old ways of thinking break down – for me, creating art was always an alternative to being social, not a means of being social.

I have plenty of ideas left in me about Saberfrog and the world it takes place in, some of which seem to suit the new digital world fairly well. I have other stories and concepts in me that might have similar potential. But I'm thinking that the time has come once again to reevaluate my priorities. I can't do it alone anymore.

I have few regrets about making Saberfrog. I learned a lot, I raised my game enormously as a writer-director, and I made several new friends who are eager to work with me again. But I need to rethink, and recharge, before I embark on such a challenging creative project again.

Catching the Express, an RIT film I acted in recently, will be in the SOFA Emerging Filmmakers program at the Rochester 360|365 film festival. The show is Saturday April 30, at 2:30pm at the Little, screen 5. So life goes on.

Film snobbery in the digital age

“When I first came out here [to Hollywood], in the late '60s, I met guys like Richard Brooks and Billy Wilder who … would invariably talk about what shit was being produced then. I thought, These guys who made films that I thought were astounding, are totally out of it today. How can this happen? … Now … I feel like Wilder and Brooks, an old nag. And, like them in the early '70s, I think that most of the films being made in this country today are garbage.”
--William Friedkin, 1996

“It’s communication. I’m all about the conversation. It’s not about filmmaking … I’m not a filmmaker, I’m some weird [bleep] hybrid of something. And right now, film isn’t even the primary conversation for me. For me, I’m way more interested in being on stage, or [podcasting]. And film is like, as much as I love it, it’s just one way to talk to the audience.”
--Kevin Smith, 2010

The Smith quote is from an interview I'll mention later. The Friedkin quote is pulled from page 414 of Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a history of the wild adventures of the 1970s generation of maverick Hollywood directors.

Flipping through Biskind's book to search for that half-remembered Friedkin quote caused me to become transported back to the New Hollywood era. OK, I wasn't really around for that stuff at the time, but 1970s filmmaking was still very potent, and its directors still considered role models, when I was a film student in the 1990s.

The general attitude then was that that the 70s was the last time movies were actually good, and that anyone who wanted to make real movies should look back to that time for inspiration. A major reason why Miramax films such as Pulp Fiction were so celebrated in their day was precisely because they seemed like a throwback to the rawness, innovation and edginess of that earlier time, before movies became soulless and formulaic.

But here's the catch: What a control-freak grownup finds soulless and formulaic, an adventurous young person might find supercool and awesome. “The 1970s were better” version of film history almost always ends by demonizing Star Wars in particular, and genre filmmaking in general, without regard for the fact that the generation after them is loyal to those films above all others.

What I loved about the sci-fi and fantasy films of the 70s/80s was that they put original, never-before-seen worlds and visions onscreen. The films of George Lucas, Ridley Scott, Terry Gilliam, James Cameron, Jim Henson, Tim Burton, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Sam Raimi and others showed that 70s/80s genre filmmaking was no less creative, no less “auteurist”, than the dramas of the 60s/70s.

In turn, big-budget fantasy films and action movies seemed to get toppled in the 1990s, with the rise of independent film as we know it today. You could feel a real generational shift happening as grunge and rap took hold. There was a growing dissatisfaction with regular Hollywood product, and a growing demand for films that were edgy and different and personal. But indie films – and dramas in general – have since lost the “it” factor, now that fanboy-friendly remakes and franchises have taken over.

Obviously, every generation eventually hits the age where its values are no longer a heroic challenge to the old guys, but a stuffy status quo being threatened by the young guys. Once that happens to you, it's time to make a course correction if you want to survive.


I've started thinking about all this for several reasons. As I ponder where to send Saberfrog next, I am forced to evaluate what I hope to gain by giving the film more exposure. The cultural landscape has changed multiple times since I first fell in love with filmmaking as a kid, and as George Santayana put it, “A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.” The recent return of Tron has also been pause for thought, but I'll get to that soon. (I've been working on this post since before it came out.)

Re-reading the anecdotes in Biskind's book reminded me just how passionate people used to be about filmmaking and film-viewing. There was something tactile and sensual about the whole process – carrying bulky film equipment to far-flung locations, like heroic explorers of a new continent … threading and splicing celluloid in an editing room, grease pencil ever ready to mark an important frame … and sitting in a darkened screening room, as cinematic dreams unspooled on a clackety projector.

It was still like that when I was a student. But several things have happened since then.

Films have become more accessible, if not downright disposable. There are a gazillion channels showing movies, and the few that aren't easily available on DVD can probably be pirated somewhere off the Internet. Also, technology has made it easier to produce footage and share it with other people. There's just not the reverence for the moving image that there was even ten years ago, let alone twenty or thirty.

Equally important is the fact that other art forms have caught up with cinema. Television, comic books and video games were each considered junky time-wasters once upon a time, but in recent decades they've made massive leaps forward in form and content. They also allow fuller explorations of a fictional world, and the characters who populate it, with greater length and depth than a single film could, often on lower budgets that allow for more risk-taking.

In trying to catch up with newer trends in indie film, I've attended workshops such as Lance Weiler's DIY Days and Jon Reiss' Think Outside The Box Office, and a common buzzword that keeps coming up is “transmedia”. This basically means extending a property and its story across multiple platforms, so that the world of your film continues into other media such as the Internet, computer games, and phone apps.

There's already a word for this. That word is “franchise”.

Star Wars is transmedia. There are the movies, which are fine. But over the last 33-plus years there have also been novels, action figures and games, all of which let the consumer explore particular aspects of the Star Wars universe in greater detail.

Monty Python is transmedia. Beyond the TV series, you had books, films, albums and stage shows, each of which had material not featured on the show, and each of which played with their chosen medium as mischievously as the TV sketches – for example, the Matching Tie and Hankerchief album was an LP with not two, but three sides; and the Big Red Book actually had a blue cover.

Lord of the Rings and Dune, even in their original book forms, were transmedia. You had the main stories, but you also had maps and glossaries – which you could consult at any point during the main story, to understand their created worlds more fully.

Increasingly, Hollywood films are no longer works of art in their own right, but are the extension of a brand that generated its loyalty elsewhere, just as films get converted into TV shows or video games. All these different media are interconnected now, and as much as the film purist in me might want to complain, this isn't changing any time soon.

Besides, I'm not really one to talk. I went to the midnight opening of Tron: Legacy, rather than waiting for a more convenient time to see it in the theater (let alone wait for home video), because of the strength of my life-long loyalty to Tron as a brand. While the new film is clearly designed to stand on its own, many aspects of the new movie – including its very existence – will be more meaningful to those of us with prior knowledge of the world, characters, themes and backstory.

Which made me think a little more about the whole “death of film criticism” issue that's been such a hot topic among film buffs in the last couple years. Many people (including film critics, natch) lament the decline of serious intellectual debate regarding films, and the decline in appreciation of film as a serious art form. An alternate view, however, was summed up well by Kevin Smith in an IndieWire interview back in July:

“I used to read [reviews] to see if anybody got it … And back in the day that was the only way you could know, because there was no [bleep] internet. You know, you could see people at a screening and they would tell you how much the movie meant to them or what it did for them and stuff. But, generally all you had to go by was the critics … Then into that world was introduced the Internet and suddenly everybody can give you their opinion on movies, which is what I was always chiefly interested in. So, I’m getting opinions from not just the same 100 people … I don’t dislike critics, I’m just like, why are these 100 people any more valid than the people that, I don’t know, the 1.7 million on Twitter, or whatever it is.”

For Smith, then, connecting with audiences who “got” his movies is more important than impressing cultural gatekeepers. Regular readers of my blog (all four of you) will have heard me complain about all the remakes and adaptations, and also about the fan types who don't care whether a film is good or not unless it's faithful to the original material. But seeing Tron: Legacy made me appreciate two things more deeply:

1) When it's something you're a fan of, you have different priorities than someone who's only judging it as a stand-alone movie.

2) Critics know about films (especially dramas) and are purist about film as a separate art form with its own history; they don't necessarily know much about other art forms, and thus don't always have the most useful insight when a film is based on something with a larger history.

The original Tron, for me, was a gateway to the life and career I'm in now. I first saw the film as a kid, thinking it would be about arcade games, and it turned out to be an introduction to the then-new world of computers. Like William Gibson's Neuromancer, it was an analog production that showed the potential of a digital future. So when I glance at Rotten Tomatoes and see reviews from critics who not only disliked the new movie, but thought the original Tron was a silly flop that never merited a sequel anyway, I thought, They don't get it. It seems an obvious thing to say, but Tron: Legacy wasn't made for fans of Citizen Kane or Casablanca; it was made for fans of the original Tron, and fans of computers and digital imagery.

Even the smarter critics are running aground in their failure to recognize the evolving relationship between film and other art forms. Roger Ebert's reluctance to consider video games an art form has received scorn even from his dedicated fans, to point where he finally recanted; and his negative review of Tyler Perry's debut feature, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, provoked angry responses from Perry fans scolding him for his unfamiliarity with Perry's earlier theater work. (The latter example suggests that these cross-media disputes don't solely affect the geek community.)

It's an almost deadening cliché to point out that we're living in a digital age, and that our lives and our culture are being changed by Facebook and Twitter, by YouTube and Netflix, by Google and Wikipedia, by the iPad and the Kindle. Yet certain nostalgic attitudes die hard, even though some of these attitudes – if we stop to think about it – have perhaps outlived their usefulness.

Glancing through Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls was a melancholy experience, because it chronicles a romantic attitude towards film – and filmmakers – that is just plain gone. Yet two things need to be said to put the freewheeling 70s film counterculture in perspective. One is that – at least by Biskind's account, and judging by what they say about each other in the book – these guys were assholes. As enthralling as their war stories are, most of the directors covered by Biskind come off as out-of-control egomaniacs who dug their own graves, then tried to blame others for their own demise.

The other thing is that many of the issues these guys fought for are simply outdated. Biskind's introduction praises these artists for producing “work that was character- rather than plot-driven, that defied traditional narrative conventions, that challenged the tyranny of technical correctness, that broke the taboos of language and behavior, that dared to end unhappily.” Admittedly Biskind's book is itself over a decade old now, but all of these qualities are quite commonplace in the storytelling media of today. And “technical correctness”, far from being a “tyranny”, is not only craved but demanded by the film and media buffs of today, and is also within reach of any consumer- or prosumer-level media maker willing to put in the effort to learn how to use the tools.


I get the sense that, when it comes to art – in any format – there are two broad schools of thought. One is that art must be “real” – that it should be truthful to real emotions and real experiences. The other is that art is artifice – it is imaginative and imaginary, an escape from humdrum reality.

Supporters of the former always criticize the latter, on the grounds that stories which amuse or distract us are a brainwashing diversion from the real world. But the core assumption there is that “real” always means grim, angst-ridden or defeated … the assumption being that anything positive, optimistic or constructive is always a lie.

But I'm a lifelong science fiction fan, and have come to learn the SF philosophy from authors' essays and filmmakers' interviews. I'm far more drawn to the idea of art and storytelling as a venue where you can create something better, promote new possibilities, envision things that haven't happened yet, propose better models for how things could be.

The existence of computers strikes at the very heart of this debate. Many people condemn anything digital as a bad thing, on the grounds that computers and virtual worlds aren't “real”, and are highly reluctant to understand how much power these new tools give to people who are willing to embrace them.

This contrast between introversion and misery on the one hand, versus extroversion and confidence and willingness to make something happen, is probably the most important divide in our culture, and people who embrace modern media are firmly in the latter camp.

While I was in college, I was given the assignment of reading the Beckett play Waiting for Godot for a liberal-arts class in the history of theater. At the same time, I happened to be reading – for pleasure – Medea: Harlan's World, an odd book that resulted from SF author Harlan Ellison inviting several of his fellow writers (with some input from a seminar audience) to collaboratively create an alien world and write some short stories set within it. The book consists of a transcript of a panel where the authors thrashed out their ideas, followed by individual treatises on various aspects of the invented world, and finally the short stories (a couple of them quite moving) written by individual authors.

I couldn't help but notice the contrast. Beckett's protagonists were passive, helpless victims who couldn't even work out what day it was. Ellison and his colleagues, on the other hand, were pooling their imagination, intelligence and cleverness to create something that wouldn't have existed if they hadn't worked to make it so. Medea: Harlan's World, though forgotten today, was a completely unique kind of book, and perhaps just as mold-breaking as Godot but for completely different reasons that I found far more inspiring. By working together to create stories in a shared world, Ellison and his writers were creating – to all intents and purposes – a little mini-franchise.

However, there still have to be people with the vision to create a franchise in the first place, not just perpetuate one created by someone else. I do still believe in creating original work, and the only way to do that is by having a passion.

That passion is easier to tap into when you're young, and haven't been weighted down by disappointments and setbacks. It gets harder with age; you have to resist the temptation to play it safe, and continue to be as determined and adventurous. Filmmaking is a drug. And as Paul Schrader says in Biskind's book, “In your forties, you really have to want to be a drug user, because it's so hard to keep the hours.”

So why do it? Because you must. Not for fortune or fame, but because you have a vision you believe in. It's important to learn from your experiences, but also to keep your youthful vision and not let experience deaden you or trap you in the past.

“I had the confidence of ignorance. Not knowing anything about it, there was no basis for fear. In other words, if you're walking along the edge of a cliff and you don't know it's the edge of a cliff, you have perfect confidence. And I didn't discover the cliff in the theater or in films until after I'd been in it for a while.
“Then you have to be careful not to listen to anybody. You have to remember your old ignorance and ask for the impossible with the same cheerfulness that you did when you didn't know what you were talking about.”
--Orson Welles