There are good ideas for Hollywood’s next evolution, and I’ve heard them with my own ears.
I’ve long railed against the industry’s willingness to speak loudly and do nothing as it falls off a cliff. But last week at Slamdance, the Los Angeles-based filmmaker-first celebration of emerging artists, some of the brightest minds in the NonDē (or non-dependent) cinema movement championed by Ted Hope came to play.
Their guidebooks — all excerpted below, thanks to Ted and the Slamdance participants — were revealed during a panel called, “Fun and Dangerous Ideas to Disrupt What was Once ‘Indie’ and to Separate from a Broken Corporate Film Industry.”
As the festival program explained:
Working from the premise that both Hollywood and Indie are on their death rattles — if not yet quite a rotting corpse — what does an ecosystem that prioritizes the sustainability of the art, artist audience and ecosystem look like. In collaboration with Slamdance, NonDē presents a rapid-fire feast of dangerous ideas delivered in 10 minute rants, sermons, and pleas… each to build this thing we love (cinema) better than before — and always along practical and positive lines.
I found the day incredibly uplifting, not just from the relentlessly positive and undaunted spirit — something I haven’t encountered much of lately — but because I found the presentations to be incredibly concrete, plausible and constructive. Each was grounded in the realities of building something new, while fueled by the spirit of rebellion. I don’t think I could have laid it out better than Ted did in his opening remarks:
So, a little change of pace today. While the world fumes and burns and Hollywood’s leadership seems like they’re on a mission to dismantle the whole thing, green shoots are sprouting in the New New Hollywood (I will make this stick by hell or high water). There, people are building and making plans for a future that is non-dependent on handouts from the studios. With the participants’ permission, I wanted to share highlights and synopses of the presentations, which may yet come to be seen as the founding documents of what will grow from the studios’ ashes.
The 14 speakers laid out what at first seemed like wildly different approaches. But by the end, a pattern emerged for a blueprint to rebuild this broken industry.
The ideas clustered around four pillars:
Pillar I: Build your own system
Pillar II: Own your audience
Pillar III: Reject corporate gatekeeping
Pillar IV: Organize politically
Taken together, they don’t just critique Hollywood. They route around it. With swagger.
And here’s what that actually looks like in practice.
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