Indie A-Holes Part II: Fixing Production, Distribution & Marketing
Plus: This 'insufferable, attention-craving blowhard' — me! — has a message for the one who takes dictation
In my last column, I painted a fairly grim picture of the state of the indie film world, as seen on the ground at Sundance. After all, if someone keeps stabbing themselves in the neck, sooner or later the results of that effort will kick in.
The current moment might look a lot like a sector about to implode or freefall, but as alarming as things may seem today, there is reason to believe that help may be on the way.
Taking a step back, indie film doesn’t look so much doomed as blocked. The conditions for success are there, right down the stream, but there are huge glaciers blocking the passage. When flow is backed up, conditions become stagnant and brackish.
The fact is, where audiences are fed and nourished, the market for indie films is vital and healthy, and new talent builds. At the moment, the only space doing that is the horror genre, where an excitement for indie work remains vigorous and talents like Robert Eggers appear, doing better and better work there, keeping the genre healthy.
There are three stages in the film process — production, distribution and marketing — and all of them are currently held in check by the calcified ways of old Hollywood or vicissitudes of the Streaming Wars, both of which prevent indie film from reaching audiences in a cost-effective way.
But changes are coming.
Fix #1: Production and Distribution
In production, indie film offers a real competitor to Hollywood, a much lower-cost supply to the now prohibitively expensive studio process. In a very mobile world where people are shooting fantastically high-quality footage on their phones, independent filmmakers have access to tools to create professional-level productions for very cheap. As production flees Los Angeles and disperses across the country (and the world), the ability for regional filmmakers to tap into studio-level talent only multiplies.
In distribution, the indie world is still looking to a studio system which now has no economic model for anything other than nine-figure tentpoles. To an alarming extent indie films have also been depending on the awards hunger of the streaming world to keep it afloat — a spigot that can be turned off with the flick of the wrist. Even while it’s on, taking the streaming check has meant that films disappear into the great digital maw the vast majority of the time, where they will be barely heard from again, leaving the filmmakers with little apart from the check to build a career on.
To get its films out theatrically and build an effective release, indie filmmakers have been dependent on being brought by the studios into a vast 80-year-old system of hundreds of regional distribution offices dependent on an impenetrable network of local relations.
Fixing the second half of this problem will fix the first half.
In 2025, with the tools at our command, there is no reason that filmmakers should need to rely on these vast armies to get their films in front of audiences. If ever there were a sector ripe for disruption, this ancient, pre-computer world is it — and it will only take a success story or two from outside the current system to break this wide open.
At Sundance, I hosted a panel discussion with John Fithian and the newly minted Fithian Group. Formerly the head of NATO, Fithian is now building a system that will allow filmmakers to strike their own deals — and ensure payment — from theater owners, using AI and digital tools to create release patterns crafted for their films.