Jason Scott, creator of the BBS Documentary, was four days ahead of me in commenting on the Times story about the poor broke independent filmmakers I commented on earlier today. He takes the gloves off, and it’s a one-two punch:
It is maddening to me to read this, to see yet another set of filmmakers who have been handed these great opportunities in film equipment (cheap cameras) editing (cheap software) and DVDs/Internet Files (cheap product), all 21st-century advances and situations…. and then fall back down into the 1940s era distribution channels as a savior and logical end to their work! …
Before you can say “yo ho ho and a bottle of bittorrent”, your film can be in more places than the original prints of Casablanca could have dreamed of touching. Overnight. Right now. No film festivals. No sucking down bad cocktail weiners. No showing up and begging the same 12 people to sit in your expensively-rented suite and blow smoke up your donut. Right Now. …
If you are dumping not only your spare cash but actual, can’t-ever-get-it-back savings into your film, you have made some serious fundamental errors, some basic miscalculations about your life. And you are insane, the bad insane with the missing shoe and the newspaper hat to protect you from UFO radiation.
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