Questions, Questions Everywhere.
FSDD #112 brings you a bunch of them, because the future of cinema isn't getting any less complicated.
1
The FilmStack Daily has a sibling, and it sure is Deep.
Perhaps you know this already. But back when we birthed this ‘ol newsletter, we had another idea or twenty-five. Daily is a sampling of what the FilmStack community on a regular basis. Many ideas land here in a single issue. And that’s one of the ways our minds tend to work: look at what is before us at any given time and then assess. But it is not the only way we work.
Sometimes we like to focus more. Sometimes we want multiple perspectives gathered and contextualized, but all around a single subject. That’s where FilmStack Deep Dive comes in.
The sort of digging we do at The Deep Dive takes awhile to gel. Ideally we’d publish more regularly, but when you like to nudge towards the comprehensive it takes time. So we haven’t been publishing as often as we’d like, we’ve had some time to improve the logo and organization. You should check it out.
I think it is pretty effin’ awesome. All the posts are free initially. But the paywall kicks in after two weeks. That’s one of the many reasons why you should subscribe. These are the sort of things you will want to live in your inbox for ever and ever and ever.
(TH)
2
Is the future passing us by? Are we imagining hard enough?
The relentless firehose of information smashes bits and pieces of ideas into our gray matter: AI is bad! AI is overblown! We live under technofeudalism! The future of filmmaking is damned to hell! The only genre in the future will be horror! While all these hot takes may have a degree of salience, it’s only by inculcating the underlying info with some good old fashioned human thinking that we can wade into the future with a ship of our own making.
That’s what Alex Rollins Berg demonstrates for us in this comprehensive and essential essay of observations on how the cinematic tides are shifting amid the YouTube, AI, media consolidation era through which we claw. He calls us in to look at the map as it currently stands and use a bit of nuanced, dare I say, brain AND gut power. If you want a holistic understanding of where we are to help you envision where we should go, you must read this.
(CR)
3
What steps are we still missing?
I get so much from reading what Emily Best shares. I hope you subscribe to the founder/CEO of Seed&Spark’s newsletter. In reading the linked post below, not only did her central idea — when we don’t have a working business model for cinema, we shouldn’t encourage people to be investing in film for financial reasons — resonate with me, but so did many other thoughts dancing on the periphery of her subject.
We are in the early days of building relationships with our audiences. Relationships are a two way street. What sort of return do we offer people on the investment of their engagement? Is providing audiences entertainment really enough? Is the sort of para-social relationship that a newsletter facilitates enough? Have we given enough thought about how to transform audiences into communities, or communities into collaborators? Can we do more experiments in this realm? What would they look like?
(TH)
4
Are those entry fees paying for it all?
I think most of us submitting to festivals have wondered where our fees are going. Are they inflated to support the festival itself or someone’s salary? Or are they a small bit of the budget needed to pay screeners to watch them all? Stephen Follows shares some data on this issue, but as most things in the film business, the answer varies greatly.
(AS)
5
What do you do with the space between?
In this post, Mauro Mueller / El Suizo explores one of the film industry's most limiting tendencies: its need to categorize everything. Is it arthouse or commercial? Prestige or genre? Festival film or crowd-pleaser? While these labels may help financiers and distributors feel more comfortable, many of cinema's greatest works succeed precisely because they resist such easy classification. The problem, Mueller argues, is that the industry often struggles to recognize, finance, and market films that don't conform to its preferred categories.
(AS)
BONUS!
After checking out Courtney & Ted’s LIVE Substack at 2p ET today, you can join filmmaker Vanessa Hope at 3P ET for a live zoom:
Register here: https://www.theworldismycountry.com/tryoutclub
Who’s sharing what, you ask?
ARB= Alex Rollins Berg AS= Amanda Sweikow AV=Ami Vora CR= Courtney Romano DS= Danielle A. Scruggs SS= Sara’s Solilquies TH= Ted Hope
And please remember:
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