Everybody complains and whines and bellyaches about the lamentable state of distribution for independent film.
“They don’t want drama. They don’t want period. Whatever happened to emotion?”
“I can’t get a distributor for my mooooovie.”
“My investors found out where I live and they’re on their way over with molten tar and pillows...”
You wanna know THE problem with independent film? That it’s independent.
The wonderful thing about studio executives, fingers-in-your-pie master manipulators they may be, is those folks exist to help make your movie better. You may not believe it, but it’s true. Writer-Producer-Directors (WPDs) screech they don’t want their vision adulterated by Brioni-suited pinheads, but the problem with most WPDs is what they desperately need is someone to adulterate their vision.
Allow me to explain.
“Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.”
-Flannery O’Connor
What independent film needs is universities, obviously.
I was on the screening committee of the Nashville Film Festival. One of the oldest festivals in the country but, admittedly, not Sundance, and they got hundreds of entries. Hundreds of completed feature films. Most were dreadful dreck. I’d watch five minutes at the start, want to jab my eyes out with hot pokers, skip to the middle, note zero improvement, and then squander five more precious minutes at the end, by now in the throes of mortal depression. Finally, I’d heave the DVD across the room, curse my fate, and drag out the next crud by the next hopeless loser.
Harsh? Probably. True, without a doubt. Plus, a story repeated at every single film festival across this great land of ours.
It’s a brutal business. No one is interested in whether you’re nice or if your mom thinks your movie is better than CITIZEN KANE. It’s a business. If your film won’t make them look great, they do not care.
Watching those independent films, I felt so sorry for the crews, standing around in the snow, eating icy pizza because the director had a “vision” and they got conned into helping bring it to the world. All were freezing to death, wasting their time and didn’t even know it yet. That horrifying fact would become chillingly clear only later, when the hapless WPD tried to sell the foolishness that he or she had gotten investors to invest in and crew members to fritter away time helping make.
The problem with independent film is the filmmaker is writer, producer, director all in the same person. There’s a reason the producer walks off with the Best Picture Academy Award... it’s because they were there to yell at the writer and, later, the director.
Independent filmmakers have no one to yell at them. Ergo, most indy films stink. And the reason they stink is the screenplay.
“It’s a personal film. You’re not supposed to understand it.”
-Filmmaker in my first grad film class. (He didn’t last long.)
A movie can only be as good as its script. Period.
If a script does not go through a rigorous development process, it will not be worth the paper it’s printed on. It’s natural to write something and think it’s done before it IS done. WPDs must have someone who can say, “Here are your script’s problems, and here are ways to solve them.” If you’re a WPD, you have no one to tell you to do ten more drafts.
It is impossible to judge your own work. It’s always easier to critique someone else’s... so get someone else to critique yours, which is, admittedly, a scary process. Far better for someone to rip your precious script to bits than the finished film. Screenplays only cost time. Movies cost time, blood, sweat, tears, and MONEY. Don’t forget, Alvin Sargent took a year to write ORDINARY PEOPLE and he didn’t have a day job.
