15/10/2023
Originally published in April 2018 and recently removed by Facebook censors:
The three best things that I saw during the 42nd annual Cleveland International Film Festival were a series of Youtube music videos, Episode 1 of Season 2 of Legion on FX, and John Mulaney’s opening monologue on the April 14th episode of Saturday Night Live.
No, I’m not trashing the film festival. The program put together by Bill Guentzler, Mallory Martin, and a vast selection committee made up of members of the film festival community continues to be as solid as ever. I saw a little over a dozen feature-length movies at the fest this year, and on the Roxanne T. Mueller scale, I rated most of them as excellent, and none less than good. Some have stuck with me all week, and a couple of those that I saw rose to the level of outstanding. You can read more on my thoughts on the individual films that I saw here.
My statement is intended more as a comment on the evolution of the entertainment industry, and where to find today’s top talent.
It used to be that for filmmakers, the absolute pinnacle of success was to be making movies at a major studio. While this is still undeniably true to a certain extent, there needs to be a qualifier: the absolute pinnacle of financial success in filmmaking today is to be making blockbuster CGI movies about commercially licensed superheroes at a major studio.
In the golden age of cinema, to have a shot at making a film, you used to have to know and have influence over the right people, and/or work your way up the studio chain from coffee-fetching to sleeping with a producer.
Democratization of the medium via the advance of technology has made filmmaking more accessible. While this evolution has been a continual process, a notable wave happened in the 1990’s, when independent films produced outside of the studio system started getting major distribution at such a pace that their significance to the film industry started to eclipse that of studio films. Film festivals became a hugely popular vehicle, both for those major distributors to find and elevate those gems for the rest of the world to see, and for filmgoers, who otherwise might not have had any opportunity to see that majority of independent films that didn’t get picked up for distribution.
Eventually, video sales and rentals reached such a peak that “straight-to-video” became a genre of its own --- usually representing those films of such lesser desirability, or niche fandom, that they didn’t end up earning theatrical releases from the distributors. This development certainly widened the horizon for both filmmakers and film consumers. Although the best movies were still found in the theaters, odd little gems and quirky, underappreciated masterpieces sometimes found their audiences through these secondary channels.
But then, starting with Youtube in 2005, the internet heralded a new era of distribution possibilities. With streaming services such as Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, and hundreds of others, film enthusiasts no longer needed to wait for great independent films to find distributors and hit theaters. These days, filmmakers can self-distribute via online platforms such as Vimeo, FilmHub, Zype, and CreateSpace, and audiences need never leave their homes to find them. This shift undercuts the necessity of film festivals as a necessary platform for both distributors and eager audiences, as it simultaneously blasts the doors wide open on the volume and range of content available for viewing.
The nuclear expansion of content has had an enormous influence on our viewing habits. Not only are we watching more content, but now, that content all simultaneously competes for our attention. We’re watching shorter and shorter formats, and when we do invest our limited attention spans in longer formats, we want more of the story to watch next week --- or better yet, right away.
The vast and ready availability of all kinds of content means that we don’t have to rely on studio heads and distributors to choose the movies that they think will appeal to the highest number of ticket buyers. At least one highly successful video streaming service has famously based their marketing and production model on niche demographics. A remarkable and somewhat exclusive feature of film festivals of the past, the availability of fringe or niche films today has become so widespread that film festivals, by comparison, have become tame and ordinary.
When studios enforced morality codes between the 1930s and 1960s, it hampered the process of storytelling through the medium of film during this era, because the studios controlled the means of production. When the studios began to relax the morality code, there followed a tremendous avalanche of amazing storytelling through film in the 1970s. The medium veered once again towards heavy commercialization and lowest common denominators in the 1980s with the advent of the Cineplex and cable television, but in the 1990s, as movie consumers increasingly sought wide selections for home viewing from their local Blockbuster video stores, audiences began to show their appreciation for more independent fare, and distributors, led by Miramax, Sony Pictures Classics, and LionsGate, quickly caught up to the demand. It was during this period that film festivals experienced peak growth, as they catered not only to distributors looking for their next big VHS or cable premium classic, but also, directly to viewers looking for films that they couldn’t find anywhere else.
It’s still true that an aspiring filmmaker can find decent opportunities working on major film productions in the studio system. Captain America: Winter Soldier lists 1414 credits for its visual effects department alone. That represents a lot of working stiffs bringing home paychecks in Hollywood. And don’t get me wrong, I love superhero blockbusters --- especially those that bring some of those myriad work opportunities to my hometown.
But, for a filmmaker that wants to tell their own story, make their own art, working through the studio system offers fewer and fewer of these opportunities. For a filmmaker that wants to bring their own unique vision to light, a far more likely path would be to invest in making their own film. To put that figure of 1414 visual effects credits in perspective, I once worked on an independent film with a crew of 6 people, including the director and producer. We shot on film (Super 16) in 10 days on a budget of $10,000. The producer, who also happened to be the director’s little sister, ran craft services. Before writing the screenplay and raising the money for this film, the director’s former credits included film school projects, and appearing as Geena Davis’s stunt double in A League of Their Own. That film, The Language of Kickball, played in a couple of festivals including the Cleveland International Film Festival, and later, on the Independent Film Channel.
I’m proud to have worked on independent films like The Language of Kickball. But, if it were made today rather than in the 1990s, it would likely cost far less to make a higher quality version that could easily appear in more places. But would it have been more successful in today’s film environment? This theoretical higher quality version of The Language of Kickball would have landed in competition with thousands of other films similarly shot in high quality digital format for reasonable budgets. Because of this content explosion, it takes a lot more to knock the socks off today’s filmgoers. In fact, the word “filmgoer” might not be appropriate here; today’s watchers of film need not go anywhere to have films delivered instantly to them on any number of devices. It takes a whole team of Marvel superheroes, or a lineup of 200+ films, to draw people to a theater these days. And this dearth of filmgoers means that the talent has migrated to where the viewers are watching.
The film industry has reached a new phase in its century-long evolution. Instead of raising $10,000 or $100,000 to shoot a low-budget feature, the people with stories to tell need only flip their ubiquitous phones to the Facebook Live or Instagram Story setting, and tell them. Kids with popular Youtube channels can make more money and get more famous than they probably ever would fetching coffee for a studio executive. And with the birth of the movement in the offices and hotel rooms of Hollywood bigshots, why would they take the risk? There are newer, shinier, and more lucrative avenues for rising talent to be heard than for them to put all their eggs in one making-movies-the-old-fashioned-way basket.
This brings me to the Youtube series that blew me away during the festival. I saw it first in the festival’s Perspectives Lounge, where it sat among other immersive viewing experiences: 3D virtual reality stories that had people sitting in egg-shaped chairs from the future with viewing devices attached to their foreheads, and 3D animation booths where festival goers could transform themselves into stick figures dancing to LCD Soundsystem. The Words Hurt exhibit was nothing more than a monitor, a mouse, and some headphones. While it also appears on Youtube, the display as it appeared in the Perspectives Lounge cut down on the Youtube clutter, and the full-screen viewing and headphones allowed you to immerse yourself in the story. A catchy soundtrack (the titular song) accompanied you on a choose-your-own-adventure type story as you were faced with a decision at the end of each short video which would take you to the next video. The several storylines that I followed all had me laughing at their wit and commentary on western cultural values, and I was impressed with the way in which the storytellers managed to tell the story of a life --- in fact many different versions of that story --- with such brevity. The makers of Words Hurt made the absolute most of their use of cinematic language, and found a new way to tell a simple yet highly engaging story using technology that wasn’t available to us in the decades before. For me, it was a revelatory look at what kind of storytelling is possible. And, it took the form of a fun, interactive game with a catchy song that had me dancing throughout the experience.
This use of new technology is fitting: nobody has the time or attention span for two-hour stories anymore. I can’t say that I have any demographics to prove my theory, but it struck me this year that the festival audience is skewing older. I know I had a hard time enticing my own teenage son to the festival, and his tickets were paid for. I can’t visualize today’s financially struggling youth directing their paltry paychecks away from rent and social activities to pay $16 per screening to sit in a crowded downtown theater full of olds for 2 hours, when they already have more content than they could possibly desire easily at their fingertips, delivered to their phones, to watch at their convenience, for the cost of borrowed wifi.
With attention at a premium, our stories must be delivered efficiently. According to my screenwriting professor, the number one way to get your screenplay thrown immediately into the trash is to include too many pages. If you can’t tell your story in less than 90 pages, you might as well write a novel. Or better yet, flesh it out into a ten-episode arc. These are where stories can take a deeper dive. As such, today’s top talent has migrated to television.
What are the best directors in cinema doing today? David Lynch, Jane Campion, David Fincher, Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, the Wachowskis: They’re all making television. The absolute pinnacle of financial success in filmmaking today may be superhero movies from major studios. But the absolute pinnacle of critical success in filmmaking today is running the production of a 10-episode arc. If you can manage to find success doing both, well, you better make sure not to sexually assault anyone.
Brian Singer first moved to television with the superb House, MD, a show that, for many, elevated the medium of television into something worth watching. After making several superhero movies at major studios, Singer returned to television with the first season of Legion. But revelations from his past caused him to step down from the series, and Noah Hawley, who adeptly brought the Fargo storyline to brilliant episodic fruition, helms season 2, the quality and absolute cinematic joy of which, I’ll say it again, eclipses everything that I’ve seen at the film festival, or in theaters anywhere, over the past few years.
It’s not to say that the Cleveland International Film Festival is showing bad movies. Not at all. It’s just that television is that much better.
One of my favorite sidebars at the film festival, the Greg Gund Memorial Standing Up Competition, highlights documentaries about activists making positive changes in the world. Yes, this is fantastic, especially in an industry that used to squelch voices that stood against the status quo. But if you look around, challenging the status quo has BECOME the status quo. Social media has allowed us all to have a voice, and to organize around that voice, far more effectively than film. I’m not suggesting that film has become an obsolete medium for drawing attention to social or political issues, but it is far from the most far-reaching and effective vehicle. When you can launch an entire movement with a well-placed tweet, and when the cause-du-jour changes with the 24-hour news cycle, the process of planning, storyboarding, shooting, editing, producing, and submitting a documentary to a film festival requires that your story not be subject to the vagaries of time.
In 2003, I witnessed and recorded the Cleveland Police prepare and execute an attack on a group of peaceful antiwar demonstrators, and contributed some of the footage to a documentary about the erosion of civil rights in the post-9/11 era. The film came out about six months later, and even though it had been a high-quality, well-researched production, it was quaint at the time of its release, as most of the topics covered in the film had been long since eclipsed by greater challenges. The film was reporting on the world as it was six months prior to its release, and it was already out of date. This is the challenge of making documentary film appear timely in a world where everything changes so fast it’s hard enough to keep up with it as it’s happening.
Saturday Night Live, on the other hand, has the capacity to satirize current events to a huge audience, and as such, draws the talent for doing so. But in a world where tweets lose relevance in hours rather than days, even SNL faces incredible timeliness pressures. There have been times when SNL’s Weekend Update seemed a little out of date as it reported on news stories that happened earlier in the week. But as the 42nd International Film Festival careened through its week, two of the world’s major superpowers aligned against the United States, whose president launched a proxy war in Syria as his attorney’s office was raided by the FBI. What we all really need in moments like these are a few laughs, a little perspective, and some cutting satire to remind and reassure us that we’re not all going crazy. Rather than the high art of feature-length cinema, it was Saturday Night Live’s instant-turnaround format that could best deliver on this human need, and I consider this kind of satirical political and social commentary to be one of the highest, purest, most necessary, and most immediate forms of art.
For cinephiles, nothing beats immersing oneself in the darkness of a theater, turning eyes to screen, and letting 24 frames per second of light and film reel wash over you. I love having the opportunity to enjoy so many of intimately crafted feature-length narrative and documentary films, and to do so at such an event as the Cleveland International Film Festival has been a treat I look forward to year after year. But when we consider how the art and craft of narrative storytelling through moving pictures has evolved, it is time to acknowledge that the genre’s boundaries have become interdimensional, gone rogue, and just might be coming to you live.
