Hello from the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, my old job. Great to be here as an attendee for once. I have been writing a manifesto of sorts on how to fix the cracks in the load bearing wall of independent film. But in the last week, two colleagues, @TedHope and @BrianNewman have written pointedly about the dire state our festivals, films and art houses.
As someone who ran this festival for over a decade and recently an art house for almost three years, and served as a founding board member of the Film Festival Alliance (FFA) and now the Art House Convergence(AHC), I agree with all they are saying. I just think it’s been going on far longer than anyone is admitting and have a few other areas we keep ignoring.
As I stated in one of my last posts, when the Lorimar sign came down and the Sony sign went up, we saw the conglomeration of the majors and emergence of the mini majors that helped start the beginning of the end. I remember how the indie community laughed about “the people in black” in Park City, as a way to differentiate who had flown in from LA from the rest of us. Now they, the sponsors, the studios, own it all. I remember how rocky it was for nonprofits after the 2008 crash. I remember sensing a lot of these changes, like frogs slowly lowered into boiling water.
It doesn’t take much to rattle nonprofits’ fragile infrastructures. Film…cinema, is not considered an art form here in the United States. Dance, Opera, theater, symphonies; these have existed for centuries. Film? About a hundred years.
Why do I bring this up? First, look at infrastructure for the above art forms. The American nonprofit theater, for example, founded Theater Communications Group, or TCG as it is called, in the 60’s or 70’s with a million dollar grant from the Ford Foundation. I am not an economist, but I know enough that in today’s dollars that would be far higher, and TCG is now a thriving organization. Just recently the heads of the major regional theaters in the USA announced an agreement with the White House to focus on continued funding for their field post COVID. That same group of leaders met via zoom throughout the pandemic, speaking with their senators to get major relief passed for concert venues to community playhouses. Cinemas? We didn’t have a voice. The Ford Foundation, though they have given film grants here and there, only recently started funding documentary filmmakers’ projects with a stand-alone program, and that was worldwide and spread out in the five-figure range for each film.
When the much-needed ADA compliance passed in Washington, that all cinemas must have closed captioning, the FFA, barely with the ink dry on our 501c-3, sat in on a call with the DOJ’s office to ask, what constitutes a cinema? Does a converted gym or synagogue, like at Sundance, make a cinema? How do we make these transitions with films that are pre-market, when neither the filmmaker or festival had the revenue to make these truly important changes possible? Not to mention audio description? And when our question was raised, you could hear the DOJ attorneys pause, because they did not consider film festivals when making their decision. Why? Because we didn’t have a voice.
The Art House Convergence was a program of the Michigan Theater for so long, we didn’t stop to think what would happen when this relationship ended. Only now are we, the current AHC board, applying for nonprofit status. There is no million dollars grant to help build infrastructure. Nor was there for the FFA, admirably growing and thriving, but far, far smaller than other national arts organizations like TCG, or the Alliance of Museums, League of American Orchestras, The American Alliance of Museums, etc.
Without infrastructure, we suffer from a lack of training and shared institutional knowledge, that starts with front of house, goes through the projection booth and all the way up to institutional leadership, including boards that really don’t understand the film “business” and how it presses down from the studios, through the distributors onto the independents: festivals and art houses who serve their communities. We lack a unifying voice. We lack funding.
Once a long time ago in a land far away there was a project called The Transparency Project. Sundance was a major partner, and the idea was, among other things, to quantify the economic impact film festivals had on the life of a film Especially in the documentary world, this still matters As the Popcorn List launches, it underscores that you should be able to draw a straight line from films that play “the circuit” to their inevitable theatrical distribution. This is where streaming and the death of journalism, particularly film criticism, also has added to the problem. Data shows clearly that most people choose to see a film based on word of mouth. Algorithms only go so far, and not far at all when it comes to attending cinemas in person.
We desperately need the foundational support organizations to fund our independent film hubs, especially the FFA and AHC. We need schools for projectionists. We need replacement parts for 35 and 16mm projectors. We need advocates to insist that films be more available to repertory programs. We need some old-fashioned training on preventing piracy in our cinemas. Above all, we need the donors and foundations who give so generously to the arts to understand that cinema, too, is an art form worthy of their support. Especially for festivals, if you only sell tickets 4-10 days a year, how else can you fund your work?
We need to articulate to American film lovers that the nonprofit film world, the indie film world, is an art form that deserves support. So, like the leaders of the American Theater did, how can we join together to make the case to studios, film lovers and philanthropists that we need leadership and funding not just to fix our crumbling infrastructure but to build one that will last?
Right on! It can be done. It will be done. It is just surprising that after 40+ years of this Indie Film thing, paths have not yet been placed, let alone paved.