Monday we collectively crossed the rubicon. My emails, zooms, conversations took a darker turn. The USA has changed its name to DumpsterFire. Trump trademarked the name, but it’s been a crowdsourced effort. As the US started locking down again, and even Hong Kong started to re-close theaters, the film world seems to have collectively woken up to the reality that this shit is real and nothing is getting better anytime soon. So what do we do to survive?
Small businesses are giving up. Cases are climbing. Schools are in turmoil. Cities, Counties, States and entire Countries that were doing better are not looking good for the future (but I’m mainly writing about the US here). Behind the scenes, I’ve had conversations I can’t detail with experts I can’t name (but anyone who knows me personally can gather that I have some good sources) that public health experts are a) not feeling we’re ready to open as much as we’ve done, and b) are headed towards surges that no one is publicly discussing. And what little we’ve done to prepare, is publicly known to not be enough.
Promising developments are starting to fail. I’ve argued about flaws in some of the models, but it has been great to see festivals, distributors, individual filmmakers, and in other arts, things like theater and dance, and even art auctions switching to online offerings, drive-ins and distanced screening ideas. But even here, reports remain the same as elsewhere – because of no centralized leadership, and a forced reliance on ad hoc, entrepreneurial decisions (partly a good thing) – we have a cacophony of shouts for solutions, but no coordination and thus declining attendance, impressions, sales and a lessening in any metric you might measure. The emails between potential collaborators have moved from positive outcomes to private confessions that we’ve been building solutions for a quicker recovery than will ever be possible and far too few of us can weather another 6-12 months or longer in this Sisyphean slog.
My Cassandra declarations to my little audience are increasingly becoming spoken nightmares shared among many, albeit seldom in public forums. The only silver lining we have here is a very big awakening to the myriad issues around diversity, inclusion and equity, and the conversations that have come to pass (let’s keep these going) – but these might only go so far when people are trying to put out the other fires engulfing them.
But this is not a post meant to lead to mourning, or inaction in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Despite it all, I remain hopeful and believe ever more that we can use this dumpster fire as a cleansing one, that lets us rebuild anew. I am also privileged enough to have this hope; that’s true. But increasingly, I find the same problem that needs to be addressed – thinking bigger about the scope of what we need to build in order to make the changes that need to be addressed.
Little solutions won’t work. Big ideas attract attention, support, money and make change. That’s not to discount the power of individuals or small groups, by any means (here’s an inspiring video on how small groups of makers have been making PPE). It’s to argue that these need to coalesce around bigger, systemic changes. There’s a reason that Boris Johnson is trying to echo Roosevelt in his calls for a New, New Deal. But we need it in every sector.
Back in March, we could think about how one distributor or one film festival, or one theater could make the move to digital and online more rapidly. Back in March, we could worry about how we make some tentative connections to our audiences and our donors and our sponsors, or our constituents, our grantees, our customers. As someone said somewhere, that was March thinking. Then we had May/June thinking, where we accept online festivals and Zoom meetings as the new normal. But this is July, 2020 and we need to be thinking about what July, 2021 looks like. And it won’t be the same, at least not in the US. In fact, we may see the entire business thrive everywhere except the US:
We need to be exploring and even forcing changes that are much, much bigger than we’ve contemplated yet. One of the big problems in the US is that everyone is operating from scratch and with no coordination. Take contact tracing, which I know about somehow – because of no federal leadership, ever city, county, jurisdiction and/or state are building their own systems from scratch. They are duplicating efforts and successes and failures in myriad, heart-breaking ways- because of a lack of leadership and thinking bigger.
Narrowing this to the arts, and specifically film, but this applies to larger societal concerns – I’m talking not just major collaborations for the survival of our field, but also:
- Use this Reset to Truly Address Diversity – This needs to inform every aspect of what we do going forward. One thing we can do is start tying diversity improvements to executive pay – everywhere from the Studios down to the Nonprofits, although they don’t give many pay raises anyways. I had a bit more to say here, but this Ally pledge just hit the news, and I think everyone should read what they have to say and implement their suggestions ahead of mine (more below);
- Collaboration: We need never-before-tried sharing of – data, audiences, websites, programmers, curators, back-office staff, boards, etc. We need to embrace deep collaboration, and that doesn’t mean getting rid of premiere policies, but much deeper collaboration that might lead to something more.
- Mergers & acquisitions. And that something more is probably M&A. Let’s face it – many for profit and nonprofits are close to death or going to operate as zombies, not doing much, but holding on via low salaries and half-assed plans – so let’s merge them into something more sustainable, while avoiding the private equity trap of gutting them for profits – this should be about building new strengths. There are usually few incentives to merge nonprofits, but near-death experiences are among them. It’s time this conversation gets forced – by the foundations funding these orgs, by their boards and members, and by their shareholders and investors;
- Timing of festivals and events – to simplify the ideas here as they apply to festivals – why do we need separate events at all in Toronto, Telluride, NYFF and Venice in a virtual world? Why don’t they combine – if only for a couple of years -and share every aspect, not just talk to one another and waive premiere policies. Take it further, and add more festivals to the mix. I promise you – one or more of these folks will die by 2021, and while Media Desk funding might save the European ones, an intense merger of interests would go further. And sure enough, after I wrote the first draft of this, Telluride cancelled for 2020 (they didn’t go out of business, and hopefully won’t, but you see my point). No, this probably wouldn’t continue post-Covid, and it needs to be a real effort (not the We are the World fest debacle), but a truly shared fest event would help all survive and build the buzz and network effects to make it a success that we need.;
- This also applies to regional and genre festivals, and to distributors and sales agents and every aspect of the business. There is literally no aspect of this business that isn’t in danger of collapse, so let’s think big.
- Blow it Up, Build Something New, But Be Honest – I keep joining film zooms where people talk about blowing it all up and getting rid of some bogeyman (distributors and Netflix are the favorites, usually), but none of them think about the consumer. Sure – we should only fund social issue media, or right now only BIPOC led media (which I agree with and would support), but there’s a bigger problem we face – the average US household who can afford any VOD service subscribes to 5 of them and has over 100,000 hours of content to choose to watch. Breaking through this noise is a bigger problem than getting the content made. We need systemic collaborations to build technologies that can help all of us share data (with permissions, etc.) and marketing resources, and audiences and impact/engagement strategies, and most importantly – curation, so we don’t drown in shit, as audiences – and this needs to be built collectively.
- Rethinking geography and things like geo-blocking, to focus more on shared affinities across time zones and interests. Everyone keeps saying geo-blocking is essential. That’s wrong – it’s essential to keep legacy models, so…
- Kill the Legacy Models – Seldom do people think of this bigger picture, so you find a movie theater or distributor offering 50 films a month, instead of smartly building a curated selection and an audience – across time zones and interests – because of legacy models. But the legacy models will also kill us before we can make them work in the new world. I get it – we want theaters to survive, so geo-blocking helps keep that model. But humor me – If I, as an audience member, trust the curation of a theater in Iowa, I should be able to designate them as my preferred theater to get a cut of the revenue. I should be forced to pay a NYC (vs Iowa City) price, but still get their recommendations, and pay them for it. And if a film plays in NYC only, but I live in Iowa, I should be able to pay to see it – to the Film Forum or whoever – from Iowa, but not live in NYC. Further, if I am a filmmaker with a film on the festival circuit, or a juror, I should be able to override geo-blocking for my friends and family. Hell, if I watch a film on a theater’s website offered by one distributor, and share the info about it with a friend in Thailand, they should be able to rent it and pay their own local theater (or me, or my local theater) a cut for curating it for them. The possibilities are now endless, but not in the way we’re rebuilding old models online. None of this is actually that hard to build, digitally, but in our rush to preserve legacy models, we are killing new business models that could add up to a saving of the business.
- Radical Transparency – we need to move from talks about who gets what data to radical transparency. Yes, we must set up good privacy practices, and permission-based systems. As a consumer, I should be able to tell the distributor of a film – NO – I don’t want to be on your mailing list, but I will gladly be on the filmmaker’s (or composer’s) mailing list, or the theater’s mailing list. But beyond such obvious privacy and consumer-centric needs, we should also be able to do real-time reporting between all parties of every aspect of the data. Not just reporting of box office and payments, but data that we can respond to in real time. And aggregated across multiple services – Kino could target Asian Horror Films to the same fans that like those from A24 or from an indie filmmaker, and when they see an uptick on an A/B test (let’s start doing those too) on an advertisement in an audience segment, they should get that report in real time and be able to expand the campaign to other audiences in other cities automatically. The possibilities are endless, but only if we build API’s and other data sharing protocols to share data more transparently and quickly. And teach distributors – or personalities who become them (that’s what will happen next) – how to do this, because most of us in this business just do the same rinse/wash/repeat steps for every film.
- Urgency – Like I said at the top – we’ve crossed the rubicon. If you are in denial of this, have fun, good luck and require masks. But the rest of us need to be getting together as if the dumpster fire is engulfing our homes and we want to put out the source of the fires. In politics we have elections and revolutions. In business, and nonprofits and the arts broadly, we have each other, but none of this will work if we keep acting like baby steps are good enough. Let’s grow up, face reality, get boots on the ground (diverse ones) and take swift action before we lose a culture, a generation of new leaders, a bevy of new ideas, and new business models that may seem counterintuitive B.C. but are imperative now.
These are just a few ideas and I am not suggesting they are comprehensive or even the right or only ones, or completely thought out for success. Because I am not claiming to be the expert, either. I am just trying to get us to all work together and think more broadly because we literally won’t keep 90% of what we want to keep around if we don’t start doing this now. Sure, life will go on, and experience suggests we will collectively forget this ever happened. For comparison – we will probably lose the majority of our current small restaurants. But others will open, and new businesses will fill the void after some time of depression. But think of all we will have lost. In the film world, we will eventually have theaters again, and windows and festivals will sort themselves out. But if we want to recognize any of the faces running them, and build on that institutional knowledge while building opportunities for new, again diverse, leadership to rise from intern to CEO, then we need to do it together, and fast. That, and we need to elect new leaders who can help put out this dumpster fire before it consumes our planet. But that’s another post.
The Ally Pledge:This started making the rounds on Tuesday and is a must read, must sign, must take action manifesto: “To Our White Colleagues in the Independent Film and Television Industry: There have been many open letters recently. This is a direct letter, to you, our bosses and colleagues, and from your BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) peers. We are an anonymous collective of film professionals who, through talking to each other over the past year, have discovered our complaints of this industry are the same. We see there’s a problem, and now it’s time for you to see there’s a problem. We have included direct, immediate actions you can take. It is time to take the focus off those ‘excluded’ and on to the behaviours of those who do the excluding.” Read the whole letter, take the pledge and take action all from this website.
Stanley Nelson OP-Ed on “Why We need Black filmmakers to tell the story of 2020: Take the time to read Stanley Nelson’s latest Op-Ed for the LA Times. Two important quotes:
“It’s time that film distribution companies, financiers and film festivals made a commitment to transformation of their leadership. White directors and producers who want to tell stories about people of color should instead help a filmmaker of color to tell that story. Production companies and sales agents who leverage long-standing industry relationships should examine how their practices marginalize filmmakers and audiences of color.” and “We need to create a funding stream now to ensure that this moment produces a new body of work, shaping how we cover what is happening and what has happened throughout our history.“
Telluride Cancels the Film Fest: As mentioned in my column above, and reported in Deadline. Their letter is heart-breaking – they tried hard to put on a safe show, but the dumpster fire came to town. This is the most eloquent plea: “We understand that film festivals and their long-term health are not top of mind today. A safe vaccine, vital medical interventions for those sick and properly enforced health regulations are. However, we do ask that you take this moment to consider a world where gathering around a shared love of culture is no longer possible and what that means for the psychological condition of the world. If the prospect prompts a sense of despair, please advocate and champion the return of our gatherings that provide vital nourishment and oxygen to humanity’s soul, at the appropriate time, of course!” I love Telluride too, but it is also the most exclusive show on Earth, so in light of the Ally pledge above, I can’t run this piece without adding that I hope that when they come back, they can address ways to diversify their org, the line-up and the ability of diverse artists, audiences and press to attend (not attacking them when they are down, just saying).
Peacock’s Secret Weapon is Being Free: CNET reports that this not-so-secret weapon will help it gain subscribers and share, and that’s true.
Hong Kong Cinemas Re-Closed – According to Variety, Hong Kong’s experiment with reopening cinemas was just shut down due to another surge. How the heck are we getting US theaters open anytime soon and keeping them open, when Hong Kong can’t do it, and they have this virus under control way more than we do in the US?
This is a Great TikTok on Corporate Pandering – on #lgbtqia and #blm, etc. Check it
The Great Reset – How Sales Relationships and Structure will Change Post-Covid – when is Post covid gonna be… well, this piece from Digiday ponders the changes to sales, publishing, events… The big question is forming new relationsips. But my big question is – how do events survive when no one is sending their activation teams, or their $ as a result?
Provocative #BLM Spec Spots from Sean Fahey
Director Sean Fahey was recently struck by a noble inspiration: “What if major brands addressed the crisis of systemic racism with the same intensity that they are devoting to the fight against coronavirus?”
“Creating any kind of tribute to George Floyd, like naming a street after him, is a necessary gesture,” he said. “But major brands are in a unique position to truly effect systemic change, which is at the heart of this issue.”
Two Great Articles Explaining that “Cancel Culture” is really about “elites losing power” – From The Guardian, two back to back articles on the reality that as Billy Bragg (!) says – “speech is only free when everyone has a voice.” Meanwhile, Nesrine Malik writes in the same place that “So, much of the liberal panic about new ostensibly corrosive phenomena such as populism or post-truth politics is really old panic about the incursion of new forces into elite domains.”