Kent’s Official Blog

Viva la Che!

First off, I’m a fan of Steven Soderbergh, and I believe his remake of Ocean’s 11 is one of the perfect films in terms balancing craft and entertainment factors.  And his work on Traffic and Erin Brokovich are unrivaled.

And I admire his willingness to be on the bleeding edge of technology and filmmaking.  He’s been a constant advocate of digital acquisition and shot Che entirely on the Red Camera system.  (Except I wanted to scream when he deliberately made the DV footage in Full Frontal look intentionally crappy, which I felt damaged the reputation of DV.)

His pushing the edge with the release of Bubble and now Che by collapsing the theatrical window continues to go boldly where no other filmmaker wants to go.

But the industry hates what he’s doing and is, I think, punishing him for his efforts.  That Benecio del Toro wasn’t nominated for any acting awards is a crime.  True the marketing budget for Che has been miniscule, but industry folks have gotten the screeners and been to the screenings.  And there’s been a tremendous amount of PR around it.  The right people have seen this movie and dismissed it and del Toro’s performance.

But I think that people are looking at Che not as a film, but as a indie miniseries.  It’s four hours long, in two parts, and is all in Spanish.  They overlook the fact that it had a very successful screening run, despite it’s massive runtime, and look at it only as a VOD property, or as some sort of artistic folly.

And maybe it is a folly.  A more awards friendly strategy would have been to put out only part one in 2008 and part two (if you produced it at all) in 2009.  An arthouse Lord of the Rings.  But he didn’t, he wanted it shown like this, commercial viabilities be damned.

The larger trend will be what becomes of situations like Che in the future.  Collapsing the windows between theatrical release, VOD and DVD are all big benefits to smaller producers, producers like you and me because you only have to spend marketing dollars once and the majority of smaller films will never go wide to theaters for any length of time.

The major studios are trending towards continuing to produce major event movies that will premiere on 3000 plus screens and opting for 3D and other spectacles that will drive people out of their homes and into theater seats.  These films will continue to have marketing budgets many times greater than the production budgets of an indie.

I’ve watched the majority of the Academy nominated films in my home on my laptop and haven’t felt like I’ve missed anything in terms of experience — the films I saw on the big screen, most notably the Dark Knight, were big and expansive films that begged to be seen in a theatrical environment.

But the Dark Knight was snubbed by smaller films, films that you could imagine HBO or the BBC producing, i.e., quality entertainment and drama for people over the age of 18 that is produced on a reasonable budget.

As I see it, over the next ten years things are still going to be confusing for the Oscars.  More and more awards-caliber films will be forced to take the VOD/cable route with limited theatrical runs in LA and NYC.  The academy rules currently state that a film must run for a week in LA County to be in consideration, so I think you’ll see a film released to meet this minimum, and then be available for purchase, VOD, or cable the week after to consolidate marketing expenses.  The films that get a good buzz will then be carpet bombed to awards voters on DVD with an additional theatrical run during nominating times.

The Oscars will either change the rules to explicitly punish these practices and nominate films that are conventionally theatrical (i.e., the Dark Knight and Paul Blart, Mall Cop) or more insidiously continue to ignore the indie films that collapse the windows.

The least likely approach is that they can embrace the change and face tremendous backlash from the exhibitors.  I think we’re in the insidous ignore them phase right now, but the identity crisis will continue to loom until they are forced to make a decision through either overwhelmingly mass exodus of talent from conventionally theatrical small films.

As one of my Twitter peeps said, the new art house is your house and the sooner the business realities of film reflect this, the better off we’ll all be.