Stuck at home? Whatcha gonna do? How about making a movie?
Roger Corman is 94 and wants to see what you can do in two minutes.
Just don’t forget to tag it @RogerCorman and #CormanChallenge.
The deadline is April 30, 2020.
My take: this is a lot harder than you might think.
Jim Amos reports in Forbes about a Texas cinema chain and its quest to reinvent itself by reviving a blast from the past: the drive-in.
“[Last] weekend, Lone Star state-based EVO Entertainment debuted its drive-in concept at its multiplex in Schertz, Texas, providing movie fans an out-of-the-home outlet to watch recent Hollywood blockbusters. To say the first weekend was a success was an understatement as every show of ‘Spider-Man Homecoming’ since it opened on Friday has been sold out. In fact, every ticket through Tuesday has been sold and the theater is planning on adding additional showtimes later this week.”
“As to how it works from a technical aspect, the exterior wall of the theater was painted with high-gain white paint for increased visibility and sound is transmitted directly to each vehicle through AM/FM radios. Indoor rest rooms are available with sanitary and social distancing measures in place. Films begin at dusk and end in time to meet the local area’s 10 p.m. curfew restriction.”
UPDATE: they’ve been shut down, after their one and only weekend!
“Due to new shelter-in-place restrictions, we have been ordered by the City of Schertz to halt operation of the EVO Drive-In Experience.”
My take: gosh darn! Just when it looked like someone had come up with a safe way to watch movies out of your house by recreating a COVID-safe drive-in!
The COVID-19 pandemic has closed all 165 Cineplex theatres in Canada (as well as Landmark Cinemas and Imagine Cinemas.)
In the United States, all AMC and Regal theatres have also closed.
The Los Angeles Times reports that:
“AMC Theatres said it would close all of its U.S. locations, starting Tuesday, for six to 12 weeks in response to the pandemic after President Trump declared that people should avoid gatherings of more than 10 people.”
The moves follow widespread orders to close bars and clubs and other places where people gather to socialize.
My take: although the movie exhibition industry has been in decline for the last decade, it only took one week of this pandemic to kill it. Suddenly VOD is an option for new movies as the 90-day theatre window proves impossible. People will be streaming everything for the next two weeks to two months and it’s going to be hard to get them back into the theatres.
In the meantime, here’s something funny to watch:
The latest fallout from COVID-19 and China closing almost all of its 70,000 cinemas in January: 007 has decided it’s No Time to Release its latest instalment, No Time to Die, postponing it from April to Thanksgiving.
Elsewhere, Vulture‘s Chris Lee reports that the total fallout “could result in a loss of at least $5 billion from diminished box-office returns.”
He then quotes David Unger, chief executive of Artist International Group:
“Who wants to go to the theater right now? Do you want to go sit in a room with a bunch of people that are coughing? It’s going to change viewing patterns. It’s going to change behavior. It’s going to change the way people consume entertainment. This is where streaming becomes normalized for the world and it’s going to be disastrous for the entire industry.”
Meanwhile, Georg Szalai of the Hollywood Reporter reports that some film studios had their best year ever last year: “Among key trends for 2019, Disney hit an all-time film profit record that many say may stand for years.”
The Netflix insights are huge:
My take: COVID-19 has the potential to rewire society completely. Imagine if every cinema had to remove every two out of three seats and every second row. OMG, tickets just became six times more expensive! Is this the push VR has been waiting for?
Tom Taulli asks in Forbes if Artificial Intelligence (AI) Can Help Make Hollywood Blockbusters?
He reports that:
“Warner Bros. recently struck a deal with Cinelytic, which has built an AI-infused project management system. It is focused on the green-lighting process, such as by helping to predict the potential profits on new films.”
Cinelytic says users can:
“Gain critical insights into how key talent will increase the chances of success of your project, and by how much. Our proprietary economic scoring system, Cinelytic’s TalentScores™, ranks talent by their economic impact across the film industry, including by media type, genre, and key territories.”
See also:
My take: I’m not sure AI tools will help make better Hollywood films. AI tools analyze past successes and compare new projects against old ones. With this in mind, how can we expect anything but retreads of yesteryear’s blockbusters? More comic book films coming soon.
Ben Yennie posts on Guerrilla Rep Media How and Why to Test Screen Your Independent Film and lists five main things that work:
Your film should be close to picture lock and the test screening invitees should be strangers representative of your target audience.
The survey you hand out to every single viewer must be printed on paper and ask for their demographics (but not their name) as well as answers to specific feedback questions.
Ben suggests you ask the test screening audience to rate your film on IMDb after completing the paper questionnaire and before the Q&A.
He also suggests you collect their email addresses so you can contact them with news about your film in the future.
Finally, he suggests you invite local press to your test screening to start creating a buzz for your project.
John August has suggestions for your questionnaire.
Don’t want to organize all this? These folks will hold your test screening online — all for $10,000 and up.
My take: this is all good advice. The test screening vlog by Darious above is great too. I must admit I have never heard of asking your test screening audience to rate your film on IMDb before it has been released. The main takeaway from all this is that you don’t want your premiere to be a de facto test screening because it will then be too late to incorporate anything you learn into the finished film. Well, you can, but it will just be much more expensive to make any changes at that point.
Randee Dawn, reports in the LA Times: For auteurs, the question sometimes becomes: How much do you believe in your film?
Her thesis is that to guarantee getting your film made, more often now, you have to produce it yourself:
“Being inspired by film actors, directors and writers is easy. It’s all there on the big screen, in the finished project. But fewer aspirational filmmakers first think, “What I really wanna do is produce.” That particular job, which can cover an enormous range of organizational, financial and generally unsexy duties, is frequently invisible and thankless. But without producers, films wouldn’t get made. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons we’re seeing so many writer-directors also putting on producer hats this season. Films including “Marriage Story,” “The Report,” “Knives Out” and “Parasite” have all been made by filmmakers wearing three hats, while “Jojo Rabbit” and “Motherless Brooklyn” feature writer-director-actors who took on a producing role.”
She interviews Edward Norton, Rian Johnson, Scott Z. Burns, Bong Joon Ho, Taika Waititi and Noah Baumbach for their perspectives.
On producing, Norton evokes the legend of Sisyphus:
“Writing is lonely; directing and acting, if you’re overlapping them, is challenging but fun. But producing is just pushing a rock up a hill. And sometimes it rolls over you on the way back down.”
He goes on to explain why he produced his own indie:
“It’s the film business equivalent of if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. It’s a necessary grind to get to the fun part. And if you believe in your story, it’s what you have to do to put it all together.”
My take: I love DIY filmmaking! More often than not, no-budget filmmakers like me wear many, many hats, including the producer’s. But finding someone who only wants to produce is a challenge. Everyone wants to direct, or shoot. If you want to produce, let’s talk. I’ve often said, “If you can balance your chequebook AND throw a fantastic party, you can produce.”
As 2019 turns into 2020, the Cineplex Board of Directors has given Canada a present, one that has the potential to change the mediascape into something never seen before: the option to have control over our country’s movie screens.
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Recall that Cineplex accepted an offer from the United Kingdom’s Cineworld to buy it for $2.8-billion on December 16, 2019.
It then entered a 7-week “go shop” period in which it can accept better offers until February 2, 2020.
In a nod to nationalism, the Cineplex Board made the terms more advantageous for a Canadian offer by halving the deal termination fee of $56-million.
My modest proposal: let’s add a movie theatre chain to the pipeline the people of Canada already own!
Why control the movie screens in our country? To enforce screen quotas, of course. The reason Canadians don’t see Canadian movies at the local mutiplex is because those theatres would rather show American movies. Embarrassingly, we had to give up our national policy target of a measly 5% of the box office because we missed the mark so badly year after year.
With almost 1,700 screens in 165 locations and approximately 75% of the audience, we could finally see our own stories on the big screen. It’s about time, eh?
It worked for Canadian music on Canadian radio, and it’s called CanCon.
My take: as much as I would love to see this happen, I’m afraid it won’t, if only because the remaining movie theatre operators in Canada will complain that Cineplex CanCon would have the unfair advantage of unlimited (taxpayer) funding. Fine, I say, we’ll buy you out too! Imagine if the people of Canada owned every movie screen in Canada!
Rebecca Davis reports for Variety at the recent Macao International Film Festival on the future of indies and theatrical distribution.
She says:
“New viewing habits brought on by the rise of streaming have hastened the demise of the mid-budget American indie, changed the very definition of arthouse cinema, and shaken the indie distribution business. But theatrical is still here to stay, attendees of the Macao International Film Festival’s closed-door industry panels concluded Saturday.”
Some takeaways:
Panel moderator Andy Whittaker, founder of distributor Dogwoof, says:
“Arthouse used to mean a Korean film that was award-winning. Now, an arthouse film is not a comedy, not ‘Star Wars,’ and everything else. Even mid-budget, $10 million movies are all arthouse.”
Dori Begley, executive VP of Magnolia Pictures, concludes:
“Producers are happier and distributors are miserable. There’s more production work for hire and less of an opportunity to nurture talent as there once was.”
My take: as the decade closes, streaming has truly conquered both TV and theatrical to become the undisputed source for the majority of viewing. The technology has matured so that bandwidth and resolution are no longer issues. However, access and discoverability, as well as curation and choice are increasingly becoming problematic for indie filmmakers and their supporters.
‘Cats‘ has released a second trailer:
This one aims to do better than the first one:
Does it?
Well, it is shorter, at 99 seconds, versus 142 seconds.
It outlines more of a story for the audience to expect. And the cats spend almost all of their time on two feet, rather than on all fours. It’s brighter.
But the biggest change was suppose to be with regards to the “digital fur technology.”
Director Tom Hooper, quoted in Empire Magazine in his first interview anywhere about the movie, claims that the explosive response caught him off guard:
“I was just so fascinated because I didn’t think it was controversial at all. So it was quite entertaining. Cats was apparently the number-one trending topic in the world, for a good few hours at least. We’d only finished shooting in March, so all the visual effects were at quite an early stage. Possibly there were, in the extremity in some of the responses, some clues in how to keep evolving it. When you watch the finished film, you’ll see that some of the designs of the cats have moved on since then, and certainly our understanding of how to use the technology to make them work has gone up, too.”
O-kay.
Me, I hardly see a difference. Maybe, when you compare Jennifer Hudson in #2 at 1:08 with her slightly furrier self in #1 at 2:04. But the others seem virtually the same. See 1:50 (#1) and 0:40 (#2.)
My take: what I think is fascinating about this is that the audience has had an impact on the final film. An early trailer caused the blog-o-shpere to gag. And the filmmakers listened and subsequently modified the film. This is a purr-fect (sorry) example of the filmmakers giving their audience what they want. Should more films do that?