Discussing NY Times 20 Directors to Watch

Discussing NY Times 20 Directors to Watch,

For more information visit: 20 Directors to Watch

Before I re-post my original digression on presale qualification, I should take a moment to actually submit a digestion on the filmmakers themselves: I realized TODAY something that I'd always known but never thought about.  I do not have a refined sense of cinema.  It either makes sense or it doesn't.  I don't value a heavy investment on captured moments without proper story.  I'm addicted to compelling narrative found in commercial cinema.  I struggle to connect with foreign cinema and of all the cinema I've seen listed by the NY Times critics, I was mainly confused by their success.  I don't hate any of it and more power to them, but I am confused.

I feel as if film is going the route of amateur poetry and is becoming meaningless in how varied the use is translated.  Everything can be recorded and what we once believed was a supposed to be a show, a tale, an escape, is quickly merging with home recording making it appear that greater accessibility to equipment means anyone can do anything and have the possibility of renown thrust upon them out of sheer brazen interest.

I feel like cinema is made primarily for the adventure or the mystery and now it's more about disguising the director's memoir (or not disguising it at all).  I'm not sure if I'm fascinated with any of it.  But many of these directors have gone on to win at several festivals and in certain cases pay their bills, so...  It makes me think about the value of pure accomplishment and the people behind it that can resist the temptations of doubt.  It makes me think about the machine that must make use of the people who dare to create anything, the press and so forth.

It makes me think that despite my education in film, there's so much more I need to understand about people and audiences, and so much more credit I have to give to people who dare to finish something.  I can't care about these films because it feels too much like I'm hearing the directors tell me of the random of their imagination - disjointed images, alien soundscapes, long awkward holds on anything, docu-style process films...what?  and why?  We could've gone through this over a couple of beers.

I'm spoiled.  I can go across the globe and witness the world of visionaries for free in just two minutes and I'm too American to care.

-------------------

I just want to say that I called it AGAIN!

On August 6th I commented on a blog post explaining the new SEC Job Acts ruling that will open up public options for investment in show production.

My thinking is that since investors are always looking for an edge in information, there will be work on setting up information on film investment in such a way that it will be easier to observe successful trends and predict success. Marketing departments already do this and for generations but how producers setup the proposal is anyone's guess, although I'm sure we're looking at paperwork much like a business plan.

With the Job Acts ruling, the potential for wider investment in a non-direct way means there needs to be an objective assessment protocol mediated by experienced analysts, much the way brokers provide agency for investor capital today. This might mean something like package elements receiving arbitrary numerical values that equal a score which can indicate investor viability. It would repeat what we've done with sports, the race track, straight up gambling etc. The system was a prediction of mine but really it's likely a normal amount of common sense applied by anyone watching the weather. Still, I was impressed with myself.

In the very first excerpts from interviews of the "20 to watch," Dee Rees admits that she needs a specific element to get an indie film greenlit: a white, known, a-list action-hero because there's a foreign-value spreadsheet that scores her current package below acceptance for foreign pre-sale.

That she needed the white-guy was not what stunned me. That there is already collected data ready to support statistical evaluation did and made me think we are actually way closer to seeing a new form of broker and business emerge to answer the call of translating film potential to private investors.

As an aspiring filmmaker among filmmakers I did not anticipate having to write press releases or prepare proposals for the broker, but here goes a new spin on how funding will be acquired and another way in which we need to be looking ahead.

C.M. Sanchez III