Proof Crowdfunding Works

Apparently you can crowdfund an indie Canadian movie. Catch: it has to star the Mayor of Toronto.

Arrested Development: Made for DVR

Farhad Manjoo writes in Slate that ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT was ahead of its time in a specific way:  it was so jam-packed with jokes that flitted across the screen, and foreshadowings of bizarre events, that audiences can only appreciate it in its full glory on a DVR. But the show came out before many people had DVRs. Now 46% of the audience does.

Some of Arrested Development’s best jokes are on screen for just a few seconds—quick shots of yearbook quotes or Tobias’ blue handprints. (Arrested Development owes a huge debt to The Simpsons here, a show in which every bit of on-screen text is a joke that can to be decoded by freeze frame.) The show is also obsessed with continuity. “We wanted the rules of the world to be consistent,” Hurwitz said during a recent conference call with journalists. “If somebody smashed a hole in the wall, we wanted that hole there the next week. People who ended up seeing it back-to-back really got a distilled sense of that.”

... Once the show was issued on DVD, new audiences could finally see the show as a self-referential, endlessly rewatchable whole. And once they did so, people noticed something amazing—they could watch each episode a second, third, or fourth time and keep seeing new stuff. For example, it turns out the show was subtly foreshadowing Buster’s missing hand long before that tragic seal attack, and it was constantly dropping hints about Annyong’s planned revenge on the Bluths. Also, Tobias was probably an albino black man.

Canada Takes Care of Its Own

Just a shout out to Danielle Bélanger and Danny Lennon, who put together the terrific Not Short on Talent program at Cannes this year. You guys really opened the door for us. And no country outside Canada gave their emerging filmmakers a similar showcase at the market.

I had an interesting chat with Carole Brabant about Telefilm's evolving mandate. (Classic Cannes sentence:  back home, I don't tend to bump into Carole Brabant.) The agency seems to be moving out of development and aiming more to help market films that are already made. As a writer this is bad for me, but marketing has long been where the Canadian film industry drops dead. If fewer films get developed but more get adequately marketed, perhaps the anglophone side of the Canadian feature biz can break out of its ghetto.

A boy can dream, can't he?

A Pirate's Life For Me

Faithful Reader Shaula E sent me a link to a Ryerson School of Media "Report on Canadian Screenwriters" by professors Michael Coutanche and Charles Davis.

The report comes from a survey of WGC members, so it doesn't address non-Guild writers. These tend to be younger, less experienced writers. As you work in the biz, you tend to join the Guild and stay in the Guild; you don't hear of a lot of people quitting the Guild. However, it also doesn't include directors who also write, but count on the DGC to protect them. And it doesn't include a few cats I know who write mostly for overseas production companies, whose work the Guild wouldn't cover anyway.

Most of the conclusions seem about right.

1. Most WGC members have at least ten years of experience.
2. Only a little over half of professional WGC writers make all their living from writing

3. Writers make the most money in their forties. Income from screenwriting tends to drop in the 50's, and plunge in the 60's. I can confirm that I know very few working sixty-year-old writers. You would think that people become better writers the longer they write. Quite a number of older writers complain of age discrimination, but I'm not sure. They may become more subtle writers when the world is looking for a fart joke; it's hard to write a movie in which the hero slaughters dozens of "guards" after you've changed your first thousand diapers. Or they may not like the hours a TV writer works, and go into the relatively less lucrative field of feature writing. Or they want control over their work, and turn to novel writing. Or they get fed up with chasing after jobs, and become full time professors and part time writers. Or, hell, they become directors.
4. Not a lot of minority writers in Canada, and they are making not a lot of money.
5. Not that many woman writers, either, and they're not making as much as the boys.

Half of the biz is in Toronto. Considering that almost all the American biz is in LA, that figure is actually pretty low.

About half of older writers mentor.

Consider becoming a pirate, for greater longevity and job security.

Cannes, Day 5

The best films I've seen at Cannes have been Canadian shorts. I actually did get to see a bit of Joss Whedon's MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. You know the story behind it, right? Joss has been having actor friends over to his house to read Shakespeare for some time. He had an empty month in his schedule after THE AVENGERS, and rather than going somewhere on vacation, he just decided to shoot a Shakespeare play, in black and white, in modern dress, at his house.

It's a very nice house. And it's fun to see Amy Acker (from DOLLHOUSE and ANGEL and CABIN IN THE WOODS) and Fran Kranz (ditto) and the other usual suspects performing Shakespeare. But Joss Whedon is not an outstanding film director. He's an outstanding storyteller and dialoguist. The problem is that here he's filming Shakespeare's story and dialogue. Though he keeps the visuals interesting and gives the actors interesting things to do amid all that dialog, he just doesn't bring enough to it to make it new.

Or so the buyers seemed to feel. The folks at the desk were holding back hordes of Joss fans with badges, hoping to save seats for actual buyers. By the time I got to the theater, maybe eight minute in, the place was almost empty; and it was not a big theater.

Possibly the most inventive film I've seen here is Chris Landreth's animated 3D film SUBCONSCIOUS PASSWORD, in which C'thulhu, James Joyce, Ayn Rand and Chris's childhood babysitter, among others, try to help Chris remember the name of the guy who seems to know him at the party.



 I was also terribly fond of Monica Sauer's whimsical silent THE PROVIDER, about a woman musher who needs a man to provide food for her huskies; and I dug Mark Slutsky's THE DECELERATORS, a parable about a group of kids who want to freeze time so they can stay in their favorite moments. Monia Chokri's QUELQU'UN D'EXTRAORDINAIRE (en français) tells the story of a not-so-young-anymore woman experiencing a surprising moment at the end of a day that starts badly and then goes to Hell in a handbasket. And Elise de Blois has a really clever and funny story called FOU, RIEN PIS PERSONNE.

I haven't seen all the Canuck shorts yet; I'll try to catch more tomorrow. It was interesting to see on the Cannes program that only Canada and Quebec are providing screenings in the market for their shorts. Cannes has a festival program of shorts, of course, and I know the American Pavilion is holding a screening of student work in their tent; but only Canada and Québec (separate pavilions, of course) are helping their filmmakers this way.

But what's really incredible is the wide variety of technique and style and story and theme in the shorts. A narrative feature has a lot of restrictions on it. A short isn't going to make money anyway, so you can do anything you want; and the audience will tolerate more elliptical story telling over the course of ten minutes than they will for ninety. So you're free to execute on your extraordinary vision. And these guys have.

Waro no take

So, I have absolutely no idea what makes a film worthy of screening at Cannes. Your market badge entitles you to a certain number of red carpet screenings. There's no special hijinks involved, you just have to sign onto the website with your badge number at the exact time a given screening goes up for grabs, and spend your points, and if you're online in, say, the first 7 minutes, you'll probably get a shiny holograph end ticket.

So, I'm here in Cannes, with my tuxedo and all; no way I'm not going up that red carpet at least once, right?

Thing is, most of the films selected for red carpet screenings sound not fun at all. I can't remember the premise of ONLY GOD FORGIVES, but you can guess it's not a Kate Hudson vehicle. And my old UCLA classmate Alexander Payne has a movie about a son traveling with his father, who has dementia. It's the tragic sequel to AS GOOD AS IT GETS; I think it's called IT'S ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE. Okay, that last sentence I made up. But you get the idea.

So WARO NO TAKE (STRAW SHIELD) is about a team of cops tasked with bringing a giggling psychopath child rapist/murderer 1200km across Japan to Tokyo. Obstacle: a multibillionaire whose granddaughter he murdered has offered a billion yen to whoever takes the guy out. So potentially, anyone they meet could be an assassin. And many of them are. And cops have been bought. And as teammates die over the course of the mission, they themselves will begin to question why good cops are dying to preserve a giggling child murderer who is destined for the noose anyway.

So, this sounds like a good premise for a John Woo movie, right? And, therefore, exactly the sort of movie that gets programmed at Fantasia, and not at Cannes. I mean, it's got good guys and bad guys, and a plot, right?

Goes to show, I have no idea what gets something programmed at Cannes. The movie is exactly as cheesy and on-the-nose as it sounds. Linear narrative, lots of yelling, looooooots of expository dialog, fair amount of blood. And at least five conversations among the teammates about, "why don't we just shoot him and take the money, instead of letting good cops die to preserve the life of a scumbag" (the actual word used in the subtitles). Until I was asking myself, "yeah, why don't you?"

The answer is, apparently, that honor and duty are important to Japanese people. I know, right. Who knew?

And then, tacked-on happy ending.

The only thing I can figure is, a cheesy cop story with a heavy-handed theme is okay for Cannes so long as it is Not Actually Fun.

Bear in mind, of course, any number of my friends saw the movie and liked it. So there you go.

An odd thing about the red carpet is that they will not actually let you exit the theatre via the red carpet. You have to get on line to exit the Palais. And that takes some time. No idea why, but the French do not seem to be too good at managing crowds. The other day I was in the worst river of human traffic I've ever been in, just trying to get up the Croisette to the Scandinavia Terrace. The cops blocked the street to traffic, prioritizing cars. So there you go. 

Cannes

Today is my second real day at Cannes. Saturday I was only semi-coherent, at least to myself, on only about three hours of sleep on the plane, followed by one of the most harrowing descents I've ever been in, second only to landing in Palm Desert many years ago.

And the rest of the day, wandering around in the pounding rain.

It's odd being a writer-director at the Cannes market, or indeed at any market. Film markets are about you, but they're not really for you. Markets are for producers to sell to distributors, and for distribs to sell to buyers. So I keep having conversations that end with, "we'll that sounds really interesting. Let me know when you have a few more pieces in place."

So, oddly, I'm hanging out with the other Canadians. It is, after all, good to get to meet the up-and-coming talent. And it is always good to let old friends know what else you're up to.

One odd thing about screening your short at a market is that very few buyers or producers are likely to come to your screening -- they'd have to sit through nine other shorts. But it gives you an excuse to hand people the postcard with your poster on it, and direct them to your online screener.  So your actual presence, or your film's actual screening, is just the tip of the iceberg.

The rest of it is just walking around the festival looking at the posters -- it's an education in what people worldwide want to see.

Such as AVALANCHE  SHARKS.

Another Version

In another version of the story, three were offered the same choice. Achilles chose glory and death, Homer chose to sing of others' glory, and the third, whose name is not recorded, became the ancestor of most of the human race.