Happy New Year, and Why I'm Always Pessimistic About Everything
In the interest of controlling my own content and not giving anything away for free to Elon Musk so can he further consolidate power and control the earth, I’m starting this Substack (I believe we used to call these blogs).
If you know me and my writing, you know that I tend to approach things with a “glass half-empty” (or about a third empty) perspective. I believe this is an appropriate point of view as a critical thinker, as I like to break things down and see how they’re either unfair or not working.
For instance, I’d like to once again highlight the four articles I’ve written over the past month, which delve into various facets of the film business to show how it’s failing, or at the very least, not benefiting the very people who participate in its machinations and try to make a living within it.
Hits & Misses: How Six Sundance 2023 Titles Performed in Distribution
My annual year-end wrap-up for Filmmaker Magazine offers some useful information about how independent films are fairing in the marketplace. Documentary filmmakers are wise to read up on the final case study of “King Coal,” a film produced by Shane Boris and Diane Becker, hot off the heels of their Best Documentary Oscar win for “Navalny.”XTR is Trying to Solve the Crisis in Documentary Film, but Some Filmmakers Feel Betrayed
This may be the most important article I’ve written in a long time, and I want to especially thank the filmmakers who were courageous enough to speak out. I also want more people to read it, so I’m highlighting it again here. Read it! It’s not only a cautionary tale about what it takes to raise money to make movies, but it also reveals certain fundamental ways that the system for finishing funds and Sundance launches is broken.
Inside DOC NYC: Power, Profit, and Community at America’s “Largest” Doc Fest
Another must-read for documentary filmmakers, this article snuck into 2023 under the wire while everyone was probably on vacation, but I hope that people go back to it. For the record, I personally don’t have anything against the people who run DOC NYC and I considered Thom Powers a friend and a good colleague (though the feelings might not be mutual after the publication of this story), but over the years, filmmakers have repeatedly complained to me about different aspects of the festival, so I thought it was finally time to dig in. It’s a long read, but worth the investigation and I think raises a lot of important questions for documentary filmmakers about the expectations and expense that surrounds festival play.
This Was the Year That the Golden Age of Documentary Felt Like a Distant Memory
While this commentary may have been the most widely read piece because of IndieWire’s reach, it’s also perhaps the most basic, and doesn’t really tell documentary filmmakers anything that they don’t already know from being in the trenches: That in this corporate age of docs, theatrical releases have bottomed-out and and true crime, sports stories, and celebrity-driven docs dominate the ecosystem, absorbing all the funding and ignoring new talent—as one producer told me, offering this pivotal pull-quote of the year: “There was a pivot from embracing quality, because that was seen as valuable, to embracing schlock, because that has become more valuable.”