The Chutry Experiment

In case you missed them, I have a review of the second edition of Jeff Ulin’s book, The Business of Media Distribution, for Antenna, and an interview with Ulin for Filmmaker Magazine.

Just a quick pointer to the news that acclaimed independent filmmaker Hal Hartley has announced that he is offering a couple of new perks for people who give to the Kickstarter campaign for his upcoming film, Ned Rifle, the third in a trilogy of films including Henry Fool and Fay Grim. Namely, he is allowing supporters to collect territorial theatrical rights to the film. For $3,000, you can have the rights to Hungary, while Spanish-speaking Latin America would cost $9,000, to name two examples (though rights to Canada, Israel, and many other countries are also available).

So, if you thought you could sell Ned Rifle in Canadian theaters, you’d pay in advance for those rights and then all revenue you collected from ticket sales would be yours. As Scott Macauley reminds us in his Filmmaker Magazine article, plenty of tech vendors already use Kickstarter for these kinds of pre-sale agreements, so why not filmmakers, too? In some ways, I don’t think this is vastly different than the practice of foreign pre-sales that many indie filmmakers have used in the past (see Edward Jay Epstein for the most thorough explanation of this practice). Hartley is still retaining DVD and all other distribution rights (TV, VOD, etc.), but it is a fascinating opportunity for someone who has connections with theaters in a given country or region.

More compelling is Hartley’s frank analysis of movie distribution and how his Kickstarter perks fit within that. He explicitly denies that he he is doing anything “revolutionary” here and also suggests that he isn’t trying “buck” the theatrical system that had existed. Instead, he describes this as a continuation of what he has always done: a limited theatrical release that helps to promote other formats, whether a cable TV screening, DVDs, or VOD.

I’ve been bogged down with a bunch of other projects, but given my research on how digital delivery is changing the film and TV industries, I couldn’t ignore the news that Blockbuster Video has announced that it will close its remaining 300 US stores. It’s a stunning fall for the video rental store that, at one time, seemed like one of the dominant forces in home entertainment. Gina Keating’s Netflixed provides one of the more thorough–and convincing–arguments explaining why Blockbuster failed to adopt to digital delivery, so this news is hardly surprising, but it still seems to mark the end of an era.

Like many others, I’ve also been fascinated by the recent debate between Netflix’s Ted Sarandos and others over whether theaters are “killing” the film industry by refusing to go to day-and-date distribution, in which movies would be released to theaters and on VOD (or streaming video) on the same day. Sarandos has backtracked somewhat from the (perceived) suggestion that he was advocating a pure day-and-date model to suggest that he was merely calling for a shorter theatrical window. Still, a number of indie producers have rightfully expressed some qualms about Sarandos’s arguments.

Finally, I’m intrigued by this report from Vulture about a conflict between TV studios, cable channels, and Netflix over how to divide up the rights to specific TV shows. Specifically, TNT and FX are fighting to retain exclusive streaming rights to the entire current seasons of their shows, rather than the current situation where they only have rights to the last five episodes. Given that syndication deals are no longer as lucrative as they used to be, cable channels are looking for alternative forms of programming.

This spring, I’ll be teaching our department’s junior seminar, which I’ll be structuring around the theme of “Primetime Politics.” I’ve written quite a bit in the past about citizen-generated political mashups, online parody videos, and image macros that mix popular culture with political commentary. To some extent, this grew out of a fascination with the debates about how social media tools were opening new forms of political engagement. But more recently, these interests have led me to think about how Washington, D.C. has been depicted in television and film. Washington culture has certainly become the subject of fascination for many TV viewers with shows like Scandal, House of Cards, and Homeland currently attracting enormous attention, while parodies of DC politics (SNL, The Daily Show, and Colbert) also continue to play a vital role in how we think about politics, even to the point that Daily Show appearances can lead to political operatives getting fired.

With that in mind, I’m planning to structure the course around popular culture depictions of Washington, D.C., both past and present. For now, I expect to bracket off most documentaries, like Fahrenheit 9/11, and instead focus on scripted entertainment and will likely focus to some extent on contemporary media, although I’d like to take a look at a few past texts. I’ve generated a longish list of TV and film texts that I’m considering, knowing that I likely won’t be able to show all of them in a 16-week course. I’d welcome suggestions of texts that I might be missing and with the TV series suggestions about specific episodes that you believe might resonate the most. For Scandal, for example, I am strongly considering showing season one, episodes six and seven, which traces a major portion of the “Amanda Tanner affair” plot, while also introducing quite a bit of backstory to the president’s campaign. For The West Wing, I’m considering showing the debate episode (between Matt Santos and Arnold Vinick) and one early episode. Below the break, I’ve listed some of the movies and TV shows that I’m considering and some (very) loose themes to organize them.

Obviously it’s somewhat inaccurate to suggest that we have evolved from a naive faith in Washington to a more skeptical or cynical view (one could hardly be more cynical than Kubrick in Strangelove), and the 1990s introduced a number of polarizing views on (sexual) scandal and the role of media in shaping political perception. K Street and The War Room potentially help to turn DC insiders such as James Carville into “stars,” a situation that eventually inspires Stewart and Colbert’s satirical response to these media narratives. I’m turning over writing an article or even a longer text on some of these issues, so suggestions about both readings and texts (movies, TV shows, and even novels or short stories) would be much appreciated.