David Carr, Pay walls and "innovation"

David Carr checked-in with another solid take on the New York Times new pay wall, and the technorati response.  His best point, regarding the value of real journalism:

When I was in Austin, I would fall asleep each night to bad dreams, prompted by cable television ranting that the world was melting down, principally in Japan. And each morning I would wake up to reporting that described in very careful detail what was actually known, not feared, about the nuclear crisis in Japan.

It's also worth noting that one detractor he quotes drops the term "innovation" in his critique.  This is a favorite term of the tech crowd.  In tech, "innovative" and "good" are nearly synonymous.  Not necessarily so with journalism.  The process of journalism - especially the beat system at most major newspapers, embedding reporters in key areas where they can get to know the players, learn how things work and be on the lookout for stories which deserve the attention of the public at large - that is not an innovation.  But it continues to yield great journalism.

The tech side of news agencies should be looking for innovative ways to deliver the news, and yes they've dropped the ball in the past.  But the interface is not the content, and don't we seek out news for the content?

As I mentioned in some thoughts on the new doc Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times, Carr is one of the few effectively making the case that journalism and technology are not the same thing.  Let me again recommend that film for a more in-depth look at how real journalism works and why it achieves something the aggregators never will.

Help Kickstart Julia

Some good friends of mine are working to take Julia, an original play by Vince Melocchi, from the Pacific Resident Theater in Venice to the Off Broadway theater 59e59.  I was lucky enough to see the show just before they opened in December, and it's absolutely a great piece of theater.

Check out the video for more information, and kick in a few bucks if you can over at their Kickstarter page.  If you live in SoCal or NYC, check the play out.

Film Advocacy Day

Sugar, filming in the QC

When the Iowa film tax credit program was suspended, the Iowa Film Office was also closed - effectively closing down all fimmaking in the state.  Today, we are asking Gov. Branstad to reopen and staff the Film Office and allow this industry to thrive.

It's important to understand the Film Office and the tax credit program are not the same thing.  The Film Office has existed since the 1980s as a resource for producers looking to film in Iowa.  It connects those producers with crew, locations and other resources in Iowa.  It was responsible for bringing high-profile features such as Field of Dreams and Bridges of Madison County to the state, along with countless commercials and other productions.

Essentially, the Film Office is there to let producers know Iowa is open for business.  But now the office has no full-time staff, no clear contact information, and only a website full of outdated and misleading information.  The message to producers is clear: Iowa is not open for business.

The Film Alliance of Iowa - a new organization made up of filmmakers and business leaders throughout the state - is asking for you to CONTACT GOV. BRANSTAD TODAY asking that the Iowa Film Office be re-opened and staffed.

Here's how you can contact the Governor:

Phone: 515-281-5211

E-mail: info@terrybranstad.com

Twitter: @terrybranstad

Facebook: Terry Branstad

Here's a suggested message, from the FAI:  We respectfully request reinstating a sufficiently funded Iowa Film Office, staffed with adequate, qualified and experienced staffing. The sooner this happens, the sooner Iowa can best attract production companies to add jobs and economic development to our State's economy, especially through a new Iowa production guide establishing access to Iowa's crew, talent and resources, which will help create a strong film industry.


Also - please help spread the word about Film Advocacy Day.  Post this information to Twitter or Facebook.  Bask in the karma of doing a good deed.


To keep up to date, you can also follow the Film Alliance of Iowa on Facebook.

True/False 2011: Truth Harder

This ain't Twilight. It's a friggin' documentary.

2011 was my third year in a row at the True/False Film Festival, and I can't imagine why I wouldn't go back again next year.

It's hard to describe just how great the vibe in the town is - thousands milling around and lining up around the blocks to watch documentaries.  When I miss a film at the festival - and it's impossible to see them all - and watch them months later at home, I regret not seeing them in the Missouri Theater with 1,000 others.  I missed WasteLand at last year's festival, and as the accolades and Oscar nomination have piled up, I haven't stopped kicking myself.

Probably my favorite film this year was Life in a Day - the doc culled from a day's worth of videos uploaded to YouTube.  Given that pedigree, I had some reservations, as director Kevin MacDonald said he did.  I'm a pretty hardcore cynic, but you'd have to be even more cynical than me to not be moved by the film MacDonald and crew put together.  Life in a Day has elements of narrative, but it's more a symphony of tone, framing the highs and lows of human experience.

Sure, you could call it a gimmick.  But it is a technical achievement that wouldn't even have been possible a few years ago.  If someone offers to show you what is going on around the entire world on a single day, how could you say no?

The quality of the curation goes even deeper.  The shorts program Landmarks & Monoliths featured five shorts which all revolved around the relationship between people and the environments they've built around them.  Minka, directed by Davina Pardo, very delicately explored the lives of two longtime male companions around the story of how they rebuilt an ancient Japanese farm house as their home.

Let's be honest, shorts programs always center around a theme.  But they rarely come together into much more than "here's a few films which kind of relate to each other."

To quote the Portlandia theme song, the spirit of the 90s is alive in (Columbia).  I finally got a chance to eat an truly amazing breakfast at Cafe Berlin.  Booches still dishes out the best hamburgers I've ever been served on wax paper.

I realize I come on like the Convention & Visitors Bureau, but such is my love for this festival and the people who put it on.  If you Googled your way to this post and have read this far, you owe it to yourself to check out True/False for yourself.

Troll Hunter, The Arbor and blurring lines

Troll!!!

Troll Hunter and The Arbor may only have two things in common.  Both screened at this year's True/False Film Festival, and both blur the lines between documentary and narrative fiction.  I liked The Arbor better.

I was looking forward to Troll Hunter as a fan of comedy, bizarro subject matter and Norwegians.  I knew going in that the film was largely invented, with CGI trolls and all.  I guess I thought the filmmakers extrapolated from some kernel of truth - perhaps playing out some crazy guy's stories.  But the film is 100% invention, much in the vein of Blair Witch or Cloverfield.

There are some genuinely funny moments, and the filmmakers get a lot of mileage from just a little bit of troll footage.  Unlike many mockumentaries, they stay completely true to documentary style found footage.  But once it's clear the film is all invention, I wanted the pacing and beats of a narrative arc.  If you don't have the storytelling of narrative and you don't have the "reality" of documentary, what do you have?

Worth shooting with actors just for a bitchin' shot like this.

Whereas Troll Hunter is a fiction narrative trying to look like a documentary, The Arbor is a documentary made to look like fiction.  The film consists of audio interviews with its subjects, with actors on screen lip-synching to their words.

It's the story of British playwright Andrea Dunbar, whose teenage accounts of life in The Estate (the projects) brought her some prominence in the 80s.  Dunbar's hard drinking and hard living led to three children from three fathers and her death at just 29.  Her children, especially the oldest, struggled to get on without falling down the same path as their mother.

The lip-synching technique is a bit jarring at first, but often you forget it's even there.  But Director Clio Barnard wants the audience to remain aware that there is a level of manipulation and storytelling in what they are watching.  (I asked her.)  What really made the technique connect is that, in the same way Andrea's plays were a dramatic recreation of her life's events, the documentary is a sort-of recreation based on the stories the people in her life have told.

Coming on the heels of a year when Catfish and Exit Through the Gift Shop sparked a lot of debate about the blending of truth and fiction in docs, The Arbor and Troll Hunter illustrate that the blending of styles hinges on which elements you hold onto.

Page One: Journalism vs. Technology

A key moment in Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times comes subtly, in footage from one of many panels on "the death of newspapers."  Someone from the news aggregator Newser makes the blanket claim that media companies are in the technology business.

It's hardly new to kick newspapers around for being slow or inept at embracing new technologies.  But Page One makes a much needed counterargument - these technology companies are also in the journalism business.  Or at least they should be.

Times Reporter David Carr - the real star of the film - responds by showing the Newser front page with every piece of content gathered from a traditional news agency cut-out, leaving just a page full of holes.  In another clip, David Simon points out he's never seen a reporter from the Huffington Post at a Baltimore Zoning Board meeting.

But the real argument for the relevance of the journalist comes from watching the entire machine of the New York Times.  Editors stay long into the night debating the relevance of a story, is the angle right, is it even a story at all?  These are conversations I recognize from my days in newspaper, but it's a side of the job not often seen.

Contrasting this is the office of aggregator Gawker, where writers gather around the "big board" - a screen which constantly updates with the top ten stories readers are viewing.  The implication is to serve the audience by scrambling to give them what they want, to grab clicks with headlines that play into common search terms, etc.

In a Q&A after the screening at True/False, David Carr said that the Times is becoming more like Gawker, and Gawker is becoming more like the Times.  Perhaps modern news reporting is one part journalism and one part technology.  But the technology side has taken a lot of credit in recent years, and reveled in kicking the journalists while they're down.  Score this one for the journalists.

Premium Pricing; Premium Experience?

We know about the premium price tag on 3-D movies.  This morning, I learned my local Cinemark theater is now also charging a premium for 2-D movies in something they call "XD."  What is XD?  I'll let them explain:

Cinemark XD is an Extreme Digital Experience where viewers get face-to-face with the action and experience cinema like never before! Extra large, extreme entertainment for the senses. Mega-sized ceiling-to-floor screens, wrap-around custom sound and a maximum comfort entertainment environment ensure that every seat is an intense sensory experience.

Huh the huh?  Is it me, or does that description sound like a Mountain Dew commercial?  I could barely get through the paragraph without jumping out of a plane on a snowboard.

But if we cut out the EXTREME jargon, I think we're left with:

• Bigger screen
• Better sound system
• Comfier chairs

Those are all nice.  And for the matinees I was looking at today, the XD experience will set you back $12, whereas the traditional showings are $6.50.

Now I've been in the XD theater at my local multiplex, for a 3-D showing of Despicable Me.  I guess it was a somewhat larger screen than other auditoriums.  I don't remember being wowed by the sound or my ass feeling especially well-cushioned.  So I'll probably keep that extra $5.50 in my pocket.

The exhibition business is rough, so I hold no ill-will toward even the mega-chains for getting creative to make ends meet.  But there are things that can be done to make movie going a truly "premium" experience.

In LA, I often go to the Arclight Hollywood.  Premium pricing gets you an actual reserved seat, an usher to monitor the auditorium and quality of the projection/sound, and access to a snack bar with higher-quality eats and alcohol.  Whether that's worth the extra bump in price is up for debate, but for me it is, and at least you can point to some tangible "premium" features.

It's tricky to create tiers based on "quality," as Cinemark is doing.  Does this mean the showings in the other auditoriums are shit?  Shouldn't the projection and sound be excellent in all your auditoriums?

The cynical reaction - and I'm not sure it's wrong here - is that Cinemark XD is just a way to charge a higher rate for a few showings even when there's not a 3-D film in that auditorium.  At the least, it seems likely the vaguery of the perks will make movie-goers skeptical of premium pricing in general.