If you have a kid and are trying to get him to move to China and get a job rather than hanging around your basement with a camcorder and a copy of Adobe Premiere, make him read The Reel Truth: Everything You Didn’t Know You Need to Know About Making an Independent Film
The book is interesting in the same way that a train wreck is interesting. You’ll be amazed that any U.S. movie ever gets made outside of a studio, given the tangle of laws and the difficulty of getting so many loosely affiliated Americans to cooperate.
Is your kid a great storyteller? A wizard with lighting and videography? A brilliant video editor? A good director? That’s wonderful. He or she has all of the skills necessary to make a wonderful movie that can be shown to the rest of the family, albeit possibly in violation of the DCMA and other statutes. The book will convince him that he has less than 5 percent of what it takes to make a movie and show it legally to a group of fellow Americans.
This may be more of an indictment of the “old” way of making and profiting from films. It does seem difficult to beat the studios at a game they’ve been rigging for decades. However, assuming her subject matter doesn’t require excerpts from popular music, film, or television, what would stop a filmmaker from just posting what she has online, for free, for pay, or for some enterprising combination of free and paid access? If film really is art (and not, as one might suspect, a giant marketing exercise), surely viewers may be had online?
I guess the viability of film as an occupation depends very much on what one wants out of her occupation. If one needs to be the next Coppola or Scorsese, film is probably not a good idea. With more realistic expectations, there’s probably something tenable out there for someone who loves film.
Every book I’ve read about independent filmmaking is discouraging. I get the impression that an iron will and brass balls are the most important traits for an independent filmmaker, with filmmaking talent a distant third.
And then there’s Robert Rodriguez… although according to his book “Rebel without a crew” he was simply aiming at the Spanish language video market when he made “La Mariachi” and achieved success beyond his wildest dreams.
If you watch that movie it’s hard to believe it was made by one guy with one camera and volunteer actors. Hollywood does reward real talent. An unknown M Night Shyamalan not only sold his spec script for Sixth Sense without someone stealing the idea, he got himself the director’s chair as well. But for someone with less than outstanding talent, perhaps the cautionary tale is justified.
To some extent, Clerks and The Blair Witch Project puts a lie to this. But the story has to be extremely novel or compelling – enough so that the low production values and lack of a soundtrack becomes a feature rather than a bug.
Budget Film Boi: The two successful films that you cite are not evidence of anything except sample bias, unless you also know how many people tried to do films like Clerks and the Blair Witch Project and failed. It doesn’t make sense to say “Tom Cruise is a successful actor and therefore I have a good chance of making a comfortable living as an actor.”