Assignment 6: Sex, Lies, and Videotape

Alisa Perren, “sex, lies and marketing”

1.1989 was considered a transitional year for independent distribution because many independent distributors that started in the beginning of the 80s with the introduction of video overextended themselves and began spending a larger budget on in-house productions, creating a fear of the death of independent distributors.  An indie blockbuster is a film that replicates the "exploitation marketing and box office performance of major-studio pictures" but on a smaller scale, with a similar cost-to-earning ratio. This caused many big production companies to create a smaller division to produce smaller-scale productions, such as Fox Searchlight and Miramax.

2. Miramax distributed films that were quality pictures (had artistic value), nonclassical and focused on nonconventional subjects and styles, and they found marketing hooks that would help films transition from the arthouse to the multiplex. They also limited their spending and aimed for acquisitions rather than actual producing, and restricted their releasing schedule.

3. RCA/Columbia Home Video and Virgin financed it, but allowed Miramax to distribute it because they thought that the word "videotape" being in the title would make people think it was low-quality and shot on videotape, so they didn't approve of it.  Miramax pursued the rights so aggressively because it won awards and had a great turn-out at Sundance Film Festival, and they were determined to market it.

4. A key promotion strategy was to promote it as if it were a big-budget, mainstream film.  Also, they "found their audience", not hope that the audience found them.  They appealed to niche audiences by using a high degree of control on the marketing of the film, and in careful construction of their ads, including award listings for the arthouse niche,and reviews such as "intense comedy" for the college students.

5. Their films complimented, rather than competed with, what the major studios were producing.  They would release their films in only a few theaters at first and allow it to spread, so that it was advertised by word of mouth and built on positive reviews.  That way it combatted a lack of quality product when the blockbusters began to lack.

6. Because if an event film flops in the US, such as a film with Sylvester Stallone, it will still do pretty well in the foreign market.  These middle class films use universal marketing hooks, such as star power, to appeal to wide audiences, and can span the globe, rather than an indie film.  Malin's foresight also comes from his mention of sex, lies, and videotape being higher "quality", which distinguishes these films from industrial films, and yet making them similar because they were marketed with "all Hollywood has to offer and then some" because they have more sex, violence, and risky subject matter.

7. "Independent" eventually came to be not so different from Hollywood films because, like Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting, they used major stars, scripts from established screenwriters, and featured classical filmmaking, and so "independence" served as a tool of the press and the industry.  The "Year of the Independents" at the Oscars was ironic because although 4 of the 5 films nominated for best picture were independents, they were all produced by subsidiaries of major production companies. Some repercussions of the bifurcation of the industry are that Hollywood versus independents established their own looks: Hollywood was glossy with high production value, and independents were gritty and full of edgy content. Also, the films needed a specially-defined niche audience.

Assignment 5: Elephant

1. I thought that what Van Sant said about heterosexual white male directors was interesting.  As a gay director, he is the underdog, which is a recurring theme in his films.  I think his reasoning for keeping the kissing scene was good, because he took into consideration the reactions it  would receive, and he did not take it out specifically for that reason, because he didn't want to take it out for the wrong reasons.  I think it's cool that he thinks of it primarily as a high school movie, about disconnections between people, rather than just a school shooting film.  

  I also enjoyed reading his opinion of Psycho.  He thought it was completely different from Hitchcock's, which is interesting since it was a shot for shot, and explained that he treated the actors as humans and Hitchcock used them as "archetypes".  He also mentioned throughout the interview how audiences read into his films at times, which we touched on in class, so maybe meanings are constructed that he did not originally intend.

2. He said that when you're writing a screenplay there's not "a lot of room for the fun stuff", and you are following the strict parameters of what is in the script, so for Elephant, he did not write a script, he just had a storyline, characters, and had the actors improvise on the set. This was relying on "ordinary conversations, not scripted conversations". This allowed him to concentrate more on the visual style, and his story line turned into a map of the high school.

3. It is different because it moves back in time to show crucial events for later in the story. The temporal structure is very complex.

4. The unrecognized aspect of Elephant's time frame is that right before the shooting, the timeframe "closely approximates real time". He observes that the long, continuous tracking shots emphasize a long duration of the events. The third act has a lot of shorter cuts, twice the amount of shots in each of the other acts, which make the events of the third act feel more intense and chaotic.

5. It is different because not many character traits are given. He reveals little, with tracking shots we are able to view the character, but not dig down and know what they are thinking or how they are feeling. These strategies relate to the high school experience because Van Sant is saying that the teenagers are in disconnect, just how high school creates disconnections between the teenagers, and there is a disconnect between the students and the authority figures.

Aaron Meskin, “Authorship”Skepticism about (cinematic) authorship
6. Stephen Heath's criticism of authorship is that you must also take into consideration the context in which a film is made, so the reception of the viewers and the context of the time all come into play on how a film must be analyzed, not just base it on what the director put into the text. Edward Buscombe agrees that one must look at the context in which a film is made to analyze it. This will contextualize our discussions of Van Sant, and plays into our discussion on Psycho, and how his was different because it did not have the shock factor that the original Psycho had because it was made in the 60s, before everyone knew that she was stabbed in the shower.

7. Barthes and Foucault think we'd be better off without authorship because it limits art, and without it there would be more freedom, art would exist in a "free state". Meskin disagrees, he thinks that the extent that authorship controls a work is overstated, and that too much freedom would be negative, and would take away from the work as a whole. Too much information can be destructive or distracting.

8. One argument is that the director makes the decision of what elements to use, and by choosing what goes into a film he is controlling the essence of the film, even if it is in the mainstream film system. Arguments against solo authorship in commercial filmmaking are that the director does not have as much control as he or she is believed to, and that the control a director has may not be seen as authorship, and you must evaluate the meaning of authorship. This debate relates to our discussions on Van Sant because a few of his films are considered more mainstream, such as Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, and also has mainstream producers.

9. The shift is meant to distinguish from the "empirical author" and the author as effected by the text. The shift is meant to address the idea that a film is made by a group but has the stamp of one "author". An argument for this concept is that the author construct gives an explanation for the coherence we sense in a collaborative film. Arguments against it are that a group can organize itself to produce a unified product, it is not necessarily the doing of one individual person. Also, we cannot assume what a person produces reflects on that person. This debate relates to Van Sant in many ways. He is gay, is that why some of his films incorporate homosexual themes? He is from Portland, is that why his films are mostly set in Portland? How much does Van Sant's life have to do with his films? What about Elephant, does it reflect him, too? I don't think so, so to what extent does he, as an individual, come across in his films?