Oh how I love this man

I was speaking at Screen’s Maximising Digital Rights Value conference about a month ago. Surrounded by layers of lawyers (including the lovely James Kay, slingshot’s very own shyster) as well as by Revolver’s Justin Maccacio, who feels like a bit a kindred spirit, I was asked what I thought was holding up the pace of innovation and digital revolution in the UK. My answer had surprising amounts to do with goats. Then a few weeks later, I was an after - actually during - dinner speaker at a Breakthrough Brits event, and was asked a similar question.
Between the two events, I had the chance to start to articulate a theory that’s been growing in me for a while about innovation in an established industry. Here, in 4 brief bullet points it is. I call it the Theory of the Goat People.

• Innovation in a hybrid world, part analogue, part digital is tough. Because as long as you are still dependent on the traditional, analogue gate-keepers to generate revenue for you; you have to play by their rules.
• One case in point: windows. If you are reliant on cinemas to show your film, you have to accept their exclusivity window. So any type of innovation - be it VOD previews; or premium VOD etc is severely constrained. So despite the widespread acceptance - and indeed evidence from the IFCs First Take experiment in the US - that this method of release does better for the films without hurting cinemas attendances. Whilst I’m using windows as the example,a nd its one of the biggest ones, the theory hold through across the whole spectrum of digital innovation: DRM, free to consumer content, re-faishoning,
• So most of the innovation happens by people who don’t care about pissing of traditional analogue gate-keepers. That means that they are people who are either so powerful that they can afford to piss of traditional gate keepers, i.e. the studios who can say, take my product whatever the terms OR they are people so far on the fringes that they don’t really need the traditional gate-keepers, because their product is made so cheaply, and appeals so directly to a niche audience that they can bypass the gate-keepers altogether. This latter category, I’ve christened ‘goat-people’ because one category of them are people making very special interest documentaries, like on goat-rearing, or Vespa Enthusiasts, or New Age Beliefs, or Sports Heroes, or Cult Artists etc - which can reach out to their audiences directly via the net and sell directly both physically or by downloads.

So innovation happens at the fringe and at the center. But not where the vast majority of the British Film industry lives - in the middle. This presents all sorts of problems - it means Slingshot and all our peers, who want to be innovating, are structurally inhibited from doing so because we ARE reliant on the status quo so can’t shake the boat.

That kind of sucks. We are looking at some ways to worry less about the boat and more about goats. We’ve just applied to take part in NESTA’s digital film innovation program, which on the face of it is a thoughtful way to instigate innovation in the middle. Watch this space to see how we do.

ps - Just in case you think I am kidding about the goat people, here are some examples: documentaries about Fainting Goats, Pygmy Goats,  Socially Relevant Goats.
 Goat Movie 1, Goat Movie 2, Goat Movie 3

So I didn’t watch the Rugby this weekend. Or rather I did. but not the England-France match. I did catch the last half of South Africa’s rout of the Argentines.
Since I am, more or less, British, and since I have just finished making a movie about British - French rivalry, this decision might strike many as odd.

I was discussing this with a friend, explaining that on the whole I rather watch movies than sport, and in exasperation he said to me “but nobody wins in movies!  I mean they are fun, but its a different TYPE of fun. Nobody wins!”

Fair point.

Or is it.

Thinking about it, I come to realise that the reason I prefer the narrative of most fiction to the narrative of sport is PRECISELY BECAUSE in good fiction nobody wins. Because life, unlike sport, is more complex than winning and losing. And so is the business of film-making
But you wouldn’t know that from reading about the business of film-making in the press. According to the press, both trade and national, film-making is entirely about winning. About winning the weekend box office. About topping last weekend, or last years, or last Augusts. The highest three day weekend in box office history, the highest 2nd weekend in September in Box Office History. The biggest opening of a James Bond movie in a leap year since Goldfinger.

Honestly, who cares.
Well, you might think I should. I am after all now a film distributor, and we are supposed to care about such stuff. The studio boss with his finger on the pulse of the box office numbers, staying up late every Friday night to see the opening night figures in from EDI is a figure of movie legend. Surely I should care.

And in one sense, of course I do. Even if I wasn’t a distributor, I have long maintained that all involved in the film business need to be conversant in the fact that it is a business, and should take a healthy interest in the number side of things, since numbers are after all the same thing as audience.

So what’s my beef?

Well I have two, actually.

First I don’t understand why the public should care about the box office of a film. What conceivable difference can it make to their enjoyment of a particular movie to know that it is the 26th highest grossing movie with a title with 4 Rs in it or not?

All the film-going public should care is whether the movie is any good or not, and if they in particular will like it. They can get the first information from a reviewer, or an aggregation of reviewers such as rotten tomato; and they can get the second set of information from asking a friend who knows their taste and has seen it, or from such peer review sites as Flixster. None of that information comes from knowing the opening weekend numbers. When you buy a car, you don’t ask how many other people have the same one - you want to know that it is properly engineered, safe, efficient and sexy looking. When you buy a tooth-paste, you don’t check that it is the best selling tooth-paste; when you choose a new partner, you don’t want to know that they’ve slept with more people than anyone else in the world.

Why should movies be different? How did a discussion of box office somehow escape from the business pages and make it into the culture pages? How did we come to confuse popularity with quality? Oscar Wilde once remarked that there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. A book is either well written or badly written, that is all. If you believe the vast majority of our press, there is no longer such a thing as a good movie or a bad movie - a movie is either a block-buster or it is nothing.

My second beef (you remember, I had a pair of them) is about the industry.  Now, of course we have to care about the numbers, but here my concern is that we are fixating on the WRONG numbers. Never mind that Box Office itself represents only a small share of a movies ultimate audience; and never mind that the co-relation between Box Office and, for example, DVD sales is far from perfect; the real problem with a fixation on Box Office is that it completely fails to distinguish cost and return. The interesting question is not how many people went to see a particular movie, but how much did it cost to get them there.

To take an extreme example, which would you adjudge more successful, a movie with a production budget of $1m and a marketing budget of $500k that succeeded in a UK Box Office of $1m, or a movie with a production budget of $100m, and a marketing budget of $5m that resulted in a UK box office of $5m?

And in case that seems to leading or unrealistic an example, consider as recent a movie as SUPERMAN RETURNS, which took $30m at the UK Box Office, which sounds pretty damn healthy, till you realise the movie cost $270m to make and had a UK marketing spend of circa $10m. Contrast that with, say RUN FAT BOY RUN which is close to taking $20m at the UK Box Office for a budget of around a 10th of SUPERMAN. Does that mean that Simon Pegg’s flabby jogger is a greater hero than the Man of Steel? Or that David Schwimmer is a greater director than Bryan Synger? No, but on this evidence he’s a more profitable one. Not that the Box Office would have told you than.

We need new better metrics, and headlines less obsessed with Box Office.

Sorry its been so quiet on the slingblog these past few weeks and months. There’s been a lot going on in the real world. In no particular order:

- We’ve been locking picture on FRENCH FILM; which we are really delighted with. Its turned into a hugely romantic, very funny but still very intelligent movie. A tribute to the talents of writer and director and our wonderful cast and crew. The website will be going live over the next month and then there will be chances to catch previews and get involved in the run up to the pictures UK release, which should be in Q1 next year.

- We’re in prep on FAINTHEART which starts shooting in 4 short weeks. In addition to all the excitement and business in the film itself (Vikings! Romans! an Owl called Odin! A P.E. teacher called Gary!) is the excitement of the experimentation that we get to do with MySpace in really involving all of you out there in the film-making process. MySpace is calling it “the world’s first user generated film”, I think a more accurate description would be a mixture between open-process and open-source. The trick is working out which bits can be open source (e.g. choosing the bad, cutting multiple trailers) and which need the controlling minds of the film-makers but can be open process to observers. Its a careful balance and I think we will learn much from the process

- we’ve also got our first DVD release going on, and if you are a fan of Gypsy music and charismatic front-men, run do not work to the PIED PIPER OF HUTZOVINIA website and check out this wonderful tale of Eugene Hutz, lead singer of Punk-Gypsy sensation GOGOL BORDELLO, and also check out in glimering newness our DVD store, yes we are an e-talier now. Gosh.

Amidst all of that, we continue to be on the look out for fresh new projects and will shortly be announcing our 2008 slate, or rather I should say, our joint slate with the BBC (see below announcement our our co-dev, co-finance deal with them); and also are fundraising like busy bees to support the expansion of our distribution business.

On a personal note, it has been no less busy - I’ve also moved house (and now even own a new bed) and sadly, have parted ways from the lovely Kate; so am now sling-single ;-(.

So amidst all that I hope you will forgive me for not being too active on the blog. The real world has kind of taken over. But here I am, back with you, where I belong on the blogosphere. Soon you will forget I was ever away, and be wishing for me to leave you alone again…

If you are a friend or supporter of slingshot and our first movie SUGARHOUSE, we really need you to go see the film this weekend. The reason is this: if not enough people see it in its opening weekend, the cinemas will pull it next week and it will never get to a second week, and all our work will be for nothing, and a film that the BBC calls “bristling and brutal…. an unusually solid piece of British film-making” will be consigned to the DVD bin of cinema history.

Its as terrifyingly simple as that.

I know many of you want to see it, but if like so many, you are thinking”its finally sunny, I’ll catch movies next weekend when it is rainy again” I have to tell you that if you don’t go and see it tonight or Monday, you might never have the chance. That’s the brutal reality of the UK cinema circuits.

If the film doesn’t pull an audience on opening weekend, the powers that be can it.

And if that happens, two years of hard work and sweat that went into making a film that Jason Solomons of The Observer descibes as “a funny, furious and frightening little film…. with magnetic performances…. and a script that bristles with threat and misunderstanding. After years of trying, London film at last has its Tarantino moment - if not quite Reservoir, then certainly Walthamstow Dogs.” will go the way of the Dodo.

We at slingshot have put two years of our lives on this film. That of course isn’t your problem, but it does seem terrifyingly unfair that two years can be decided in the one sunniest weekend of August. This film deserves to be seen in the cinema. If you don’t see it this weekend, you might never have the chance to.

At the moment its on 43 cinemas across the UK, you can see details of where and book tickets right here

Please see our film.