We Are Not Alone

Or at least I'm not anyhow. I devoted this blog to ruminations about a digital revolution. I'm convinced that artists will come out holding the reins of content in the long run. And just when I start to wonder if I'm wrong--that big studio control is here to stay for my lifetime--I read words like this:

At the moment, the smart money may be going small budget. Just recently, wealthy individuals, pooling their money in hedge funds, have begun setting up deals not with studios but with successful producers like Joel Silver and producer-directors like Ivan Reitman. The production money will go to genre films—thrillers and comedies and horror pictures—in the low-budget (about twenty-million-dollar) range. John C. Malone, the chairman of Liberty Media Corporation, is opening his own studio to make movies on a similar scale. Some of these pictures will undoubtedly be routine, but the relatively low stakes could also allow producers to hire writers and directors who are willing to do more daring work, the way B-movie directors, toiling quietly on back lots, did sixty years ago.

Films made fast and cheap in this way would still need studio distribution and marketing, but once the theatres go digital that may no longer be true. Distribution is the key to freedom. In the future, what is to stop a group of producers, directors, and writers from forming a coöperative, raising money for a slate of films, and hiring non-studio distribution and promotion people to get the movies to digitized theatres—liberating themselves at last?

Check the full article over at The New Yorker.