Rumblings From the Indie Film Scene

No love for Seattle in Park City this year. (photo by Image.net)

It was kind of depressing, as I recently searched the Sundance and Slamdance rosters, to find an absence of Seattle-made movies there. A prior blog post only turned up a couple filmmakers with Northwest roots. Then, looking ahead to the spring season here in town preceding SIFF (which begins May 22), I couldn't find much other indigenous film activity in the offing. Certainly our Feb. 20 Spring Arts Guide will include some notable movies and worthwhile series, but the quality will be imported, not homemade.

That in mind, I recently sat down for coffee with one of the city's more accomplished and prolific filmmakers, Gregg Lachow, to catch up with his plans. Yes, he's starting a new company, he told me. But while the business plan was conceived last fall here in Seattle, it's to be implemented in New York. After almost 20 years of working in local film (and occasionally theater), he seems rather pessimistic about our indie scene. "The non-profit model is dead," he told me. "It doesn't work." (I didn't take notes, so no more quotes.) Likewise, he's not a believer in financing project-by-project, which is the norm for first-timers who finance their celluloid dreams via plastic credit cards. Nor does he care to repeat the experience of The Film Company, a local non-profit venture he helped found two years ago as a kind of mini-studio using the same regular crew, facilities, and talent.

The Film Company did produce results, including Brian Short's All My Love, Lynn Shelton's We Go Way Back, and Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain!, which essentially put the company out of business.

The latter film was made by an out-of-town Canadian ringer known for his sometimes brilliant pastiches of silent-era techniques and tropes, and it also incorporated live performance aspects, making it ridiculously expensive to stage. (This it had in common with Lachow's own Silence!) It was also an example of a filmmaker, not from Seattle, stretching his limited ideas too far for an even more limited budget. The Film Company lives on, if in name only, with Lachow's former partner Jamie Hook (co-founder of the Northwest Film Forum, which continues to help fund and produce films). But he, too, has gone to New York.

Where does that leave the locals? I've got in my computer at least two dozen press releases from various Seattle-centric features in progress. But most are still raising money, alluding vaguely to future start dates, with no guaranteed prospects for finishing their pictures or ever getting them seen beyond YouTube or the occasional pay-for-the-privilege engagement at the Rendezvous-Jewel Box or Central Cinema. In escalating order of difficulty, it's easy to write a press release (or solicitation letter), harder to self-finance a movie, and near impossible to secure national distribution.

That last step, getting already completed movies into theaters, will be the kernel of Lachow's new business plan in New York. Yes he intends to create more of his own movies, he told me, but this time he's putting the cart before the horse. And the distribution biz is no less daunting than filmmaking itself. To cite a convenient example, our Landmark Theatres circuit (Harvard Exit, Egyptian, Seven Gables, etc.) is owned by Internet billionaire Mark Cuban, who also controls HDnet and Magnolia Pictures, meaning he can take the same finished movie and deliver it to consumers in at least three ways. That's not even counting digital downloads from iTunes, Netflix, Amazon's Unbox service, and so forth. And let's not forget DVD, where an awful lot of Sundance darlings end up, bypassing theaters and heading straight to the shelves at Scarecrow or your Netflix queue.

But Lachow isn't an Internet billionaire, and he doesn't own a network. And while Paul Allen has bankrolled a few feature films (Titus, Far From Heaven) and invested in the DreamWorks movie studio, there's no sign he wants to become a content delivery mogul. (Though he does own a cable company and may bid on some frequency that would allow him to send movies over a wireless network.)

Lachow would like to see Allen, Bill Gates, and other local tech-money philanthropists invest more in the arts, instead of, say, adding more buildings to the Lakeside School campus with their names on them. A Harvard man (like Gates), Lachow naturally cites the arts patronage model of the Medicis in Venice. But movies are ephemeral, while those plaques on the UW Allen Library or Benaroya Hall are forever. Even those rich Seattle families with taste and money (the Wrights, the Alhadeffs, etc.) tend to put their money into enduring gallery art--whether in private collections or on public display at SAM. (And when was the last time you ever saw a Seattle-made movie at SAM?) Thus the role of Jon and Mary Shirley at the Olympic Sculpture Park. Movies can be downloaded and eventually wiped from your hard drive; not so with Richard Serra.

As I write, Carl Spence and other SIFF programmers are busy scouting at Sundance (as at Toronto last fall, Berlin, Rotterdam, and the forthcoming South by Southwest festival). What will they find back home? Not much more than I'm finding. No Outsourced. No The Heart of the Game. No Police Beat. No Zoo. (And even if I didn't like their last effort, hats off to Robinson Devor and The Stranger's Charles Mudede, who have announced three new projects this year. Pretentious? Maybe, but at least they're industrious.)

What will follow is what I call the SIFF pity effect: Let a few local filmmakers show their features, even if not in final form, even if no other festival would have them, even if they're never seen again. Recent exceptions have been Walking to Werner and Apart From That, whose Skagit County filmmakers are now selling their own DVD online.

Does this mean 2008 is bound to be a bad year for local film? Not at all, there could be breakouts from the pack of features-in-progress. Let's hope that SIFF proves wrong these initially unpromising signs of the new year. Just don't expect any new mini-studios to form. Or for rich patrons to magically unfold their wallets. Or, as Lachow's departure reminds us, for the talent drain to NYC and LA to reverse itself.