Facebook, Twitter, Open Indie, Kickstarter — are these new media tools fulfilling their great promise for indie filmmakers? Or are they just a drag?
I address this question in my latest Industry Beat column for Filmmaker Magazine, “DIWO Realities: Why Won’t Kickstarter and Twitter Save Indie Film.” I’d like to think of the article as a corrective to all the rah-rah boosterism, looking at this stuff in a more realistic way.
Here’s the lede: “While social media’s cheerleaders are many — Scott Kirsner, Lance Weiler, Ted Hope, Peter Broderick, Jon Reiss — the solvency of an Internet-enabled DIY filmmaking-and-distribution model is far from guaranteed. At this early stage, the successes are few and far between (Tze Chun’s Sundance drama Children of Invention; Franny Armstrong’s eco-doc The Age of Stupid), and some are calling a sustainable indie-film infrastructure built around crowd-funding and social-network marketing a naïve proposal.”
A hearty debate is already brewing in the comments section. Writes one reader, John Wayne Bosley: “You could essentially have the most successful crowdfunding campaign ever, but it doesn’t prove you have an audience.”
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