Dare to dream

By DTL
Posted June 29, 2010

If you’re like me (and who wouldn’t want to be like me?), you want to make movies. And if you’re like me (and here it’s perhaps slightly less good to be like me), you don’t have lots of contacts in Hollywood — or even Toronto — who will give you the resources and help you need to make movies. But if you’re like me (and here you should be like me), you’re not going to let that deter you; you’re going to make movies anyway — on your own, away from The Industry. You’re going to become an independent movie-production studio.

Making a movie is simply using moving pictures and sound to tell a story. If you’re independent, you don’t have to report to anyone, so you can tell any kind of story you want. You don’t have to get anybody else’s approval.

The price of shooting a movie on video and editing it on computer has come down to the point that anyone with a middle-class income can afford to make a movie. A movie that would have cost millions of dollars forty years ago, or hundreds of thousands of dollars twenty years ago, can now be made for only a few thousand bucks — or maybe less, depending on how inventive you can be.

These days there’s no such thing as the mass media. There really is only one mass medium. The people have made their decision, and their drug of choice is television. Most movies will be watched by most people at home on TV. I don’t have a purist’s emotional attachment to film or to the theatrical experience. True, for most of the medium’s history, movies were made to be seen with an audience in a theatre — but that’s just because that was the only way to deliver a movie. Until the 1950s there was no television; if you wanted to see a comedy or a drama, you went to the theatre. Until the 1980s there was no home video; if you wanted to laugh or cry, you went to the theatre. But today, everybody has a VCR and a DVD player and Blu-Ray spinner — not to mention a computer for watching YouTube videos or downloads from The Pirate Bay.

This is good for us. In times past, perhaps you could scrape up the money, make a 16 mm movie, and try to interest a distributor in taking it on. But today the gatekeepers who book movies into theatres can’t stop us from bypassing them entirely and peddling our movies directly to viewers. It’s never been as easy for anyone — me, you, her — to make a movie and have people watch it.

Can you earn enough money to recoup your costs, and allow you to make another and even more ambitious movie? Can you maybe even earn enough money making movies to do it full time, for a living? Ah, these remain the great unanswered questions! But we’ll never find out if we don’t try.