Actually, Chris, I'm trying to agree with you. My point is that if you want
to make $800,000 "indie" films (which is what I contend Richard Dutcher is
doing, and no shame in that per se), then you're ultimately going to have to
reach beyond the Utah/Mormon market to achieve financial solvency.
What you are actually describing in your most recent post is the tried and
true 80/20 rule of marketing. That is, 80 percent of profits come from 20
percent of inventory. This is also known as the law of "hits," because that
20 percent represents what the greatest number of people have in common.
Studios invest heavily in potential blockbusters with the widest possible
appeal hoping that the few films that gross over $100 million will drag
everything else into the black.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
The Internet age hasn't invalidated the 80/20 rule, but has added some
fascinating footnotes. Most notably, in terms of what Chris Anderson calls
the "long tail," after the power-law curve encompassing that other 80
percent trailing off to infinity. It looks like a long tail attached to the
fat body of the 20 percent of "hits" (or bestsellers, or blockbusters, or
"name brands").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail
But if you can figure out a way to aggregate that other 80 percent of
inventory at little additional cost to the retailer, then whole new markets
open up. A brick & mortar store (bookstores, video stores, theaters, etc.)
can't afford to stock or show anything but a random smattering of the "long
tail." But Amazon and Netflix, to provide two examples, can add additional
titles to their catalogs and ship them to you at minimal additional
overhead.
However, the simple elegance of the long tail curve can be very deceptive in
one respect: drawn in two dimensions, it makes it look like those niche
markets on the "tail" necessarily clump up. They don't. Rather, consumer
tastes should be plotted as spreading out in three dimensions in
inverse-square fashion, with that core 20 percent tightly packed in the
center.
(Slate has a funny article about how Netflix queues reveal personal tastes
at the margins to be highly idiosyncratic:
http://www.slate.com/id/2149575)
To put it bluntly, what most of us who spend any time consuming art out here
on the fringes really have in common is what we all don't have in common,
not what we do. "People who read Sunstone" is not a comparable group to
"People who only read The Ensign." The relationship is classic power-law
(1/X^n), with Sunstone subscriptions probably constituting 1 or 2 percent of
Ensign subscriptions in total.
Now, specialty markets (like Sunstone) can exist, but only if they are very
carefully focused and tightly budgeted to fit. The Sunstone editor has a
much tougher job than The Ensign editor, for he must herd all these
free-ranging cats into a survivable demographic. Lean too far in any one
direction, and half of them will scamper away. The Ensign audience is far
more easily and safely and reliably served.
The problem is, I don't think those Sunstone demographics will any time soon
scale up economically to the numbers demanded by the movie business. I don't
see any prospects in the near or mid-term future for a "Sunstone cinema"
(except on a very sparing scale), and there is no track record (yet) for
scaling successfully beyond the Mormon market (though I'll cheer on anybody
who tries).
What that means is that those truly interesting in a vibrant "Mormon cinema"
have to pay all due respect to the 80/20 rule. Not rail against it.
Essentially, I'm hearkening back to the Hayes Commission era where every
Hollywood movie was a de facto "G" or "PG," and because the studios owned
the theaters, they had to make sure those seats were filled.
Yes, artistic reach was sometimes compromised by what could and could not be
put on the screen, but not talent. Nor do I believe that anybody's artistic
"integrity" was at risk. When I was writing regularly for The New Era, I was
writing for the biggest Mormon market and the Mormon market that paid the
best, and also the Mormon market that was the most narrowly circumscribed.
But every story I sold them was the best story I could have sold to them.
I think part of the problem is that the whole concept of the "small" or
"low-budget" or "niche market" film has become defined as "artsy," "edgy"
and purposely--and often indulgently--inimical to blockbuster-seeking
audiences. As Stephen King scolded his audience at the National Book Awards,
"What do you think? You get social or academic brownie points for
deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?"
As a result, when you think "Japanese cinema," for example, you don't think
of Yoji Yamada, who has been making popular "family"-type films for 40
years. Walk into any Blockbuster, and you'll maybe find one Yoji Yamada film
on the shelves. But there'll be a half-dozen Takashi Miike and Kiyoshi
Kurosawa (not related to Akira) films next to it, the kind of edgy,
nihilistic, Tarantino-esque, "art house" films that we've all come to assume
belong in that category.
But it is movies from directors like Yoji Yamada that made the careers of
directors like Miike and Kurosawa viable in the first place. If there is to
be any future in "Mormon cinema," then it will begin by creating movies for
that core, common, paying audience--the one that includes Grandma, your
bishop and a couple of general authorities--within budgetary constraints
that ensure a profit. It has been done in the past. We've just got to
relearn how to do it.
Eugene Woodbury
