Sunday, October 25, 2009

Paul Osborne Spills the Festival Beans

Our friend Paul Osborne has a great piece in MovieMaker Magazine on the truth about film festival Do's and Dont's. Check it out after the jump:


"You’ve made your little independent feature film, financed with love, credit cards and some spare change from mom and dad. Now you’re going to take it to Sundance, where it will be watched by excited buyers from all of the major distributors. One of said distributors will cut you a big check, gather your movie up into its warm, welcoming arms and sprinkle it into theaters all across the land. Right?

Guess what? This never happens. And even when it did occasionally happen back in the late ’80s and ’90s, it was an extremely rare thing.
Any independent moviemaker who has worked the film festival circuit can tell you that this “Myth of Sundance” is about as real as the “Rich and Famous” contract offered to Kermit the Frog at the end of The Muppet Movie. However, the media still largely covers the major film festivals—Sundance, Toronto, Cannes—as if it’s 1994 and little can-do features actually have a fighting chance to be discovered in today’s indie landscape, the way Kevin Smith’s Clerks did.

This disconnect between the fantasy and reality of film festivals led me and my producing partner, Scott Storm, to make Official Rejection, the first documentary to really show what truly indie moviemakers experience on the film festival circuit."

Read the full piece HERE.

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