Indie Toolkit writers rewind/fast-forward on the year/decade in film
The decade in screenwriting: Looking back over the past several years—to 2006, for example, when four of the American Film Institute’s top 10 films of the year were comedies, as opposed to just one each in 2008 and 2009—a number of prominent 2009 films took on serious topical subjects, from war to racism to financial insolvency. An ever-expanding number of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror vehicles offered near fatal adrenaline rushes and perhaps a needed relief from everyday troubles. But an especially notable trend in the stories told on film in the past year was toward the dark, lonely, inside story.
[Editor’s note: The six columnists in our Indie Toolkit section were asked to offer their summaries of the year or decade and predictions for the coming year/decade in their fields of expertise.]
From the solitary journey of the explosives disarmament expert in The Hurt Locker (director Kathryn Bigelow, writer Mark Boal), to the furiously needy teenaged girl in Fish Tank (writer/director Andrea Arnold), to the Dominican baseball hopeful in Sugar (writer/directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck), to the unlucky news bearer to military families in The Messenger (writer/director Oren Moverman, co-writer Alessandro Camon), to the horrifically abused, obese, socially invisible teenaged mom in Precious (director Lee Daniels, writer Geoffrey Fletcher), to the shattered, closeted gay lover in A Single Man (writer/director Tom Ford), some of the most powerful films of the year saw main characters turn somewhere deeper than bravado for their strength.
One of the quietest films of the year, 35 Shots of Rum (writer/director Claire Denis, co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau), mined uncommon dramatic riches from the simple story of a single father stepping out of the way to allow his daughter to grow up. A continuing trend in 2009 was the animated films whose content aimed at least as much at adult as at children’s sensibilities. Think the shifting realities of Coraline (writer/director Henry Selick) and the underlying commentary on contemporary adults in Where the Wild Things Are (writer/director Spike Jonze, co-writer Dave Eggers).
The year also saw a generous handful of stories that grappled with questions of race, including historically significant works such as Invictus (director Clint Eastwood, writer Anthony Peckham), about Nelson Mandela’s quest to unify post-apartheid South Africa, and Skin (director Anthony Fabian, writers Helen Crawley, Jessie Keyt, Helena Kriel), the story of a black child born in the 1950s to white Afrikaners, as well as tales of personal journeys such as The Blind Side (writer/director John Lee Hancock), the tale of an impoverished, gifted teenaged athlete rescued by a conservative white family, and Precious (see above).
The future in screenwriting: Early signs of the stories set to reach the screen in 2010 show a trend toward narratives that document the search for answers—personal, spiritual, and political. Look for Winter’s Bone (writer/director Debra Granik, co-writer Anne Rossellini), in which an Ozark Mountain girl trails her drug dealer father; Sympathy for Delicious (director Mark Ruffalo, writer Christopher Thornton), which follows a paralyzed DJ who seeks a miracle through faith healing; Sons of Babylon (writer/director Mohamed Al Daradji), which chronicles the journey of a Kurdish boy and his grandmother to recover the remains of his father/her son in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein; and Night Catches Us (writer/director Tanya Hamilton), a story of old hopes and broken promises in the 1970s era Black Power movement.
Expect plenty of new and increasingly edgy science fiction, fantasy, and horror offerings in 2010, exemplified by Splice (writer/director Vincenzo Natali, co-writers Antoinette Bryant and Doug Taylor), which follows ambitious young scientists who combine human and animal DNA to produce a female baby with an uncertain future. Deliciously dark comedies loom as well, including The Extra Men (writer/directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, co-writer Jonathan Ames), about a struggling playwright who escorts wealthy widows in Manhattan; Homewrecker (writer/directors Todd and Brad Barnes, co-writer Sophie Goodhart), in which an ex-con locksmith on work release goes to great lengths to try to win his girlfriend back; and Get Low (director Aaron Schneider, writers Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell), the true story of a Tennessee hermit in the 1930s who staged his own funeral party while he was still living.
And look for at least two historical narratives that explore less familiar territory: The Conspirator (director Robert Redford, writers Gregory Bernstein and James D. Solomon), based on the true saga of a woman tried as a co-conspirator in the assassination of President Lincoln; and Shanghai (director Mikael Hafstrom, writers Hossein Amini, Becky Johnston, Mike Medavoy), about an American spy in WW II era, Japanese-occupied Shanghai, who pursues a murder investigation, only to uncover a dark secret protected by the U.S. government.
Lisa Rosenberg, Beyond Words
Digital trend of 2009: Free. This year Wired magazine editor and long time tech business theorist Chris Anderson described the world roughly as it currently exists online in his book Free. In it, he posited that the Internet wants content and applications to be free, and beyond this, that the next generation of Internet users in the U.S. will simply expect it. So far this has been the case for sites as diverse Hulu, YouTube, The New York Times and Google Docs, as well as a multitude of iPhone apps. It’s been both the trend and the fear of 2009.
Digital trend of 2010: Freemium. In the book, Anderson goes further to describe the potential of companies having mixed revenue models—a basic free version, supplemented by a paid premium service, often in the form of a low monthly fee. This year has been full of rumors about both Apple and Hulu moving into the subscription model space. Comcast’s acquisition of NBC Universal has seemingly put a spanner in the works for the iTunes store’s plans, considering any kind of TV Shows subscription model would need NBC buy in. However, I think it’s likely that many more sites will experiment with mixed revenue models, beyond advertising. This will probably be as a gold pass level to some of these services, or perhaps add ons to traditional cable subscriptions. Hopefully we won’t end up with the cable model—fees for service, hardware, and ads, based on a pseudo-monopoly.
Hannah Eaves, The Sixth Screen
The decade in docs: The documentary world has changed significantly in the past ten years, both outwardly—docs became popular with broad audiences—and inwardly, in how they get made. Since I’m not a film critic, I can only talk about what I got to work on full time and exclusively in those ten years: fundraising demos and rough cuts both in the U.S. and Europe. In the soon-to-be-over decade, 2009 marks the culmination of a steady curve: Demos went from almost non-existent to a must-have and from a loose 10-minute length to a sharp one minute. In storytelling, the shift was both in content and structure. Content wise, filmmakers I worked with lifted their eyes from their pre 9/11 navels to the complex landscape of international social issues, lately with an emphasis on environmental concerns. In structure, filmmakers started to become more concerned with effective storytelling and less with “it happened that way." These trends moved documentaries from informative and objective to entertaining and subjective. The year 2009 brought to my hands the shortest trailers and the most varied genres of rough cuts, crafted by filmmakers that never ceased to search for excellence and truth.
Docs pushing forward to 2010: Predictions are often nothing more than our wishes with a due date. Logic tells me that all trends tend to keep moving in the same direction unless a shock makes them shift into a new course. Demos can’t get any shorter than the current minute or two. If they did, they’d become a single frame and that’s not a trailer, that’s a poster! In that case, we will all be better off learning graphic design instead of storytelling. As per rough cuts, where the lines between the needs of depicting reality and entertain keep blurring, we’ll be entering an era of hybrids. Such genre has in the past lurked the edges of the business—more in Europe than in the U.S.—and maybe now they will be center stage. But predictions using logical thinking lack the warmth of our desires, so my wish for 2010 is for documentary filmmakers to continue their hunt for stories by following their inner compass of integrity and instinct regardless of trends past or to come.
Fernanda Rossi, Ask the Documentary Doctor
Story trend for docs in 2009: Expanding the Contrived Quest. There is a new trend in documentary storytelling that has its roots in the 2004 hit Supersize Me and will likely morph into new forms in the coming year. Documentary filmmakers are tinkering with, fine-tuning and expanding on the idea of constructing a story arc that goes something like this: I’ll attempt this crazy, quirky, or impossible feat for X amount of time, and, in the process, reveal something important about a troubling social issue.”
According to a recent New York Times book review, the literary world is also riding this “increasingly popular subgenre that involves setting oneself a task, usually for a year, and writing about it in an online diary before committing the account between covers.” As the article points out, the contrived quest has the advantage of setting out clearly defined narrative boundaries. For filmmakers, that means being able to guarantee to funders that you have a protagonist on a mission (a full-fledged story) within foreseeable time constraints and a predictable budget. These are selling points for producers seeking funding. For Morgan Spurlock, the narrative "conceit" was to prove McDonald’s assertion that its food is nutritious by eating only from the McDonald’s menu for 30 days. In King Corn (2007), Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis set out to plant an acre of corn, and in the course of four seasons, reveal our nation’s troubling addiction to corn products. More recently, writer Colin Beavan teamed up with directors Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein to document his year-long efforts to live without impacting the environment in No Impact Man (2009). I see this trend not only intensifying, but veering from the personal documentary genre— in which the filmmaker herself takes on a Herculean task within a specific timeframe—to filmmakers teaming up with writers/activists already engaged in such a task.
Many of these print-based creators are looking for innovative ways (beyond blogging and books) to document their journey. For example, I just finished reading the uncorrected proof for "The Happiness Project," in which writer Gretchen Rubin documents her 12-month effort to "sing in the morning, clean my closets, fight right… and generally have more fun." Assuming Rubin has an appealing on-camera presence, the book would have made a great documentary.
Story trend for docs in 2010: Filmmakers seeking a new, fundable project should consider capitalizing on this growing trend by teaming up with bloggers who may be trying to cross the U.S./Mexican border once a day for a month, dress like Oprah every day for a year, or in the case of the narrative film Julie and Julia (2009), cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s famous cookbook … in 365 days.
Karen Everett, The Edit Room
From the entertainment law POV: Summary of 2009 is that between Medicine for Melancholy and Everything Strange and New, there is a rebirth in strong local narrative filmmaking.
Prediction for 2010: Strong year for local genre filmmaking, and Cal will win the BCS!
George Rush, Avoiding Disaster
topics: activism, audiences, authors, bay area, critics, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, directors, drama, dramatic films, dvd, hollywood, how-to, independent film, internet, screenwriting
12.29.2009