Our friend Kevin Kelly was at that Mark Cuban panel at the TCA featured in the vague WIRED post mentioned earlier, and he sent along some further context––and quotes!
Apparently, the panel’s essential purpose was to promote Humboldt County, a SXSW vet and now a Magnolia release which will debut on VOD three weeks before hitting theaters in September. Also on the panel was Humboldt co-star Peter Bogdanovich, and talk about an odd pairing. On the one hand, you’ve got mogul Cuban making his cocky techno-evangelist pitch about how business travelers held captive in hotels are dying to charge their corporate cards $12 for the chance to see films like Flawless and Finding Amanda.
Then there’s old Pete, still an active theatrical patron himself (“Sex in the City was amazing because it was all women. I was the only guy in the theater, and the women loved it, and I loved that the women loved it”), but conscious that it’s an experience that’s diminishing for a reason (in part because trailers are “unbelievably violent, fast, crazy, noisy garbage.”) And he acknowledges that even if, for him, nothing’s going “to replace the experience of seeing a movie on the big screen with an audience,” alternate philosophies of distribution “seems to be working in terms of getting people to see the films.”
I wish I had been there. Excerpts from Kevin’s transcription of the even follow after the jump.
Mark Cuban: Starting with Bubble…initially we started simultaneously on HDNet Movies and in theaters. And you know, as we interviewed people and did some research, it became apparent that, you know, people who weren’t HDNet Movies subscribers, people who weren’t going to go into theaters, still there was demand for the movies.
So I guess it’s been seven months ago, give or take, we created HDNet Ultra VOD, and that really has been the financial differentiator because consumers just love it. And what it entails, as you can see by the dated up there, you can go to a hotel like this. If you’re staying here at the Hilton and you look at the movie previews, you’ll see Finding Amanda. You’ll see Flawless. Movies that have been playing in this hotel since three weeks before their release, and people are buying them at $11.99, more than they pay in theaters, and they’re buying them in great numbers, great quantities and we actually make more money there. And so we expanded it from just hotels to cable and satellite systems as well.
Peter Bogdanovich: It’s all new to me. I don’t think there’s anything to replace the experience of seeing a movie on the big screen with an audience. But [the Magnolia plan] seems to be working in terms of getting people to see the films. And if the film works, the word of mouth is what carries it. And word of mouth is what carries any movie anyway really. So I guess it’s working.
I don’t know. It’s a very odd climate. And I hear nothing but doom and gloom about the independent film. And it seems like the independent films are the only good ones being made because they’re about people. Everything else is about special effects. So I don’t know. It’s kind of a new world and things are changing rapidly, and I think this is part of a new way of approaching the selling of movies. So maybe it works. I don’t know. According to Mark, it’s working.
Cuban: Right now the independent movies business is broken, and whether or it’s retrievable, I don’t know. Mark Gill was interviewed and gave a very poignant interview that the independent movie business doesn’t have a future. And what we’re trying to do with Magnolia and Landmark and HDNet Movies is really recapture the independent movie business.
Bogdanovich: There was a… who was it that did that joke? Was it Jon Stewart who said he was watching Lawrence of Arabia on his iPod? I don’t know what to say about it. People can do anything. If they like the picture, okay. We should see it on a TV screen or something a little larger than a stamp. It’s bizarre. All I can say it it’s bizarre.
Cuban: I’m a technology geek, and so I’ve always tried to say how can we work backwards from people’s needs rather than to work forward from the way things are. And the reality is in this day and age, people want to be able to consume movies how they want them, when they want them, where they want them. And in traditional movies you work really, really hard to build buzz, you spend a lot of money to make people aware. And then you pray to God that people go into theaters. And when they go into theaters, the theaters don’t actually spend any money, so it all comes down to who’s spending all the big money on P&A. And then that Friday you just pray that people show up.
Bogdanovich: You know, I have a theory that one of the reasons younger people don’t like older films, films made, say, before the ‘60s, is because they’ve never seen them on a big screen, ever. If you don’t see a film on the big screen, you haven’t really seen it. You’ve seen a version of it, but you haven’t really seen it. That’s my feeling, but I’m old-fashioned.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth