In the song “Range Life,” from their 1994 album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus sang about the frustrations of being a touring indie band on the summer festival circuit, settling for cred (”Hey, you’ve got to pay your dues before you pay your rent” ), while much more famous but arguably less talented artists sucked up the spotlight. Stuck on the disenfranchised end of this binary opposition, Malkmus brattily goads the behemoth bands reaping its spoils: “Stone Temple Pilots, they’re elegant bachelors…I will agree they deserve absolutely nothin’, nothin’ more than me.” In the chorus, Malkmus longs to be rid of the touring hassle: “If I could settle down, then I would settle down.”
When Todd Sklar named his indie film roadshow venture Range Life, the Pavement reference wasn’t coincidental. The same kind of imbalance cited by Malkmus in the middle of the so-called alternative revolution has arguably gone on to infect the indie film world: the movies which least need the film festival as a platform benefit from it the most, but the little guys continue to play along (if they’re even invited to!) because even it’s the only game in town. You could say that Sklar’s Range Life, which is shepherding four truly independent films to 20+ cities in North America, is an attempt to shake up that model’s monopoly. But for Sklar, the Pavement reference goes deeper.
“The other thing that really struck a chord is that sarcastic chorus, talking about “settling down,” Sklar said this week in an email interview. “That really connected with hopping in a van and taking the film on the road rather than having it showcased to the same crowd every month while we get free cheese and crackers and fruit leather in the filmmaker lounge. Don’t get me wrong, I do LOVE filmmaker lounges (and fruit leather in specific), but I truly think, and more-so now than ever, filmmakers shouldn’t be settling down when they’ve finished their film. That should be when you’re most excited and most involved in the work.”
Sklar first went on tour last year with his own “movie about dudes being dudes,” Box Elder. Elder skipped the traditional festival route: after a super successful run at the Ragtag Cinema in Coumbia, Missouri (a cinema-friendly college town and home of the True/False Film Festival), Sklar and his crew got in a van and hand-delivered the film to 30 cities, punk rock road trip style. With that first tour a resounding success, Sklar says, “I figured we might as well do a victory lap and head west for the fall.” One by one, Sklar soon fell in with three other filmmakers who “wanted to blaze the trail with us”: JJ Lask, whose Gondry-esque On the Road with Judas (pictured above) debuted in Dramatic Competition at Sundance 2007; Bob Byington’s RSO: Registered Sex Offender, which premiered earlier this year at SXSW; and In Memory of My Father, a dark comedy starring Judy Greer (Arrested Development) which won the Grand Jury Prize at CineVegas in 2005.
“All four of them are writer/director pieces, with the filmmaker stepping in front of the camera in each one as well, and all four also have a strong aspects of naturalism and improvisation,” Sklar says. But a more important factor for the inclusion of these films in the program is that their makers “were interested in trying this model and focusing on audience versus other aspects in regards to the release of their film.”
What type of audience does Range Life focus on? “College kids or post graduate hipsters,” Sklar says. “Basically people who don’t have to wake up early, or don’t mind staying out late.” A typical tour stop is a four-night-stand at a given city’s art house or college theater, with each film playing one prime-time show on one of the four nights. The tour encompasses markets both big and small, and Sklar says the team targets their energies towards different ends in different spots. “In Lawrence, KS, we might focus mostly on getting a fun engaged crowd to help build that core audience, and then the following in Minneapolis week we might try to cater more towards picking up press exposure to use later on. Having so many different markets is really crucial because you can pick and choose what you want out of each one.” Sklar has non-exclusive deals with each filmmaker, and most plan to use the attention attracted by the tour to promote DVD sales down the road.
But there’s one city conspicuously missing from the Range Life schedule: New York. I note that if this is intentional, it would seem to defy the traditional wisdom that wisdom that small films need the support (and pullquotes) of New York critics to legitimize a long-tail prospect such as a DVD release. This question gets Sklar fired up.
“I could naive or wrong about this, but my whole take on the “platform release” in New York/Los Angeles to drive ancillary aspects is that it’s bullshit. I’ve never in my entire life walked into a store, started browsing around for something to buy, and then based my decision on what someone wrote on the cover. I think that validation is extremely overrated, and that word of mouth is much much stronger. I think we’re at a point, at least generation-wise, where searching for and discovering content is half the fun, and 90% of the media that we watch is either through word of mouth (whether that be from friends, or a curated source; i.e, festivals, Netflix, blogs, etc) or from our own outreach.”
“This interview is actually a perfect example,” Sklar continues. “I’m almost certain that the types of people who’d check out, and more importantly actually enjoy my film, would be the ones who read about it on Spout, whereas a full page spread or top shelf review in the New York TImes would be great for my dad to show his golf buddies, but certainly wouldn’t do much as far as helping the film find its audience. I very seriously think there are far too many independent filmmakers out there who are catering to their parents golf buddies. Making a film certainly shouldn’t be about validation, it should be about storytelling, and that makes releasing the film all about audience, as there’s no point in telling a story if you don’t have an audience to connect with it.”
The first real test of the power of Range Life to mobilize a long-tail audience will be the DVD release of Judas, which happens in December. In the meantime, the tour hits Chicago this weekend, with all four filmmakers in attendance. There’s more info at the Range Life website.
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