Over our five days at the Institute, we kept returning to serious of binary oppositions: print versus online; doing it for the passion versus doing it for the pay; criticism as consumer reporting versus advocacy for artists. With such circular questions, it’s hard to get anywhere, making it easy to lapse into what filmmaker Kelly Reichardt jokingly referred to at one point as “glass half full of shit” thinking. But out of the morass of questions and unresolvable clashes came an emphasis on compromise and balance: nearly every guest speaker made some mention of making trade offs, of covering for noble failures with less-noble successes.
This seemed most prevalent on Saturday, with Reichardt and Tom Kalin’s independent filmmaker panel; Ryan Werner of IFC and Don Krim from KINO representing indie distribution; and, particularly, the online film criticism panel, featuring Eugene Hernandez (indieWIRE), Michael Koresky (Reverse Shot), Matt Zoller Seitz (The House Next Door and The New York Times) and Stu Van Airsdale (The Reeler and Defamer).
The issue of blogs as an alternative/corrective to the mainstream media came up early in the day, with Seitz’s explanation for how The House Next Door got started. “I was really irritated by the negative reviews of Terrence Malick’s The New World,” he said, “And I just wanted to write about how great it was like every day.”
Though Matt experimented with Google and Amazon’s ad programs, both “were just a pain in the ass to maintain,” and The House Next Door evolved into a not-for-profit clearinghouse for mostly-serious material that an interested community of professional and amateur writers wouldn’t be able to publish elsewhere. It’s an employed film critic’s outlet for non-commercial writing, but it’s also an effort to create a greater balance in the types of voices that get to weigh in on film culture. But to established print critics who whisper to him in confidence that they’d love to have an outlet to write the kind of stuff that appears daily, for no compensation, on The House Next Door, Seitz has no sympathy. “Where do you get off with your sense of superiority, Print, if you constrain your writers in a way that [blogs] don’t?”
Seitz says what’s happening online is not in opposition to journalism––it’s returning journalism to what it should be. “Blogs have returned human communication to its natural state,” he said. “Journalism has been a white collar profession for about 20 years now, and it didn’t used to be…a lot of the defense that critics feel has to do with impoliteness.”
Of course, in a session just the day before, the lead critic of the New York Times had all but loosened his tie in discomfort at the very mention of the blogosphere, with the stated problem being comment section vitriol. Seitz referred to this factor as “Assholism,” in regards to which he shrugged, “There are certain people who only exist to show up on websites in order to tell you what an idiot you are.” He compared the blog space to high school debate: even though arguments get vicious, “there are rules, and you don’t take it personally.”
Newly-minted Defamer Stu VanAirsdale, who usually keeps at least part of a foot in the mainstream print world, concurred. “Blogs are famously kind of a caustic environment. I’m honest, maybe to a fault, but if something’s bullshit, I’m going to say it’s bullshit. That doesn’t mean I’m right, it just means I have an opinion. The print loyalty is absolutely afraid of that dialogue, and they can’t conceive of a world where they’d have to defend themselves.”
Stu noted that he had been hired to inject a sense of film culture into Defamer, a site maybe best known for posting images of Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch, captured by former editor Mark Lisanti with cellphone cam pointed at his TV. Such successes for the site have apparently been few and far between of late, and with Defamer traffic down over the past twelve months, Stu noted that his talents were seen as desirable because they could potentially attract a new audience. One of my fellow Institute fellows, New York Magazine blogger Dan Kois, expressed surprise that famously lowest common denominator-mad Defamer publisher Nick Denton would consider deeper content as a viable traffic raising solution. But as Stu pointed out, the site already has the celeb sex tape beat covered by other writers. With that steady stream of traffic taken care of, Defamer can afford to take a risk on someone like Stu, presumably in the hopes of attracting a wider audience.
Over and over again, these discussions came back to compromise. Tom Kalin needed to cast an actress of Julianne Moore’s caliber in order to get funding for his incest-infused true crime movie Savage Grace; Julianne Moore can only make Savage Grace because she pays both her own mortgage and rent on her stardom/bankability by making movies like Next. Filmmakers care primarily about their movies seeing theatrical release, but as Ryan Werner pointed out, VOD is a new revenue stream that can not only support the cost of a theatrical release, but it supports long-term word of mouth for all ancillaries. Seitz even talked about bargaining with an editor at the Newark Star-Ledger: he’d get to do an interview he really wanted to do, if he interviewed Jerry Springer as well.
In my first post about attending the Institute, I mentioned something about how I was heading to Queens to confront an existential void. I can’t say that the future looks appreciably less murky just yet, although maybe it will when it dust settles a bit. At least I know I have one thing to look forward to: a never-ending series of deals with devils. Maybe it’s not “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”; maybe it’s more like “if you let me scratch your eyes out, I’ll make it worth your while.” Does it matter, as long as the rent gets paid?
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