Are there too many films being made?
In the past few months, I’ve read articles about how there are too many films being made. And that there are too many TV shows. I’ve also heard friends say that there are too many podcasts now.
What to make of this? And what does it mean for someone like me that is hoping to bring more films into the world?
My first reaction to the “there’s too many x” statement was to disagree on a level that I couldn’t elaborate. I thought about it for a few days, considering that I might be reacting that way simply because I don’t want it to be true and I’m biased to look for evidence/arguments that confirm what I want to be true. With the bias in mind, here’s why I think the too much argument is wrong.
First of all, the question “are there too many films being made?” begs the question. It assumes a premise which isn’t true–that there is an optimal number of films to be made every year. There’s no optimal number. The articles that say there are too many x don’t even attempt to posit an optimal number of x to be made and I take that as a sign that they don’t really believe there is such a number.
Maybe what they’re really getting at is that there are too many bad films made per year. I agree that there are a lot of bad films made now. I don’t think that’s much different from past eras though, whose bad films we don’t really think or talk about because they’ve faded into oblivion. There’s usually a bias to look at past eras as being better art-wise because we look at all the great films made in the 70s and forget the bad ones. This goes back to pretty much any era — how many shitty plays were written by the Greeks? I don’t know but I’m guessing a fair amount. I think, and I admit I don’t really have any hard evidence to back this up, that we tend to judge past eras by their best achievements and judge the present era more fairly, weighing the good with the bad and sometimes weighing the bad more heavily when we want to prove a point.
It seems like the optimal number of bad films made per year would be 0, until you consider that a) great filmmakers sometimes make duds and if there was a magic way to ensure ahead of time that every film was great, then well, that’s impossible so on to b) sometimes bad films are a stepping stone on the way to good films, as filmmakers learn the craft and improve, and the only way to keep developing good filmmakers is to allow them to experiment and grow and fail, and c) sometimes bad films turn out to be really great in their own way, and d) I don’t know what d is but there’s probably another reason that I can’t think of now.
Maybe what people are really getting at is the feeling of being overwhelmed. For critics, it’s the feeling that there’s too much to review, that they have to go see a lot of crap just because it’s been 4-walled and their editors make them review it. That seems like more of a problem with editorial policies than movie production volume — I don’t think there’s any reason that reviewers should be required to review everything that gets a showing in a theater.
Is this an issue for non-critics? Well, we don’t have to watch all of them. If you’re watching on Netflix, there’s no marginal cost to watching a bad movie (except for the time wasted, but you can quit after 15 minutes of badness).
Most of the bad ones probably don’t get seen by more than a handful of people. Most of us rely on curators to help us choose what to watch: aggregators like Netflix and Hulu, Criterion, online ratings, online/newspaper/magazine reviewers, etc. If someone wants to argue that we haven’t yet figured out a way to really curate well, then I’m pretty partial to that argument. That could be better. The Netflix recommendation algorithm is sometimes comically wrong. My cinephile friends are usually really good curators. So are podcasts like Filmspotting.
The trick to navigating this modern world of abundance is to find people and outlets that you can trust to recommend good things for you. It takes a little extra work. And better curation can be solved with technology.
Another problem is that, as a society, we have less culture in common. Water cooler talk is a lot more disjointed. How many times in the last five years have you had a conversation where you ask “have you seen/heard/read x?” and nobody else has? It happens to me all the time. Sometimes the group has to offer up four or five different shows or films or whatever before hitting on one that has been seen by the majority of the group. With TV, sometimes you find a show that everyone watches but everyone is on a different distribution schedule so you can’t talk about the latest season because one person is still waiting for it to go Prime on Amazon or to come onto Netflix.
The flip side is that it’s much more likely that there’s a show out there that really appeals to your tastes but would never have been made 30 years ago because it doesn’t appeal to a mass audience. Which is a better world to live in? Would you be willing to kill off most of your favorite shows to go back to a world where everyone was on the same page, culturally? It would be an interesting question to discuss at cocktail parties (if anyone ever invited me to cocktail parties. Like seriously, where are all these cocktail parties that everyone keeps talking about?) but it’s ultimately beside the point–the world isn’t going to revert to the old ways.
OK, so that’s the consumer. But what about for the filmmaker or aspiring filmmaker?
Should you and I make something if there are already a lot of films out there? Yeah, if you want to. That’s a dumb question. As long as you’re using your own money (or money you got investors to give you voluntarily), I don’t see the issue. What about the crew that isn’t getting paid a lot? Well they’re there voluntarily. There’s no law that says they’re required to work on your film. They’re free to negotiate for higher rates. They’re free to read your script ahead of time and decide if it’s the kind of project that’s likely to help their career along. I don’t see how reducing the number of films made improves the economic choices available to actors and crew-people.
Does the world need more films? I don’t know. Maybe. Probably not. Probably. How can you answer that question?
OK, yeah, but this really sucks! It’s like almost impossible to get anyone to see my film!
Yeah, it’s harder than ever to get people to see your film. It will probably only get harder in the future. That does suck. But the technological factors that make it easier to make a movie today also make it harder to break through the noise. When I hear filmmakers complain about “too many films,” I sympathize with this sentiment but it strikes me as a bit disingenuous.
Would you rather go back to the time when it was really expensive to make films? Would you rather live in a world where you had to raise $250,000 instead of $25,000 to make your first feature? It’s the same attitude as a teenager screaming “I hate you dad! I wish I had never been born!” Really? This is so bad that you wish you didn’t exist? Wishing for less competition is wishing for a time when most filmmakers wouldn’t be able to exist, which is why this line seems disingenuous. Unless, of course, there was some overarching body that limited the number of films made each year. But I don’t think anyone really wants that. Who decides? The government? Do you want the government deciding whether or not you can make a movie? Or some kind of film standards organization? That’s not a world I want to live in.
I think filmmakers that say this kind of thing are really saying “I wish that there was only a handful of us making films, so that there was a lot less competition, but it was still really cheap to make films.” Yeah, that would be nice. I also wish I had 10 million dollars lying around and that I could eat pizza all day without gaining weight or feeling terrible.
It’s great that it’s really easy to make a movie (or a podcast or a book or even a TV show or an album). But the new reality is that it’s hard to break through. Which is pretty much the same as the old reality, where gatekeepers kept you off the air or out of theaters or without the money to make what you want. Not only did the game done changed, but it ALSO got more fierce, as Slim Charles might say if he were writing this instead of me.
OK, but seriously, there is a real problem here. There are going to be some really good indies made that never get seen by a wide audience because there’s too much chaff out there. I’ve seen some really great films at festivals this year that most of my non-filmmaker friends have never heard of. Part of the answer to this is in better curation. But as a filmmaker that doesn’t really help me today. I can’t make a better Netflix algorithm. I need an actionable strategy.
Whatever are we to do?
I certainly don’t have an answer and I don’t think there’s an “easy” answer out there, just lying around waiting to be discovered.
But first, thank the Gods that you don’t want to be a famous poet or get paid tons to do improv, because if you think it’s hard making a living as a filmmaker…
Second, I’m pretty sure that the answer involves building an audience slowly and organically. Make one thing, get a few people to see it, and do your best to establish a relationship with them so that you can tell them when you are making something else. Find a way to stay connected so they’ll be there when you need to raise money through crowdfunding or you need help spreading the word. Do this as best you can for somewhere between 3 and 30 years, and hopefully you’ll be able to make enough to live on (or get noticed by Hollywood and get paid to write/direct TV or studio films). And your success will be easier and faster if you’re good enough and lucky enough to get help from some of the curators and gatekeepers along the way.
Some people will be brilliant and die in obscurity or never make a living as an artist. Some people will get rich and famous without deserving it.
That sucks. It’s not fair. But it ranks pretty low on the list of current injustices in the world. And I say that as someone who has achieved neither wealth nor notoriety (knowing full well that I haven’t made anything that would merit either!).
One of my favorite musicians wrote a really good piece on this whole phenomenon in the music industry, called “Why Your Music Is Worthless (And How to Sell It Anyway). It’s a long but really good look at the economic factors that make it so hard to be a working musician today (basically, there’s a huge abundance of music and it’s really hard to get people to pay for it and tough luck it’s not going to change so you should start thinking creatively about how to make money from your music and while it’s really hard, it’s also not impossible).
I was going to excerpt it but I couldn’t find any magically concise quotes that would make for nice shareable content on Tumblr. If you’re serious about figuring out this problem of marketing yourself as an artist, you should probably read the whole thing.
Grubstake
grubstake: Supplies or funds advanced to a mining prospector or a person starting a business in return for a promised share of the profits.
n. Money, materials, tools, food etc. provided to a prospector in return for a share in future profits
n. An amount of money advanced to someone starting a business in return for a share of the future profits
File this under “words I wish people used in everyday conversation,” as in “lookin’ for some grubstake to get this film off the ground.”