FROM HERE TO AWESOME

FHTA - Live from San Francisco

FHTA filmmaker: Fritz Donnelly

‘To the Hills 2′ is a film about hustlers, con men, dreamers, people like you and me. Fritz Donnelly plays most of the 30 or so characters in the film; he shot and edited it himself, and has sold thousands of copies on the streets of New York City. The movie is built on the premise that the metropolis is the place to come to fulfill one’s dreams and ambitions. ‘To the Hills 2′ opens with Financial Advice and is woven together by a struggle among dueling clones. It weaves through awkward social situations, real estate on the moon, time travel, stuffed animals, surfboards, and movie pitching to take you “to the hills.” Fritz Donnelly’s film screened recently at an outdoor theatre in downtown San Francisco as a winning entry in the From Here to Awesome festival. A collection of his films, Vidopedia, is in the New Museum of Contemporary Art this fall. Fritz performs regularly at hichristina.com in the Lower East Side and at Glasslands Gallery in Williamsburg. His films are available on amazon.com and through tothehills.com.

1. What is currently wrong with the film industry from your point of view as a DIY filmmaker?

It’s hard for teenagers to find cool movies.

Why?

Film is not a reliable medium for influencing people or making money. You can’t tell, by watching a film, how popular it will be, how deeply it will affect people. Hollywood tries to assess this everyday, film critics think they know, but no one is consistently right. Count clicks and comments and you still won’t have the right answer. Films are ephemera. They are wisps that may condense into clouds or may evaporate. They are only probabilities multiplied by uncertainties. So all filmmaking, even the biggest budget Hollywood filmmaking, is experimental. Hollywood has lots of help from it’s media relatives. So it’s wisp is fogged and seeded and blown toward other wisps. But these heavy storm clouds of Hollywood, with flash and bluster, often blow over and are instantly forgotten. Whereas a tiny breath of fresh air from an anonymous filmmaker far away can clear the head and orient a person in a new direction. The conundrum of the Independent Filmmaker is to create a cloud in the desert.

One cloud to block out the sun for one minute, and everyone looks up, and the Independent filmmaker is happy, can rest because the work has been seen and has gotten people to do something.

Teenagers inhabit temperate climes where food is readily available to fuel their growing bones.

2. If today we are “here” describe “awesome”, what is the most ideal digital filmmaking utopia in your mind?

HERE:
All distribution schemes are basically scams. In the old days it was a monopoly, the studios owned the artists and the cinemas and everything in between. It was a feudal system with a few people benefiting from the collective effort, and enough leftovers for everyone to eat. Now, no one wants to own anything; because the product is not inherently valuable—it’s the marketing and promotion that is valuable. Most of the work to generate interest and awareness in a film is done by the artist. So the only difference between the feudal days and these informed days, is that we all know what’s going on.

AWESOME:
The environment is wet. Filmmaking is a practice, like cooking, that some people perform at great levels of intricacy, that everyone understands and can evaluate. Everyone supports the art they like and the people they believe in. Hip hop became an international phenomenon after starting as a grass-roots movement of musicians selling their music directly to their peers and fans. So too with the new digital art. Wet with possibilities. Everyone shoots. Surveillance cameras are taken down and thrown away. The opinion piece and the ‘how to’ are the most prevalent forms of film. Everyone has basic medical training in middle school. People have finally relaxed about their bodies. There’s enough to go around and the greed model of industry and the fear model of government have both collapsed. Curiosity, ‘what the hell are we doing here and how can we make the most of it?,’ reigns. For every 100 people paid to think one or two will come up with an idea that pays for all the rest. (This idea is a paraphrase of Buckminster Fuller’s idea.) Teachers are paid more than bankers and libraries are open all night. A homeless man is chairman of the FED.

3. What was the experience like of being one of the Pioneer From Here to Awesome Filmmakers?

I’m not sure whether to be an activist or a student, to do my homework or to change the assignment. For example, we Awesome filmmakers were offered the opportunity to campaign for a music discovery platform, a subsidiary of AOL. For every person who signed up to the service through our special link, we received $4. It sounds great but if you don’t endorse the service, it’s hard to ask your fans to do this, even thought it ‘costs’ them nothing. Spam is that unwanted mail, that request to do something that wastes a person’s time and attention. And it’s sad to turn fans toward this sort of nonsense. More and more internet schemes are offering these kinds of promotions and motivational contests. “Make a film for us,” they say. “We aren’t obligated to credit you and we have the right to use your film in any way we want, wherever we want, forever. Isn’t the exposure valuable enough to you?” (These are the terms of a recent phone film contest I was asked to participate in.) But ‘free’ exposure that increases someone else’s sales without increasing yours is exploitation. And there’s a nontransferable quality to exposure. A million views on youtube is a million views. But who viewed? Only youtube knows. And two months later what can you do with these views? Other things may happen, MTV may have viewed and offer you a gig, or fans may view and sneak back to your website to buy something from you. That people’s interest in your project only registers in the analysis of comments, spread, and views.

You have an audience. What can you get them to do? How high will they jump? This is the kind of experiment I like performing in public, and on stage, and with friends. “Dress me up, Tell me what to do,” is the title of a recent series of videos I made where strangers (mostly) picked outfits for me from a bag of donated things and ordered me around. So why be averse to doing it online?

If we can shape From Here to Awesome into a bowl for the mixing of audiences then we may have arrived at our aim and accomplished something magical–like JayZ and Beyonce getting married.

4. If you had the attention of the entire film industry right now, what would you tell them?

Support the competition, we’re all in this together. Share the spotlight. (And take the password protection off your wireless. Come on, it should all be free anyway. Taxpayer money put all the wireless nodes and copper cables down in the first place. By password protecting you’re not speeding up your connection, you’re just helping to scam people like yourself out of hard-earned money.)

5. What would you say to other filmmakers considering being a part of future renditions of From Here to Awesome?

Be an activist. Or do the Awesome homework. Or find your own way to make and share your films. I do some of all three.

If you want to be part of From Here to Awesome right now, I’ll let you join in on my curriculum. I’ll give you my assignments to follow with me.

6. Describe your next project and whether your involvement with From Here to Awesome or DIY DAYS has informed anything about how you’ll proceed in the future.

HOW TO FIGHT N WIN is an album of “foreign language action films” that have a video game flavor. I’m releasing it along with a book, HOW TO LIVE THE GOOD LIFE, and a new collection of TO THE HILLS short films. See www.tothehills.com for details.

Since joining From Here to Awesome I’ve analyzed the ethics of what I do. It’s a similar moment to when I was arrested for selling my films on the streets of New York. Was I really do something wrong? No. Standing on the first amendment you can sell your free speech (books, movies, etc.) on any street in the United States. There are many local statues against this practice but these are not constitutional. Am I doing anything wrong to ask my audience to vote for me or to comment on my video or to repost me around the internet? Won’t they think of this anyway if they really like the film? I prefer to play with people than to tell them what to do, so this has been counterintuitive to me. Which approach is more effective? Is the method the message?

The great service that From Here to Awesome can provide is data, data from all the various sponsors that have attached their names to this Awesome ride from YOUTUBE to HULU to MYSPACE to TUBEMOGUL to INDIEGOGO and go and go. Data may help a person make a more calculating choice. Data about how many fans buy. There are many theories and relatively few and dispersed numbers on which to test them. In the absence of data I go on gut.

I’ve thought much more thoroughly about our society and whether my actions are making the world a better place or not. For our generation there is no selling out, there is only the question of how much you made, what was the price you garnered. But now the internet is here, and free! (Not really, but give everyone a computer and a connection, or a library card to a library that’s open all night.) So why sell out when you can give out, and up and away and share and dare. Money will come to those who make great art. Or money will come to those who imagine it coming. The secret. Right?

I do many more live events now. I’m interested in people in the flesh. I no longer think that the Internet will solve all my problems, just as I no longer think the answer to the problem of living in Bush’s America is solved by a visit to another country. From Here to Awesome doesn’t have the answers but it’s part of the experiment and it will be as awesome as we make it. That’s true of America too. Remember to vote, it might be counted this time.

Reflecting on From Here To Awesome

The following is a repost by Zak Forsman director of I F*cking Hate You

To my mind, the biggest problem (as a filmmaker and cinephlie) is that the system is set up in such a way that audiences don’t have TRUE choices for content. The system favors the safe and familiar and “what’s worked before”. I wonder how many cutting edge, iconoclastic filmmakers have been passed over in recent decades because some suit couldn’t reduce their work to “it’s like RoboCop meets Pretty Woman”? I’d like to see this flipped on its head so that audiences have a portal through which they can access a vast array of content on demand and pull it toward them, rather than having distributors push selected content at them. This portal would navigate though a variety of methods including searches, intelligent recommendations, keyword tagging and metadata, and good old word of mouth through a social network that would also allow fans to interact and communicate with filmmakers thru live and recorded video as well as text-based discussion. For the suits reading this, “its like DirecTV meets Amazon VOD meets iTunes Store meets Facebook meets Google meets Video iChat meets Coppola’s Little Fat Girl all packaged into a 60? HD television with webcam, harddrive, and broadband built-in”.

If today we are “Here” and our goal is to get to “Awesome”, i think we are right on the brink of the next “ipod moment” — a moment that changes the way content finds its audience. today’s independent filmmaker is moving closer to what we at Sabi Pictures call the interdependent filmmaker — one who embraces the value of community-based solutions for everything from education and production needs to sharing your audience with like-minded artists. my vision of “awesome” is a universal framework that supports the artist and his or her audience cyclicly. allowing the filmmaker to retain ownership of his or her work is paramount to the evolving models of distribution and I believe that Arin Crumley’s idea for a universal distribution agreement is a brilliant concept for defining a new relationship between filmmakers and outlets. the technology is such that the only thing holding back the low budget (yet equally skilled, compelling and entertaining) filmmaker from monetizing their efforts is an audience equipped with the tools to find them.

Being a part of the first wave of the FHTA project has been a massive awakening and education in terms of elevating my understanding of what can be done with a motion picture once it’s locked and ready for the world. It has emboldened me to truly take ownership of my films, to give myself permission to fail, to assert and define my place in the film world, to brave the ever-evolving models of self-distribution and to have courage in rejecting the conventional route toward distribution for independents such as myself.

the distribution opportunities provided by FHTA were not an end result in and of themselves. they were a door that opened to a whole new journey. I learned to pursue these opportunities with vigilance, to build upon them and to let them inspire new ideas for building an audience. if you’re not pushing your filmmaking forward in some manner every single day, then you’d better go out and hire a great publicist (and a team of interns) to do it for you. that, or turn in your indie credentials right now. haha!

I received a vast “DIY” education from Lance Weiler and Arin Crumley. I now understand how to build and sustain an audience and the importance of creating a framework for the filmmaker to interact and make himself or herself available to the people drawn to the work. I now know the value of transparency and the importance of giving myself permission to fail as I experiment with the newly emerging distribution models. I now know that I’m not alone in wanting to change the status quo by retaining ownership of my work and I know it will happen for us soon. It is only a matter of time, planning and effort.