I just came back to my office from spending a couple of hours scouring the film vaults at DuArt Film & Video in New York. If you hadn’t heard, DuArt stopped processing film around 18 months ago and is trying to responsibly dispose of all the film materials they have been storing over the decades. With the help of Sandra Schulberg — who is spearheading the “IndieCollect” campaign — they are attempting to locate the owners as well as find archival homes for the films. Representatives from Academy Film Archive, UCLA, MoMA, George Eastman House, Library of Congress and Anthology Film Archives are going through the vaults and have agreed to provide proper climate-controlled longterm storage for many of the titles at risk. In my brief visit, I enountered original 35mm and 16mm negatives for films that I worked on at Cinema 5 and Cinecom, films that I recognized that were made by friends and by Columbia alums. So, if you have any materials that were stored at DuArt and are looking for a permanent home for your materials, let me know and I’ll hook you up. If you want to make a direct inquiry, please don’t call DuArt. Instead please email Steve Blakely and Sandra Schulberg. Comments after the break…
Tag: MOMA
10 (9 actually) Responses to the Issues Brought Up at the “Indie Film Summit”
Thanks to MOMA and indieWIRE, some 60 or so representatives of the “indie” film world got together yesterday to discuss the state of the business. A tip of the cap is due to Eugene Hernandez and Anne Thompson for their valiant attempt to reign in a group of outspoken, opinionated and polarized people arranged around a conference room that was clearly designed for far fewer active participants than were attending this particular event. The very existence of such an event, and the number of notable people who showed up, is both a testament to how hungry we are for this type of discussion, and a reason to be hopeful about the future of the business. In the course of a rambling two plus hours of talking, some deep arguments were addressed, some real insights were made and some of the attendees slipped into the kind of self-serving pitches that we hear on a million panels. But by the end of the day, I felt that all the real issues facing our business had at the very least been thrown on the table. My only frustration was that each of the many topics that came up deserved further exploration. Hopefully this can happen in a series of more focused discussions some time in the future.
One personal frustration was that the format didn’t allow me to get in my two cents on a number of points that I felt needed to be made. So, I’m going to use this space to do that very thing. At the beginning of the conference, Eugene asked that the particulars of who said what should be kept off the record in order to allow people to be as open as possible. I am going to respect that and deal only in the issues that were brought up without naming names. I am also going to take a piece of advice from Ted Hope and make this a list, which he says gets more hits than straight prose. So here goes… Continue reading “10 (9 actually) Responses to the Issues Brought Up at the “Indie Film Summit””