Word: filmed
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...economic recession may be ending but the independent film industry's shakeout continues to roll, as we were recently reminded by Disney's October decision to gut its Miramax division, cutting staff by more than...
...It?s just the latest move in what has already been a bloodbath. Over the past 24 months the indie film industry - responsible for recent Academy Award winners like Slumdog Millionaire, There Will Be Blood, and Juno - has lost dozens of key players on both the front and back end of the production process. (See the top 10 Sundance hits...
...Mark Gill, who served as president of Warner Independent Pictures and Miramax/LA and is now CEO of the indie-film production and financing company the Film Department, estimates that of the 38 indie-film financing firms - the so-called front end - that existed in 2007, only 11 remain. And they are mostly sitting on their hands. While Wall Street investment in independent movies totaled more than $2 billion from 2005 to 2007, according to Deutsche Bank, it has plummeted to practically nothing since then. (See TIME's audio slide show "85 Years of Warner Bros. Movies...
...rough on the back end. Small distributors like ThinkFilm, which released the popular documentaries The Aristocrats, Born into Brothels and Murderball, are struggling, while financially stronger studios - the Hollywood heavies - are scaling back. Just two years ago, each of the six major studios had at least one specialty film division that bought indie films at events like the Toronto International (TIFF) and Sundance festivals, arranged for them to be shown at movie theaters and marketed them to the public. Today only Twentieth Century Fox, Sony and Universal still have specialty divisions - Disney does, too, but in name only. Paramount closed...
...important were those specialty arms? In 2007, they accounted for more than 30% of indie box-office revenues. The big studios' specialty divisions were also key players in film-festival bidding wars, often paying between $2 million and $10 million per film. This year the highest price paid for a film at the Toronto festival was $1 million by the Weinstein Co. for Tom Ford's A Single Man. "Indie Bloodbath" was how influential movie-industry blogger Anne Thompson described the dearth of high-priced sales at the festival. (See how to plan for retirement...