The Declaration of Independent Filmmaking: An Insider's Guide To Making Movies Outside of Hollywood - Softcover
Synopsis
Less than a decade since they began working in the movies, Mark and Michael Polish have established themselves as critically acclaimed, award-winning independent filmmakers. Their innovative approach to art direction, use of digital photography, and ability to attract stellar talent to their modestly budgeted films sprang from necessity; now these aesthetics have become admired trademarks of their work.
Infused with this same balance of artistic integrity and popular appeal, The Declaration of Independent Filmmaking is a practical guide to writing, shooting, editing, scoring, promoting, and distributing short and feature films. Mark and Michael have packed this book with star-studded, often hilarious tales from their own experiences--as well as helpful insider photos. This is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in filmmaking, whether a high school student with a $500 budget or a serious filmmaker looking for a fresh approach.
A Harvest Original
Infused with this same balance of artistic integrity and popular appeal, The Declaration of Independent Filmmaking is a practical guide to writing, shooting, editing, scoring, promoting, and distributing short and feature films. Mark and Michael have packed this book with star-studded, often hilarious tales from their own experiences--as well as helpful insider photos. This is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in filmmaking, whether a high school student with a $500 budget or a serious filmmaker looking for a fresh approach.
A Harvest Original
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Authors
Identical twins MARK AND MICHAEL POLISH have written, produced, and directed three feature films: Twin Falls Idaho, Jackpot, and Northfork. Their filmmaking awards and citations
include the John Cassavetes Award at the 2002 Independent Spirit Awards and a 2001 Seattle International Film Festival New American Cinema Award. They both live in the Los Angeles area.
JONATHAN SHELDON has worked on Jackpot and Northfork and was named head of development for the Polish Brothers' production company. He lives in Los Angeles.
include the John Cassavetes Award at the 2002 Independent Spirit Awards and a 2001 Seattle International Film Festival New American Cinema Award. They both live in the Los Angeles area.
JONATHAN SHELDON has worked on Jackpot and Northfork and was named head of development for the Polish Brothers' production company. He lives in Los Angeles.
Born in El Centro, California in the early 1970's, Mark and Michael Polish, identical twin brothers collectively known as the Polish Brothers, have made three critically lauded and award-winning independent feature films: Twin Falls Idaho, Jackpot, and Northfork. Their filmmaking awards and citations include the John Cassavetes Award at the 2002 Independent Spirit Awards and a 2001 Seattle International Film Festival New American Cinema Award. Their films have collectively been nominated for five Independent Spirit Awards. They both live in the Los Angeles area.
From the Back Cover
"The Declaration of Independent Filmmaking is a well-organized, often hilarious guide for any first-time filmmaker's journey through the perilous and unpredictable world of independent filmmaking. By tracking the process of their films, from an idea's infancy to its realization in a distribution deal, the Polish Brothers take their unique and pragmatic methods and break them down into an easy how-to chronicle. Their determination, vision, and enthusiasm are evident both on screen and in writing. Their love of the process, the most important part of successful filmmaking, is inspiring."--Ridley Scott, director of Blade Runner and Gladiator
"Like their movies, the Polish Brothers' book is funny, insightful, delightful, odd, smart, and full of good ideas and truths. It's completely accessible for the absolute novice, and yet will still be helpful to those who have some experience (after making six films, I still learned a thing or two). I certainly plan to recommend it when I teach or mentor young filmmakers."--Keith Gordon, director of A Midnight Clear, Waking the Dead, and Mother Night
"All do-it-yourself filmmakers must experience their own blood, sweat, and fears. But everything else to be learned from the independent adventure can be found in this priceless and entertaining guide. Tried, true, and terrific, it's like having your most credible filmmaking friends offer their shoulders to stand on. This book is an invaluable public service to would-be celluloid dreamers and schemers everywhere. Read it. It's your inalienable right."--Alan Rudolph, director of Afterglow and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
Mark and Michael Polish have written, produced, and directed three feature films: Twin Falls Idaho, Jackpot, and Northfork. Their filmmaking awards and citations include the John Cassavetes Award at the 2002 Independent Spirit Awards and a 2001 Seattle International Film Festival New American Cinema Award. Their films have collectively been nominated for five Independent Spirit Awards. They both live in the Los Angeles area.
Jonathan Sheldon was an associate producer on Northfork and was named head of development for the Polish Brothers' production company. He lives in Los Angeles.
"Like their movies, the Polish Brothers' book is funny, insightful, delightful, odd, smart, and full of good ideas and truths. It's completely accessible for the absolute novice, and yet will still be helpful to those who have some experience (after making six films, I still learned a thing or two). I certainly plan to recommend it when I teach or mentor young filmmakers."--Keith Gordon, director of A Midnight Clear, Waking the Dead, and Mother Night
"All do-it-yourself filmmakers must experience their own blood, sweat, and fears. But everything else to be learned from the independent adventure can be found in this priceless and entertaining guide. Tried, true, and terrific, it's like having your most credible filmmaking friends offer their shoulders to stand on. This book is an invaluable public service to would-be celluloid dreamers and schemers everywhere. Read it. It's your inalienable right."--Alan Rudolph, director of Afterglow and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
Mark and Michael Polish have written, produced, and directed three feature films: Twin Falls Idaho, Jackpot, and Northfork. Their filmmaking awards and citations include the John Cassavetes Award at the 2002 Independent Spirit Awards and a 2001 Seattle International Film Festival New American Cinema Award. Their films have collectively been nominated for five Independent Spirit Awards. They both live in the Los Angeles area.
Jonathan Sheldon was an associate producer on Northfork and was named head of development for the Polish Brothers' production company. He lives in Los Angeles.
Reviews
This trio of award-winning independent film actors-writers-directors-producers reveal how their desire to make movies that fulfilled their vision led them to create a rigorous, economical regimen that, for those "willing to forego a visit to the dentist so they can instead buy film stock," and who aren't well-versed in the technical and logistical aspects of film-making, is well worth the book's cover price. Drawing on their experiences making three feature films (Twin Falls Idaho is perhaps the best known), the Polish brothers walk would-be filmmakers step-by-step from script-writing to post-production to distribution, with an explanation of each part of the process. The amount of detail packed into short chapters (particularly the chapters on directing and editing) is impressive, and informative sidebars and anecdotes about actors like James Woods and Nick Nolte complement the text's how-to aspects. With their wise and simple advice, the Polish brothers and their co-author, Sheldon, have done aspiring filmmakers (but not their dentists) a great favor. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
What Makes a Film Independent?
It's hard to say exactly what is or isn't an independent film. Most people think of financial limitations as the hallmark of an indie, but a low budget is by no means a definitive marker. If that were the case, pornography and soft-core cable movies would have to be considered independent films. Perhaps the best way to approach a definition is to define what independent film is independent of. Certainly, part of this is being unattached to the major Hollywood studios, Hollywood micro-studios, or Hollywood production companies, which ordinarily prioritize financial gain before artistic endeavor.
This should be seen for what it is. It is entirely understandable that with tens of millions of dollars on the line, profitability has to be an imperative for a studio and its film executives. To them, movies are products. To ensure profitability, studios test-market and edit a film accordingly, control the casting, make mandatory script changes, and demand contractual control over fundamental creative decisions that will have an impact on the essence of the film. Historically, the independent filmmakers' gospel has been to shun decisive creative interference. The films they made were, thus, divorced from the Hollywood studio system. An independent film was the way for a director to show a studio what he or she was capable of without its involvement.
Creative independence in the film world is risky because the chance of success is so remote. Of the thousands of films made each year with private equity (money that comes from an outside source), only a small number are accepted into the Sundance Film Festival or another major festival, and of those, even fewer get picked up for distribution. The ability to secure private equity often has more to do with the state of the economy than the quality of a screenplay. But for a first-time independent filmmaker, private equity is usually the only option to pursue. The creative upside to this is that being removed from the "hit-making" devices of Hollywood allows a young filmmaker to find his or her own voice. This is the other part of what independent connotes. Whatever the story, an independent film attempts to tell it in an original, visionary way. Attempt is the key word here, because it doesn't mean the film is brilliant or even good, but it does imply that the filmmaker is trying to express his or her vision as an artist. Of course, this is a subjective evaluation. However, we contend it is quite like the obscenity definition given by the late Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart: "You know it when you see it."
Unfortunately, this interpretive nature of independent film's definition has allowed virtually any movie that is just slightly left of center to hide in the oeuvre of independent film. Savvy Hollywood marketers now regularly label low-budget films, regardless of their artistic ambitions, as "indies." Independent film as a catch moniker is so broadly used nowadays that it has been reduced to the equivalent of a "fat-free" label on cheese. These "independent" studio films are directly affiliated with the Hollywood studios and were born through their devices. Not that they are all bad films, but many of them do not embody the values or the struggle of independent film.
Independent film started to become more of a brand than a movement by the mid-1990s, after several independent films crossed over into the mainstream. When Hollywood smells money, it soon invades. And why not? Hollywood saw a cheap product grossing ten, twenty, or even a hundred times its cost- and recognized a chance to turn a huge profit. Would-be commercial filmmakers saw an opportunity to show Hollywood that they didn't need big budgets to have a commercial success. Thus was the birth of what we call cheap mainstream. The success of cheap mainstream created a lottery-ticket market for independents where suddenly the little independent film festivals became a marketplace for selling indies to Hollywood. Independent film was no longer a small niche movement; it had become a brand. And indie success by Hollywood standards was measured by a film's crossover potential: whether it could eventually move from the art-house crowd to the masses.
While this book isn't intended as a history lesson on independent film, some historical perspective is worth researching. If you're interested, there are many thoroughly researched tomes chronicling the rise of New Wave cinema from Europe, through the beginning of American independent cinema, to present-day indie filmmaking. Our goal in writing this book was to illustrate a point about the realities of getting indies made in today's marketplace.
By 1997, when we were making our first film, Twin Falls Idaho, the indie atmosphere had wafted into the backyard of Hollywood. Even with our budget of $500,000, there was pressure from the investor and producers to make our movie more accessible, to create a film that would appeal to the malls of America. But we knew the story we wanted to tell wasn't right for a committee process of test marketing and editing. While we wanted to protect the investment, we felt we shouldn't have the kind of burden Hollywood puts on filmmakers making $20 or $30 million movies. Our first concerns were to protect our voice and vision as filmmakers, and we believed that Twin Falls would be a worthwhile film only if it was made without dubious compromises.
As we started to edit Twin Falls, there was a disagreement between the producers and us on how the film should be cut. It had to do with length and chronology. One producer suggested we start the film with a flashback and voice-over, which would have dumbed the story down for a mainstream crowd. While the producers' points could be valid from a commercial standpoint (other than the serious suggestion that we trim the film down to ninety minutes so that it could play on airplanes, which even Hollywood movies don't undertake until an airline has licensed the film), we simply disagreed.
Things became more contentious when Twin Falls was subjected to a private test screening, where one of the producers gave out scorecards to an invited audience so they could rate the film. Suddenly, we were being subjected to the mainstream marketing machine when that wasn't part of our original deal. Moreover, this didn't make sense for the film; the subject matter wasn't mainstream. There was no way we were going to rework this film into the standard Hollywood criteria, and, besides, we didn't have the money or resources to reshoot even if every scorecard wanted the same unanimous change. We knew that even if 80 percent of the audience didn't want one of the twins to die, we couldn't please them even if we had wanted to. Ultimately, the only thing the test screening accomplished was to make everyone involved very insecure about the choices we had made as filmmakers.
These types of conflicts are more the norm than the exception in today's independent film marketplace. Many filmmakers, after the Sundance high of screening (and for some of them selling) their movie in Park City, wake up to a nightmare of recuts and test marketing. Protecting the independence of a film doesn't stop after production is wrapped. Many independent filmmakers think that once they have locked picture, the war is over, that the film is creatively protected. But in reality, an indie is still vulnerable after it is sold and while the distributor is focused on selling the film.
Copyright © 2005 by Mark Polish and Michael Polish
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
It's hard to say exactly what is or isn't an independent film. Most people think of financial limitations as the hallmark of an indie, but a low budget is by no means a definitive marker. If that were the case, pornography and soft-core cable movies would have to be considered independent films. Perhaps the best way to approach a definition is to define what independent film is independent of. Certainly, part of this is being unattached to the major Hollywood studios, Hollywood micro-studios, or Hollywood production companies, which ordinarily prioritize financial gain before artistic endeavor.
This should be seen for what it is. It is entirely understandable that with tens of millions of dollars on the line, profitability has to be an imperative for a studio and its film executives. To them, movies are products. To ensure profitability, studios test-market and edit a film accordingly, control the casting, make mandatory script changes, and demand contractual control over fundamental creative decisions that will have an impact on the essence of the film. Historically, the independent filmmakers' gospel has been to shun decisive creative interference. The films they made were, thus, divorced from the Hollywood studio system. An independent film was the way for a director to show a studio what he or she was capable of without its involvement.
Creative independence in the film world is risky because the chance of success is so remote. Of the thousands of films made each year with private equity (money that comes from an outside source), only a small number are accepted into the Sundance Film Festival or another major festival, and of those, even fewer get picked up for distribution. The ability to secure private equity often has more to do with the state of the economy than the quality of a screenplay. But for a first-time independent filmmaker, private equity is usually the only option to pursue. The creative upside to this is that being removed from the "hit-making" devices of Hollywood allows a young filmmaker to find his or her own voice. This is the other part of what independent connotes. Whatever the story, an independent film attempts to tell it in an original, visionary way. Attempt is the key word here, because it doesn't mean the film is brilliant or even good, but it does imply that the filmmaker is trying to express his or her vision as an artist. Of course, this is a subjective evaluation. However, we contend it is quite like the obscenity definition given by the late Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart: "You know it when you see it."
Unfortunately, this interpretive nature of independent film's definition has allowed virtually any movie that is just slightly left of center to hide in the oeuvre of independent film. Savvy Hollywood marketers now regularly label low-budget films, regardless of their artistic ambitions, as "indies." Independent film as a catch moniker is so broadly used nowadays that it has been reduced to the equivalent of a "fat-free" label on cheese. These "independent" studio films are directly affiliated with the Hollywood studios and were born through their devices. Not that they are all bad films, but many of them do not embody the values or the struggle of independent film.
Independent film started to become more of a brand than a movement by the mid-1990s, after several independent films crossed over into the mainstream. When Hollywood smells money, it soon invades. And why not? Hollywood saw a cheap product grossing ten, twenty, or even a hundred times its cost- and recognized a chance to turn a huge profit. Would-be commercial filmmakers saw an opportunity to show Hollywood that they didn't need big budgets to have a commercial success. Thus was the birth of what we call cheap mainstream. The success of cheap mainstream created a lottery-ticket market for independents where suddenly the little independent film festivals became a marketplace for selling indies to Hollywood. Independent film was no longer a small niche movement; it had become a brand. And indie success by Hollywood standards was measured by a film's crossover potential: whether it could eventually move from the art-house crowd to the masses.
While this book isn't intended as a history lesson on independent film, some historical perspective is worth researching. If you're interested, there are many thoroughly researched tomes chronicling the rise of New Wave cinema from Europe, through the beginning of American independent cinema, to present-day indie filmmaking. Our goal in writing this book was to illustrate a point about the realities of getting indies made in today's marketplace.
By 1997, when we were making our first film, Twin Falls Idaho, the indie atmosphere had wafted into the backyard of Hollywood. Even with our budget of $500,000, there was pressure from the investor and producers to make our movie more accessible, to create a film that would appeal to the malls of America. But we knew the story we wanted to tell wasn't right for a committee process of test marketing and editing. While we wanted to protect the investment, we felt we shouldn't have the kind of burden Hollywood puts on filmmakers making $20 or $30 million movies. Our first concerns were to protect our voice and vision as filmmakers, and we believed that Twin Falls would be a worthwhile film only if it was made without dubious compromises.
As we started to edit Twin Falls, there was a disagreement between the producers and us on how the film should be cut. It had to do with length and chronology. One producer suggested we start the film with a flashback and voice-over, which would have dumbed the story down for a mainstream crowd. While the producers' points could be valid from a commercial standpoint (other than the serious suggestion that we trim the film down to ninety minutes so that it could play on airplanes, which even Hollywood movies don't undertake until an airline has licensed the film), we simply disagreed.
Things became more contentious when Twin Falls was subjected to a private test screening, where one of the producers gave out scorecards to an invited audience so they could rate the film. Suddenly, we were being subjected to the mainstream marketing machine when that wasn't part of our original deal. Moreover, this didn't make sense for the film; the subject matter wasn't mainstream. There was no way we were going to rework this film into the standard Hollywood criteria, and, besides, we didn't have the money or resources to reshoot even if every scorecard wanted the same unanimous change. We knew that even if 80 percent of the audience didn't want one of the twins to die, we couldn't please them even if we had wanted to. Ultimately, the only thing the test screening accomplished was to make everyone involved very insecure about the choices we had made as filmmakers.
These types of conflicts are more the norm than the exception in today's independent film marketplace. Many filmmakers, after the Sundance high of screening (and for some of them selling) their movie in Park City, wake up to a nightmare of recuts and test marketing. Protecting the independence of a film doesn't stop after production is wrapped. Many independent filmmakers think that once they have locked picture, the war is over, that the film is creatively protected. But in reality, an indie is still vulnerable after it is sold and while the distributor is focused on selling the film.
Copyright © 2005 by Mark Polish and Michael Polish
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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