A hard road at the American Film Market

November 12th, 2008

A jet-lagged hello from New York City, where I am re-acclimating after a week in Santa Monica for the American Film Market. AFM is the annual bazaar of film sales, with a focus on stars and genre films. So-called “art house” films are not popular at AFM, and documentaries are generally disdained.

This year has been fairly depressing for most of the veteran buyers and sellers here, getting off to a terribly slow start due to the global financial meltdown and a glut of films that took buyers a while to sift through before finally executing some sales over the weekend. 

As a documentary filmmaker and marketer, I definitely felt like an outsider at AFM, where it seems every third film features either Michael Madsen holding a gun or a large-breasted woman on the verge of impalement by some shiny phallic instrument.

However, in talking to dozens of buyers and sales agents this past week, the anti-documentary message was particularly resounding. Of the 513 films screening at AFM, only 34 were documentaries. My unofficial inspection found fewer than a dozen of the 400-plus exhibitors even had a poster for a documentary hanging in their hotel suites.

There are markets that are stronger for docs — both Berlin and Cannes have markets that are more doc-friendly, and HotDocs in Toronto is designed to put documentary filmmakers and buyers together. But the weak market at AFM is still a disturbing omen for any “factual-content” producer who hopes for international distribution or theatrical release here in the United States. And the fact that a hoary, performance-enhanced Sylvester Stallone vehicle called The Expendibles is the hottest thing at AFM is pretty disconcerting for independent “specialty” filmmakers across all genres.

The good news? Everyone here realizes they exist in a distribution model for film that is broken and soon to completely collapse as technology allows every consumer to pick what, where and when they watch. So, the fact that docs were not welcome at AFM means little for the future of documentaries in general.

PS: You may have noticed a monthlong gap in my blog postings. I apologize, but my blog admin site got broken into and all kinds of silliness ensued. 

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