Don’t get me wrong.  I’m a big fan of Mark Gill.  He and I were on an AFI 3rd Decade Council committee years and years ago when he was still doing ad-pub, and he had a great attitude, great energy and was clearly going places.

And his speech at the LAFF financing panel on 6/21/08 at the Landmark in West L.A., which I’ve linked to farther down the page, is an absolute must read for anyone in this business today.  I’ve seen keynotes before by distinguished, eloquent and even erudite (not an oxymoron in Hollywood, c’mon!) execs over the years – but Mark really turns up the heat in this one. 

To the point where he has definitely pulled his/the town’s collective head out of its/our collective ass. 

He is uncompromising in describing the serious contraction of the wide/mass audience linear narrative segment of the transmedia entertainment business.  Yes, carefully chosen words on my part, ’cause there’s a much bigger picture here that he and I’m sure most of the people at this event were/are missing.  They “work in film.” 

LOL.  Mark still thinks there’s a film business.

Anne Thompson posted the full text of the speech on her blog:

  http://weblogs.variety.com/thompsononhollywood/2008/06/laff-mark-gill.html

The truth, of course, is that the film business is the Neanderthal to the Transmedia Cro-Magnon that hit the savannah a while ago and is now filling up its dance card.  OK: no.  Film is not going to become extinct.  Yes, I was being too glib.  TV did not eradicate Radio and Film.  Video did not kill Theatrical.  But transmedia is not a “window” in the current paradigm of this business.  It is a completely new order.

What this means is that Mark’s well-stated exhortation to make better films (because there is less room to make them at all), is pointless.  He is stuck in this illusion that the quality of films is the issue.  His scholarly preachment about the creative values necessary for a well-made film are just a little bit condescending, and unfortunately irrelevant in a new world where narrative is holographic, and user experience is integral to the narrative.  Hey, Mark – let me say this to you in terms you can understand:  seeing your films at the Arclight is a better experience than seeing them at the AMC.  In a transmedia world, you need to take into account where and how and who (and how many) are experiencing (not “watching” – passive is only part of it) your “film,” and to realize that your “film” is only a subset of a larger narrative package.

C’mon, everyone!  We have to think beyond the concept of “making films” – including the writing, producing, direction, distributing, and, yes, even conceiving of what films are.

Does Mark seriously think that feature films are going to be downloaded or streamed to mobile devices the same way they were re-packaged for VHS and then for DVD?  The “films” you see on your mobile device will be different versions of the same Title that you will see in the Theater or in a Video Game.  They will be one piece of the puzzle, an element of the total content cloud that constitutes the totality of the Title.  Sorry to be so ponderous, but this is an important distinction that surprisingly few people in leadership positions in our business are talking about.

What Mark and the rest of us 20th century fossils have an impossible time reconciling is that the stand-alone movie is doomed, particularly the movie that only exists in a sequential, windowed distribution world.  Movies that are conceived as single, standalone narratives, that do not engage their audience in ways other than through the single linear approx. 90-120 min experience are thin and incomplete experiences in the current culture.

Yes, there will always be a place for these pieces, these experiences, these “films.” But, as Mark correctly predicts, they will be fewer and fewer.  His 10 year-old son wants to know why “films suck.”  He’s being polite, because he knows his old man is too old-school to get it.  What he means is: why aren’t films more like everything else in my transmedia world?  Films, silver-process photography, printed newspapers, hand-built automobiles - analog forms that inspire admiration, great affect and justifiable nostalgia, but that sit on the sidelines of the mainstream consumer experience as we move forward into the first digital century.