Last week, the organization behind the Tribeca Film Festival announced it was launching a for-profit distribution company, Tribeca Film. Seven of the ten films they’ve acquired will be viewable on Video On Demand (VOD) during the April festival and for at least 60 days, available to a potential audience of over 40 million TV households.  They also announced that they’d be offering online access to many of the movies screening in their festival through their website.

“I think festivals need to reinvent themselves,” Tribeca’s Chief Creative Officer Geoff Gilmore told IndieWire.  “The old model of a customary promotion needs to be amplified.” Will the other major film festivals quickly follow Gilmore’s model?  Sundance Pictures Classics?  Cannes Searchlight?  TorontoFlix?  If initiatives like this catch on, could they become the trusted brands that the serious moviegoing public turn to when they look for good films, in Eugene Hernandez’s words, “The New “Miramax”?  Or, as David Poland has suggested, is this just another way to screw filmmakers?

Day-and-date online video or VOD screenings at festivals aren’t unusual, but they’ve been put on by outside companies like IFC and Cinetic’s Filmbuff.  But the most celebrated example is this year’s presentation of a few Sundance movies on YouTube.  

Unfortunately, the reason the YouTube experiment is so well known is that the media pronounced it a failure.  The general perception was that very few people watched the Sundance movies on YouTube. 

So how is it going to be different this time?   Apparently, this time American Express is going to be spending tons of money promoting this. I’m sure that they have a lot of stuff up their sleeve that will do the trick.  But I have my concerns, and I know I’m not the only one.  As producer Ted Hope pointed out, “a media launch does not translate into immediate audience want-to-see.  Without want-to-see failure is a forgone conclusion.”  

So what to do?   Here are my thoughts:

Film festivals are not just movies—they’re full-out experiences: the chaos of the red carpet; the scramble to get tickets to the hot movie; the Q&A’s; the contentious discussions in the lobby…

I don’t think that giving people access to just movies is enough.   If you expect somebody in Des Moines to tune in, you’ve got to give them a little something extra--a taste of what it’s really like to be there.   In as near to real time as you can get it. 

How about streaming the Q&A’s live online and on VOD?  Raw footage from the red carpet? Why not hand out Flip Cameras to the actors and directors in the green room?  

I’ve been with dozens of directors as their film was unspooling for the very first time.  This is very dramatic stuff—they are rarely calm.  They’re thinking, “Will people like my movie?  I’ve spent three years of my life and I’m totally in debt.  I guess I’ll find out soon…”   And after that, there is applause. 

Give people watching from home the feeling of what it really is like to be there, right as the festival unfolds.   Not in some polished promo video, but rough-and-tumble, the way a festival is.  Give them an emotional investment in the human beings behind the movies.

What is a festival?   Seeing “Precious”?   Anybody can see “Precious.”  But few can be on the scene the first time a “Precious” is shown.  That chance only comes once. 

Give people an online and VOD inside experience that they will tell all their friends about.  They’ll tell their friends about the movies and they’ll tell them that virtual film festivals are amazing. 

Isn’t that what it’s all about?

This week is going to be absolutely nerve-wracking week for a lot of very talented people. And the just the ones who are contending for the big prize, but their families, friends, journalists and all their fans.

Some of these people have prepared for this moment for their whole lives. Some have no training at all. It doesn’t matter.  They all want it.

Some have been through this competition before. That doesn’t make it any easier. The way they train that camera on their faces when they lose in front of millions of people?   That can’t be too pleasant the first time. And then you have to repeat it?  But you don’t mind.  It’s an honor to be in that group. Right.

You try not to, but of course you can’t help reading the magazines and the blogs. Some people think it’s all over and you don’t have a chance. That’s kind of dispiriting. Thanks a lot, guys.

You cling to the idea that there are always upsets.

But you have to look at the positive side. Getting dressed up? Posing for major magazine photos? Hearing the paparazzi shout your name?

How many people get to have an experience like that? It’s all pretty scary, but you know there are millions of people who would kill to be in your shoes.

Still, you know the truth.

On Thursday, Seacrest will ask you to stand up. He’ll screw with your head just for the fun of it. He’ll make you sweat.

Has he forgotten that you’re only doing this for your family? Has he forgotten that they’re all going to starve if you don’t at least make it to the top twelve?

Will you be “safe”? Or will you have to sing the same damned song that got you voted off? Who came up with that idea? It must have been Simon because it’s just plain nasty.

As far as you’re concerned, Ryan can just kiss your butt, go straight to hell, and he can take Simon and Kara and Ellen along with him. Pitchy? More like bitchy. What the hell do they know, anyway?

What’s that?  You made it to the top 16?

Never mind.

As a publicist, I’ve taken my clients to thousands of photo sessions. Most of the photographers were technically proficient, and many were extremely imaginative. You’d show up and there’d be this wild set that had been constructed.  They’d take an actor who starred in a gritty realist film and make him up Ziggy Stardust-style. Often there’d be loud music, giving the session the feeling of a club.

I’ve been lucky enough to watch a lot of talented photographers at work, from Richard Avedon to David LaChapelle, but most of the photo shoots I went to were deadly dull.   After a lot of waiting around and hair and makeup, the “talent” would be positioned in front of a seamless background. The photographer would have a lot of equipment. And then: “snap&strobe-Turn your body to the left!-snap&strobe-Look at me!-snap&strobe-Move your face a little to the right!-snap&strobe-A little more to the right!-snap&strobe-Too far!-snap&strobe-Hold It!-snap&strobe-Yeah!-snap&strobe-That’s so good!-snap&strobe-I like that!-snap&strobe-Woohoo!-snap&strobe-Oh that’s good!-snap&strobe-One more!-snap&strobe-Just like that!-snap&strobe-Love it!”

It was like someone struggling to have sex with a partner who needed a lot of directions.

After what seemed like months, they were done. With the first pose.

Regardless of whether the photo sessions were generic or wildly creative, nearly all of them had one thing in common: they were planned out before you got there. You could customize it in small ways, like picking clothes from a rack, but the conceptual stage was set.

Of all the photo sessions I’ve been to over the years, two stand out. Both of them were with Duane Michals. Each time he turned up at a hotel room, accompanied only by a Nikon.

The first one was Brazilian actress Sonia Braga. He came in and started talking to Sonia. I decided to leave them alone. I went into the bedroom and made some phone calls.  After about ten minutes, I came back in. Sonia was nude by the window and he had wrapped her in the window curtain.  He was lighting her with the available sunlight and a hotel room lamp.  He positioned where he wanted her to be and took a picture. It was plain as day he was making a choice--that’s what I want, I want that image. that image… and no other.

This is a pretty interesting way to do it, I thought. Walk in the door with no expectations, no plans. Make use of whatever is there. And then stand by each of your images. Each one is a choice.

Like all exciting things, the photo shoot was over before I wanted it to be. The finished picture was extraordinary.

The next time I saw Michals was when he came to photograph Werner Herzog in his hotel room.  But we didn’t stay at Werner’s hotel for very long long. Michals told us that he had passed a parade on his way over. We left immediately. Michals and Werner raced up the street until they caught up with the parade. They talked some paraders into positing. I remember being struck by one shot where Werner stood ramrod straight as a soldier in the middle of a bunch of costumed guys from the parade. Years later, I found it in a book.

Was Michals trying to make Werner look like a character in a Werner Herzog movie?  I don’t know.

But he knew he had to grab that parade.

I only encountered Duane Michals for a few minutes, but he taught me lessons about art I will never forget.

As everyone knows, James Cameron has taken movies to a whole new level with the technology behind “Avatar.”

Still, Cameron hasn’t exactly been sitting on his hands waiting for Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin to strike up their opening monologue. Having taken motion control and 3D to previously unimagined levels, he’s hard at work reinvigorating some other filmic devices.

Here are a few of the ideas he’s polishing up for the new century:

Sensurround was a rumbling theatre-shaking sound created by Universal Studios for the 1974 film “Earthquake.” Anybody who was around in those days remembers how stupendously entertaining it was. But there were some drawbacks: some customers puked into their popcorn bags and products rattled off shelves in nearby businesses. It ultimately was seen as a failure and faded into film history until recently, when Cameron took on the task of resurrecting it. “In no way did Sensurround give the feeling of being in a real earthquake,” he says. “You need to have stuff falling on people’s heads. And that’s what I’m going to do. Nothing very heavy, but even a good-sized piece of Styrofoam can really get your attention if you’re not expecting it. Combine that with 3D boulders and it’s a truly immersive experience.” He expects to have 352 CameronQuake™-ready theatres set to go by 2013.

Smell-O-Vision. Any regular movie-goer knows that smells in movie-theatres have never been limited to popcorn. But it took producer Mike Todd, Jr. to add this essential third sense to the movie experience with “Scent of Mystery” in 1960. At key moments in the narrative, various fragrances were pumped under the theatre seats. Smell-O-Vision faced competition from the copycat Aromavision and, as with Sensurround, there were numerous technical problems. People in the balconies complained that the smells reached them too late, so their whiffing wasn’t synchronized to the story-telling. Some found the smells too faint, so there was a lot of loud snorting and sniffing, which other patrons found distracting. The problem wasn’t solved until John Waters developed Odorama technology for the release of “Polyester,” starring Divine and Tab Hunter, in 1982. The genius of Odorama was its simplicity: scratch and sniff cards with colored dots. “Citizen Kane” was my favorite film until “Polyester” made it possible for me to smell Divine’s farts.

“I don’t want to criticize John Waters,” says Cameron, “but just thinking about snatch and sniff cards makes me madder than I am at Meryl Streep for thinking that voicing ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ had anything to do with motion capture.” While Pixar and Dreamworks have been testing smell-equipped 3D glasses, Cameron opted for transmitting aromas directly through the synapses into the brain. “The nasal passage might seem the obvious route,” says Cameron. “But what if somebody has a cold? My films are for all audiences, and that includes people with stuffed-up noses. CameroScent™ will give the audience such an immersive experience that they’ll be reaching for their virtual hankies. Which will seem to be there.”

Percepto was developed by famed producer/director William Castle for the film “The Tingler.” During the climax of the film, the lights would go black and the voice of Vincent Price warned the audience, “The Tingler is loose in THIS theatre! Scream! Run for Your Lives!” At this moment, the projectionist would trigger buzzers in some of the seats. “Percepto was no more than a cheesy gimmick,” says Cameron. “Trust me, when I zap the audience in the ass, it will draw them into the story, not send them running out of the theatre!”

Looking Ahead As recently reported in The New York Times, some people have complained that watching 3D movies give them headaches, nausea, blurred vision, and other symptoms of visually induced motion sickness. There are also potential problems from falling debris from CameronQuake™ as well as allergic reactions, seizures and strokes from CameroScent™, and various butt-related ailments from CameroCepto™. Cameron feels that he will have all the bugs worked out in time for the 2014 release of his next film, but just in case, he has a backup plan. “I have taken .05% of my profits on my films and given a $2 million contribution to each and every member of the House and Senate,” says Cameron. “We need to have a better health care system in America so that the viewers of my films will have access to affordable care when my movies make them sick.”

I was really enjoying the scene in “Up in the Air” where George Clooney’s character meets Vera Farmiga in a hotel bar. But as soon as she introduced herself, I went right out of the movie.

Why did she have to be called Alex?

For me, “Alex” is Hollywood screenwriter code for a post-feminist archetype: an empowered woman who can do anything a man can do—but is also smokin’ hot. The male characters sense that Alexes might turn out to be stronger than them and that cuts into their confidence and sense of entitlement. Alexes scare men, but they also give them boners. Out of this primal conflict, Academy Award nominated screenplays and books by Camille Paglia are born.

The mother of all Alexes is Alex Owens (Jennifer Beals) in Adrian Lyne’s “Flashdance” (1983). Like most women I knew at the time, Alex works as a welder by day and an exotic dancer by night. But Alex doesn’t take off her clothes, because she considers stripping to be exploitative—instead, she wears skimpy outfits and drops a tub of water on herself in front of boozy schlunks in a bar. Even though Alex displays a remarkable talent for taking her bra off without removing her shirt, her dream is to be a ballet dancer. But when her boyfriend (Michael Nouri) tries to pull a few strings to get her an audition, she dumps him and sets him straight: sisters are doing it for themselves.  She also throws a brick through his front window, but I don’t remember exactly why.

ALEX LESSON #1 – Alexes don’t need men to help them reach their dreams.

The next Alex didn’t come along until 1987 but she was a doozy: Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest in “Fatal Attraction,” once again directed by Adrian Lyne. Happily married Michael Douglas has what he assumes is a momentary affair with businesswoman Close, only to find out to his chagrin that he has messed with Medea. Alex becomes a fearsome stalker, willing to do anything to possess Douglas, even if it involves heinous acts on bunnies.

ALEX LESSON #2: Alexes do need men--to do whatever they want or else!

So I couldn’t help flashing on those two Alexes when I heard that Farmiga introduce herself as Alex. For me, this was too much information before the story even got started. Oscar-nominated screenwriters Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner aren’t at fault, as the name came from Walter Kirn’s book. Still, I think the three of them should wise up and emulate a real writer like Joe Eszterhas, who co-wrote “Flashdance,” but learned his lesson and used the name Catherine Trammell for his next Alex, Sharon Stone in “Basic Instinct.”

ALEX LESSON #3  Alexes need men, but only now and then. 

While Clooney and  Farmiga came on to each other with their frequent flyer cards, I tried to remember other notable screen Alexes. I could only remember the late Brittany Murphy in “8 Mile” and the great Tori Spelling in “Scary Movie 2.” Murphy’s Alex reprised the tough-talking street girl with higher aspirations portrayed by Karen Lynn Gorney in “Saturday Night Fever.” She didn’t take any crap from Eminem, that’s for sure. But Murphy wanted to be a model, which sealed the deal on the go-go dancer aspect of being an Alex.

ALEX LESSON #4: Alexes don’t let men stand in front of their career plans.

In “Scary Movie 2,” Tori Spelling’s Alex is asleep in bed when she starts to be fellated by a phantom. Instead of being frightened, her Alex takes charge right away. “Bring it on, bitch!” she shouts, as she spider-f*cks across the ceiling. “You want me!”

ALEX LESSON #5: Alexes need men—for sex!

After a few moments of thinking about this, I tried to warn Clooney about what he was getting into, but the woman ahead of me kept shushing me. I went back to watching the movie, which incidentally, I liked.

NOURI/DOUGLAS/CLOONEY/EMINEM/GHOST MESSAGE:  Ouch! 

Am I the only one who thinks that this whole Alex deal isn’t about opening up the definitions of sex roles but of trying to jam them back into the bottle?  Even in really good movies like “Up in the Air”?  Are we so married to traditional notions of men and women that if a female character is ambitious or independent or even a little cold it’s time to slap a male name on her head?  

Just asking. 

Also, anybody else have some other screen Alexes they’d like to contribute?

A week ago, Sharon Waxman wrote the following item in her Report From Sundance in The Wrap.

Steven Soderbergh, a filmmaker who may well be synonymous with the Sundance brand (“sex, lies, and videotape” put the festival on the map in 1989), gave his latest film to Slamdance.  “And Everything is Going Fine” is screening at the rival festival. I asked Sundance executive director John Cooper about this slight, and Cooper told me that the director never brought the film to his attention. When he did, Cooper said, the director responded that he was trying to “share the love, babe.”

I wrote a comment suggesting what the reason might have been.  In 1995, Soderbergh submitted a film he co-produced, "The Daytrippers," to Sundance and was turned down.  After the rejection, “The Daytrippers” went to the 1996 Slamdance, where it won the Grand Jury Prize, followed by awards at Toronto, Athens, and the National Board of Review, among other prizes.  When it finally came out in 1997, it became one of the most commercially successful independent films of the year.  He returned to Slamdance the following year with “Schizopolis.”

Personally, I think that Soderbergh isn’t spanking Sundance, he’s thanking  Slamdance for giving “The Daytrippers” such a successful launch, not to mention the advantages of  World Premiering his Spaulding Gray doc, “And Everything is Going Fine” at Slamdance, where it would be the Big Fish.  That’s how I take his  “share the love” comment.

Also, I was the publicist on “The Daytrippers,” and I don’t remember Steven cracking a sweat about the film not getting into Sundance.  He was busy with two other films of his own (“Schizopolis” and his Spaulding Gray performance film, “Gray’s Anatomy”),  he wasn’t petty, he believed in the film and moved on.

The one who got worked up into a self-righteous fury was me.

As it happened, in 1995, I wasn’t just the publicist for “The Daytrippers,” I was also the publicity consultant for the Sundance Institute. Not just the festival, but the whole kit-and-kaboodle Sundance, with all its programs.  Maybe someday I’ll write about my ill-fated year with the Institute, but I will say that when Redford offered me this resume-embossing gig, I suspected it wasn’t something I’d be a wizard at. I’m not saying I don’t have confidence in my abilities as  a publicist, just that institutions aren’t my strong suit as I don’t have an instinct for politics.   But how could I say no?  My vanity shook up like a snow globe when Redford expressed his faith in me.  

One of the ways I proved I wasn’t worthy of the consultant job was to harangue Geoff Gilmore about how he was making a huge mistake by turning down “The Daytrippers.”  It never occurred to me that it wasn’t right for me to use my access to Gilmore to lobby aggressively for another client.

Geoff and I often got into, shall we say, spirited discussions.  He wasn’t afraid to have an argument.  We’d have it out, but there’d be a resolution and the next day it was forgotten.

I tore into Geoff about Steven and what the festival owed him.  I said that Greg Mottola, the future director of “Superbad” and “Adventureland,” was a big talent and that Geoff would regret not having launched him.  I said that this was Parker Posey’s best role to date, and that people would see her in a new way after they saw it.  I said that two of the other lead actors, Hope Davis and Liev Schreiber, were going to be big someday.  I said that the movie was in the spirit of what Sundance was supposed to be all about.  Greg had written a script and couldn’t get the money to make it, so Steven and co-producer Nancy Tenenbaum  had said something like here’s 500 bucks, make it for that. The number was somewhat bigger than that, but Greg wrote a movie that could be made for very little.  Among the people who signed on to play cameos in this labor of love were Campbell Scott, Marcia Gay Harden, and Stanley Tucci. And I kept on going, hoping to knock down his resistance with the sheer quantity of my arguments.

“You through?” Geoff asked.  “Reid, nobody liked it. We all watched it and nobody liked it.” 

That shut me up.

The Sundance programmers pick the films they like.   It’s something so simple that it’s easy to forget.   If Geoff responded to a heavy-duty lobbying effort like I was trying to make, he wouldn’t be doing his job.   Because his job was… being Geoff. 

Once I accepted that, all my arguments shrunk faster than George Costanza’s shmekel in the swimming pool. There was nothing left to say except:

“You are totally right.”

Gilmore, John Cooper, Trevor Groth, or any festival programmer at any festival, can’t presume to know how their tastes will stand up to history.  That’s a weight others put on them and one that they don’t ask for.  They have their tastes and they exercise them.  Ultimately, the success of any festival rests on the foundation of the programmers’ tastes. Sundance is a very successful festival.   Nothing more to be said. 

“The Daytrippers” did just fine without getting into Sundance.  It got a lot of great reviews, but they weren’t all great.  It’s always that way.  You can’t expect everybody to love you all the time if you want to make movies.

Getting into Sundance is an honor. Not being accepted is just a difference of opinion, and should be taken as such.  People make a big mistake when they inflate a Sundance turndown into some kind of ultimate judgment.  Real talent, if it persists, will out.

I think it’s good for the Sundance programmers that Soderbergh supports Slamdance.  It takes some heat off them if Slamdance continues to exist.  At a moment when some filmmakers might be standing in front of the Egyptian Theatre, brooding in the cold, it’s a blessing there’s a place where they can find shelter from their stormy thoughts:

The Treasure Mountain Inn.

Like a lot of guys who played in garage bands when they were teenagers, I’ve kept playing and writing songs. I’ve forgotten the lyrics and the melodies to most of them years ago, but lately I’ve taken to recording a few.  So, without further ado, here is:

Indie Film Man

I was inspired to write the song a few years ago when I was packing my suitcase for Sundance and Roger McGuinn’s “So You Want Be A Rock n’ Roll Star” happened to be playing. It occurred to that the world of independent film was ripe for parody. I used the word “Indie” in the title because I’ve always detested it for corrupting the word “independent” into a candy bar.

If you want to be an INDIE FILM MAN
Get yourself a Handicam
Read the manual if you can and then
Grab yourself a bunch of friends
Tell a story about an indian
Who was a Native American
And he’s dealing with being a lesbian
With his mama on the juice
And his daddy in the can
But damned if he don’t find redemption in the end
With love and mercy and a truck-driving nun named Dan

Soon you’ll be at Sundance
Snow bunnies begging to get in your pants
Agents trying to be your friend
And you’ll never go back to Teaneck again.

Gay or straight, a woman or a man
You get laid, it’s really great to be an INDIE FILM MAN.

Your film gets shown at a sidebar at Cannes
Where the French girls take off their tops as they tan
Jerry Lewis and you loved by Parisienes,
’Cause you
Are a true-blue INDIE FILM MAN

Soon you’ll be back at Sundance
You’ll meet Bobby Redford and you’ll piss in your pants
‘Cause you can’t believe you got this chance
To be an INDIE FILM MAN.

Why should you have a rock & roll band
If you can
Be an INDIE FILM MAN

Soon you’ve got another feature in the can
Starring Harvey Keitel and a chick from “Friends”
This merry-go-round will never end
You can depend
You’ll always win you’re an INDIE FILM MAN

The publicity man and the various brands dine and wine you
Movie stars try to get you on the phone
And all your best friends hit a big dead end trying to find you
But in your hotel room you’re even more alone

When you can’t remember when anything made sense
You understand
You little lamb
You’re an INDIE FILM MAN.

While Eric Rohmer began making films in the 1950s, he had only broken through as an internationally famous filmmaker the year before, with “My Night at Maud’s” in 1969 which won numerous critics’ prizes, was nominated for Oscars for Best Screenplay and Best Foreign Language Film, and was his first feature film to be shown in the U.S. He was 49.

“My Night at Maud’s hero, Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is an uptight Catholic, decides to marry a blandly pretty young blonde, a total stranger he sees at church and is too shy to approach. Through a friend, he meets and ends up spending the night at the apartment of Maud (Françoise Fabian), a divorcee, religious  skeptic, intellectual, and to my 17-year-old eyes, overwhelmingly sexy woman. Through the course of the night they have a lively discussion that contrasts her freewheeling attitudes to life with his more ascetic, religious, and to his eyes, less superficial, disciplined and scrupulously ethical ones. While Maud’s stories were earthy, their discussion was often very bookish, with much talk about Blaise Pascal’s “Pensées.”  Despite Maud’s attempts to seduce Jean-Louis, nothing happens. (It doesn’t take much imagination to see “Maud”’s influence on “My Dinner With Andre.”)

I had never seen anything like “My Night at Maud’s.” To me it was utterly captivating… and sensual in every sense of the word.

Obviously I was incredibly excited to see his follow-up, “Claire’s Knee.” Once again it was a story of a guy who is attracted to a beautiful woman, but for various reasons, is unable to follow through. I would learn later that these two films were part of a series called “Six Moral Tales,” each of which were variations of this same basic plot: a guy aching for someone, but not being able to do anything about it because of his social situation, or conflicted sense of morality. This kind of thing is extremely rich soil for story-telling, and has fueled not only Rohmer’s early oeuvre, but also much of Jane Austen’s and Ang Lee’s film careers.

In his tribute to Rohmer, A.O. Scott wrote in the Times that the subject of Rohmer’s work was passion. Perhaps so, but I believe that the Moral Tales are the films most people think about when they think of Rohmer--and they are more precisely about thwarted passion, and conflicted feelings--not passion per se.

Anyway, in “Claire’s Knee,” this time it’s Jean-Claude Brialy who gets to play the guy who’s about to get married, when he’s tempted by a looker. While on holiday before his wedding, he meets Claire (Laurence de Monaghan), a 16-year-old girl, who is beautiful, but not tremendously fascinating. Rohmer shows us that by giving her a far more interesting teenaged sister, Laura (Beatrice Romand), who has a crush on Brialy’s character. But when Claire goes up a ladder and Brialy locks eyes with her knee, he becomes consumed with the idea of caressing it. But how? What possible excuse could he find to do that?

In my high school art class, I was given the assignment of taking a small image, marking it up in squares and squaring up a much larger piece of paper to blow it up into a watercolor a few feet wide . Of course I used the ladder shot from “Claire’s Knee,” which encapsulated everything I loved about Rohmer, and was irresistibly timeless. There was nothing about the luscious landscape, Brialy’s hat, beard, sweater draped over his shoulders, or de Monaghan’s legs that would have looked out of place in an impressionist painting.

One thing people toss off as an anecdote about Rohmer is that he hid his identity as a film critic and director by using Eric Rohmer as a pseudonym. Even the name he was born with is subject to discussion – it was either Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer or Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer, depending on who you talk to. Scherer published a novel under the name Gilbert Cordier in 1946, and later took the name “Eric Rohmer,” from Erich Von Stroheim and Sax Rohmer, author of the “Fu Manchu” stories.

Generally it’s said that he didn’t use his real name for some undisclosed family reasons, but I was told by someone who should know who exactly it was in his family he didn’t want to upset. (I’m just going to say Freud and that’s all you’ll get out of me.) And he didn’t just change his name either. I once saw a hilarious photograph of him decked out in an obviously phony beard, although if memory serves, it was closer to a Van Dyck than--thank heaven!--a Fu Manchu.

Just stop for a second and think long and hard about being in the closet for most of your life about the thing you love the most. The Cinema was his Grand Passion, and his early writing was dedicated the proposition that it should be taken as seriously as any art form. But presumably, there was somebody that mattered to him who would be very disappointed to discover he was married to a vocation so far beneath him.

His life might make a good movie, don’t you think?

Maybe that’s why he made it so many times.

.

Postscript: Years later, I was the publicist on his 1978 film “Perceval le Gallois,” when he came to New York to promote it during the New York Film Festival. I was told then that the disapproving family member was no longer with us, but I don’t know for sure whether this was his first NY press junket.

Today you’ll see that SpeedCine is sporting a new design and a bunch of new features. (Check out our video.)  But the big news is that today SpeedCine goes global. For the first time, anybody in the world with a computer and a decent internet connection can use it.

I have to admit the old SpeedCine wasn’t very useful for people outside the U.S.A. Most of the films we index are from sites like iTunes USA, Amazon VOD, Netflix, Crackle and Hulu that are US-only.

But starting today, If you’re in the UK, you won’t see any of those US-only sites on SpeedCine. Instead you’ll see films from local sites like iTunes-UK, Blinkbox, LOVEFiLM, Indie Movies Online and joiningTHEdocs, not to mention sites like The Auteurs, IndiePix, SnagFilms, EZTakes, AMC B-Movie Classics, YouTube, Internet Archive, National Film Board of Canada, and others, that have rights to some or all of their films in the UK.   

The internet doesn’t care about borders, so why should we? There are a lot of companies for us to serve. Companies like IndiePix and EZTakes have been selling their films globally for years, but I think The Auteurs, which handles over 50 worldwide distributors, has taken a very bold step in showing where the online movie business needs to go. You don’t need to have world rights to a film—you can put together a patchwork quilt of films, and create a site that is different in whatever country you happen to find yourself. Of course they aren’t the only ones thinking this way:  there’s Apple with its 6 iTunes stores with online movies (SpeedCine has contracted with all of them),  LOVEFiLM, which is the UK’s Netflix, also has DVD sites in Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia, and Reed Hastings has announced that Netflix will expand their streaming business internationally with one (as yet unnamed) country this year.

Of course I hope that SpeedCine will be able to play a role to support this global business as it develops. We need to have more companies like The Auteurs, and more local sites like BIGFlix in India, Ameibo and Voddler in Scandinavia, Cineman in Switzerland,  and BigPond in Australia. Recently, China’s top search engine company, Baidu, announced that they are teaming up with Hulu-investors Providence Equity Partners, to set up a Hulu-like online video channel in China.

This is exploding. It just might be the answer to the question, “Why should we give up cable dollars for internet pennies?” Because maybe they will become internet dollars before you know it.

Why does Hulu have to be US-only because of the “rights”?   Hollywood movies play all over the world on various online websites.  There are lots of free streaming movies and TV on Blinkbox and LOVEFiLM in the UK.  If they can show studio movies free, why can’t Hulu follow the model of The Auteurs and have Hulu-UK, Hulu-Canada, Hulu-Australia, Hulu-Germany, etc. Hulu is a potent brand. Why can’t Crackle leverage the power of Sony to do the same thing? Why invest millions of dollars on R&D to create the technology and UI for these sites and not take advantage of the opportunity to sell different commercials in each country? There’s your internet dollars.

This is a powerful way to fully harness the power of blogs and social media to spread the word everywhere with ease and speed. And there is the potential here to fight piracy in a positive way, by offering more people a legitimate way to watch films for free at an incredible rate.  

Finally, I think that SpeedCine can have a symbiotic relationship with popular sites like Flixster, and the amazing Recommendation Engine sites like Jinni, Clerkdogs and Criticker. They automatically become international, because for the first time people can use their sites to choose movies and then go to SpeedCine to find out what their options are.

After a year and a half of working on this 24/7 I can’t believe that it actually took that long.  On the other hand, I’m proud to have made it DIY style with no money.    I consider this the start.  There are still features to be added and I need to put a LOT more movies in. We have only 23,000 unique movies now, but as so many of them are available from multiple sources, there are 80,000 links.  I’d like to double or triple those numbers by the end of the year.

I’d like to thank my wife Melissa, Lead Developer Ben Amada, plus Richard Abramowitz, who came in with support at a critical time. Nina Rosefelt, Laura Schlecht, and especially Laura Orlowski made enormous contributions to making this thing happen. But most of all I’d like to thank Co-Founder Bob Harris, without whom SpeedCine would never have come to be.

Reading it over, I see that my previous blog post ended up achieving the opposite of what I wanted it to, when I began writing it.  This is probably because it was written in haste, but that’s no excuse.

I had no idea what a hubbub it would cause and how much my intentions could be misinterpreted.  If you read it, you will see it begins by paraphrasing Paul Simon in “The Boxer” and saying that we all believe what we want to believe and disregard the rest.”

And the point I was trying to make with the blog was: maybe we should stop and not do that for a moment. 

Now I agree with the MPAA that file-sharing hurts the industry.  Most studio executives and producers and journalists think the same way. It’s common sense.  I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for people who defend file-sharing.

After all, why on earth would I spend a year and a half of my life working 24/7 to create SpeedCine, which is devoted to fostering legal online movies if I thought that file-sharing was good?

But none of us in the industry are interested in a study that looks at what’s really going on.   What we want is a study that quantifies how much we are losing. To say that file-sharing hurts the industry and then estimate how many people do it and calculate the damages is not a study.  You cannot study a phenomenon if you begin with the conclusion.

And an attempt at finding the truth—whatever it might be--is a handy thing to have in a time of crisis and change and opportunity.

Where I know I went wrong is that I made my opinion all too clear that file-sharing might have worked to the advantage of this one film.   Millions of times things that are generally not good have worked in an unexpected way to someone’s advantage.  I was making no generalization statement about file-sharing.

What has happened in the blogosphere has been a lot of shouting.  People who are against file-sharing say it that I’m wrong and I can’t prove it. Of course I can’t prove anything.  People who are for file-sharing say that this is just more evidence that file-sharing is good for the industry. Which is total bullshit.

It’s not evidence of anything at all.  It’s just data.  Data doesn’t prove anything one way or another.  

What I’d like to see is a real study.  Where you poll people, and ask questions like these:

Did you watch the copy of “Wolverine” on the net?   Did you ever pay for the movie in any way afterwards?  Theatre? DVD purchase? Rental? Netflix? Redbox?

For non-file sharers:  How did you hear about the film?  What made you want to see it?

I think it would be interesting.  Again, it wouldn’t “prove” anything absolutely, but it might raise the level of the discourse.

Now for my readers:  Do you like the idea of a poll like that?  And if not, why not?