The democratization of film in the form of readily available cameras threatens the Hollywood paradigm.
They just don’t know it yet.
Before DSLR cameras came around, if you wanted to make an indie movie, you needed money. Lots of money.
You could ask rich people for help (good luck on that one), or you could sell your body to medical science for the money like Robert Rodriguez did, according to IGN.com. With that money, he made “El Mariachi,” and it launched his career.
Show business wasn’t just for any dreamer. It was for the lucky dreamers.
Now anybody with a couple of thousand and a will can make an indie film. And this is very exciting. Now you can make your dreams a reality and you don’t need the approval of production executives to do it.
You too can be a movie star/famous director/producer/etc.
For the first time, anybody can explore the boundaries of what is possible with a home computer and a smallish camera.
But Hollywood keeps churning out the same stuff, day after day. Some of it is good, a lot of it is not. But the movies that are truly good take chances. And that is what holds Hollywood back.
It’s an “industry.” The word industry has been applied to the mainstream film business a lot recently in historical terms.
When you pump millions of dollars into a project, it makes sense that you’d get bent out of shape when you don’t make at least some of that money back.
Indie filmmakers don’t have the same expectations. There’s less on the line, so there’s more freedom to explore.
But, I can see a not-too-distant-future where indie films are even more common than they are now, and many of them are excellent.
Art frequently needs a blood sacrifice every now and again to continue. Maybe it’s time to kill the old way of doing things in favor of something new and exciting. You know, what movies were like when you first fell in love with them; when cinema was magic.
Maybe it has already begun. Everyone likes a good underdog tale.