Bobcat and ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ star Robin Williams at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.
Last week, I broke the news that Magnolia Pictures had purchased World’s Greatest Dad, a joyfully dark and vulgar comedy that premiered at Sundance in January. It’s not a perfect movie, but people who decried Bobcat Goldthwait’s rather blunt directorial skills seem to miss the point: Goldthwait’s not a flawless filmmaker, but he mostly succeeds as an amusing storyteller, and his self-involved, seriously dysfunctional characters are refreshingly easy to watch. There’s a a delightful wide-eyed innocence to his movies, so that you only feel that “oh-no-he-didn’t” wave of discomfort only after the fact. Approaching middle age, Goldthwait has plenty of potential as a writer-director, but much time will pass before most people stop identifying him mainly as the crazy dude from the seemingly endless run of Police Academy movies.
And, much as I hate to admit it, I’m still one of those people. I admitted that to Goldthwait when he called me to share the Magnolia news, and he seems to have made peace with this reality — but that doesn’t mean he plans to return to it.
IMDb lists Goldthwait as playing Zed in a “rumored” production of Police Academy 8, set for release in 2011. Bobcat tells me that’s bunk: “The only place Police Academy 8 exists is on IMDB,” he says. “No one has ever spoken to me about it. If they do make another Police Academy, I think it would be wise of them to do a remake, seeing as a couple of us are dead now.”
Fair enough, but if you take a look at the fallacious page on IMDb, there’s really nothing to distinguish this essentially non-existent movie from the countless real ones listed on the site. In the early days of IMDb, it was a lot easier to submit fake movies to the database, but inaccurate entries still frequently slip through the cracks. This raises a larger epistemological question: What makes a movie a movie? If it gets an IMDb page, and fans start posting their reactions to the movie’s potential ingredients (as they have in this case), has some element of Police Academy 8 snuck into existence?
I think there’s a real value to asking this question. Web tools have enabled a number of ways for the seeds of film production to take root before any substantial part of a movie comes together. On IndieGoGo, users simply need to post the idea for a movie in order to start raising money for it. The new partnership between Massify and Killer Films suggests a similar situation, where movies begin their lifespans as “free form pitch videos and screenplays” that ultimately develop into full length features. If someone makes a pitch video for a great movie, should that movie get an IMDb page? How much does an idea have to form before it yields an actual product?
The easy answer? A lot. But it has become insanely simple to get the gears rolling.
This story from The New York Times about artists selling their work in Second Life raises a lot of important issues. Rather than getting the details of the story here, I highly recommend checking out Sara Corbett’s extensive feature.
I am a little hesitant to fully embrace the creative potential of Second Life, mainly because I tried it out for about five minutes before growing bored of the place. (Also, some weird technical glitch kept turning my avatar into a vaguely defined cloud—not the best welcome to the neighborhood.) However, there’s no denying that smart, capable minds have found ways to utilize the digital realm as a means of extending their art into new media spaces, and this will surely increase over time. I recently received the third edition of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s invaluable Film History textbook, which now includes a detailed chapter on cinematic expressions in new media, with a screening of Four Eyed Monsters in Second Life used as a prominent example.
I would like to know if many filmmakers would at least consider this route. Why not market your movie to avatars? The average indie filmmaker has to break the bank just to cover traveling costs while promoting his or her feature. In Second Life, all you have to do is teleport. Okay, we’re talking about a very limited audience here, but isn’t that always the case?
Think about it.
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