In the rescued hull of a barnacle-encrusted boat, Silicon Alley digerati and New York independent film producers came together Saturday to schmooze and revel at the first annual Filmmakers and Webmasters Spring Ball. The ball, said organizer Jonathan Sarno of Webcinema, was intended to bridge the yawning gap between indie film and Web start-ups, over beers in the captain's galley.
"[The Web and film communities] just don't know each other," Sarno said. "We need to create a kind of third community where they can come together."
As an atmospheric meetingplace, The Frying Pan, dredged from the harbor and now docked at Chelsea Piers, provided a surreal - even cinematic - backdrop for the affair. Partygoers (film people in black and webmasters in denim) wandered the narrow passages of the ship, their way lit by exposed bulbs dangling from the rafters. "You can't stay on it for very long," said Stuart Green of online casting resource Buzz Communications. "It was submerged for 50 years and it smells like that - it really needs a good airing."
Visitors ended up under the tent on the pier, where 18-person bar-band Manhattan Samba played for the crowd and Sergeant Kabuki Man of the NYPD - a B-movie hero from Troma Pictures - asked the crowd to feel his abs. "We wanted to give the party a wild flavor," said Troma spokesman Ed James.
Perhaps the strangest element to the ball, noted Green, was that it was a party of intimate strangers. "There were so many people who I had emailed and had long conversations with, but I didn't know what they looked like," Green said. "Jonathan [Sarno] could have been a woman for all I knew."
The ball came just as the intersection between film and the Web seems to be intensifying. Though Sarno considers it a "Mickey Mouse" enterprise, Destiny Pictures recently offered stock in its low-budget film Intimate Strangers over the Web at US$100 a share, and more than 150 private investors are now onboard. In March, the GenArt film festival, sponsored by Manhattan BBS Echo, screened the monster flick Love God, shot entirely on digital-video stock DVW700 and transferred to the standard 35mm. Troma Pictures has already started to use the Web to explore and till for new screenwriting "talent." The company's scriptwriting contest online allows promising writers the chance to write pages of the next Class of Nukem High 4 and Battle of Bikini SubHumanoids.
Later this month, Sarno will orchestrate a "virtual backers audition" fund-raiser for his new film about - not surprisingly - Silicon Alley. Often with independent films, producers will invite 20 to 30 potential investors to hear a live reading of the screenplay. Sarno hopes to do the same, but to stream digital footage of the event over the Internet.
But despite these examples of indie film and Web start-ups working together, Sarno sees a large gap between the two industries. He pointed to the example of Thinking Pictures, a "visionary" Web-based company working with "virtual-set" technology and intelligent film databases.
"Right across the street you have [independent film company] Good Machine at the top of their form," said Sarno, "and they don't even know each other exist." He criticized companies like Good Machine that "don't have email, aren't on the WWWAC list" (a listserv of weekly arts events in New York), and have only "crummy Web sites."
Beginning with fundamental administrative measures, Green adds that "more filmmakers and performing artists need to get wired."
"The Web is perfect for film and casting because it stops a senseless expense of head shots, products, and faxes," Green said. "But it's just not there yet."
According to Sarno, the two groups - both isolated from their booming West Coast incarnations - will be forced to rely on each other more to survive. "With the convergence of media," Sarno said, "they'll need each other."
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
