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Why is that not the headline for any of the stories about the Smithsonian’s exclusive TV programming deal with Showtime?
Smithsonian officials signed a 30-year contract with CBS Corporation’s Showtime division giving them rights of first refusal to any “commercial” films produced using the Smithsonian’s collection, archives or experts in any more than an “incidental” way.
Look back 30 years and ask yourself what changes have been wrought in the cable TV market, the Internet, and film production. How many of them did you foresee? How many of them did you write into your contracts in 1976?
Then ask yourself what changes might occur in the next 30 years. Look what’s happened to the distribution of independent and user-created video with YouTube and Google Video in just the last year, for example, the same year it took for Showtime and Smithsonian to negotiate their secret deal. And since the Smithsonian sale came to light in March, AOL has also announced its own video competitor to YouTube.
From Robert Rodriguez’ home studio operation and Soderbergh’s HD Bubble to Jonathan Caouette’s DV/iMovie Tarnation to Rocketboom to liveblogging to Matt Haughey’s Star Wars Kid remake, we’re in the early days of an independently-created video content revolution. How many tens of thousands of potential documentaries, features, and shorts and who-knows-what-kinds of programs could be created in the next three years, never mind the next thirty, if the national patrimony held by the Smithsonian were made available in the way that, say, the BBC is planning to do? They’re opening their entire archive for remixing and reuse by the people who paid for it–the citizens and residents of the UK.
Instead, the Smithsonian has locked its holdings up for thirty years with a single company–CBS/Showtime–and for what? The right to make six programs per year outside the agreement, a 10% stake in the Smithsonian On Demand service, and guaranteed payments of $500,000 a year, plus some unknown percentage of future profits or revenues.
At even the most conservative calculations, the present value of those $500,000 payments is around $7.9 million. At a more typical discount rate (the historical risk-free rate of 8%), Showtime sews up 30 years of exclusive use of the Smithsonian’s resources for a freakin’ $6 million.
So not only did Smithsonian executives sell out America’s patrimony to a single, giant media corporation, they sold it for practically nothing.
Is there no other way for the Smithsonian to bring in $500k/year? Did they look at any other options at all? Did they consider at all the benefits and costs beyond guaranteed annual payments? For screenplays it helps develop that get turned into actual films, The Sundance Institute asks for a donation of a fraction of a percent of the film’s production budget, and 1% net profit participation.
What would be result if the Smithsonian charged a 0.5% fee for each program it cooperates with? It signed an average of 180 media contracts/year between 2000 and 2005. With an average budget of even $250,000, that’s already $225,000/year. Now imagine thousands or tens of thousands of filmmakers using the Institute’s collections to make tiny-budget–but commercially viable–content in the near future we’re already beginning to imagine.
The Smithsonian executives’ dogged insistence that only a very few filmmakers are affected demonstrates an inexcusable lack of some combination of vision, integrity, or sense of responsibility, and it shortchanges both the Institute and the country to the exclusive benefit of CBS. From the standpoint of what we got–and more importantly, of what we lost–we, the American people, have been thoroughly ripped off.
Smithsonian Hands Over TV Contract [wapo]

Whit Stillman not only lives, he writes in the Guardain about what the heck he’s been working on all this time. Some adaptation that didn’t work out, a script about Jamaican gospel churches…
As I’ve gone from identifying with the protagonists of Metropolitan to the aging yuppie at the bar at JG Melon’s in Metropolitan, I have to say, I’m a little put off by Mr. Stillman’s apparently laconic–or wary, maybe–approach to filmmaking.
But that’s probably because I seem to be doing the same thing, bouncing back and forth in stolen moments between pipe dream projects and adaptations. I just haven’t got three features under my belt.
Confessions of a serial drifter [guardian via greencine]

Documentary director Alison Chernick’s newest film, Matthew Barney: No Restraint, sounds like a must-see, and not just for the rare behind-the-scenes footage in includes from the set of the artist’s own latest production, Drawing Restraint 9. [That’s the new one. You know, the one with Bjork. The one shot on a Japanese whaling ship. The one that has people pretending sure, they knew what a flensing knife was before they read the production notes, didn’t you read Moby Dick or something? Same page here? Great, let’s move on.]
No, MB:NR offers some things even rarer in the Matthew Barney-verse: dialogue. explication. edits. time for dinner. [The docu runs an audience-friendly 70 minutes.] From the trailer, it looks like there are some thoroughly objective interviews with disinterested folks like Barney’s dealer, his curator, his Guggenheim director, and his employees. And the film is being distributed by Barney’s distributor, too, who must be considering this a kind of primer for Barney neophytes, a gateway drug, if you will, to vast vats of Vaseline.
But enough snark. I kid because I love, more or less. And I think MB:NR can provide some interesting insights into Barney’s process, if not exactly into his work. Which, given its sculptural, material, and experiential nature, is probably as close as you can get
expect to get.
Matthew Barney: No Restraint debuted at Berlin and in the US at Full Frame, and it’s continuing on the festival circuit. But The Walker Center is also screening the film next Thursday, May 25, at 8pm. See the WAC calendar for details and tickets.
Matthew Barney: No Restraint filmsite [matthewbarneynorestraint.com]
Previous Barneyana on greg.org

On the eve of the Cannes Film Festival, John Anderson takes a look at the phenomenally large amount of work that Palme d’Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne put into making their seemingly artless, effortless films.
And he looks at the phenomenally small amount of money Palme d’Or winners seem to make from US theatrical distribution. [What he doesn’t look at, though, is how much films like this will be dependent on DVD sales and rentals to make their actual US money. I thought that DVD was the new Box Office for indie/foreign/specialty films.]
Cannes Gold Tarnishes in U.S. [nyt]