Fan Cinema Today

YouTube announced this past weekend that it will start sharing ad revenue with people who upload films on the site. Banking on the idea that everyone wants to watch cell phone clips of Asian schoolgirls giggling in their high school libraries (i.e. the vast majority of legal content on YouTube), the system will be introduced in a few months; ads may vary from banners to proposed three-second adverts before a clip rolls. While the new system may “reward creativity,” as founder Chad Hurley told the BBC, it could potentially mark the end of fan films on YouTube.

While YouTube is late to the payment plan party–other sites like revver.com have been handing out pennies since last fall–it has survived quite nicely without having to dole out for content so far. However, it was inevitable that the site would have to find ways to include more advertising; given that Google shelled out $1.65 billion for it in October, surely it was suggested to the founders that they’d better make Google some money to help pay for the deal. But all that said, really: Who goes to Revver and their ilk anyway? (and yes, I really used “ilk” in a sentence) I just went there to research this article and a tumbleweed blew right across my screen.

The proposed system would only pay out to people who own the full copyright of the videos that they are uploading. However, since YouTube is often attacked for hosting thousands of illegally uploaded clips, the move to monetize may also be a convenient way for the site to avoid future lawsuits. See, the system will probably be applied to all clips that are uploaded–although Hurley conspicuously used language that avoided saying that in news reports. As a result, if visitors put up illegal clips, they can be sued for piracy, since they’ll have accepted money for material that isn’t theirs. That said, if I run Little Airplane Productions and I have a choice of suing a broke-ass kid who made an Oobie Gives The Finger To The Wonderpets fan film or suing a website worth the same amount as what Bill Gates makes in the time it takes to read this run-on sentence, the kid’s gonna get a pass…as in “a lifetime pass to my multinational conglomerate’s theme park” for giving me an opportunity to sue the pants off anything worth $1.65 billion. (Oh, and for the record, The Wonderpets rule.)

In truth, the payment plan sounds like a token effort to give legal foes some pause. YouTube has built its reputation on offering scads of TV and movie clips, music videos and so on, to the extent that the aforementioned Asian chicks–and, of course, your mom–represent nearly all the legal material on the site. It’s in YouTube’s best interest to keep as much illegal content on its site as possible, because it’s what people want to see. Adding payment to the mix would appear to be more aimed at protecting YouTube from content companies’ lawsuits by proving it acted in good faith, rather than seriously preventing copyright infringement.

If the site does buckle down on illegal uploaders, YouTube stands to make the classic move of shooting itself in the foot, reloading and shooting the other foot. According to a Harris Poll released yesterday, nearly three-quarters of adults who frequently visit YouTube say they would visit it a lot (31%) or a little (42%) less often if there were ads before the clips. Meanwhile, Harris found that nearly as many online adults (41%) say they have watched a video at a TV network website as they have at YouTube (42%), so the networks could easily win back their viewers if YouTube blows it. On the other hand, I can’t get 24 to play on Fox’s crummy MySpace streaming page, so I doubt the 42% figure is right; maybe a more accurate terminology would be “42% screamed bloody murder at their computer while it stuttered to a standstill after 17 seconds of blocky video and 40 minutes of loading, That No Good, Lowdown, ROTTEN PIECE OF RASAFRASA BRICKABRACKA @#$%&!!!…..”

Ahem. Now, where was I?

Fan filmmakers have historically been careful to avoid making profits from their movies, doing their best to respect the copyrights that they are in fact breaking by making their own flicks. The standard legal theory used by fan filmmakers–as flimsy as many of the productions themselves–is that if no profits are made, then copyright owners can’t sue. Well, no; it only shows moderately good intentions. Still, if fan filmmakers become “forced” to make money from their movies, only a few fan efforts–such as documentaries, parodies and movies with no copyrighted music, character names or footage in them–will be legally eligible for posting on YouTube. In which case, all those amateur auteurs making “illegal” fan productions will be just as wary as they’ve been all along–which is to say, not at all. Fan films are gonna stay right where they are on YouTube.

Utah’s famed Sundance Film Festival is all about independent film–at least in theory–so it was all too apt that the indie movie with the biggest buzz there last week was all about making the ultimate kind of indie flick: a fan film. Son of Rambow generated so much attention, in fact, that U.S. distribution rights sold to Paramount Vantage for a sum variously reported as $7 million and $8 million (but why split hairs–after the first coupla mil, what’s another one?).

Directed by Garth Jennings (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and produced by UK music video gurus Hammer & Tongs (AKA Jennings and Nick Goldsmith), the film follows two British kids in the 1980s on a quest to make a full-on sequel to that cinematic classic, Rambo: First Blood. As work on their production progresses, the awkward alliance between an extremely sheltered boy (the hero, Will) and the school freak, who makes bug snuff films, turns into true friendship.

While the audience at Sundance would naturally love a movie about making movies, that didn’t stop Cinematical from raving “the giddy, goofy and heartfelt creativity of Son of Rambow would stand out regardless of where, or when, one had the good fortune to see it.” For a cool interview with the filmmakers while they were in pre-production last spring, visit Time Out.

Tap tap tap….hello? Is this thing on?

Ok…and it goes a little something like this:

Welcome to Fan Cinema Today, a blog (ideally THE blog) about fan films in all their variety, glory and sucktitude. Fan films are a pretty wide ranging topic as I see ‘em, so we’ll be talking about everything that has to do with them, not just movie announcements and behind-the-scenes drama. Rather than yatter about what the blog will be and won’t be, however, I figure it’s better to let it unfold itself.

The site has been running quietly in ‘beta’ for a while, as I worked out DNS issues and rebuilt it twice, so rest assured, it won’t die out three days from now; there’s already a backlog of material to put on here. So thanks for stopping by–make sure to hit that there RSS button and stop in again sometime.