Primer? Thanks for the recommendation. I do add all freeper suggestions to my watchlist; I figure it’s the reciprocal obligation I owe since I am forever pushing my finds — always oriented towards good, non-woke, morally grounded RightWorld movies — on them. But I glanced at Primer and it immediately shot near the top of my list for a reason I don’t mention enough. IMDB says the budget was $7,000, most of which was spent on filmstock.
$7,000.
Coherence was made for $50,000. My Road to Damascus movie (the one that suddenly showed me that I had a huge blind spot) was Columbus, which was made for $700,000. Those are just three that come to mind; I’d like to build out a list of very low budget movies that I would feel comfortable recommending from a conservative viewpoint.
The big studios are spending tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars to produce absolute garbage, conceived as generic content for generic global audiences, terminally infected with the woke mind virus, and increasingly prone to flopping at the box office. Disney has lost money on almost every film they’ve released this year, and that’s good news for us. Go woke, go broke. As the giants have locked themselves into a race to the bottom, I’ve gotten increasingly interested in the remaining independent studios that are still aspiring to make great movies.
It’s a high risk business. Many of the little indie films will not make money, and very few of them will be great art. But at least the people involved are still trying. Enough of these films are good enough that, on my optimistic days, I think there will a saving remnant to start the rebuilding after Woke Hollywood crashes and burns. For the moment, I have a particular fondness for the little indie films with a writer/director team of one and a group of backers who stake their personal savings, pawn the cat and the baseball card collection they inherited from Uncle Bob, and check under the couch cushions to find the cash to make the movie. At least they’re still trying, and we should be attentive to preserving an ecosystem that gives them a chance to find an audience without being swallowed by the Borg.
Primer was made for $7,000, which wouldn’t even pay for the business lunch to pitch a Hollywood star on doing a Disney comic book movie. It won some prizes in festivals including the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and then made over $500,000 at the box office plus whatever it has earned since on VOD. I hope everyone involved got paid on the backend, because they sure didn’t make anything on the front end. Bootstraps and barnstorming are pluses in my book.
Maybe the big studios will self-correct. Maybe they won’t. They are now mostly owned by the streamers, and that is part of the problem. The streamers are ultimately in the subscription business, not the movie business. They regard movies as just generic content and theatrical movies are well down the list of content types that attract subscriptions, with sports and trash tv being bigger factors.
The movie industry has always had its problems and its ups and downs. But in the final analysis, until recently it was at least its own domain, with the studios, large and small, being run by people who lived, ate, and breathed movies. That’s no longer the case. The industry is now dominated by people who are answering to bosses with other priorities. And it shows.
When you read the credits T the end you will understand how the film was put together.
Do you ever watch the John Sayles films. Mattapan is one of his bigger one and I didn’t enjoy it half as much as the secaucus 7. Roan ornis or brother from another planet.
Sayles is a film writer who who saved up money to occasionally make a film.