Movie City Indie

« [PR] Summit's Hurt Locker factsheet | Main | Nagi Noda, 35, noted Japanese director, designer »

September 10, 2008

Wayne Wang's Princess of Nebraska debuts on YouTube while 1,000 Years Of Good Luck hits theaters

Wayne Wang's career as a feature director came with one of the first micro-budgeted success of the once-burgeoning American independent movement, 1992's Chan is Missing Much of his work is with women or bears Chinese and Chinese-American themes, even as he alternates studio work with smaller projects, such as Brooklyn-by-the-block Smoke (1995), written by Paul Auster. With a modest amount of money on hand after shooting, a companion film, Blue in the Face was made in five days by Wang and Auster, and there's a similar occasion a decade later, with Wang's latest, the generational drama A Thousand Years of Good Luck to be released next Friday in New York and L.A. in theaters, and the teensy-scaled The Princess of Nebraska, a story of a young woman making a momentous choice, shot with smaller, mostly consumer-level cameras, including the main character's cell phones, to be shown on YouTube's Screening Room for free starting October 17 (there's a trailer here.) A primary reason these almost guerilla-scaled collaborations appeal to Wang is how contrary they are to the style of editing in contemporary studio-budgeted projects, where a moment for reflection is a moment to be snipped. It's called a "pacing pass," or a review of the assembly to make sure that everything is always moving at the briskest of clips. "Well, that's true with all these studios now. You preview, you preview, and you're already chopping things out. And then at the end, they go through a pacing pace and basically anything that is a moment of taking a breath, for the audience to think, they take it right out. So that's what the studio films have become. There are no characters: they're heroes, they're comic strip heroes, and they're very one-note most of the time. There are a few films that go and deal with characters but there are very few of them. And plot! Everything has to be part of the plot. Everything is so cause-and-effect, it's unreal. That's why, again, in my film there are a lot of things that are not explained. A lot of things that don't lead to something. Which is part of their lives and their conflicts." Wang is open to evolving forms of distribution, but says, "We need to look at the world in both those ways. The sad thing is probably that the theater films are all going to be event films. That's the reality." And smaller pictures? The easy-to-laugh director says, laughing, "It's fun to do. It's almost like throwing all the rules out the window." Today's press release credits Magnolia PIctures, Cinetic Rights Management and YouTube for collaborating on devising the parallel distribution strategy." Quoting Magnolia's Ray Price: "The internet's ability to provide free streaming video is going to radically redefine independent film's access and availability to its audience. It provides a new platform, which can free us from the 'Top Ten' mentality in the same way that FM radio did for the music business." "The Princess of Nebraska is about a young woman from China who tries to locate her identity through different kinds of new media," Wang adds. "The piece was shot with this kind of mentality with various kinds of easily accessible digital sources. I am very excited that the distribution will be consistent with the way the piece was conceived and produced." Matt Dentler of Cinetic Rights enthuses: "For years, filmmakers have asked me when a veteran icon would release a new work for free, online," said Matt Dentler of Cinetic Rights Management. "That time is now, and we're thrilled to be part of this exciting distribution strategy."

Posted by Ray Pride at September 10, 2008 03:55 PM

Comments

Post a comment