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Variety: "Reports of the death of New York independent filmmaking have been greatly exaggerated."

I was extremely happy to see an article in Variety that focused on current NYC indie filmmaking...The first line did seem as if it was an exerpt from The Onion: "Reports of the death of New York independent filmmaking have been greatly exaggerated." but went on to focus on some great filmmakers, producers & production companies in New York including: Red Bucket Films, Borderline Films and Parts & Labor. 

Here's the Variety Article:

New indies find fertile ground

Shingles tailor biz to new rules

By Gregg Goldstein

Borderline got a jolt of coin from the sale of 'Martha Marcy May Marlene.'

Reports of the death of New York independent filmmaking have been greatly exaggerated.

Jolted by startups like Celine Rattray and Trudie Styler's Maven Pictures, suddenly adventurous financiers, record-high state tax credits, lower budgets, revamped business models and reopened distrib pocketbooks, indie film producers are experiencing a renaissance.

Yes, outfits like New Line Cinema and Rattray's former shingle Mandalay Vision are still being consolidated into their parent companies' Los Angeles homes. Producers' fees are lower, and overhead deals are nearly impossible to find. But as they make painful adjustments to post-recession realities, emerging producers are adapting, finding funds and having their first big breakthroughs.

"The old model of how an independent producer grows has changed a lot, and new producers are navigating new territory," says producer and Filmmaker Magazine editor Scott Macaulay. "Making a first-time film for $2.5 million wasn't a crazy idea, but now a number of people say you should make it for $600,000 or $300,000. New technologies and digital projection at festivals have allowed budgets to come down."

The first big ray of hope came with last fall's sales boom in Toronto. The watershed was Sundance, where low-budget narrative films without big-name stars were snapped up by specialty divisions like Fox Searchlight ("Another Earth," "Martha Marcy May Marlene") and Focus ("Pariah").

Combined with niche hits like "Winter's Bone," these deals offered further encouragement to producer/financiers like BCDF Pictures ("Higher Ground"), Maybach Cunningham Entertainment ("Martha …") and Super Crispy Entertainment ("Like Crazy"), as well as individuals who can now afford to play patron of the arts on very low-budget projects. Features from upstart Gotham-based outfits like Red Bucket Films (home of the picmakers Joshua and Ben Safdie) and the nonprofit Artists Public Domain ("Another Earth") suddenly seemed like much safer bets.

"There's a real outlet for movies at this budget level on VOD and in a festival platform," says "Tiny Furniture" producer Alicia Van Couvering, whose $50,000 film earned about as much from on-demand rentals as from the $392,000 it made in theaters.

Some producers are setting up shop because of the lack of Gotham opportunities, not in spite of them. "It didn't make sense to go out into the marketplace hoping a production company would hire me," explains Table Ten Films co-founder Molly Pearson, who raised funds for her upcoming debut feature, "The Green," through her theater company's investors. "It seemed like the safer thing was developing content with (partner) Paul (Marcarelli) and having that potentially function as a calling card."

Others are encouraged by the overall economics. "I've made three movies in Michigan in the last two years. (State tax credits there are) now capped and much harder to pull off in terms of a guaranteed rebate," says Maven's Rattray ("The Kids Are All Right"). She loves the record high $420 million annual cap on New York State's 30% film tax credit enacted last fall, and that it won't expire until December 2014. "It makes so much sense to shoot here now, just from a financial standpoint."

Styler ("Moon") says Gotham has financial advantages that London (home of her other production shingle, Xingu Films) and other cities don't. "There are more supporters of the arts here who will have a punt because they're passionate about movies, so you have a bigger list to draw from for equity," she says. "You can find money in some unexpected places."

Paper Street Films co-founder Austin Stark has one partner (Benji Cohen) from Bear Sterns and another (Chris Papavasiliou) who still works at Goldman Sachs. (A fourth, Bingo Gubelmann, focuses on producing such films as Tony Kaye's "Detachment"). "The main reason we wouldn't move (to Los Angeles) is that without our investor base, we wouldn't be making films," he says.

But Wall Street friends aren't always essential. Parts and Labor co-founder Jay Van Hoy ("Beginners") notes that production partners, grants from New York-based nonprofits like Cinereach and even the online fundraising site Kickstarter can be essential to many of the low-budget films that drive his prolific company. "Twenty-five thousand dollars is a major help for a film (that costs less than) $700,000," he notes.

Indie film outfits are adapting and surviving primarily by diversifying, with an increased focus on more lucrative television, commercials, branded entertainment and Internet projects.

"At Sundance, everyone saw that you can have a business making movies for a couple of hundred thousand dollars and not a couple of million, but those movies are hard to make," notes Van Couvering. Her sophomore producing effort, "Nobody Walks," is funded by Super Crispy and stars John Krasinski, yet she still needs to write for magazines, ghostwrite and consult on film budgets and scheduling to pay the bills.

Even more established Gotham producers need creative ways to supplement the industry's less-than-steady income. Swarovski Entertainment, the branded-content division of the crystal house, hired Primary Prods. founder Amy Kaufman ("The Whistleblower") as an consultant for its features. "I think you have to be incredibly crafty in these times," Kaufman says. "That's been my little side business, which has worked out really nicely."

Producer Noah Harlan (the Cannes entry "Return") develops mobile apps through his Two Bulls outfit. And newer players like Toy Closet Films use branded entertainment to fund their inhouse development slate, which includes George A. Romero screenplays.

Many Gotham outfits that set out to exclusively tackle film have turned to TV for the larger, often more reliable income it provides. Locomotive's Lucy Barzun Donnelly and Joshua Astrachan got into it when their first planned theatrical outing, "Grey Gardens," ended up at HBO. They are now considering a reality series, though their main focus will remain on features like the upcoming "Friends With Kids."

Commercials and musicvideos are now essential for several New York-based film companies. One of Sundance's biggest success stories is Brooklyn-based Borderline Films, a collective run by director/producers Antonio Campos, Sean Durkin and Josh Mond, who've been able to pay crew members more on commercials than features.

"We're paying our rent just to survive with commercial work," said Campos in January, shortly after Fox Searchlight nabbed their "Martha Marcy May Marlene" for a reported $1.6 million. "My phone literally shut off about an hour into the negotiations because I couldn't pay my phone bill," he added. Things have changed: Mond says they're now looking for their own Brooklyn office thanks to the Searchlight sale.

Speak to any New York producer and themes you'll hear time and again are community, collaboration, mentorship and unselfishly sharing information with others -- more what you'd expect from Peace Corps volunteers than the cutthroat film industry. Many extol organizations like IFP and their shared hardships during dire economic times seem to have only strengthened their bond.

"We borrow a lot from what Silicon Valley does when small startups there share information -- it's one big think tank," notes Toy Closet partner Ryan Silbert. "That's going to be the future for producers in New York."

You Wont Miss Me Limited Edition Vinyl/DVD

Check out the newest Factory 25 Vinyl/DVD release: You Wont Miss Me, directed by Ry Russo-Young...The vinyl LP is an unreleased album by Stylofone featuring members of MGMT and Amazing Baby.

Here are some of the amazing things in this LTD set:
The original Shelly Brown interviews, artifacts of Shelly Brown, Essays by Karina Longworth & Lena Dunham, Previously Unreleased Stylofone Vinyl LP, exclusive poster and an art book by Shelly Brown (Stella Schnabel)

No-Age bring the noise to David Letterman

No-Age have come a long way since the High School Record days...Check out the best thing on Letterman in ages:

Interview Magazine article on Factory 25 by Durga Chew-Bose

It's been a crazy day for Factory 25, first the WSJ article and not the Interview Magazine article...Here's the interview with Matt Grady by Durga Chew-Bose

Factory Boy: Matt Grady Talks Distribution

By Durga Chew-Bose   

SEVERAL OF FACTORY 25'S RELEASES.

Independent distribution company Factory 25 does not exactly have a type. Included in its catalog are an unrequited zombie love story, a scripted adaptation of Jerome Robbins' "ballet in sneakers," a rare look at Chicago's punk scene, Ronnie Bronstein's "rotten egg lobbed with spazmo aim at the spotless surface of the silver screen" (whatever that means), and Stella Schnabel as a New York misfit. Eager to keep alive the collector's approach to physical media, founder Matt Grady's designs and packaging reinvent the notion of "special features." Found objects like strips of 16mm footage, scribbled cartoons, character artifacts, vinyl LPs, essays by critics, friends, and admirers, accompany each film and add texture to its story and production. We spoke to the Brooklyn-based founder about his company, his influences, and the year in film.


DURGA CHEW-BOSE: First, I'm not entirely sure what to call Factory 25. It doesn't really fall under the same canopy of other distribution companies.

MATT GRADY: Yeah, well, we do distribute films, but I feel like we're almost something other than that.

CHEW-BOSE: Right—can you talk a bit about how it all got started?

GRADY: In 2002, I was getting involved with Plexifilm, pretty much right when it started. It's Gary Hustwit's company, the guy who directed Helvetica and Objectified. And he was starting it, and he only had a couple titles. One was Wilco's I Am Trying to Break Your Heart and this other movie, Benjamin Smoke, which is still one of my all-time favorite documentaries. I don't know if you've heard of it...

CHEW-BOSE: No, what is it?

GRADY: It's about this cross-dressing Southern singer called Benjamin. And it's directed by Jem Cohen, who did Fugazi: Instrument. So yeah, Plexifilm, I was there for eight years with Gary, trying to build a catalog of cool indie stuff, and we did. And a few years ago I decided that there were so many films I was seeing that I wanted to put out, so I thought, "I'm just going to do it." I had a few new directions I wanted to take, like pairing vinyl with DVDs, and everyone thought I was pretty much crazy for that. So yeah, I wanted to put out under-the-radar indie films that I felt deserved a bigger audience. The first film that really did it was Frownland.

CHEW-BOSE: You either love that movie or hate it. I loved it.

GRADY: Yeah, it's one of those films...

CHEW-BOSE: And [Ronald Bronstein] just won a Gotham Award!

GRADY: Yes. Amazing.

CHEW-BOSE: Daddy Longlegs was one of my favorite movies of the year.

GRADY: Mine, too. Frownland is the kind of movie that you tell your friends to see, and half of them will never listen to anything you ever say after that, and the other half will love it and want to know more.

CHEW-BOSE: Yeah, it's a bit of a wild card.

GRADY: So that was the first thing Factory 25 released. And before I announced it, I was able to get a bunch of titles.

CHEW-BOSE: Did you have a big inaugural sort of celebration—although I guess that's oxymoronic in terms of the film—for Frownland?

GRADY: Actually, the day I announced it and the website went up was the day Michael Jackson died. So I started getting some press and I thought, "Great! People care about this." And then all of a sudden, nothing. I mean, makes sense. It's not like that happens every day.

CHEW-BOSE: Design-wise, Factory 25 has a very specific aesthetic in terms of packaging, which separates it from other distributors.

GRADY: Yeah, immediately from when I start watching the movie, I start having ideas. My goal is to, for lack of a better way of saying it, make a piece of art. Like with Frownland, dealing with Ronnie was amazing, because we wanted to make the world of the film this piece.

CHEW-BOSE: Yeah, the way the packaging is described on your website captures the film entirely: "Excerpts from an insufferably long-winded email exchange," and "mean-spirited drawings."

GRADY: Ronnie wrote all of that.

CHEW-BOSE: So you collaborate a lot with the artists when designing your packaging?

GRADY: Yes. I put my heart and soul into every project, but the projects that where I've worked really closely with the directors, with their vision, I think that's when it's really been great.

CHEW-BOSE: And Ry Russo-Young's You Wont Miss Me, which is also in your catalog, recently opened. What do you have planned for that packaging?

GRADY: It's going to be an art book done by Stella Schnabel with collage, and the LP is this band Stylofone, and members of the band went on to become Amazing Baby and MGMT. And it's never been released, so that's in there. And there will be essays by Karina Longworth and Lena Dunham.

CHEW-BOSE: Where does the name Factory 25 come from?

GRADY: I was working on this project about obsession and talking with these people who are obsessed with baseball cards. And the one baseball card, Honus Wagner, it's a tobacco card. It's the Holy Grail of baseball cards. There's one that's worth millions and millions of dollars. So where that card was made was in this factory, in Factory 25. And I always thought it was amazing that people know where that card was made. So I went with that because I wanted to develop a collector's mentality to film, and make things amazing, and sort of fetishize. I want to make things that people are obsessed with.

CHEW-BOSE: On your site, there's a whole section dedicated to Friends of Factory 25. Could you share a bit about what sort of community you are a part of, especially on the Internet? Your list includes more than just film and music—also "Design friends" and "Friends who write and read."

GRADY: A lot of it has to do with being in Brooklyn. There are so many writers, people with similar interests, and we all do things together and collaborate. It's all people who really about art and what they do. Even if it isn't similar to what I do.

CHEW-BOSE: Who were some of your influences when designing what Factory 25 would be, in terms of its aesthetic?

GRADY: I mean I was heavily influenced by certain things. In terms of design, Peter Saville and Vaughan Oliver, and artists who designed records from the '80s and '90s. And you know, in terms of the film, it's more about the feel and the passion behind it. You know, I never thought I would release in the span of two months a black metal, a ballet, and a zombie film. Actually, I didn't even realize how odd that was. But I feel like they all work together!

CHEW-BOSE: And if you can, top ten movies of 2010?

GRADY: Daddy Longlegs, NY Export: Opus Jazz, Marwencol, Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, I Am Secretly An Important Man, Tiny Furniture, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, Kati with an I, Winter's Bone, and The Colonel's Bride.

CHEW-BOSE: Thanks!

GRADY: Thank you!