I just saw an interview with Woody Allen where he said that he managed to be more or less independent and do his own thing because he kept his movies "low budget". Which means under $20 million, which perhaps does not seem low budget, but by Hollywood standards...
Agreed. Woody Allen isn't bad, comparatively - but one of my major gripes about Hollywood style movies is that if the production company had spent even a fraction as much on their screenwriters as they do on their star actor/actresses and special effects then maybe there would be fewer money losing turkeys out there.
I'm also thinking of a while back reading that the reason most scifi tv series get canned is that they cost a lot to make. TV shows are made to draw in advertising revenue, which is in proportion to audience share. You make some soap for $100,000 an episode, but the scifi one might cost $1,000,000 an episode. So unless the scifi one gets ten times the ratings of the soap, you don't think it's worth it. So the 10% rating soap continues while the 50% ratings scifi series gets axed.
Most TV series also require at least a season in order to build up an audience. It seems that if a scifi TV series isn't deemed a hit right at the start, then most channels will refuse to keep it going. Two great examples of this are
Firefly and
Space: Above and Beyond. The former was better than the latter, but both were above average productions for their time.
Basically, as soon as a heap of money gets involved, you become picky with the details and don't want to take risks.
Me, I'd rather see five "independent" $20 million films, or twenty to fifty genuienly independent movies, than one "studio" $100 million film. We'd miss out on some films where the $100 million or more was used to great effect, like Cleopatra, Titanic or Gladiator. It would be a shame to lose them, but in their place we'd get five No Country for Old Men, I'm Not There, or about twenty Touching the Void. And we'd miss out on turkeys like the Star Wars prequels, Waterworld or Ishtar.
See, right now we are actually in a Golden Age for fantasy and scifi productions. Computer animation and computer generated special effects allow production companies the capability to make incredible special effects for a fraction of the cost that those same effects used to. This has been done to great effect with TV series like
newBSG,
the New Outer Limits, and
Stargate. The only hangup remains the writers - but even that can be overcome by mining the vast collection of previous short stories and novels already published (a great example of which was the
New Outer Limits episode
Inconstant Moon based on the Larry Niven story of the same name).
Just thinking of Star Trek, there are a lot of crazy fans out there making their own episodes. Now this is not brilliant film-making. But let's be honest, neither was the original Star Trek, or about two-thirds the episodes or movies. And they are not spending hundreds of millions of dollars doing it. Nor are they being frighteningly original and taking risks with that money
But YouTube does provide a great playground for young moviemakers to learn in. Maybe some will become the next James Cameron or Ridley Scott.