New Hollywood Happening Now

If you recall from our history lesson, Hollywood began when D.W. Griffiths discovered the quiet little town while in L.A. shooting short films for the Biograph company with their in-house troupe of actors.

Griffiths already had ambitions about shooting longer feature-length films. But at the time the films were primarily seen by the corporation as promotional pieces, more or less technical demonstrations. They were not that concerned about advancing the content of cinema as much as the hardware.

The first films that included narrative over one-shot images of real-life were:

• short in length
• writers and staff were the actors
• created by few people
• minimal editing
• primarily comedy and action based

This actually describes pretty well the kind of video currently being made popular on the new distribution networks like Youtube and Vimeo. Like the early days prior to Hollywood, most of the videos going up on video sharing sites were short “actualities”, much like that very first Youtube video “A day at the zoo”, uploaded by the site owner himself.

In time, we’ve seen video with higher production values and narrative begin to appear. This corresponds with that first bit of work created by D.W. Griffiths and others like him. With that in mind, we will take a look at some of the current stars of independent production.

Justine Ezarik

A year before Vincent Laforet picked up a pre-release Canon 5D and shot “Reverie”, Justine Ezarik (or iJustine as she is known) picked up her iPhone and shot “300 Page iPhone Bill” in a public coffee shop. Ten days later, the video had been viewed over 2 million times. Granted, Ezarik was no stranger to the video sharing scene having previously been on Kevin Sites’ People of the Web series, as well as Yahoo Video and Revver. Even so, the video is impressive.

All of Justine’s early videos were small snippets of real-life, like the early Biograph corporation videos pre-Hollywood. Such videos are quick and easy to produce and require minimal editing. Yet Ezarik has managed to transition seamlessly from the lifecaster to turning iJustine into a character whom she portrays. Even with great success for her real-life videos, Justine has seen the need to evolve into more narrative style video, and in 2008 relocated to Los Angeles, appearing in commercials and hosting various online shows. In 2010, the Streamy Awards nominated iJustine in the best Vlogger category.

Recently on her Q+A show, she was asked if she would like to have her own fictional show, like “The Guild” and she responded that she really would, but is not yet sure what that show would be about and is looking for suggestions from her subscribers. This seems to be a fairly common theme among “New Hollywood” celebrities, who are very used to listening to, and responding, to feedback from their fans.

Corridor Digital

Between 2001 and 2004, again prior to the DSLR revolution, two friends named Sam Gorski and Niko Pueringer were learning to do visual effects and were active on the forum for FXhome, makers of inexpensive visual effects editing software. On June 22, 2003 they posted up DXM, their first short vfx film, to the applause of the community they had contributed to.

For a time, the guys went quiet as they both headed off to school, but they had both gotten the bug for making and self-publishing video. In 2009 they resurfaced, now in Los Angeles working together under the name Corridor Digital. Clearly their practice had paid off.

Corridor VFX / Action Reel 2009 from C Dig on Vimeo.

While the guys skills had vastly improved between 2005 and 2009, what really put them on the map was their video “Modern Warfare: Frozen Crossing”. Reportedly created with a budget of $200.

Modern Warfare: Frozen Crossing (A Modern Warfare Tribute) from C Dig on Vimeo.

The video features Drew Martin and Jake Watson in the roles of “Dust” and “Specter”, two highly trained soldiers. It is set in the world of the Activision game of the same name, and is essentially good ‘ole shoot-em-up action. Masks on all the main characters allowed for voice-overs to increase the production value of the audio and worked for the plot. In less than a week, the video reached over a million views thanks to a coordinated effort in placing links on popular sites like Digg, Reddit, and Youtube.

Corridor Digital’s videos bear all the earmarks of New Hollywood – short, entertaining as action or comedy, produced and posted weekly or bi-weekly.

Wong Fu Productions

Wesley Chan, Ted Fu, and Philip Wang form the team of Wong Fu Productions. The Chinese-American trio met in 2004 (although Wang traces his first videos back to 2001) and have been producing videos ever since that range from music videos to short films.

In 2007, Wong Fu uploaded their trailer to their first feature-length movie, “A Moment with You”

As of August 2011, Wong Fu achieved over one million subscribers, with more than 100 million views of their work.

The guys write, direct, edit, and completely create their videos entirely on their own. In 2009 they were featured on CNN and went on a nation-wide tour to promote their work across colleges and high-schools throughout the USA.

The hard work shows. Look at their progress between 2007 and now and you’ll see higher production values, and in particular better audio quality. The videos also tend to get shorter, and perhaps there is a correlation there. Camera moves get smoother, and videos do not go up without color correction and nice touches like vignettes that draw the eye to the center of attention.

Unlike some of the other members of New Hollywood, the Wong Fu team is used to taking on dramatic and more cerebral narrative. This could be one of the reasons their work usually takes longer to produce and their growth in terms of fans has been slower than some of the others. This is not to say their work is not phenomenal, and they bring a much-needed depth to the wave of new independent producers.

Yes, writing, editing, shooting, and starring in their own short films, distributing on Youtube and Vimeo, the stars of New Hollywood (or maybe it should be Hollywood 2.0) are definitely falling into a pattern seen almost 100 years ago, directly before the rise of the major studios and their vertical structure. In fact, if the pattern will really holding true there would be a gathering of them together to share ideas and resources, and a collaboration to help them gain ground against the more traditional media companies before them, pulling away from the “videos as technical demonstrations”. And we haven’t seen that yet.

Or have we? Onwards to the team that may be changing all of that, pulling the threads together to build something sustainable.