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INDEPENDENT FILM PRODUCING: THE OUTSIDER'S GUIDE TO PRODUCING A FIRST LOW BUDGET FEATURE FILM Paul Battista. Beverly Hills: Lucrifacio Books, 2010, 244 pp.
There are many challenges in teaching film production at the college level today. However, one of the biggest is that the headlong rush into personal/guerilla filmmaking (made easier by low-cost tools in production and postproduction) has led to sloppiness in many areas of the process. Our students then take this flawed process with them as they create their own works after they graduate, to sometimes disastrous results. It may be easy to proclaim that sloppiness is an artistic choice in terms of the style of the film (see "mumblecore"), but it is a large danger sign when that same carelessness comes to the legal and professional necessities of planning a feature production.
It is this void that Paul Battista attempts, with varying levels of success, to fill with his book Independent Film Producing: The Outsider's Guide. His general thesis is that ignoring the business of film production keeps independent filmmakers from accomplishing their artistic goals and distributing their films. "Filmmaking, more than any other art form," he writes, "is the fusion of the business and the creative, and the most 'successful' films are the ones where the filmmakers followed their creative instincts while balancing the practical aspects in the process" (37). However, he defines success in a bizarrely narrow manner: "having achieved a completed film that looks like it cost four or five times actual cost" (20). Still, this is a great overall point and one that we, when we are teaching media production, need to be concerned about.
Battista confines his discussion to his definition of an independent film-a narrative/ dramatic feature film with a budget between $50,000 and $1 million, made (more or less) under the laws of the State of California, which is a serviceable but incomplete definition for many of us.
The book is generally told in an accessible style, though it often moves into legal jargon that betrays Battista's background as a lawyer (he is also a teacher and a filmmaker himself, having directed, written, and produced a lowbudget independent feature-Crooks [2002]). In that area, it falls short of the style and content of The Independent Film...