LONG LIVE THE NEW SHORT (PT 1)

In spite of recent pronouncements that might have led you to believe otherwise, a huge and growing entertainment market exists in international television, web-based film and cell cinema venues, which are buying short films like hotcakes. Scores of dedicated short subject distributors are dropping serious coin on acquisitions. And, the U.S. is in an ideal position to take advantage of it. Just as cities like Chicago became Mecca's of storefront theatre and improv comedy. Which is to say that if you're a member of what Richard Florida calls the Creative Class, and a resident of the Urban Archipelago besides, I've got a message for you: It's time to hop into the engineer’s seat of this particular train before it passes us by.

Last January, NPR’s Douglas Hopper did a Morning Edition story about an entertaining but penguins-at-the-zoo style report on the Cellflix Festival sponsored by upstate New York’s Ithaca College. On the surface the featured contest sounded like most university sponsored film festivals, open to high school and college students from around the world, a $5,000 grand prize. It even sported a built-in gimmick—to qualify, submissions had to be shot on a cell phone, have a running time of 30 seconds or less and include dialogue, music or other audio.

The “cell cinema” angle wasn’t a gimmick. It was the tip of an iceberg.

According to Cellflix organizer and Dean of Itahca’s Park School of Communications Dianne Lynch, the festival was her way of asking a question that everyone in our business should be these days: What do filmmakers need to know to be successful in spite of the shifting and changing media landscape that’s confronting all of us?

The answer is so close at hand it’s about to be missed: Short films are selling agan! Until the 1950s, standard commercial cinema included not only the feature films, but newsreels, cartoons and live action short films as well. Television altered the entertainment landscape completely, introducing a new set of market imperatives and consigning short film producers like Hal Roach and Mack Sennett to financial obsolescence. Now, after decades of film school/festival exile, the short as product is back.

Hoping to boost sales, Sony is sponsoring a series of short films designed for its PSP (PlayStation Portable). Verizon and Fox Entertainment Group have launched three "mobisode" series specifically for cell phone screens. Sprint actually beat Verizon and Fox to the punch with its cell phone dram The Spot. And CBS spent the latter half of 2005 inking deals to deliver programming, including it's own “micro-series” The Courier, through every available medium—the net, cell phones and iPods.

Sony, Fox, Sprint and CBS aren’t charting new territory; they’re playing catch-up, desperately trying to carve out a niche for their brand in one of the few filmed entertainment venues whose market-share is actually growing rather than shrinking.

TO BE CON'T . . .