Blogs in Focus: Editors Blog

As Peter Bowen notes in a blog post below, Focus CEO James Schamus and Showtime Chairman and CEO Matthew Blank were honored by the Museum of the Moving Image the other night, and a couple weeks earlier, the two of them were seated by the Hollywood Reporter and asked them to discuss the ins and outs of this business. Head over to the link for an insightful talk on issues involving film production and distribution in the early 21st century, an excerpt of which is below.

Schamus: I say to my film students at Columbia when they say they want to get into the film business, "There is no such business. It's all TV business." All the film side is is getting people to help you pay for your ad campaign for your TV show and DVD because literally all they are doing is chipping in to cut away at the cost.THR: For a cable network, branding is an important concept -- but does it come into the mix with Focus?

Schamus: Branding is shorthand for a lot of different things. The Focus brand -- whatever that is -- is a big deal for us. What the brand means is a kind of articulated conversation ongoing with a group of people who are very diverse, who may or may not go for this one but may go for that one. They need to know that what the brand means is that they are being invited to a discussion that they may or may not want to take part in, but that they need to know about. It's much more powerful in my sphere because it's a very inexpensive way of getting people's attention.

Blank: If I were an important filmmaker, and if I could get a meeting with Focus, Focus is a brand. But on a consumer level, nobody goes to a movie because it's a Focus movie -- they go to a movie because it's "Atonement." But (Schamus') ability to make the "Atonements" of the world comes from being Focus. In our case, we have to get people to pay a certain amount of money every month for the brands. And now as you go into the digital world, you know, Focus may be a brand.

THR: Right, Focus recently developed a Web site called Film in Focus, which is like a film magazine. How does that help you as a specialty film label?

Schamus: We're starting a conversation with a small core of people. We're slowly building a space, and you can see where this is going. At a certain point, we know we're going to have to be in a much more direct relationship with our consumers, besides delivering our films to them. And also -- in curating and keeping them part of that curatorial process -- letting them participate. We are accruing an attitude, a rhetoric that means we are empowering our core to be in that space and know that it is going to be delivering incrementally over the years exactly the kinds of things they want.