I'm not a businessman/I'm a business...man!

The immortal words of Jay-Z have never been truer.

Particularly in the days when celebrities are finding new and different ways of flexing their creative muscles across genres—like Johnny Depp and Chelsea Handler getting into publishing, Whoopi Goldberg getting into documentaries, and the most erstwhile of the Kardashians, Robert, developing a premium sock line.

(I'm kidding on that last one...the first two have actual economic/creative potential, while R-Dash's sox sux, as Variety would have, no doubt, put it back in the day.)

Good on these guys for leveraging their brands...the typical shelf lives of careers for actors and comedians can be short—best to get while the getting is good.

And yet...

Note allllll the rage lately around the Zach Braff Kickstarter campaign.

Now, the point of this post isn't to argue for or against Braff's right to be on Kickstarter—personally, I don't love it and wish he wouldn't (as much because I don't see the need for a second installment of what was a solid, but unremarkable movie), but I can see the merits of the counter-argument.

I guess my bigger concern here is this: with media companies and traditional sources of funding already so tight...it seems like there's an inherent bias toward giving book deals and documentary greenlights and product lines to folks who already have made a name for themselves.

Basically, like Jay-Z says...it's all about extending your brand.

And that's great...when you actually have something to bring to that new arena you're pursuing.

But really:  is there a need for 'Garden State II:  This Time, the Moping and Overriding Angst Get Personal?' Does there need to be more than one book by Chelsea Handler about how much she loves to drink and screw?

Probably not.

But these items will continue to vie for your money and your time...why?

Well, I believe it's because most media gatekeeper types—and I'm casting a wide net:  cable network execs, publishers, advertisers, movie studio heads—all are in positions where, if they want to keep their jobs, they need to make money on surefire hits/shows and movies that draw maximum eyeballs.

And thus, your best bet for making money? Is by going with tried-and-true brands, things that have already proven their worth in the marketplace.

Thus, this is why you see 70 iterations of hillbilly family reality shows on cable (this is a running joke in the industry and um...pretty much everywhere else), this is why sequels exist...

It takes time, money and guts (and yet more money) to really look for and develop unknown talent and allow it to grow.

Gawker recently featured a long piece by Tom Socca touching on some of this same space. The article focused on Frank Rich's spawn and the author mused (angrily and not necessarily wrongly) about how he's got book deals out the wazoo, tons of press in the pages of the NY Times (where dad used to work), which is interesting since the kid is all of about 28.

The phenomena of the spawn of famous people having a much easier entry point into the pages of the Times or onto major TV shows can easily be viewed as straight up nepotism, as Tom Socca seems to indicate in his Gawker piece.

But for me, there's something much more insidious going on here—for me, it's more about an overall trend amongst the decision makers about what they're willing to take a chance on...

...and what they're not. My big takeaway:  nobody's really interested in taking chances these days.

And that's a shame. Books, movies, TV shows are littered with admirable attempts at trying something new, but that are, incontrovertibly...failures. 

Not to get all overly romantic/maudlin here, but:  the good stuff comes from the failures, dammit. And then there's the related point:  without failures, it's hard to find really, really good, NEW stuff.  From new voices.

And I think that's where a lot of the anger over the Zach Braffs of the world pleading that they need money from the internet to maintain their 'creative freedom' comes from.

Zach's had his shot and unless he's going to give me something absolutely unheard of that is going to blow my mind...then he best go back to the business of figuring out how to leverage his shit and be 'a business, man.'

Again, I can't hate on Zach too hard...cuz after, all, Ice-T said it best:  don't hate the playa, hate the game.

Documentaries: NOT coming to a theater near you...

So, if you ask most folks who make documentaries what their hope is for their lil' baby they've grown up, nurtured and fed, often for years on end and sometimes with their own money and always with a lot of blood/sweat/tears, they'll tell you: Sundance, baby...or the Oscars! and they'll invariably also talk about the wide theatrical release that goes with festivals and big time awards.

But here's the thing: getting your film into theaters, while not totally impossible is an uphill, expensive battle that may not really yield you much in the way of financial return or even guarantee lots of eyeballs seeing the thing. (I say this notwithstanding the recent (and thoroughly stomach-churning) success of longtime, rightwing hack Dinesh D'Souza's 2016: Obama's America)

Enter the web. If you're like me, (and Allah help you, if you are) you see most of your docs on Netflix, for which you pay a monthly premium or maybe you visit new sites like Snagfilms.com, Splitsider.com, or Chill.com—the pay-per-play model is in full effect on those last two. (Chill.com, in particular, puts more money back into the hands of the content creators, which in and of itself is a reason to rejoice over/support their efforts.)

Meanwhile, I've been waiting for a well-known doc maker to embrace the brave 'new' (but not really) world of online content.

And more importantly, I've been waiting for someone to announce, officially, that the old model of producing documentaries as a single thing and then begging/bowing/scraping to distributors in an expensive/fraught effort to get the thing into theaters...is mostly dead.

That and docmakers have to think more like content creators and well, marketers/entrepreneurs who work across various media and fully embrace social engagement/community outreach programs.

Ask and you shall receive: Ondi Timoner, the filmmaker behind DiG! and We Live in Public has a new venture (for which she's launched the obligatory Kickstarter campaign to raise funds/awareness)—A Total Disruption.

The project itself is indirectly related to documentary film, but is primarily a talk show about new technologies/inventors across a variety of disciplines. And well, we'll see about that: her Kickstarter pitch seems more than a little overheated with phrases like, 'these people are disrupting everything that's old and inefficient, solving some of our biggest problems,' and 'it's a web channel and a portal and an archive!'

(That last bit reminds me of similarly vigorous pitches from 1970s TV for pretty much anything ever sold by Ronco.)

You can read more about Timoner's recent talk/manifesto at the 2013 Hot Docs Festival in Toronto, on RealScreen's site here.

Of note, from that talk:

“We need to think differently about making films before we start shooting and we should be distributing as we go,” the two-time Sundance-winner told a packed house on Monday morning (April 29). “You can reach one billion people but we need to find our audiences where they live, which is on their devices.”

Amen to that, sister.