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.