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World Wide SundanceWill the Web make film festivals obsolete?

By Tim WuPosted Friday, Jan. 26, 2007, at 4:54 PM ET

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That may change. The more daunting problem may be our attention spans. Educators studying college students in the 1970s and 1980s confirmed a 15-minute boredom barrier—people's attention drops off at the 15- to 20-minute mark, even for material we're supposed to be paying attention to. If that's true, it may be a powerful reason why the Web may have trouble acting as a filter for promising but unknown films. Web filters, to work, rely on thousands of volunteers willing to watch the product and issue a recommendation. The short run times of pop songs and YouTube videos (maximum length: 10 minutes) makes Web filtering work for them. But there may be no Army of Davids willing to sit through a completely unknown 90-minute film to figure out whether it's any good, in which case, Web filtering breaks down.

Is there a way to get past the 15-minute barrier? The traditional way is to pay people. Film festivals employ programmers whose otherwise pleasant lives also include watching hundreds and hundreds of lousy films. One of my best friends is a programmer for the Toronto Film Festival, and she sometimes locks herself into her room to get through her assigned films. The process works: She is a good first filter for films from Argentina, Mexico, and other up-and-coming Latin American markets. But she wouldn't do it for fun or for free.

Beyond paying, film festivals are themselves an ingenious collective solution to the 15-minute barrier. Through what amounts to an implicit pact, Sundance attendees put on a good attitude and sit through films that they might not normally pay to see—with parties, skiing, and swag serving as a compensating factor. One of the great ironies of Sundance is that people will fight bouncers to get into films that would normally play to empty theaters. While individually everyone might chicken out, watching an unknown film with a hundred other people builds a certain esprit de corps. Or, at least, it's a little harder to get up and leave.

The Sundance system works: For 10 days, everyone agrees to sit through a lot of films, good and bad, and presto, out comes a surprise hit. Like Reservoir Dogs, Clerks, Little Miss Sunshine, or this year's Teeth. A film about a woman with teeth in her vagina is a pretty good example of material that's hard to judge before you actually see it. The discovery of these films is the festivals' own decentralized filtration system in action, and its success at uncovering winners helps explain Sundance's lasting power.

Where does this leave the Web-film movement? Most obviously, films shorter than 15 minutes or so will most easily and naturally use the Web as a launch pad, while a Web revolution for feature-length film will be harder. Producers will have to, first of all, leggo their egos—get used to putting their entire films online, trusting that the exposure will be worth it. Second, Web distributors will have to rely far more heavily on expert filters (i.e., critics, programmers, scholars), paid or otherwise, than is usual for Web businesses obsessed with the doctrine of the long tail and its more-content-is-always-better mantra. Let's face it: For someone to invest money and 90 minutes in a completely unknown film, they'll need some decent signal—at least a hope—that the film will be worth the time. The Web-film-distribution firm that manages to somehow nail this filtration problem will become the YouTube of independent film.

But in the end, even if Web film does take off, the festivals still have one trick the Web will never match. A lot of folks just need to go to Sundance to see everyone else. And while it may puzzle rational-choice theorists, the illogical human attraction to exclusive guest lists and velvet ropes shows no sign of ever disappearing.