Movies Like Crazy – The Movie Filter

For the cost of a two-bedroom, two-bath home in south Baton Rouge, 29-year-old Drake Doremus made 2011’s indie sensation, a largely improvised star-crossed drama called Like Crazy. Shot in London and Los Angeles with a few friends, a couple of consumer-grade DSLR cameras from Best Buy and the kid who played Chekov nervous and nerdy in the last Star Trek, Doremus’ award-winning, headline-stealing movie that earned top honors at Sundance and praise from The New York Times is no fluke.

Like Crazy may not win any Oscars this month, but what its prominence represents could have a far greater impact on the industry than a gold statue collecting dust on a producer’s shelf in Brentwood. The film is the latest bud of a creative revolution—one that is going to do to cinema what the Internet did to publishing.

At some point this month or next, report analysts at Screen Digest, cinemas worldwide equipped with digital projection will outnumber the long-standing celluloid-fuelled originals, the theaters that carried the industry for the past century of storytelling. For the majority of cinephiles, this means no matter where we go or what we watch, chances are we’ll no longer be basking in the supple imagery created by actual reels threading a roll of film across the path of a beam of light at 24 frames per second.

Some will mourn the decline of the celluloid era. Though the latest digital imagery can be astounding, gone soon will be the warm, sputtering hum of the projector, those squiggly hairs and scratches during the trailers, the cigarette burns when the reels change, that cinematic look.

All it really means is that content distributors have at last caught up with content creators.

But who are these creators? Who is Drake Doremus, anyway? He sounds like a soap opera villain, but he’s simply a guy who set out to eliminate as many walkie-talkies and golf carts from his project as possible.

“The idea was to invest ourselves,” Doremus told The Wrap last year. “It’s not about feeling like a filmmaker, it’s about being a filmmaker. The cheaper you can make it for the better without sacrificing the vision.”

Creatives like Doremus sound more ordinary in 2012, and as anyone familiar with Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr can attest, they are legion.

With modern digital technologies, anyone can be a photographer, a musician or a filmmaker. New online documentary PressPausePlay explores this phenomenon in great detail. But when anyone can make a movie, when a multitude of cinema options present themselves outside of the mega-marketing schemes, the billboards and the Happy Meal tie-ins, how will we know which ones to choose? When everyone is a creator, what then of creation?

Maybe future blockbusters won’t be made by marketers, but by trusted tastemakers. Maybe some of the most important films will make audiences feel not like they are sitting in a theater but around a campfire. Maybe the death of celluloid will mean a rebirth of storytelling.

The Academy Awards will air live on ABC Sunday, Feb. 28, from Hollywood, where Like Crazy will not win Best Picture.