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Congrats on 20 years of indie excellence Zeitgeist!

If I were to develop an indie film theatrical distribution business (which, come to think of it, I would like to do), I would follow the Zeitgeist Films model (from the Village Voice article re: the company's 20 year anniversary):

"Gerstman and Russo, veterans of indie distribs First Run Pictures and Interama, respectively, joined forces in 1988, working in an elevator-sized apartment in the West Village for $175 per month. "We started the company with $1,000 each and $900 on a credit card," recalls Gerstman. Their first release was Bruce Weber's nonfiction boxing portrait, Broken Noses, followed by a collection of shorts from Todd Haynes and Christine Vachon's Apparatus Productions. Soon after, they released Haynes's feature debut, Poison, along with a bevy of work from budding auteurs, such as Guy Maddin's Archangel, Atom Egoyan's Speaking Parts, and The Films of the Brothers Quay."

More here.

And, the company is cool when approaching the big distribution changes that others are busy exploring at the moment:

"While other distributors are experimenting with video-on-demand and Internet distribution, Gerstman and Russo, in their typically tentative style, aren't leaping headlong into the new-media arena. "Big transformations are really not our thing," says Gerstman. "We're theatrical distributors. We're not looking to become producers..."

Read the entire excellent & inspiring article by Anthony Kaufman here at the Village Voice.

- Sujewa

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Introduce us to your favorite painters & paintings.

There's a PBS (i think) show on French painters right now. Other, older, forms of art, & the people who made them, can be inspirational & useful for filmmakers I think. I've learned a lot from indie rock (some aesthetic stuff, lots of bidness stuff), maybe I can learn stuff from painting too. So in July & August I am going to blog about painters & I would like you to comment & tell us about your favorite painters & other interesting stuff about painting. Painting is thousands of years old. Filmmaking is a little over 100 years old. US Indie filmmaking as we know it is perhaps a little over 50 years old (w/ the beginning somewhere around the time when the Cassavetes generation got its inspiration/started work). Us new indie filmmakers - the digital/web/DIY generation, can probably learn a lot by taking a look at/getting to know, painting & other older art forms. I'll start w/ Edward Hopper . Here's page w/ a lot of info on him. His most famou...

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