ALAMO PICTURES & COVID-19:

It’s Business as Usual

Last week the US box office recorded a near zero revenue for the first time ever, the first time since cinema was born well over one hundred years ago.

This comes as the coronavirus pandemic brought a near total shutdown of all movie theatres across the country.

This hardly comes as a surprise. The same is happening across the world, in the United Kingdom, Australia and everywhere in between.

The lights are going out over the movie theatres and so too, inevitably, the lights are going out on sound stages from Hollywood to Bollywood. Lockdown means down time for everyone in the movie industry whether you are the guy who drives the talent to the set or the internationally acclaimed director in the middle of a multi million-dollar production.

The movie industry like so much of the creative world runs on what has become known as the “gig economy”. Short-term contracts, if indeed any contract at all, is the norm for many working within the film world. It has always been thus. Understandably many are wondering where and more importantly when this is all going to end.

Here at Alamo Pictures we are open for business.

Yes, you read that right: we are open for business. Perhaps it’s because of our name. Whatever the defenders of the Alamo where they did not thrown in the towel, give into defeatism, sit around moaning about their lot – no, they may have all died but they died fighting. That same spirit of resilience is what is going to get Alamo Pictures – and you – through this time.

Make no mistake the time of corona virus will pass. It may even pass sooner than some predict. What will return is a time when people are interested in other stories. No doubt there will be many films made about this time.

Rightly so, it is like nothing anyone has ever experienced, unless you were re old enough to remember the Spanish Flu of 1918. Guess what though, back then cinemas closed too and there were the same dire predictions that the movie industry, then barely a decade old, would fold. The opposite happened. In fact movies in the 1920s grew to become the global phenomenon that we know now.

But for the expansion of film making in the 1920a we would not have the films we have today. The 1920s saw an explosion of film making across the globe.

Feature-length films became the norm, replacing the shorter “two-reelers.” The studio system grew and the proliferation of smaller film studios gave way to larger scale studios that would create and then dominate cinema and which largely we still have today.

This expansion of filmmaking was not only in Hollywood. It was across the world and nowhere more so than in Germany. This was a country that had been devastated by the slaughter and political instability following the Great War before it was also caught up in the Spanish Flu epidemic. Almost half a million Germans perished on account of that disease in barely one year. Yet, this was the country where film making and film makers where to become some of the
greatest in the world with a huge creative influence that continues to this day.

Feature-length films became the norm, replacing the shorter “two-reelers.” The studio system grew and the proliferation of smaller film studios gave way to larger scale studios that would create and then dominate cinema and which largely we still have today.

This expansion of filmmaking was not only in Hollywood. It was across the world and nowhere more so than in Germany. This was a country that had been devastated by the slaughter and political instability following the Great War before it was also caught up in the Spanish Flu epidemic. Almost half a million Germans perished on account of that disease in barely one year. Yet, this was the country where film making and film makers where to become some of the
greatest in the world with a huge creative influence that continues to this day.

So we at Alamo are hopeful of the future.

Human creativity and human ingenuity has had tougher things to deal with than the coronavirus, as true for the film industry as any other business. That is not to say that in the short term things may be rough for some. Of course, that much is obvious but nothing bad lasts for a hundred years and this as not yet impacted for 100 days. So let’s steady our nerves, calm our imaginations and work on what we can while we are in this unusual and surely a once in a lifetime situation.

So please send us through your ideas. We are all ears. And we have more time than ever to look over your proposals.

Think creatively about ways in which you can work now. Some documentarians who rely heavily on archive footage will be in their element! They have no excuse and no distraction from hours of work in their editing suites. Are there any films that can be constructed upon these lines? We’d like to hear your thoughts.

Also, when we all get back to work companies and businesses are going to need new approaches to marketing and advertising. Are there businesses out there that would like to take this time to have a chat about what is possible and what is best for their brands in the world of documentary film? Again, we are all ears.

So, in short, Alamo Pictures is open for business. We are not going anywhere. We want to hear from you – ideas, pitches, what you have to offer, what you need for your business or venture. We can have those conversations like never before.

We are planning the future

It may be, perhaps it will be, a different future to that already planned but one thing remains true. Since the dawn of time people have loved stories. In fact, they need stories; they will need them more than ever when we come out of this. That’s where we will be; we will be ready to tell those stories.

Alamo Pictures looks around the world today and as documentary film makers our deepest conviction is being confirmed daily with every news broadcast, namely, that real life is much more interesting that anything cooked up on a Hollywood sound stage.

On that, at least, I’m sure you’ll agree.

But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or o