SXSWorld
Issue link: https://sxsw.uberflip.com/i/81862
Lim proclaimed that "mumblecore is the sole signifi cant American indie fi lm wave of the last 20 years to have emerged outside the ecosystem of the Sundance Film Festival." To SXSW's Louis Black, that was both good and bad. "People tell me after Sundance, day: Mumblecore, as coined by Mutual Appreciation sound mixer Eric Masunaga in a bar after one SXSW screening. Bujalski fi rst uttered the word to indieWIRE the following August: "Pretty catchy," he said, creating the monster. Th e New York Times' Dennis But another buzzword won the Joan Jett rocks Stubbs at SXSW 2004. it's Tribeca and then SXSW," he told the website Austin Daze. "And you really see it in the fi lms we get. People say: 'well you're going to be the next Sundance.' But I don't want to be the next Sundance. I really don't. When SXSW started, the New Music Seminar was number one and we were number two. And that was great, because everybody hated them and liked us. So Sundance is Sundance. It's about people that don't really care about movies. It's a market. It's see and be seen. In Austin, fi lm is really about fi lm. And music is about music." Except when music is also about 0s and 1s. Roland Swenson sums up 2002-2006 as "the period when the entertainment and information industries could no longer deny the fundamental changes the Internet was causing, and they began to fi nd ways to deal with it, even when, in most cases, their revenue was shrinking. SXSW became positioned as one place to go to learn about ways to deal with the changes." During SXSW 2006, Th e New York Times' Kelefah Sanneh went even further, suggesting that the conference proved that in the age of MP3s, there's still an awful lot of music business left. "When those songs get beamed around the Internet, it's seductive to think that bands and listeners have eliminated the middleman: music goes straight from the recording studio to your laptop," he wrote. "Th is conference is a reminder of how many professionals it takes to turn an amateur band into a popular MP3. " 2006 was also the debut of SXSW ScreenBurn, devoted to the video game industry. Interactive was about to fi nally arrive. Attendance, which had hovered at 3,000 since the bubble popped, rose from 3,343 people in 2005 to 4,733 in 2006. Today, it's more than triple that. "One of the things we used to ask ourselves was 'who is this event tangible indication of how much interest the event was generating, and how much more it could generate," he says. "After so many years of shouting into the darkness, people were fi nally shouting back." In his 2007 music keynote, Pete Townshend would refl ect upon the dying music industry and by extension, Interactive, saying "An Austin music festival, SXSW, built on top of a really solid, healthy Internet is a very diff erent music festival from one built just on the fact that people in Austin really like to drink beer and listen to live bands." But SXSW still tries to be both. "I still think of SXSW as a place for local and regional acts," says Swenson. "Over the years, we've just added more and more regions." Responding to the various critics and conspiracy theories that are as much a part of each year's conference as migas and Shiner Bock, Swenson also sarcastically reveals "SXSW's hidden agenda. When SXSW started, I worked for the Austin Chronicle, which was primarily supported by advertising from live music clubs. We started SXSW as a way to bring in money to the nightclubs to help them stay in business and keep advertising." He also notes that Austin bands still make up the largest portion of the music line-up every year: "When we travel, the rest of the world complains that we have too many Austin acts." "If we tried to do this anywhere else it wouldn't work," Louis Black for?,'" says Swenson. "We knew it was supposed to be for creative people making content. But after all the VC-funded start ups imploded, not so many of those people had jobs anymore. In my mind, the turning point was when everything returned to a more entrepreneurial, 'start small and build' attitude from bloggers and people doing interesting things with what was then becoming known as social media." Says Interactive director Hugh Forrest, "Th ere were plenty of times that I wanted to throw in the towel. Because we didn't seem to be growing, and because we seemed so out of sync with everything else at SXSW. But Roland never fl inched on his commitment to this event." Shortly after SXSW 2006, Forrest started PanelPicker, which encour- aged registrants and the entire public to propose events. "It gave a 12 SXSW ORLD / M ARCH M USIC 201 1 told Austin Daze. "If you go to Park City, Utah, the week before or the week after Sundance you would never know that this was a town that had a fi lm festival. You go to Austin any day of the year, and it is exactly the same as SXSW—it's just not as intense. Th ere's great music, great fi lms, tons of great intellectual activity and all kinds of media activity. SXSW is Austin." ★ This is the fourth of fi ve excerpts from the forthcoming SXSW Scrapbook: People and Things That Went Before to be published in the coming issues of SXSWORLD. The book will be published by UT Press and available in March 2011. Do you have a SXSW memory to share? Or a photo from an important show or event at SXSW? Send it to scrapbook@sxsw.com AMBER NOVAK