Once a year, I am immersed in the film industry. I mean this quite literally. I do not go out of my way to come into contact with film people, hear about deals, listen to screenwriters discuss plots, learn about agents, or explore marketing campaigns. Instead, the industry rolls like a tsunami wave over me and the town in which I live, obliterating all in its path, particularly parking spaces and restaurant tables. I refer to the Sundance Film Festival (http:/www.sundance.org) and its major venue, Park City, Utah. Some years ago, Sundance was all about films. It still is, but today it's about the Internet as well. Small independent filmmakers have become dot com companies and seminars are held on marketing your film using a variety of Internet techniques. Variety (the publication) is, of course, also on the Internet (http://www.variety.com), as well as on traditional electronic sources such as Factiva's Publications Library and LEXIS-NEXIS News Library.

The independent film industry was never well covered by traditional database information sources. That is changing, but only moderately. Searches for independent () film? ? in the business databases ABI/INFORM, PROMT, and Business & Industry on Dialog showed a similar pattern in all three databases, with a greater percentage of the total results being in the past few years. There isn't a huge amount of information to be had from traditional business information sources, but at least it's increasing.

Using such traditional sources, the entertainment industry in general was best researched in publications that were included in business or popular magazine databases, through newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, which is read by the Hollywood community, and via the established trade press for the entertainment industry such as Variety.

SPECIALIZED NEWSLETTERS

It is only since the rise of the Internet that fewer mainstream information sources have become widely available to business researchers. For example, two newsletters (to be honest, they resemble broadsheets more than typical newsletters) that circulate widely during Sundance, with good coverage of both the artistic and business sides of the industry, are Rough Cut, owned by Turner Broadcasting, a Time Warner-soon to be AOL Time Warner-Company (http://www.roughcut.com), and IndieWire Daily (httpJ/www.indiewire. com). They are not represented in any of the traditional databases. They are not listed in FullText Sources Online (Information Today), Net.Journal (Hermograph Press), nor Journal NameFinder (Dialog File 414).

This is typical not only for the film industry, but for any new publication. It takes a while before database producers acknowledge that a publication has staying power, contains sufficient valuable content, and is sought after by a critical mass of readers. Many still adhere as well to the "If it isn't on a library's shelf, then it's not going in my database" mentality. The problem is that, particularly where newsletters are concerned, libraries are hesitant to subscribe because the information is ephemeral and the publications are un-indexed.

WEB ANOMALIES

Simply having a Web site doesn't necessarily qualify a newsletter as being valuable to researchers. They are a fantastic resource during film festivals such as Sundance because they provide running commentary, up-to-the-minute news, and an educated assessment of films' financial potential, but the writers have no concept of their words as having retrospective importance. These newsletters exemplify the Web as a window to the here and now, a current awareness tool. Archival retrieval on such sites is minimal. Actually, they resemble a newsfeed more than a true newsletter. Indiewire has no retrospective search engine, and Rough Cut's search engine, Excite, doesn't do too well at business searches on the site, probably because of the preponderance of movie reviews as content.

It's an interesting anomaly: we use film to record events for posterity, whether it's a documentary, a news program, or a home video, yet film Web sites concentrate on today's news and this week's events rather than providing access to past stories. Film is archival; film Web sites tend not to be.

CONVERGENCE OF TECHNOLOGIES

Alongside the growing number of resources is the convergence of the film industry with Internet technology. You can use the Internet not only to research the industry but also to watch films. You can find information about marketing your film, but you can also market your film. Just looking at a few of the sponsors of Sundance should indicate that the industry is changing. Along with Dolby Laboratories and Sony Electronics, there's Excite@Home and On2.com. Excite@Home shows movie trailers and provides film reviews and local movie times. On2.com is a broadband company with its first channel being On2Movies, which shows "full screen, full motion, television quality video on demand." No wonder they're interested in sponsoring a film festival. Expect more dot toms in the future of film festivals.

The film industry is one of the first to understand and exploit the full value of infotainment. As Josh Chetwynd points out in USA Today (May 3, 2000), the independent filmmakers are way ahead of the major studios, which seem to see the Internet as a plot device. The email in You've Got Mail, the online dance in American Pie, and the identity theft in The Net are the three he cites. The Web sites Chetwynd thinks are leading the way include AtomFilms, iFilm, and Sightsound. He doesn't mention Live (http://www.live-at. com) which has a daily calendar of online events and the indieFILMguide, featuring articles about this portion of the film industry.

FILM SITES

AtomFilms.com (http://www.atomfilms.com) is primarily a guide to short films. A title search on Blair, for example, retrieved two films: the 21-minute-long Making of the Blair Witch Project (shot by the director's girlfriend) and the four-minute Blair Fish Project. The iFilm site (http:// www.ifilm.com) is one of the more comprehensive and informative sites I've found for any industry. It includes a list of film festivals and a list of film schools, both with activated hyperlinks. There are informative articles on legal aspects of the industry (even if you're in film school, make sure you have the rights to the music you use) and on business (how to use the Internet to market your film). There are also hundreds of affiliated sites linked from iFilm.

Sightsound (httpJ/www.sightsound. com), headquartered in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, leads the way in distributing downloadable videos. Most recently, Sightsound is the distributor for Metafilmics' "made for Internet" video, Quantum Project, a 32-minute film starring John Cleese. Cleese, famous for his work in the British Monty Python and Fawlty Towers television series and for his business training videos (Meetings, Bloody Meetings is my favorite) plays an "electron-crossed lover." Sightsound and Metafilmics believe that this is the first film produced solely for the Internet.

NEWS OF THE INDUSTRY

News about recent films and favorite stars is easy to come by. Separating gossip from news is not as easy. Even more frustrating is gathering hardcore business information. On the consumer level, reviews of films and tales of the outrageous behavior of actors, actresses, and directors are a dime a dozen. Reuters has its Entertainment Wire just for this. Most people view the film industry as a spectator sport. They rely on reviews to decide which movies to watch, rent, and/or purchase. That is why retrieving serious business information from newspapers is a frustrating undertaking. I prefer indexed databases such as Business & Industry for this task.

Major studios pose less of a problem. Frequently owned by publicly traded, listed companies, or existing as free-standing public companies, these can be researched just as any other public company through standard investment sources. Interestingly, even some of the newer companies involved in the emerging Internet/film industry are going public. Examples include Launch, Macromedia, and Wink. They issue press releases, have industry analysts following them, and get involved in mergers and acquisitions. Thus, databases such as BusinessWire, Investext, and Mergerstat fit the bill for serious researchers. It is at the public company level that convergence between film and Web is most evident. Witness AOL's purchase of Time Warner, which owns Warner Brothers studio.

THE NOT-SO-SECRET CODES

The industry itself enjoys a twodigit U.S. SIC code, 78, for Motion Pictures. There are numerous subdivisions, such as 7812 for production, 7819 for services such as editing, rental, reproduction, and consulting, 7822 for distribution, 7829 for services such as booking and delivery, 783 for theaters, and 784 for videotape rental. The detail to which the U.S. SIC codes go reflects the predominance of the U.S. in the film industry. The NAILS codes are not as welldefined. Use 51211 for motion picture production (the equivalent of 7812), 512191 for teleproduction and post-production (the new definition of 7819), 71151 for independent artists, writers, and performers (a category previously defined as film directors and related independent production services), and that everuseful 512199 for "other" motion picture-related industries. This is one instance where I sincerely hope the traditional databases stick with the old U.S. SIC codes and don't adopt NAILS.

When the film industry is covered by a database or Web site that does not support code searching, it frequently is subsumed under the more-general industry name of Entertainment. This can present problems since, unless free text keyword searching is supported, you can be deluged with non-film-industry information, such as live theater and popular music topics.

VENTURING TOWARD FINANCE

The convergence of film and Internet has not caught the venture capitalists off guard. Instead, they are rushing to finance newer companies. Finding statistics on venture capital was well covered in Leslie Fisher's article ("Venture Capital: A Start-Up Guide to Electronic Resources," DATABASE, FebruaryMarch 1997). There are frustrations, however, when it's the film industry you want statistics for. Venture One, a Reuters subsidiary (http://www. vl.com), has quarterly reports that non-subscribers can access, but they are not broken out by industry. PricewaterhouseCooper's Money Tree site (http://www.pwcmoneytree. com) does let you select by industry, but Entertainment isn't one of them. There is a keyword option with no Boolean capabilities. Three separate searches, one on fi m, one on mo vi e, and one on entertainment, were successful in retrieving companies in the industry that had received venture financing.

The two words that sum up the concerns of the film industry at the moment are bandwidth and distribution. They are related. As bandwidth increases, the possibilities for distribution by Internet also increase. For example, Sightsound debuted its Quantum Project film at the Yahoo! Internet Life Online Film Festival (http://www.zdnet.com/yil/filmfest/ index.html). Yes, even film festivals are going virtual, although they certainly can't duplicate the star-spotting or the parties that go on at physical festivals such as Sundance. While legitimate distribution channels are changing drastically, so are the opportunities for piracy. The video equivalent of Napster is DivX (no relation to Divx, the now-defunct pay-per-view DVD distribution platform), which allows a full-length movie to be copied onto a single CDROM. Ask any university student how many movies he or she "owns" on their university's server and you will be amazed.

FILMOGRAPHIES

On a final note, for those readers interested in filmographies of the excessively specialized variety, I highly recommend Brigham Young University librarian Martin Raish's annotated filmography of Librarians in the Movies (http:/www.lib.byu.edu/ dept/libsci/films/introduction.html). Not only does he have the films listed, he also includes a list of actors and actresses who have portrayed librarians on film, and a short bibliography of articles about librarians in the movies.