The speech by Gill was fantastic. And frankly, it doesn't strike me as a dour future. As someone who is aiming to sell one of those scripts, I suppose I should be discouraged by the reduced number of films being produced. But on the contrary, as a film-lover, a world of fewer films of higher quality is a world I eagerly await. And regardless, every effort at writing is to achieve -- fingers crossed -- great writing with "quality emotional content" with an audience in mind. Where's the satisfaction with anything else?

And maybe someday films can overtake chicken as consumers' perceived number one bang for the buck.

As a consumer and film lover, I couldn't agree more with your point re "fewer films of higher quality." However, for people who work for a living in the entertainment industry, the guiding instinct has to be -- MORE, MORE, MORE! Job opportunities for anyone involved in filmmaking, above and below the line, are a zero sum game -- we all take a slice from the pie. If the pie's size is reduced, that translates into fewer slices to go around.

This where "art" and "commerce" smash up against each other. Or as, I believe, Charlton Heston said, "The problem with movie as art is that it's a business."

The funny thing is to have this art vs. commerce discussion about independent movies. Hollywood had zero interest in them until indie movies started to have breakout B.O. numbers. In a way, Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) is to independent movies what Jaws (1975) is to mainstream commercial movies. Once Hollywood realized they could make money on indie movies, they created or bought their own 'specialty' divisions (e.g., Fox Searchlight, Sony Classics, Focus Films). Now that seems to be all roiled up, witness Mark Gill's comments.

Any guesses what the landscape will look like after this all shakes out?

Tom, your guess is as good as mine and probably any Hollywood mogul to boot! Everything goes in cycles. During the recent run-up of speciality movies, conventional wisdom was that movies with budgets less than $10M had the best prospects at seeing profits, and that any movie between $10 - 25M was already DOA. Now along with the demise of some of the specialty divisions, like Picturehouse, there is an emergence of mini-major companies like Mandate Pictures and Overture Pictures, companies, along with Lionsgate, which are actually focusing on movies with budgets up to $25M -- that suggests that we're definitely in a different cycle.

From a screenwriter's POV, the one constant is that a great script will always find a home.