ABSTRACT
This chapter tries to understand the impact of greater participatory practices on the relationship between film audiences and contemporary Hollywood film distribution. It begins by exploring how the power practices and power structures of film distribution were first standardised in the USA and what this process of standardisation means concerning the response by early US film distributors to ‘non-standard’ methods of film distribution. It then discusses this industrial response in relation to the supposed end to the traditional model of Hollywood film distribution heralded by the contemporary model of film circulation. It then uses this circulatory model to explore the power practices and power structure inherent to the supposedly more ‘democratic’ form of film distribution enabled by services like OurScreen, Demand.film, Gathr, and Tugg. It then demonstrates the disruptive impact of crowdsourcing on standardised business practices by analysing a film that utilised the crowdsourced cinema platform, Touch the Wall (Grant Barbeito and Christo Brock, 2014) and explores what this means in relation to supposedly more ‘democratic’ means of film distribution.
