For the last few weeks of the year, I’m going through stories I saved, but never posted. Today’s stories are from May 2009:

* Found a wonderful documentary here.

The Way We Get By is the story of Bill, Joan and Jerry, three elderly troop greeters who spend much of their time at the Bangor International Airport shaking hands with troops as they come in and out on their way to and from Iraq. Watching it, you wouldn’t suspect that Joan’s son made the film. But underneath it all the doc is really a family affair. In 2004 Aron Gaudet and his fiancée, then girlfriend, Gita Pullapilly were looking for a documentary project to get them out of their TV news jobs. Pullapilly was a reporter, Gaudet a producer, and they both wanted a change.

Usually Gaudet’s mother was at home when he called to chat, but suddenly he started to notice she was always out. Soon he found out what she was doing; she was going to the Bangor International Airport in Maine to meet troops as they passed through this main hub, letting them know they were appreciated.

The movie’s trailer:

* What’s wrong with this script submission [Note: All grammar, spacing, typos, and misspellings are as is]:

I was wondering if you were looking for scripts? We have sent a script to **** and they read it and liked it. But they said they are to busy at the time to do it right away. So we are looking around to see if there was anyone else interested in buying it. We will probully sell to the first person that gets back to us who likes it. If you want to read it i can send it over throgh my email.

* Meanwhile Hwood’s perplexing relationship with the Web continued unabated per this THR piece:

Michael Lynton, chairman & CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, on Thursday decried what he described as the consistently negative impact of the Internet on the film business.

“I am a guy who hasn’t seen any good come out of the Internet,” said Lynton, a former CEO of AOL Europe and president of AOL International. “It seems to have done damage to every (part) of the entertainment business.”

Lynton called on Washington to draw up rules that would protect copyrighted material instead of only focusing on expanding the availability of broadband across the U.S.

Citing the Obama administration’s current focus on boosting broadband coverage, he said: “Somebody has got to realize that we need some rules.”

Otherwise, it is as if the U.S. had built the highway system in the 1950s without speed limits, truck weight limits, and without driver licenses.

This is feels like such an ‘analog’ voice in a digital age: Let’s make the biggest communications breakthrough in perhaps ever our enemy. Smart. However Lynton really tries to see the good side of things:

He did acknowledge that the Web can serve as a promotional tool, but argued that Internet marketing in many cases hasn’t created a big enough sense of urgency among potential moviegoers to turn out.

Dude, that’s not the Web’s fault! The Web is an information and entertainment delivery system. It’s up to say… you… and your marketing people to figure out how to market your movies.

* Meanwhile back at the digital ranch, most folks are thrilled by what’s happening on the Web:

Critics of the digital era often argue that the deluge of new technology evolving daily is driving us to become more insulated as individuals — but what if the Internet is actually forging a new era of relationships?

In fact, online video sites like YouTube are allowing us to become “producers,” remaking our own identities and relating to others in the community in an entirely different way, says Mike Wesch, a cultural anthropologist who studies the effects of social media and digital technology on global society at Kansas State University.

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The professor said his summer journeys to New Guinea, where he lives in a remote village and studies the native people, only further exemplified how much technology connected him to others.

Unable to communicate in the native language, Wesch felt completely isolated. He said it made him realize how much we depend on conversation, clothing and gestures in the U.S., whereas abroad, identities are completely formulated from face-to-face relationships.

“I realized that media are not tools or modes of communication, but that media mediates relationships,” he said.

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Online, we have the freedom to create characters, blurring the lines between the reality and fiction of our personas. We also have the ability to more closely observe the actions of others than in real life. And because we can go back and watch the videos we produce, we learn not just what it’s like to talk, but to be seen.

Wesch believes the web’s lack of boundaries are shifting self-identity. We can no longer erase what’s come behind us once it has been documented, and this can have both a positive and negative effect. Once we are captured on camera doing something, it is there forever — and may come back to haunt us later (which, he said, seems of less concern to the younger generation). On the other hand, we can become our own public-relations agents, shaping the persona we want the world to see.

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But even Chad Hurley, the CEO of YouTube who was in the audience at the event, chimed in to say he believes televisions and movie theater screens hold a power YouTube will never be able to possess. “People in a dorm might suffer through watching things on their laptop, but that’s really not the best way to experience long-form content,” Hurley said. “Still, YouTube can offer a way for people with lots of talent to show off their content. People appreciate good art and stories, and a lot of people participating on the site are the cream of the crop.”

Hurley says this even as YouTube is aggressively moving into long-form, primarily because that’s where their advertising profits lie.

Back to Lynton: His comments are representative of the Hollywood fear factor that has existed toward new technologies since the beginning. Talkies, color film, television, digital cameras (instead of film), VCRs, DVDs, the Web, each of those technologies seen by many in Hwood as the end of the world. For example, none other than Steven Spielberg was quoted as saying that the videocassette trend would kill theatrical motion pictures. In fact, it helped to expand the moviegoing audience.

Digital filmmaking and content delivery platforms like YouTube are going to be key cogs in creating a sustainable marketing and distribution approach for indie filmmakers.

These next five years should be revolutionary.