John Oak Dalton is a filmmaker that has been making films for a long time. He has continually put out his features and they have found an audience but Amazon has targeted him along with many other filmmakers and have removed many of his films.
Scared Stiff was fortunate enough to stumble upon his “Open Letter to Amazon” and it says it as good as it can be said.
An Open Letter to Amazon Prime Video
I was never a person who decried Amazon destroying independent bookstores (and then independent everything else) because for the best part of twenty-five years I have lived in a rural area, in the great Flyover Country, with nothing of the sort within thirty minutes in any direction. So Amazon, and in the same fashion Netflix, became my window to the world.
I have never been mad at Facebook for all their shenanigans, because Facebook has always been exactly what it is; it’s the rest of us who, because it was so ubiquitous, thought it was a public utility, like electricity. But Amazon, equally or more ubiquitous, has held a different place in my life.
It was a place where I could do a deep dive on gathering evidence that Anthony Steffen was the best spaghetti western Django, to find that one Hercules movie that scared me as a child, where I could learn about The Strugatsky Brothers and Jean-Claude Izzo and Yuri Herrera and Hideo Yokoyama and Jean-Patrick Manchette all existed and two days later be holding one of their books in my hands.
I am part of the one percent; the idea that one percent of people on the internet create all of the content and 99 percent of people lurk (more generously, that one percent creates content, 9 percent contributes feedback to it, and 90 percent lurk). I blog and provide content on other platforms as well as pursue other DIY avenues like create my own comics and write fiction and write screenplays for movies, the last two of which (until yesterday) appeared on Amazon for people to enjoy.
Amazon’s decision to remove independent films is a stunning, and in the case of some of my creative friends, a devastating reversal. Citing “customer content quality expectations,” a large swath of independent films were taken down, without an option for recourse nor any other avenue to sell or rent the material. The movies seem to have been chosen at random, lower quality films (by their own director’s admission) left intact while higher quality films swept aside as if by the hand of a blind Goliath.
It seems a curious place to start curating content on Amazon; I have been victim to the occasional shoddy import of product, and the Kindle market of homebrewed content, some equally as rough-hewn, appears untouched to date.
The cynical might point out that perhaps the world is better off without a movie I wrote, PETER ROTTENTAIL, which a prominent British website decreed was one of the Top Ten Worst of All Time; but despite its detractors has acted as a vehicle for myself and others to share the love of all genre interests and advocate for our communities, to express ourselves creatively.
I was a midwestern kid who loved movies, and then made some; who read pulp paperbacks, and then wrote stories for some. Whether Amazon was an unwitting vehicle in all this, Amazon provided a vehicle for the hopes and dreams of myself and others.
I have happily lived in that long tail of content; that idea is that a zillion people love Justin Timberlake, but a small but loyal group love Ennio Morricone; that a zillion people are waiting for the new Stephen King, but there are fervent readers who won’t rest until they collect all of Harry Whittington and his various pseudonyms; that a zillion moviegoers are waiting for The Avengers, but an interested group is hoping somebody finds some lost Andy Milligan films.
I hope that Amazon reconsiders the repercussions of cutting off their long tail, on creators, their fans, and Amazon’s disenfranchised customers.
