This year, Park City, among other things, is abuzz with what the Internet will do to make films accessible that weren't accessible before. For instance, in the Queer Lounge at Sundance, withoutabox.com announced some basic community tools on their website (blogs, ratings, calendar building) and said they'll be distributing Arin Crumley and Susan Buice's film, Four Eyed Monsters, and Jacques Thelemaque's film, The Dogwalker. Although any details as to how that distribution will work have been inconclusive and murky, it's enough to generate some attention from people desperate for audiences to have access to more films.

Karina Longworth over at Cinematical interviewed Geoffrey Gilmore, Director of the Sundance Film Festival, earlier this week. His hopes for the Internet and distribution are tempered.

"What are the gates people have to go through? Everyone embraces the fact that there are no gates. Well, that's terrific on one level, theoretically, but what does it mean? It means there's a lot of junk out there."

Gilmore says regardless of accessibility, films still have a marketing problem. People need to be able to find out what's special about the film. So how does the audience find out about its distinctive quality? At Spout we've often used the phrase, "Infinite accessibility creates the problem of infinite choice." When confronted by the problem of making a choice from infinite options, we either fall back on what we know is safe or we make no choice at all. Which is why we need gatekeepers.

Geoffrey Gilmore is a gatekeeper. He's the ultimate decision-maker for what's programmed at Sundance. In the interview earlier this week, he came across as a benevolent gatekeeper: He judges films on what they set out to do and whether or not they did it well. If a film is shot on digital video he asks, "Is the film better because it's shot on DV?" Other gatekeepers are not so benevolent. Hollywood studios are gatekeepers allowing through only movies that stand to put money in their pockets, regardless of quality. Withoutabox.com is another kind of gatekeeper. Somebody over there is deciding what will be distributed and what won't. The 35 year-old film geek who runs the local video shop is a gatekeeper. All of these people decide somewhere along the way whether or not a certain film will reach you.

Gatekeepers are people who put the film on your radar. Whether through a national advertising campaign, a film festival, or a simple recommendation, they are the connecting point. The beautiful thing about a gatekeeper, like Geoffrey Gilmore or the video shop guy, is they don't just grant the films they love permission to pass through their gates. They become champions for those films. At Spout, we're not opening the floodgates for infinite accessibility. We're providing a platform for gatekeepers of all walks to come and champion the films they love to their widest possible audience. When audiences have an infinite number of films to choose from, we think they'll want access to gatekeepers more than they'll want access to films.