Then there’s the story of David and Nathan Zellner, filmmaker siblings from Austin, who prove that starry-eyed Sundance still embraces deeply idiosyncratic work made on a shoestring budget. After screening some of their short films at the festival, the filmmakers introduced their eccentric debut feature, “Goliath,” there in 2008. A comedy about an aimless thirtysomething (played by David) whose life begins to come unglued after his cat goes missing, “Goliath” received encouraging reviews and eventually secured a video-on-demand and DVD release through IFC Films.
But the brothers didn’t immediately book one-way tickets to Los Angeles. Instead, they chose to remain in Austin, where they continued to make shorts and direct music videos for their favorite local bands.
a wormhole has opened up between Sundance Past and the Online Present. Through it, films seemingly lost in time — or swallowed up by the gaping maw of bad distribution deals, or no distribution deals — might find commercial redemption.
Thanks to a recent arrangement between the Sundance Institute, which operates the festival, and the Manhattan distributor New Video, six Web homes — Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, iTunes, YouTube and SundanceNOW — are making Mr. Noonan’s movie, and any other eligible Sundance film, available for streaming online. The option is open to every film ever shown at the festival, or brought to a Sundance lab, or given a Sundance grant. Filmmakers don’t surrender their rights. They (17 so far, with thousands of potential participants) can opt to go with any or all of the half-dozen sites. They have, in essence, a guaranteed means of distribution.
The new twist here is the way his experiment changes video “windows” — which determine when shows and movies show up on different outlets. By going direct-to-fanfirst, C.K. doesn’t shut off his chance to end up working the Big Media Companies he says he doesn’t want to work with. He’s just making them wait. So the people who really love him can get it right away, and he can capture almost all of that value in the transaction.
Kafka points out that there’s plenty of room for traditional distributors to get in on the action after the first “fan-only” release:
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that a million people pony up for the concert — basically, that is, everyone who watches his (great) show on News Corp.’s FX channel. (News Corp. owns this site, too.)
That’s a wildly optimistic estimate, and it will still be a fraction of the people that HBO, which has some 28 million subscribers, can reach. You can fault Big Media for a lot of things, but it remains pretty good at rounding up Big Audiences.
Filmmakers looking for validation in the DIY distribution model need look no further – the more experiments like this that we see, the more likely it is that distributors will look seriously at filmmakers who prove their worth by finding their own audience first and building a platform for bigger things later. While distributors have traditionally viewed DIY distributed films as damaged goods (perceiving the sales already out the door as missed opportunities for them), the model of building on previous success may become more common. Let’s hope so.
Ashkan Karbasfrooshan at mediapost.com, writing about online video distributors like Hulu and Netflix:
Now don’t get me wrong, while content is king, monarchies are no longer in vogue; indeed the distributors have the power. Any producer that doesn’t “get this” is living in the past. But to ensure that advertisers keep the system running, distributors need to please viewers. To do that, you have to give viewers the content that they want when they want it.
The lesson is that producers are still paying the price for giving away too much, too easily, too fast. That kind of reputation is hard to shake. But once they realize they can have the upper hand if they play the game right — then maybe, just maybe, they can get the diamond they deserve.
The New York Times on rumored plans by Tribeca and Sundance festivals to increase their distribution efforts:
Tribeca plans on Monday to announce a significant expansion of its fledgling movie releasing arm, Tribeca Film, which was founded last year as a test in releasing movies both digitally and in theaters. Tribeca Film plans to increase its annual output to 26 pictures, up from 11.
So of the roughly 5000 feature films that get made each year, fifteen more will have greater hope of seeing distribution. Let’s be generous and assume that 500 of those films (the top ten percent) are actually worth watching. A plan for an additional fifteen seems like a drop in the bucket. Not that I’m criticizing Tribeca (or Sundance, who declined to comment for the article) for making the effort, but the problem seems larger than that.
Personally I’m more and more of the opinion that Ted Hope’s fears are true: that the explosion of independent film (enabled by ever-cheaper movie making technology) has created an endless series of first-time hobby filmmakers. The career filmmakers will still emerge, but it will be harder and harder to distinguish who they are until later in their lives, and it will be harder for them to hang on through the onslaught of hobbyists who make one film and then decide that independent film is too hard.
I was also amused by the reporter’s definition of the festival world, which seems to encompass only the top ten or twenty festivals nationally. In particular I chortled at the assertion that Sundance is unlike other festivals in that is a non-profit (most fests are non-profit) and that SXSW is “in the minority” in not having a department dedicated to distributing films that play at the festival. The festival directors I know are mostly busy figuring out how their events will survive from year to year to worry too much about what happens to the films afterwards. Not that they wouldn’t love to help more, but distribution beyond the festival bounds isn’t really in the mission statement of the vast majority of film fests.
Watch Twitter and the indie film blogs for much discussion about what this means to indie filmmakers (as a species, not much) and possibly a resurgence of the old “festivals should give filmmakers a cut of the ticket revenue” idea, something I wrote about back in 2008.
In short – it’s always nice to see big festivals try new things, but a new model of compensation to flimmakers for their work is unlikely to be the result.
A fun story from NPR about the resurgence in popularity of a drive-in theater in Illinois. Having survived the onslaught of home video, the theater has become a social hub for local families. The result? They’re knocking down an abandoned cineplex to add a third screen.
The takeaway for filmmakers: there are all kinds of ways to watch movies, and therefore all kinds of ways to get your movie seen. You just need to find the hook that makes your screening an event.
Planet Money is one of the best podcasts out there, and in this episode they strike close to our collective heart: the accounting involved with film distribution. This should be required listening for every filmmaker looking for distribution for their film. After hearing this, it should be no surprise that independent filmmakers are routinely screwed out of their share of a film’s proceeds by creative accounting similar to what the studios use. It’s fascinating, terrifying stuff.
There’s this weird thing in the movie business: Almost all movies lose money. Except they don’t, really.
On today’s Planet Money, Edward Jay Epstein, the author of a recent book called The Hollywood Economist, explains the business of movies.
As a case study, he walks us through the numbers for “Gone In 60 Seconds.” (It starred Angelina Jolie and Nicolas Cage. They stole cars. Don’t pretend like you don’t remember it.)
The movie grossed $240 million at the box office. And, after you take out all the costs and fees and everything associated with the movie, it lost $212 million.
This is the part of Hollywood accounting that is, essentially, fiction. Disney, which produced the movie, did not lose that money.
A. For us, Purple Violets didn’t have the highest profile. I don’t know how well it did for the financiers. The problem I’ve had the last couple years is, you make these films, you get released in New York and L.A., and then you’re going to platform from there. A lot of times you don’t get beyond the second platform. But I’ve always had the ability to get pretty decent publicity for my films. You have, let’s say, people in St. Louis and Kansas City and Cincinnati who might see Selma Blair on Conan talking about the film, get really excited for it, and then it doesn’t get to that city. And by the time it comes out on DVD, they’ve forgotten about seeing Selma Blair and getting excited. What the iTunes thing enabled, in the moment when you have your greatest heat, publicity-wise, everybody who’s into your film can access your film. For the small movies, that’s probably the model that makes the most sense.
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Peter Kafka at AllThingsD 
