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.
According to a YouTube spokesperson via email, “When we announced YouTube Rentals in January we said we would be creating a destination after more partners joined the program. To date, we have nearly 500 partners that have joined our Rental program.
YouTube’s online rental concept was introduced at the Sundance Film Festival in January and it looks like their model of presenting films currently running the festival circuit will continue. For example, you can rent Metropia (which has played extensively in Europe, at Fantastic Fest, and is now playing at Tribeca) on YouTube for $5.99.
My argument here is really with the notion that a premiere at a major festival is your point of maximal awareness. It’s not, never has been and never will be, unless such festivals do a lot of re-visioning of what they are and how they operate.
It’s truly a sign of the self-absorption of the entire industry that they can think this is remotely true.
I think we’re assigning and bemoaning this dwindling commercial purpose to small festivals retro-actively in light of a perceived dearth of distribution deals – a dearth which, again, is only really relevant to festivals that were the hosting space for sales in the first place, and entirely irrelevant to the continued purpose of the small festivals who saw no such activity in their meeting rooms. Most annoyingly perhaps, small festivals gamely play along, trotting out their one or two success stories as bait for a system that never functioned for them or their filmmakers in the first place.
This is the first of five thoughts Saskia intends to post on the subject of festivals as they relate to distribution – I can’t wait to read the other four.
Eric Kohn’s article in indieWIRE explores a new startup concept from Arin Crumley and Kieran Masterton.
OpenIndie.com will allow filmmakers to input their e-mail lists and discover locations with high audience demand. The grassroots strategy allows movies to reach their intended audiences with a community-based approach. Because the site is open-sourced, anyone can enter a location into the site and figure out the level of interest for specific movies.
What this is really about is taking advantage of Twitter and other communication tools to play a major part in the global conversation about your work. (If there isn’t one, you need to start it.) Piracy on Canal St. happened before the Internet, and illegal downloading happened before Twitter. As Abraham acknowledged, you can’t stop it. Beyond pointers to free downloads, people are going to be saying lots of things about your film that you don’t like, including bad reviews, off-brand descriptions of your work and possibly even lies or personal attacks. The power of the Internet is that you can be in on it. You can know it’s happening, you can respond to it and you can preempt it.
The glory days of independent film, when hot young directors like Steven Soderbergh and Mr. Tarantino had studio executives tangled in fierce bidding wars at Sundance and other celebrity-studded festivals, are now barely a speck in the rearview mirror. And something new, something much odder, has taken their place.
Here is how it used to work: aspiring filmmakers playing the cool auteur in hopes of attracting the eye of a Hollywood power broker.
Here is the new way: filmmakers doing it themselves — paying for their own distribution, marketing films through social networking sites and Twitter blasts, putting their work up free on the Web to build a reputation, cozying up to concierges at luxury hotels in film festival cities to get them to whisper into the right ears.
Nothing new here but it’s always nice when the major news outlets turn their attention to independent film and the problems we’re facing now.
From the blog of Felicia Day. Apart from being adorable and talented, Felicia is pretty smart. She’s been around the block a few times with the whole “original web series” thing which, at the end of the day, is the same as independent filmmaking. All four of these questions apply just as much to your indie doc feature as they do to her web series about online role-playing gamers.
The internet isn’t TV: It’s 20 million channels rather than 200. If you can’t sit down and easily identify what kind of person will like your show and name 5 places that person might go to on the internet, you will have a hard time getting the word out, no matter how good it is.
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From the blog of Felicia Day. Apart from being adorable and talented, Felicia is pretty smart. She’s been around the block a few times with the whole “original web series” thing which, at the end of the day, is the same as independent filmmaking. All four of these questions apply just as much to your indie doc feature as they do to her 