An insightful interview with one of my favorite festival directors.
I know that when I think of DIY filmmaking, one of the first filmmakers who comes to mind is Tony Comstock, whose wonderful film, ‘Damon and Hunter: Doing it Together,’ played at CineKink a few years back. He and his wife, Peggy, have been producing and distributing explicit documentaries for the past decade – and they regularly top Amazon sales lists for number of DVDs sold. Obviously, they’re doing something right – during a recent distribution/marketing panel I attended, Tony was tweeting me from a sailing excursion through the Caribbean, prodding me to ask the participants how many of them owned a yacht.
Overall, I think Comstock Films exemplifies how many filmmakers on the “porn/erotica” side have—largely through necessity—become proficient in getting their work out there and noticed once it’s been produced. Rather than waiting on the hope of some distributor picking them up, the need is there to reach out to an audience directly, bringing with it a front-running understanding of all the tools necessary to do so, especially staying on top of reaching out through the internet, including supreme mastery of SEO and finding ways to circumvent the many technical road-blocks that are intended to inhibit sexual content.
Scott Kirsner, creator of the Cinematech blog, answers questions about the (much-speculated-upon) forthcoming revolution in DIY film distribution. It’s inspirational stuff if you’re disheartened by the lack of opportunity in traditional distribution right now.
Look, I do think that if you can do what Joss and Radiohead do, which is leverage the power of established media companies and their distribution channels while also doing some DIY experimentation, that’s not a bad thing. But I also believe there is incredible opportunity for total unknowns right now. You have access to the tools to make what you want, inexpensively. And you have access to all these distribution channels – DVD production, CD production, book production, digital downloads – that were really locked up just five or ten years ago. What can you do to overcome the power imbalance? You start by making really remarkable stuff that no one else is making, focus on a niche audience, and then experiment with different ways to grow that small initial audience.
Unveiled with very little fanfare, the first episode of the Film Festival Secrets podcast. In it I talk with Fred Andrews of the new Kansas City FilmFest, the joint creation of the festivals formerly known as KC FilmFest and KC Filmmakers Jubilee. You can listen to it on the web with this player:
You can subscribe to get future episodes with this URL:
(If you don’t know how to subscribe to a podcast in iTunes, you can follow these instructions.) I have submitted it to the iTunes store, hopefully you’ll be able to subscribe directly through iTunes soon.
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