Sorry, Comics, But You’re Fucked

How Privateering, Not Piracy, Destroys Commercial Art & Media

At C2E2 over the weekend, a bunch of people were running around showing off how awesome comics look on the iPad. I have to agree, comics on the iPad appear to be way more enjoyably readable than I had anticipated. No one seems to be quite sure if this is great news or awful news. Well, it’s both. It’s great news for comics junkies who aren’t yet overstimulated by too much digital content and for comics creators who see their stories as loss leaders for movies and action figures… the rest of you are fucked.

Oh I’m no Luddite about this shit, but I do have more than enough anecdotal reference material to make the call here.

Here’s a list of a few retail shops I worked at during my teens and early 20s:
- Tower Records (Huntington, NY)
- Tower Video (Lafayette & 4th, Greenwich Village NY)
- Kim’s Video (Bleecker Street, West Village NY)
- Two Boots Video (Ave A, East Village NY)
- See Hear Zines (St Mark’s Place, East Village NY)
- St. Mark’s Comics (St Mark’s Place, East Village NY)
- Village Comics (Bleecker Street, New York)
- Mama Mia What A Pizza (Broadway & 8th, NY)

Yeah I had a lot of jobs, sometimes I worked at more than one at once and sometimes I got fired right away for being an asshole.

The only one on that list who’s likely to see the next decade is Mama Mia What A Pizza (or whatever it’s called nowadays) because you can’t download a pizza (yet).

Tower Records was put out of business by iTunes.
Tower Video, Kim’s Video, and Two Boots Video were put out of business by Netflix.
See Hear was put out of business by Blogger.

I hate to put a deathwish on great indie businesses, but the iPad has me concerned about the future for St Mark’s Comics and Village Comics.

There’s a reason why I attribute the death of music retail and video retail to iTunes and Netflix rather than Napster and PirateBay. Here’s my unique take on all this: Piracy doesn’t put companies out of business, Privateering does.

For my purposes here, a Privateer is a legal Pirate… let the historians argue the nuances of that. Privateers were essentially pirates with a government issued right to attack, capture, and plunder enemy ships. These days, there are people who receive government protection (in the form of corporate status) to plunder other businesses (in this case, media creators). Businesses like iTunes and Netflix have figured out how to make a dollar by costing other people three dollars. They are not creating value, they are accruing revenue by lowballing the value of other people’s content.

The reason Piracy isn’t the problem is because Piracy is an unreliable, unsustainable pain in the ass way to consume content… and people are lazy consumers of entertainment. Sure, you’ll get a bunch of shit for free and then you’ll get a virus and then you’ll get free shit but then you won’t be able to find what you want and then you’ll get free shit and then the people running the site get jobs and it shuts down. Piracy alone is too difficult to manage.

The problem comes from the union of Piracy and Privateering.

Before iTunes & iPods, we were all downloading thousands of songs that we had to burn to CD-Rs if we wanted to listen to them anyplace other than our computers. It was a fucking hassle. Suddenly we all had more music than we could fit in our CD wallets and our mixes were too long for a mix CD. A new demand occurred in the marketplace: “give us a way to organize all our stolen music.” Apple responded with the iTunes/iPod system. The iPod didn’t replace the walkman simply because mp3 players were cool, there were plenty of mp3 players in the marketplace. And it wasn’t the iTunes store either… it was the system of managing a tremendous amount of digital music that most people had accumulated through piracy. Privateering… Apple benefited legally by managing the illegal sharing of content.

Netflix is a bit different and I’ve already beaten that horse to glue, so for right now I’m gonna stick to Apple.

So what does this have to do with comics? Well, the iPad is a very impressive device… and based on the fact that there’s a Kindle app on there I’m assuming Apple’s business model is not to shave revenue off ebook sales. No, the iPad is going to be a fantastic means of managing stolen comic books.

My friend has the first few hundred issues of Spider-Man, X-Men, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, and Captain America on his computer as .cbr files (all obtained legally I’m sure… or maybe they were cracked out of the PDFs on those Marvel CD-Rs from a few years back). I tried reading one on my iPod and it was annoying. It’s also not a great experience to read them on a laptop or desktop since the monitor is landscape not profile. Well… the prospect of reading them on the iPad is downright exciting.

There is already rampant scanning piracy of comics, but until now there was no ideal way to organize and read those pirated comics. Well, it’s here… and as soon as the iPad (or a similar device) takes hold, there will be a blitz of comic book scanning that will begin a cycle of the iPad causing increased comic book scanning which will lead to increased sales of iPads and then more people scanning and so on.

The piracy of comics will be uniquely ubiquitous because so many back issues are simply not available, so fans will consider it a service to share their back issues. The publishers will want to cash in by making digital back issues available, but at $2 a pop how many people are going to actually buy 1,000 or so back-issues of the various Spider-Man series? Instantly, there will be too much content avilable and that will diminish the value of the individual books… smart publishers will offer blocks of content cheaply (Spider-Man issues 1-100 for $20 or something) and then suddenly new comic books will be competing directly with classic back issues for the time, attention, and dollars of each comic book reader. The digital comics New Release Rack will be as glutted as the rest of the internet.

The drop in perceived value for comics will have massive repercussions for comic shops and especially comic con dealers who specialize in back issues, but also for publishers in general… especially indies.

My advice? Open a pizza shop. Or buy stock in Apple, I guess. The rise of the iPod didn’t exactly make the music business more lucrative but it sure helped Apple’s share price.

But I actually don’t think comics are as fucked as other types of digitized media, because comics have a unique advantage over film and music in that they’re fundamentally periodicals. I know a lot of people will get pissed at me for saying that because there’s been a big push in comics to get away from being periodicals in favor of amassing libraries, but if there’s one thing every industry can learn from MGM and Miramax it’s that the media library business model is a bust… digital media ubiquity demands periodicals. The internet loves nothing more than ongoing, serialized, branded content that keeps issuing forth new releases. So that could wind up making all this hugely favorable to the comics business… but either way it certainly won’t be business as usual.

(get here by accident? welcome to www.hollywood-2point0.com)

Don’t call it a comeback, I’ve been here for years.

I bailed on this blog in the middle of last year because I got too busy to think. I really was too busy to think for a while, then I just got lazy. But then Pizzolo busted my balls and said that people actually like this blog, and that I’m easier to deal with when I’m blogging because he doesn’t have to be the outlet for my rants. Speaking of which…

Pizzolo sent me this article. Its not really an article, but a stock tip regarding the Warner Music Group. We don’t trade stocks, nor do we follow the market religiously, but we do pay attention to the fate of media companies, especially when they are kicked so squarely in the balls.

That WMG would receive a downgrade from a wall street analyst is not surprising or novel. The fun here is that the analyst recommends replacing your holdings in WMG with stock from Live Nation, News Corp., and Apple. Basically, throw away the old music business and replace it with a concert promotion company, a diversified media conglomerate, and a lifestyle gadget builder. That pretty much sums up the last ten years of the music business in one convenient stock pick. Goodnight, WMG. Happy new year everybody.

10s & 1s: Not Getting Bad Reviews? Try Harder.

If there’s one thing I hate about being on the supply side of this business, it’s reviews. When it comes to reviews about my personal productions, I can’t really complain because I’m such a snarky, sarcastic prick that my karma is a trainwreck and I deserve anything that can be thrown at me. But some of our filmmakers and performers are really nice people who simply don’t deserve the beatings they take in reviews, user comments, blogs, etc. And they all read every single post because they all have themselves on Google Alerts these days… it used to be weirdly narcissistic to Google yourself, now you need a Google Alert just to keep track of yourself. So even if a blogger has no readership at all and is just venting his spleen for the fuck of it, his one reader will be the person he’s tearing to pieces. It’d be awful if it wasn’t so downright hilarious.

I’ll give you an example of how things can go awry very quickly. We put out fitness videos with indie rock music playing in sync with the workouts. It was a clever idea and people really dig them. At first we were super on top of making them cool, then we got preoccupied with other projects and let one of the performers take charge of the production and design. The result was that the aesthetic changed and, for whatever reason, the choices she made turned it… less cool. We were surprised we dodged the hipster-snark bullet for the most part on the first batch, but as soon as we took our eyes off the project it was targeted for internet ridicule. Now, to be fair, it kind of deserved a lot of the ridicule… it was the weakest video in the line and the style was a mess. So I have no problem with the fact that it was criticized. But the snark quickly got out of control. In The Onion, Amelie Gillette and her readers called the girls “beefy-thigh indie whores” and went on to say:
- “at least two of them are on heroin, the rest are on crack,”
- the instructor “should have been sold into white slavery when she was 6,”
- and the cast should be “date-raped, murdered, and thrown in a dumpster.”

I mean, jesus christ, whatever happened to Thumbs Down?

I could spend pages and pages recounting the ridiculous verbal sludge I’ve seen thrown at our filmmakers and performers, but I’m not feeling very Sisyphus right now. Again, there are plenty of perfectly fair critical assessments that, while I may not agree, I respect their validity. Then there are the kinds of ad hominem attacks that make you envy Hillary Clinton for the comparatively kid-gloved treatment she received in the primary last year.

But none of that is the point of this blog post. The point of this blog post is sales.

The filmmakers & performers getting kicked in the balls & ovaries by hateful snarks always complain the same complaint “this asshole’s opinion is costing me money, making it harder for me to pay my rent, making it harder for me to feed my family with PERSONAL attacks because I must have somehow pissed him off… did I not sleep with him in high school or something??”

Yes, besides wounded egos, there is also business at hand and even those who can take a few emotional arrows still don’t like losing money and career opportunities based on some random person’s opinion. This is why gangsta rappers are known to stab critics over bad reviews (did you know Wordpress dictionary recognizes the word “gangsta” but not the word “Wordpress?” how awesome is that?)

So… after all this blathering, I’m finally ready to hit you with the twist ending to all this.

Do bad reviews, snark, and hateful blog posts cost filmmakers & performers money and career opportunities? Well, yes, they probably do.

Ok that wasn’t a very good riddle. BUT!

Do bad reviews, snark, and hateful blog posts cost FILMS money?

NO! THEY MAKE THEM SELL MORE!

Well, wait, let me clarify.

In the lexicon of the internet, let’s use a 1-10 star rating system to break down the analytics of a film’s critical reception.

- Movies that get mostly 3 through 6 star reviews (out of 10) are generally our lowest sellers.
- Movies that get mostly 7 through 10 star reviews are our lower midline sellers.
- Movies that get mostly 1 through 2 star reviews are our upper midline sellers.
- Movies that get mostly 1 star reviews or 10 star reviews are our TOP sellers. By far.

Why is this? Beats me. Would I hazard a guess? Sure!

First of all, nobody likes mediocre. People will watch a mediocre movie that’s on TV, but rarely will they run out to the store and plunk down good cash for a mediocre movie. So getting consistent 3-6 star reviews is death.

Why do 1-2 star reviewed films outsell 8-10 star reviewed films? I have no idea. We have a film that has a 91% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes from over 30 reviews… it’s one of our lowest sellers. We have a splatter film that I’ve never heard a single positive thing said about and it pays the rent each month. My gut is that, for whatever reason, people rent the highly-rated films on Netflix (where we make no money) and buy the guilty pleasures.

Of course, it makes perfect sense that titles which consistently score 10s and 1s would be the top sellers, because they’re divisive. People argue about them, get mad at them, champion them… people CARE about them. This is why Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck and Howard Stern are so ridiculously successful. If you’re not pissing someone off, then nobody cares.

Allow me to demonstrate: Let’s say you love the band W.A.S.P. (haha). Ok, you tell me “holy shit I love W.A.S.P.” and I say “yeah, they’re pretty good.” The conversation is over. You’re not going to champion them to me, nobody fights against lukewarm. But if I say “I fucking hate W.A.S.P., Blackie Lawless is a no-talent prick who should never be allowed in public with buttless leather pants!” Well, now we’re in an argument and we’ll start making some noise. Multiple that conversation a few thousand times across the internet and watch W.A.S.P. albums fly through PirateBay left and right.

Now, here is the flaw in the internet analytics system… if a movie gets 100 6-star reviews and a 100 4-star reviews, a website’s rating system will tell you it’s a 5-star movie. If a movie gets 100 10-star reviews and 100 1-star reviews, the website’s rating system will tell you it too is a 5-star movie. But those two 5-star movies couldn’t be more different.

Good reviews are better than mediocre reviews, but if you’re not getting bad reviews then I have two words of advice for you: try harder.

The Curse of A FILM BY…

There’s been a long-running debate on directors taking (demanding?) the “A Film By” credit on movie key art. I’m kind of indifferent to it. I personally don’t take the credit but that’s just me… hell, I’d prefer all my work be anonymous if I could effectively produce & market that way. So I don’t have a dog in this race, but I do have a unique observation on the whole thing…

At Halo-8, we’ll put the A FILM BY credit [henceforth I'll refer to it as AFB] on the key art if a filmmaker wants it there, so we have a handful of release with the credit. Now, I hate to do this because I don’t want everybody checking key art to figure out other filmmakers’ sales etc, but it’s interesting… our films with the AFB credit are our lowest selling DVDs. Consistently. It’s so fucking weird. They range in content and marketability, but for some reason if that AFB credit is there it dooms the release.

I do NOT want to villify or judge the filmmakers, so I don’t know how much to weigh in on this… but my gut is that a filmmaker who wants that credit has an overall filmmaking ideology that might make the rest of the team less apt to feel ownership of the film and want to help promote it. That may or may not be a big deal on a studio level, but for an indie release that feeling of camaraderie and collaborative-ownership is critical. Or maybe it’s totally coincidental. I sincerely have no clue. I don’t feel comfortable getting super analytical on this one (at least not in public haha), but I thought it was interesting enough to mention.

I’m really curious what everyone else thinks.

[FULL DISCLOSURE: I did once take the AFB credit sort of (and probably cursed myself in the process). I always referred to THREAT as "A Kings Mob Production" and used that term where the AFB credit would otherwise go. When Queque and Killili were making the first THREAT postcard, they asked me about it and I said it should be "A Kings Mob Production." Q&K made the argument that if Kings Mob is a creative collective where everyone eventually helms their own project (the dream that was never realized), then the key art should represent both by saying "A Kings Mob Production" as well as, for example, "A film by Matt Pizzolo." Besides seeing their point as valid in terms of accountability and also allowing the collective to have two levels of ownership to identify the team as well as the project's primary creative force, I also agreed to it because I was incredibly frustrated that press was constantly referring to it as "Matt Pizzolo's THREAT" just because I was the director... but in fairness if it wasn't "Kings Mob's THREAT" and if they insisted on personalizing it then Katie should certainly have the same level of ownership I did, so I suggested "A film by Katie Nisa & Matt Pizzolo" (alphabetical order). I later pulled the credit entirely when the movie finally came out. Now... if that didn't just completely bore the shit out of you, I'd be happy to spend a few pages detailing my neurotic process of dealing with THREAT's opening title cards. Ugh. Credits are stupid.]

If you can’t be the guest of honor, be the one who doesn’t belong there

In my opinion, there are two reasons to be someplace: be the guest of honor or be the one who doesn’t belong there.

Example: I was lucky enough to be included in the Horror Comics Into Film panel Peter Katz organized at Comic Con last month. At risk of hurting my fellow panelists’ feelings, I imagine Marv Wolfman was the guest of honor. Maybe not, surely there were a lot of important, influential, successful panelists up there… and then there was me and Jeff Katz. I mean, who the fuck am I to sit next to Tim Seeley and Whitley Strieber talking about horror? The only horror film I’ve directed was Slumber Party Slaughterhouse and that was a joke (literally: it was supposed to be a Halloween prank but it accidentally became a real DVD… oops). In any case, I’m pretty sure I had no business being on that panel. Which is why it was awesome for me, because I got to reach a new audience.

I like to take Halo-8 and our various titles to all sorts of places where we don’t belong. It didn’t make a lot of sense for us to set up a table at comic book conventions last year, but it seemed like a cool place to spread the word about our films and we were starting to publish comics at the time. Before we headed to the first con, we wondered if we should bother bringing the Fitness For Indie Rockers DVDs with us. We decided to bring them along and the results were this: we didn’t sell any comics, we sold a ton of fitness videos. Why? Because everyone else there was selling comics, and the kind of art school girls who go to comic cons love our fitness videos. Yoga For Indie Rockers had no business being at the comic con, and thus it stood out.

In the past few months, Godkiller has had panels and signings at Wondercon, Comic Con, and Fangoria Weekend of Horrors in LA. Because Godkiller utilizes a brand new filmmaking format that integrates comic books with cinema, you might think it would be a homerun at Comic Con. Nope. The people who dug it at Comic Con were awesome, but the turnout for the signings was light. The Wondercon panel went okay because the art school crowd was into it, but the best response was at Fangoria. Why? Why does Godkiller get chatter in the film trades and horror press but not in the comics blogs? My guess is that when viewed through a horror prism Godkiller is weird enough to be unique, whereas through a comic book prism it just doesn’t stand out as much… either due to comic art overload or because the luddites think we’re bastardizing their artform (which we are, thank you very much). The best thing we can do with Godkiller is present it in a context where the audience isn’t already desentisized to its unique attributes.

Threat was carried by tons of retailers, but I find two particular retailers define my argument here well: Best Buy and Hot Topic. When Threat was in Best Buy, everyone thought it was awesome for it to be there because that’s where most people buy DVDs (at least, DVDs that aren’t in WalMart). Threat sat on a shelf next to thousands of other DVDs including the biggest hits from the top studios. When Threat was in Hot Topic, a lot of people thought it was weird for it to be there… after all, Hot Topic isn’t really a seller of DVDs. In fact, Threat sat on a tiny little shelf in the back next to a handful of other punk-themed DVDs like Sid & Nancy, Repo Man, etc. Guess where Threat sold better?

Seth Godin makes a point about the importance of being “the best” at a specific niche. He points out that the top performer generally outsells all its competitors combined. If you can be in Best Buy and be the top-selling supplier there, good for you. If not, move to a different context… it’s not hard to be the best-selling line of fitness videos at a comic book convention–and it can be quite profitable.

Worm In The Apple

Apple has long made a selling point out of its supposedly virus proof operating system. I vaguely remember running some version of Norton on my Mac based Avid’s back in the late 1990s, but that went away with OSX. I don’t know anything about the dissemination of malicious code, but I’ve always assumed that there were no viruses invading Mac OS because there wasn’t enough interest from virus creators to attack an OS that only has about five percent of the market share. But the Ibook and Iphone have changed that equation. There are millions more mac users now than there were a few years ago, and I can’t help but imagine that they represent a big collective bulls eye.

I’ve never used the virus proof argument to tout the benefits of Mac OS. It just seemed like bad karma that would come back to bite me someday. But Apple’s “virus proof” marketing angle and those mildly obnoxious “Mac vs. PC” commercials have flushed good karma down the toilet. If the pervaiors of malicious code weren’t bothering with Mac OS before, we’ve certainly got their attention now.

Video Color Grading – The Sober Truth

My first year in Los Angeles, I spent 7 or 8 months as a Telecine assistant in the Valley. The shop was a really low budget operation without many clients, or much working equipment, and the colorist that trained me was a drunk. He would roll in sometime after 10:30 each day, and, teaching through his hangover, he imparted to me the basics of cinematic color, in theory and practice.

I subconsciously use that information on a daily basis, but I hadn’t thought about the philosophical and psychological concepts of color grading for some time, until I found this post on Mike Jones blog, Digital Basin. Mike Jones isn’t a drunk like my old mentor, but he’s got a great take on the psychology of cinematic color grading. The post is called “Colour Grading – Concepts and Paradigms.” Firstly, any reference to “Concepts and Paradigms” in regards to post production is automatically intriguing, because post production tends to be myopicallyworkflow oriented, often avoiding the larger philosophical considerations behind the choices that we make in method and technology.

The post neatly packages the basics of video color grading theory, an art form that seems to have gone out the window in the age ofprosumer video production. Access to very powerful color manipulation tools (I use Color Finesse and Colorista pretty regularly) have created a wealth of color styling opportunity, but I have witnessed an inversely proportional dearth of knowledge about how to apply those tools effectively. Mike Jones breaks down the use of these tools into a set of values that allow the intention of the filmmaker to inform color choices. That sounds like a basic concept, but its easy to overlook when you start fiddling with the color corrector before you’ve mapped a clear aesthetic plan for the project.

Final Cut Pro 7 – I Want To Believe

It seems like I’ve been doing a lot of Apple bashing lately. There was my post about the American Cinematic Editors vs. Final Cut Pro, and a couple weeks before that I predicted the imminent death of Final Cut Pro. I’m not not coming down on the products they provide, but I do have a bad feeling that Apple isn’t betting long on Pro Apps.

This fact was most evident in 2006 when Apple ceased development on Shake, the immensely popular composting software they acquired in 2002. The rumor mill claimed that Apple was developing the “next generation” of the technology for release in 2008, but that never materialized and former Shake users moved on. Shake was finally dropped from the Apple website last week.

I actually wrote a first part of this post a couple weeks ago, then the next day Apple released Final Cut Pro 7, the first major upgrade in two years. There are a few much needed fixes, and some additions that should have been standard features three versions back. The only real innovation is theIChat Theater, which integrates the output of Final Cut Pro into a live video chat for real time playback over the Internet . Its interesting that the feature I find most innovative comes from the integration of a freeware app that comes with every new mac. I appreciate the upgrade toFCP 7, but I won’t hold my breath for another major upgrade. I still think Apple is going to withdraw from the the pro apps market, andFCP as we know it is doomed.

Most of the other apps in the Final Cut Suite were also upgraded. The suite has always been a mixed bag of functionality. Motion and Sound Track Pro have been borderline useless since version 1. If this upgrade gets them operational with reasonable stability, it would be a victory. DVD Studio Pro is conspicuously missing from this upgrade, which I’m thankful for. I use DVD Studio on a regular basis, and I don’t have many complaints. I would prefer that Apple not mess with it unless they want to addBlu-Ray support, but I won’t hold my breath for that either.

Brand Cameron

James Cameron made a big splash at Comic Con San Diego by previewing 24 minutes of Avatar for an eagerly receptive audience. Cameron has been hyping the 3D imaging technology behind Avatar for the last two years, only to spend the last 6 months tempering expectations in advance of the Comic Con preview. The preview scene was generally well reviewed, and Cameron went on to give interviews touting the fact that Avatar is an original script, without ties to an existing brand. Comic Con is an odd place to take a dig at movies derived existing properties like, say… comic books, but Cameron is proud of his effort, and the movie looks cool.

What Cameron failed to mention is that, in the absence of an existing brand property, Cameron is the brand. He certainly has the cinematic pedigree to prop up an original sci-fi movie. Furthermore, Cameron leveraged his personal brand into branding Avatar as the movie that will revolutionize the theatrical industry with groundbreaking 3D technology. In the current media economy, Cameron faces the same dilemma as many of us. He can’t get financing for an innovative new property unless he promises to reinvent the entire game in the process. Its a genius marketing scheme that probably helped finance Avatar’s $200 million production, and helped the movie receive an advance wave of press that other movies don’t enjoy. Comic Con was the first time the public had seen a frame of Avatar, but we’ve been reading about the production since early 2008 in everything from Variety to Wired. The technological brand of Avatar even outshines the A-list talent in the film. I realized a couple of weeks ago that Sigourney Weaver stars in the movie, but even her press blurbs are tethered to Cameron’s technology talking points.

Its a $200 million dollar gamble, leveraged by Cameron’s personal brand and hedged by his massively successful box office performance. If it hits, he’s at the helm of a billion dollar franchise. If it tanks, Hollywood will forgive him. But if Avatar is just plain bad, and those core fans are displeased, the credibility of brand Cameron will take a serious hit.

All Marketing Is Local

The singlemost prevalent and unfixable problem I’ve observed in filmmakers is the lack of a core fanbase. Without a core following, someone (either a producer, marketer, or distributor) is expected to create momentum out of thin air… and that is becoming more and more difficult as marketing moves from synthetic (advertising, junkets, etc) to organic (word-of-mouth, web chatter, etc).

Personally, I don’t like the term “fanbase.” I prefer the simpler term “base.” I also like “core following.” I find those to be more instructive. Today’s media creators can learn a lot from politicians who understand things like kissing babies & shaking hands, galvanizing the base, and “all politics are local.” Political pundits have developed a shorthand for how politicans roll: there’s retail politics and wholesale politics. Retail politics is direct, one-on-one… shakin’ babies and kissin’ hands. Wholesale politics is broad, massmarket… reading a teleprompter on network television. I suppose in the Age of Obama we could probably add a third category: aggregator politics–the use of web-systems to create retail connections on a wholesale level. [I brought up Obama so I guess I should close out that thought: Obama is masterful as a wholesale politician and groundbreaking as an aggregator politician, but not so great as a retail politician. Then why did he crush his opposition? Is retail politics less effective than wholesale & aggregator politics? I don't think so. I think he developed aggregator politics into a science to offset his retail weakness, and he raised enough money to crowd out opposition in the far costlier battleground of wholesale politics. But that's just my humble opinion and I digress.]

There’s a theory that’s been circulating the past few years called A Thousand True Fans… basically if an artist can have 1,000 people who adore her work enough to buy everything she does as soon as she does it, that artist can make a decent living. It works a bit better for say a singer-songwriter than an actress or filmmaker, but that’s not the point. The point is “True Fan.” True Fan does not equal Fan and it does not equal Friend. It’s a very specific type of person… it’s basically a fan who feels they have a personal connection with you, but not so much that they’re actually your friend (because your friends want everything for free). Where does a True Fan come from? I believe a True Fan comes from retail politics.

I’ve Got 99 Problems and being famousish ain’t 1

I occasionally roll with famousish people. It’s a bit more fun than rolling with people who wish they were famous and a lot less fun than rolling with criminals. But most famousish people are nice enough.

A couple months back I was hanging with a famousish actress at a festival. I asked her if she’s psyched that she won the lottery and became famousish really early in life, and her answer was that she was happy about it because she “really learned a lot about people.” Really? Being famousish enables you to really learn a lot about people?

For the rest of the day, I watched her get hounded by fans who interrupted her conversations, asked her questions that had nothing to do with herself or even her public persona but simply about characters she’s played, and aggressively requested (demanded?) she take photos with them so they could grab her around the waist and smear sweat on her shoulder.

I don’t know what those kinds of experiences teach her about people, but if it were me I’d probably learn that most people are a mix of narcissistic dorks and overly-entitled assholes. I would think my fans were to be tolerated rather than appreciated and that they existed for profit not for connection.

So despite it being one-on-one, that’s not what I mean when I say retail politics.

That kind of relationship is the fruit of wholesale politics and massmarketing. It’s a relationship of “star” and “fan.” Massmarketing puts up huge barriers between stars and fans. On its face, the symbiotic relationship of mutual exploitation is fine, but it’s not built to last. The barrier between star and fan is erected by middlemen who profit from the transaction until the relationship inevitably sours. The fans and the middlemen move their attention to another star, and the star has no fanbase to call her own. Bummer for the star.

The key to retail-politics and base-building, in my opinion, is creating a direct, personal connection with your audience.

I’ve had a lot of different experiences marketing/promoting films and events, but there are two that really define the poles for me here.

My experiences in retail politics
After making the guerrilla-indie film Threat with the Kings Mob crew, we piled into a van and drove cross-country to Sundance. We were naive enough to think Sundance was some sort of halfway house for aspiring filmmakers, so it seemed like the place to take our film even though we weren’t actually invited (or welcome). I was 23 at the time and the internet was fairly new but it was already an effective means of organizing. Through hardcore-punk messageboards and the mailing list we’d developed during production, we turned our trip to Sundance into a little mini-tour. On the Atari Teenage Riot messageboard, we found a dude in Pittsburgh who offered to screen the movie in his apartment and let us sleep on his floor. Not only was the apartment packed full of awesome people when we got there, but he became one of my very close friends and ten years later he flew to LA for my wedding (I also eventually convinced him to make a vegan cooking DVD we put out). It’s weird to describe a relationship like that as retail politics or marketing, but it’s an instructive example of how marketing can result in real personal connections. On the way to Sundance, we met some of the most amazing, coolest people I’d ever met in my life, slept on their floors, ate the food they cooked for us, and played our movie for them and their friends and whoever else showed up. The audiences ranged from 10-300, which isn’t all that different from a lot of movie theater showings I’ve had over the years, except for the insightful conversations and personal connections that followed. I remember one night we played the movie in a bar in Iowa City and someone who really wanted to see it missed the show, so we went to her apartment that night and played it for a packed room (many of whom had seen it earlier in the night and wanted to watch it again) while we ate the bean burritos she cooked us and slept on her floor. This all probably sounds very small and unprofitable, but it is neither. Not only were these great times and great people, but the shows were more consistently profitable than a lot of things we do on a massmarket level these days, and without those relatively small pieces coming together I would’ve never had the base that’s enabled me to function on a massmarket level. If anything, I regret not being able to do more of those types of events today. Anyhow, we eventually made our way to Sundance where, of course, nobody gave a shit about us. None of the suits trying to get on the guestlist for the coolest coke parties wanted to see our movie. And if we hadn’t built our base along the way, we would’ve been fucked. BUT on the way to Sundance we’d learned that we didn’t need the suits to reach our audience. So we walked into a Doc Marten’s shoe store across the street from Sundance’s flagship Egyptian Theater and talked to the clerks, who later convinced their bosses to let us show the movie there. Then we went to WalMart and talked to the skater girl working in the electronics section about WalMart’s 30-Days No Questions Asked return policy. We outfitted the shoe store with as many TVs as we could put on our credit cards (all to be returned shortly thereafter) and promoted our shows to hardcore kids, skaters, snowboarders, and various young ne’er-do-wells in the greater Salt Lake City area. We wound up with lines around the block, all four showings sold out, and a 4-page feature cover story in London’s Daily Telegraph Saturday Magazine, which we later parlayed into a European tour. That was neither small nor unprofitable.

My experiences in wholesale politics
When I was turning 30, I’d been through the wringer a few times and was broke and working graveyard shifts in a print shop in Central LA. One night at around 4am, I was arguing with my supervisor about something ridiculous and realized I needed to get the fuck out of there before I wound up losing my temper and doing something stupid (as I’m apt to do). So I went out in the parking lot, sat on the tailgate of my pickup truck, drank cold coffee and decided to dig up Threat, stitch it into some sort of Frankenstein and raise it from the dead so I could get out of my job. The question was how to do that with a strange little movie that never got much interest from the industry and whose core audience seemed to be hardcore punk kids, anarcho-squatters, radical protesters, and black women (what? I have no idea, that’s just how Threat rolls). To solve that problem, I considered a few of the cultural shifts that’d occurred since Threat had its life cycle as an underground weirdo movie: DVDs became huge, hardcore-punk and its metalcore derivations became popular, and “mashups” became stylish. So… I decided to make a Threat soundtrack album of hardcore bands being mashed up by electronica DJs, take that to one of the major studios that distributes indie labels, tell them it’s a modern day “Judgment Night” soundtrack, and convince them to give me a bunch of money for my new DVD/CD movie & soundtrack label. And basically that’s what I did. I got a bunch of money from Sony and I was so sick of retail politics that all I wanted to do was spend someone else’s money and market the film to people who buy stuff (astonishingly enough, anarcho-squatters don’t buy a lot of DVDs) so I could pay off my debts to society for years of indie rabblerousing. All of this led to some questionable marketing decisions where Frankenstein-Threat was retrofitted for American malls. Nearly ten years after it took its first breath of life as a gritty little bastard of a film that played bars, basements, and anarchist bookstores, Threat was essentially dolled up in a spiked collar & mascara’d eyes as a “New Release” at FYE, Tower, and Hot Topic sandwiched in between Thirteen and Underworld with full page ads in Revolver and Alternative Press and commercials running on MTV2 and Fuse. The result? Meh. It sold ok, but at such astronomical marketing cost that it wasn’t worth the effort. Plus it made its money by selling to people it wasn’t suited for, so the initial audience and critic response was lousy and that did more harm than good. I’d basically gone out of my way to make all the newbie mistakes of chasing massmarket will-o-wisps that we’d been savvy enough to avoid the first time around. So, kicking myself for being an idiot, I went back out on the road and started the retail politics of Threat over again from scratch, playing it in small venues, hanging with the audience afterward to discuss the film, seeking out critics with the appropriate tastes to understand the film and champion it, shakin’ babies and kissin’ hands. I managed to salvage it again (or maybe it managed to salvage me again), and it finally settled into the kind of respected-by-weirdos movie it was intended to be. And it got me out of the print shop, so I guess the ridiculous scheme worked at the end of the day.

Here’s the lesson I took from all this:
Threat wasn’t sustainable as a solely retail-politics style release, but it wasn’t launchable as a solely wholesale-politics style release. It needed both. AS DOES EVERYTHING. Your boat needs both a paddle and a sail, otherwise you’ll either never get out to sea in the first place or you’ll exhaust yourself once you get there.

You’re not making movies or music or webisodes or whatever it is you think you’re making, you’re making personal connections with other people. A film is a personal connection between the filmmakers and the film watchers. If you ignore that connection, the product itself has no value.

Making a personal connection with members of your audience can take many forms. It can consist of sleeping on their floors, facebook-friending them, or meeting them in public and taking a picture with them. However, it doesn’t mean getting a spambot to autofriend them or holding your nose in the photo. That’s why I prefer the example of sleeping on their floor… you can’t get a bot to sleep on someone’s floor for you. I’ll get into aggregator-politics in a future post (and hopefully a more concise, focused one at that), but do not make the mistake of confusing retail-politics with aggregator-politics. They’re two different things, even though they can be done using similar tools.

Your job is to cultivate a core following that cares about your message and what you do, and will support you with cash-purchases and positive word of mouth as you create your body of work. That process cannot be outsourced to spambots and massmarket advertising, it can only be done one personal connection at a time. Only once you’ve built that support network can you potentially benefit from the wholesale-politicking of massmarket distribution.