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.

There’s a bridge from the Internet to your TV–Steve Jobs & Bill Gates are the trolls under it

I solved the Last Ten Feet… by walking across the room

I can’t remember ever feeling quite so smart and quite so stupid at exactly the same time.

There’s a concept you hear every so often from media pundits and technology providers: the last ten feet. Basically it refers to the process of digitally delivering movies and TV shows and other video content via the internet. Internet speeds and compression and bandwidth have gotten to the point where high quality video can be sent from anywhere in the world right to your computer… but you probably want to watch it on your TV… and your TV is only another ten feet or so away… but the internet just doesn’t know how to get there.

So there are all sorts of proprietary solutions for how to connect your TV to the internet. If you want to buy an Apple TV, you can port your iTunes videos to your TV through Apple TV… but Apple TV is lame so it’s not being broadly adopted. Microsoft has its cumbersome home network system or its Xbox Live system where you can buy downloads of TV shows & movies or stream Netflix movies if you have an account… but you can’t just download or stream anything you want, only what Microsoft or Netflix has negotiated to sell you—and Netflix has a particularly weak catalog since suppliers are sick of getting nuggied by Netflix’s business model that seems to help Netflix and nobody else. Playstation 3 has a similar operation developing, as does Wii and Roku (formerly a Netflix-only box) which are offering broader catalogs from Hulu and Amazon Unbox. And there’s plenty more… it seems like every day someone is popping up with a new set-top box that will finally connect my TV to the internet.

Basically, everyone wants to be the iPod of movies and TV. Apple figured out how to integrate your stolen mp3s with your walkman in a seamless configuration that was hip, stylish, and integrated into Apple technology… the rest is a CNBC special on the genius of Steve Jobs, rugged capitalist individualist.

But iTunes and the iPod were integrating my access to *everything* into a newfangled walkman. It worked because the internet was already providing me with all the music I could possibly want to hear, Steve Jobs just gave me a simple way to organize and enjoy what I already had. iTunes did not generate false scarcity, it managed abundance.

These set-top boxes, however, are creating a false scarcity of available video content. They’re trying to tell me what I’m allowed to see and how I’m allowed to watch it. I want to watch Battlestar Galactica so I download it on my Xbox, but then I’m not allowed to take it off my Xbox without Xbox-branded plugins. I want to watch Season 1 of True Blood, but HBO only seems to have it available digitally on iTunes… who imposes DRM that prevents me from watching it on my TV unless I buy their stupid set-top box. I can’t even watch it on HBO On Demand through my cable provider, even though I pay a monthly subscription to the bastards and I hardly ever watch any of their goddamned programming. So I wind up calling Blockbuster (since both my local indie videostores have gone out of business thanks to Netflix) asking to see what discs they have in stock like I’m back in 1992 or something. Ridiculous.

Don’t these disservice-providers understand that I want to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it? I don’t want to wait 2 days for Netflix to deliver it by mail like this is some Benjamin Franklin pony express bullshit… 2 days from now I’ll want to watch something else. And I certainly don’t want to have to choose from Netflix’s paltry Watch Now catalog just because they’re too miserly to offer suppliers enough incentive to sign on their streaming service.

So… I wanted to watch this mumblecore movie and of course it’s not on Xbox Live, it’s not on Netflix Watch Now, it’s not on Amazon Unbox, it’s not on Hulu, and it’s not on my Time Warner Cable On Demand. It’s not available for download on the filmmaker’s website or on the distributor’s website. But it is on Pirate Bay. So fuck you set-top box providers and fuck you filmmaker and distributor, you make it so I can’t see this thing legally and conveniently I’ll just download the torrent.

So I download the torrent and I’m about to watch it on my computer when something occurs to me… why can’t I just walk it over to my TV? I dump the file on one of the USB flash drives I have laying around. These days they’re like $20 for 15 GB and I keep accidentally leaving them in my pants when I do my laundry so I have like a gazillion of them laying around.

I drag the avi file I just downloaded from Pirate Bay onto the USB flash drive and I walk ten feet to my TV. I start looking for USB ports. Voila! Xbox has USB ports. I plug it in. I navigate to Video Library and it shows my USB drive. So I click it and there’s that little whippersnapper of an avi file. I click there, Xbox downloads some driver automatically, and 10 seconds later I’m watching the movie on my bigass flatscreen TV and it looks pretty fuckin sweet.

Am I an idiot? Does everyone else already know you can do this?

I did a little more research and found that on Amazon I can buy an iPod-to-RCA adapter for 53 cents. If you aren’t a techie, RCA outputs are the red/white/yellow plugs that come out of your VHS player or DVD player (if you’re not using one of the newer options like HDMI) and plug easily into just about any TV on the planet.

So then I wanted to see what else I could play on my Xbox besides avi files. On our website Televandalism we sell all our movies as DRM-free m4v files because that’s the file type we found to be most compatible with iPods, and we figured at the time that the most likely reason to download a movie rather than stream it would be for portability via iPod.

So I downloaded an m4v of Pilates For Indie Rockers, dropped it on the USB flash drive, plugged it into the Xbox, and goddamn it played easy and looked awesome. No fuss, no muss… does that mean I can finally get rid of this goddamned bookshelf full of DVDs?

Maybe the rest of you already knew how easy it was to download movies and watch them digitally on your TV, but I didn’t… and I’m the kind of guy who’s supposed to know these things. Why didn’t I know it? Besides the fact that I’m a dumbass? Because it’s not in the interest of the massmarket aggregators, technology providers, and set-top boxes to market how simple it is for audiences to download platform-agnostic video content playable on whatever player they have handy and how filmmakers can sell their movies digitally on their own websites without having to lose 75% of the revenue to all these various pipeline providers.

But aren’t those revenue losses made up for by the fact that digital distribution is cheaper than manufacturing shiny plastic discs? No! Everyone talks about how the cost of distribution will decrease because of digital distribution rather than plastic DVD manufacturing, but in order to get into the iTunes store Apple has required an encode fee that is MORE than the cost of DVD-authoring plus manufacturing an indie-sized run of shiny plastic discs. Adding insult to a kick in the balls, the Apple encode is (a) the same fucking thing as outputting to h.264 quicktime for free in any number of applications, and (b) not transferable to other digital stores which have their own unnecessary encode fees. Basically, they’re all creating fabricated profit-centers that make digital distribution MORE expensive than traditional distribution. The middleman is boning both sides of the transaction.

It’s like if you and I wanted to hang out and there’s a perfectly safe path between our houses, but Steve Jobs and Bill Gates erected bridges and demanded we pay tolls and they spent millions marketing their bridges so we think we have to take them… but their bridges aren’t crossing a raging river, they’re just crossing a path that’s actually EASIER for us to take than their stupid bridges.

Microsoft loses money on Xbox sales, so they actually have to sell software and licenses and subscriptions etc etc–they need to sell content, not just Xboxes, so it’s not in their best interest to market the fact that you can buy video online and watch it through Xbox. Apple is a bit different… since the iTunes store is free and their margins are slim on downloads, they want you to buy iPods–so it’s important to them that whatever you buy in their free store encourages you to buy their proprietary hardware. As a result, no one’s running around raising a ruckus about how simple it is to watch a movie from the internet by using their hardware without using their pipeline. To be honest, I’m astonished they even allow their hardware to support it.

To be fair, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates aren’t the only ones doing this, I just use them as prime examples because they’d make particularly funny looking trolls. Last year Time Warner Cable rented me a DVR with USB inputs and I excitedly asked the cable guy if I could send in video files through the USB ports and he said “probably, but Time Warner Cable disabled all the USB ports before distributing the set-top boxes.” Fuckers.

There’s actually tons of simple ways to move video files from the computer to the TV, but these are discussed mostly in tech blogs not in consumer media. Brian just mentioned to me that LaCie is releasing a hard drive designed specifically for this purpose, but at $349 it’s no cheaper than an Xbox. There are plenty of even cheaper solutions.

The problem is that by muddying all this, they’re actually encouraging piracy. I download and stream plenty of video content legally and pay Microsoft, Apple, Time Warner quite well for it. If that mumblecore movie was available for download legally, I would have bought it–but by creating a false scarcity they made piracy the only way I could get the content in the format I wanted to consume it. I actually felt kind of guilty downloading it and if it was any good I would’ve felt even guiltier. But don’t worry, Justice Department: I was downloading it as research for this very important blog post.

So why has the buying and selling of non-DRM, platform-agnostic movies not become ubiquitous yet? If I can sell you a downloadable movie on my website that you can watch on your computer, on your iPod, on your Xbox, and anyplace else you want to watch it… then why would you choose to download it from Xbox where you can only watch it on Xbox? Or from iTunes where you can only watch it on Apple-approved players? And what’s the incentive for me to distribute through those pipelines if I get more money by selling to you directly? Because I’m hoping that by being on iTunes and Xbox you’ll discover my movie? That’s not very likely. Then maybe because being on those services somehow gives my movie credibility? Puh-lease.

The cost-benefit analysis here favors consumers buying direct from filmmakers’ websites, distributors’ websites, and DRM-free digital stores; and filmmakers, distributors, and e-tailers selling direct from their own websites while also hypersyndicating the content to all those other bridges for the suckers who want to use them. The only thing standing in the way of this model taking hold is the marketing campaigns of the service providers who all want to control the last ten feet between your computer and your TV.

I solved the crisis of the last ten feet. It’s called get off your ass and walk, ya fatass.

[get here by accident? this is a blog post from Hollywood-2.0, read more at www.hollywood-2point0.com]

Go Big or Go Home? Bad Advice. Better Advice: Go Niche or Go Broke.

Go Big or Go Home is some of the worst advice I’ve ever heard. Big successes hardly ever start out that way, and now more than ever if you try to start big you’ll probably lose your home… and then where will you go?

If you want to go BIG, there’s no better model than the bigass Hollywood studios and their bigass tentpole movies. But already the logic is flawed because hardly any of the tentpoles’ underlying properties were big right out of the gate.

There’s a reason why the biggest studio movies are remakes, reboots, sequels, and adaptations… it’s just too damn costly, risky, and most importantly ineffective these days to market an entirely new property from the ground straight up to the stratosphere of massmarket, major motion picture distribution. It’s rare to accuse Hollywood-types of being fiscally-conservative, but just as ‘we’re all marketers now’ it could also be said ‘we’re all beancounters now.’

Hollywood isn’t rebooting and remaking movies nonstop because there’s a lack of new ideas… there are zillions of unmade spec scripts circulating around town that could make perfectly good films. But they can’t go big if they don’t have a core audience, because it’s simply bad business to try and make something out of nothing. Here’s the sad truth: film is a terrible incubator for new ideas.

The solution? Well, the studios have existing brands (that they own or that they have the warchest to license), but we all share niches. Vampires and zombies are popular right now for this reason, you can’t afford Will Smith but zombies and vampires are public domain box office superstars. It’s also a reason why indie H.P Lovecraft adaptations are so popular, his stories are public domain and have a huge built-in core audience. Adaptations and marketable monsters are shortcuts, you can start with an original idea… but you shouldn’t start big and you shouldn’t expect it to go big quickly (or anytime soon).

A niche is a portal to a core audience. That core will enable you to start with a targeted base that can be galvanized into supporting your project, and once you’ve got the base you can potentially grow it into something BIG. You don’t have to, you can subsist for a long time catering solely to your core audience and that’s great… but there’s another possibility: a project that was initially geared for a specific audience could grow far beyond that into BIG… like Harry Potter or Batman. Those properties were not strategized in a corporate board room and taken out in their infancy to market BIG. They started relatively small with core audiences and then grew incrementally and later exponentially. Even Transformers had humbler beginnings than a $200M Michael Bay effectsapalooza. Batman had 50 years of marketing behind it before Tim Burton’s major motion picture adaptation took it BIG, and 70 years before Christopher Nolan made it respectable. Lord of the Rings brewed for 47 years before Peter Jackson took it BIG BIG BIG (no disrespect to Ralph Bakshi). Transformers had 23 years of marketing before Michael Bay’s re-imagining took it BIG. Sure Harry Potter was relatively young at 4 years when it got taken to the major motion picture level, but hell sometimes you win the lottery… plus JK Rowling had that property in the incubator for 7 years prior to the first book being published, so you could just as easily call it 11 years. Will the ‘Half-Blood Prince’ movie outperform the ‘Sorcerer’s Stone’ movie? I certainly hope so… Half-Blood Prince is benefiting from 19 years of incubation/marketing whereas Sorcerer’s Stone only benefited from 11. Going BIG takes longer than most marketers would like to admit. Can you imagine bringing an investor a business plan for a superhero franchise with a 70 year marketing campaign?

Of course, it’s not as simple as throwing a vampire or a wizard or a punk or a robot into your project. Studios can buy access to niches by licensing existing, credible properties… indie creators have to earn their access to niches by creating new credible properties. That takes time and it requires starting with a small core audience that will support you in the long term.

If a project has no core audience, it is not marketable. The massmarket will never champion your project, no matter how good it is. If you build a core audience and deliver the best project for them, they will champion the project. That way, if it’s not crossover-material, you’ll still have an audience to support you… and if it is crossover-material, your core will do the legwork of getting it to the next level. Then you can go big and go home.

[Cautionary notes: When thinking niche, there are two things to keep in mind. 1- it is problematic for your project to be confrontational against its own niche, this is a hurdle I personally face all the time since I’m inflammatory to a fault. From a marketer’s point of view, the best kind of niche marketing is a Robert Greenwald or Michael Moore movie where they sell to a niche that already believes what they’re saying and feels vindicated by seeing it onscreen… if it’s successful it expands to less sympathetic audiences who might welcome an intellectual debate, but Outfoxed’s core audience was people who already hated Fox News. So if you want your marketing effort to be financially successful, you’ll want to pander to your niche, not challenge it. 2- if you can organically and authentically cater to more than one niche that’s great, but it's risky. Each time you add a niche, you dilute the core. I’ve seen so many projects and marketing campaigns fail by trying to incorporate something for everyone. Find your niche and be the best for that niche, don't spread yourself thin by going too broad -- better to be the best for a small audience than to be mediocre for a huge one.]

[get here by accident? this is a blog post from Hollywood-2.0, read more at www.hollywood-2point0.com]

H2.0 the book – Chapter 1: The Producer-Marketer

This is the first chapter of our work-in-progress book “Hollywood-2.0: An Actionable System for Developing, Producing, Distributing, & Marketing Your Project in a Changing Media Landscape.”

Chapter 1 is titled “The Long Tail of Death, The Evil Aggregator Empire, The Decline of Distribution, and You: The Producer-Marketer.” While we pride ourselves on this book’s commitment to actionable information, the first chapter is a bit of a primer on the shifts in the media creation-distribution landscape. We think it’s important to get everyone on the same page before breaking down hard-numbers and logistics.

The first section of this chapter, Rise of the Producer-Marketer, is free for everybody. The chapter continues for 16 pages after that and can be read by Members — an Early Adopter account is currently 99 cents per month, you can join here.

The sections of chapter 1 are:
- Rise of the Producer-Marketer
- “Marketing is for suits”
- “Isn’t my distributor supposed to handle marketing?”
- “What about The Long Tail?”
- “But isn’t it great that my movies will be on Amazon & Netflix?”
- “How have the Long Tail e-Tailers made all this more difficult for me?”
- “So why bother with Amazon & Netflix?”
- “Why are you telling me all this?”

Let us know what you think.

CHAPTER 1: The Long Tail of Death, The Evil Aggregator Empire, The Decline of Distribution, and You: The Producer-Marketer

Rise of the Producer-Marketer

When I was first getting started as a filmmaker, I interned at a non-profit film school in downtown NYC called Film/Video Arts. A lecturer named Dov S-S Simens was coming through to deliver a filmmaking course called The Hollywood Film School and I volunteered to be his assistant. Dov’s class blew my mind.

Without getting too far into Dov’s curriculum (his course is available on DVD and I highly recommend it), the primary lesson I took from it was this: you are NOT a filmmaker, there is no credit on a movie for “filmmaker;” you are a producer. As a producer, you may choose to hire yourself as writer (or not) or you may choose to hire yourself as director (or not). Regardless, when you call yourself a filmmaker you mean that you will be the driving force behind the creation of a new film. There is a title for that: it’s called producer.

Dov is a brilliant instructor and his course is still incredibly relevant today, but its main thesis was forged and polished in the Independent Film Explosion of the 1990s. In fact, 90% of books on independent filmmaking are based on the marketplace of the 1990s. Certain things are still very relevant: story structure, casting, cinematic composition, editing theory, lighting design, sound recording, etc. Anything antiquated about those subjects in terms of technology has been revised over the years, so this book is not going to tackle them. The basics of creating content haven’t changed drastically, but everything else has. And so in this book we’re focusing on “everything else.”

The central thesis of this book is that, in order for a contemporary filmmaker to compete today, (s)he can no longer be just a producer… (s)he must be a producer-marketer.

… Continue Reading

The Myth of Hypersyndication

Hypersyndication is a buzzword (a bit long in tooth for web 2.0, but still prevalent) for massmarket online distribution. If massmarket distribution means being in every chain store from WalMart to Best Buy to your local grocery store and gas station, then hypersyndication is its web equivalent. The idea is your content should be out there as widely, freely, and unsupervisedly as possible… so it should be on iTunes, Amazon Unbox, Xbox, Netflix Watch Now, Hulu, Crackle, YouTube, ad infinitum, ad nauseam and also easily embeddable on blogs, Myspace pages, emails, widgets, and whatnot.

To a certain extent, it’s completely accurate. There is so much content already out there and so much new content being generated every second that you literally have to be everywhere just to be noticed. But there’s a dark side to hypersyndication… the same dark side as massmarket distribution.

Massmarket/hypersyndication is for mainstream, broadly-accessible content that requires no context. That’s fine for major studio tentpoles, but the trend these days is more toward niche/narrowcast than mainstream/broadcast. When niche/narrowcast content is seen out of context, it does more harm than good.

An example… Iron Man (directed by Jon Favreau) is mainstream/broadcast. 95% of people who stumble across that movie randomly could instantly be pulled in on some level. On the other hand, Tetsuo the Iron Man (directed by Shinya Tsukamoto) does not have the same broad appeal. Even someone who might fall in love with Tetsuo the Iron Man would probably not enjoy it immediately based on seeing it play in someone’s embedded video on their Myspace page. The viewer needs to know what they’re getting themselves into… they need to commit to Tetsuo the Iron Man before watching it. Iron Man requires no such prior commitment.

Does that mean Iron Man is a better film than Tetsuo the Iron Man. I don’t think so, I think they’re both great at what they are. It’s meaningless to compare them, they have nothing in common other than they are stories on film that we collectively label as “movies” or “films.” To Netflix, they’re the same thing. Netflix offers hardly any context. And once you have a Netflix subscription, the movies are essentially free. FREE means that there is no commitment on the part of the consumer… there is no due diligence required, and thus FREE further diminishes context. As Michael Ironside says in Starship Troopers “something given has no value.” I could see a mainstream Netflix customer who enjoyed Iron Man happen across Tetsuo the Iron Man, think to himself ‘I liked Iron Man, I’ll check this out’ and add it to his Netflix queue… then a week or so later it winds up in his mailbox, a week or two after that he pops it in the DVD player forgetting everything about why he selected it in the first place, and then he gets immediately annoyed by the movie, stops it after 3 minutes, mails it back and writes a bad review on Netflix about how it’s unwatchable and pretentious. That’s a bummer for Tsukamoto… he doesn’t deserve that kind of aggravation.

Most people will argue that hypersyndication still works because a small percentage of an exponentially larger audience is still far huger than a relatively large percentage of a tiny niche. The problem with that model is the Tyranny Of The Naysayers. Someone who dislikes a movie is far more likely to write a bad review than someone who likes a movie is apt to write a good review. If you exponentially increase the number of people who see the movie (knowing full well that the number of viewers it’s truly geared for is disproportionately smaller than those who simply won’t get it), you’re setting the film up to be tarred and feathered on the public stage. You’ll have no niche audience to champion the film, only naysayers hating on it… and most consumers can’t discern the comments of people who ‘don’t get it’ from people who ‘do get it.’

Some of the coolest, most exciting, most compelling films simply should not be seen by everyone. They’re great films, and they’re not for everybody. That statement flies in the face of the given wisdom about great films… about Oscars and box office and the meritocracy of great storytelling. Being a best-seller requires appealing to the widest possible audience–sure that can mean it’s a great transcendent film that every human being can relate to, but more often it means that it’s lowest common denominator cotton candy. There’s nothing wrong with cotton candy, but is it a better made food than sushi? Not everyone likes sushi… and even people who may like sushi wouldn’t like it if I put it on a stick and sold it to them at a theme park next to the funnel cakes and cotton candy.

One of my first questions to filmmakers is “who is the audience of this movie?” The answer is generally some variation on “people who love great films.” That is not a type of person. Iron Man is a great film. Tetsuo the Iron Man is a great film. If your audience is people who love BOTH movies, then your audience is smaller than you think.

Scarcity creates value. It’s better to build a core fanbase and grow your audience from there than to hypersyndicate and try to reach the largest possible audience as quickly as possible.

[BTW- before I get called out on the fact that Tetsuo the Iron Man is generally favorably reviewed on Netflix (despite it being a lower score than Iron Man or even the dreadful Invincible Iron Man animated movie), let me just point out I was using Tetsuo the Iron Man as an example that most readers could easily identify (and also I was being a bit clever, sue me). Tetsuo the Iron Man was not hypersyndicated upon its initial release back in the 90s, so by the time Netflix came along Tetsuo had already protected itself with a core following and a cineaste pedigree... precisely what I'm suggesting you do before you consider hypersyndicating. Also, I recognize Netflix has the 'Ratings of Users Like You' addition to the ratings system, which is an appreciated effort but not a silver bullet for the problems faced by content creators/suppliers.]

Budgeting films for what they are, not for how much change you can shake out of people’s pockets

The given wisdom in indie filmmaking circles is that your film budget should be roughly as much money as you can possibly get… with a little bit more added on top that you’ll worry about later. If you have a meeting with a potential investor, your filmmaker friends and filmmaking teachers will all advise you to ask for as much money as you possibly can… after all, the more you spend on your film the better it will be, right?

This is all great advice if your chief aim is to separate suckers from their money, which certainly is the primary goal of many film producers–and who am I to criticize? But that philosophy is also a relic from a previous generation where you packed as much production value as you could into a film (usually an artsy, feel good film about the triumph of the human spirit) so you could flip it for a huge return-on-investment at a film festival… and we’ve already exhaustively discussed how badly that turns out for 99.9% of films and filmmakers. It’s barely even an option on the table anymore, so why not get with the cool kids on the next big thing… spending money wisely (even Other People’s Money) so you can turn a reasonable profit and re-invest in more productions, grow your body of work, expand your audience over time, and increase your budgets as the size of your audience allows. Sure, this isn’t the sexiest business model in the world especially for a pastime as narcissistic as filmmaking… but you could do a lot worse than to spend money wisely these days.

The reason this topic is on my mind is because of a few comments I’ve seen popping up around the blogiverse after we posted the trailer for our upcoming illustrated film Godkiller. Many people seem to be asking the question of whether we devised the illustrated film format because we think it’d be a cool form of filmmaking or if we devised it because we couldn’t get the money to make a completely animated movie.

It’s a weird question because it presumes that every filmmaking decision isn’t a mix of creative and economic choices. Movies are really expensive to make and really risky, you can’t make a creative decision without weighing the economic impact on the film.

According to IMDb, the budget for The Hangover was $35M. Well, why wasn’t it $200M like the budget for Transformers 2? Is Warner Brothers a bunch of pussies because they could only come up with $35M for The Hangover while Dreamworks shelled out $200M for Transformers 2? Maybe, but probably not… it’s probably a little more complicated than that.

On the one hand, it would cost us millions to make Godkiller as a fully animated feature film. So the short answer is, no we didn’t have a few mill laying around to make Godkiller look like Final Fantasy VII. But as business-people who have to justify the money we spend and actually earn it back on the films themselves since we can’t sell air conditioners and Blu-ray player to make up our shortfalls, I wouldn’t want to spend millions on Godkiller even if I could. Why not? Don’t I believe in it? Sure, I believe that it’s a totally rad movie for its audience. But it’s not a totally rad movie for everybody in the world. And I don’t want it to be. Godkiller is really fucking weird and it’s made for weirdos. When I write for studio production companies, Development Hell consists of rewrite after rewrite removing any element that won’t work for the widest possible audience. That’s fine because those movies will cost tens of millions if not hundreds of millions and the studios need to sell them to everybody on the planet in order to make their money back. I don’t want to have that problem when producing for Halo-8… the great part about creative control is having the right to create for my audience, not for everybody I hate plus my audience. We take on so many risks at Halo-8 that it’s only worth it to us if we can make weird movies for weird people. And in order to do that effectively and continue doing it, we have to keep our budgets low. After all, our audience is more likely to download our movies on Pirate Bay than haul ass out to a store and buy the DVD, so just how irresponsible do you expect us to be?

All of that equivocating and over-justifying does not in any way diminish how much I creatively adore the illustrated film format, nor does it diminish the brutal amount of backbreaking work we put into producing these things. It’s great to love a storytelling format you’ve developed, and it’s even better to love a storytelling format you can afford to take creative risks with. If we’re going to be creatively daring, experimental, controversial, confrontational, and subversive for a long time into the future we also have to be smart with our money… it’s no coincidence that the same Wall Street firms who’ve been financing ridiculously expensive independent films for the past ten years are choking to death on debt. Tinseltown has always been about separating suckers from their money, we think there’s a better way.

I’m an Internet Filmmaking Millionaire and SO CAN YOU!

There have always been indie film snake oil salesmen. Back in the heyday of the 90s Indie Film Boom there were gazillions of books telling you how if you just sold your car, sold your blood, or sold out your family’s mortgage you too could sell a film at Sundance and be an overnight multi-millionaire. Some of those books had accurate production information, most did not, but they all shared one thing in common: a fairy tale ending that was either disingenuous (if you want to be nice about it) or a straightup lie (if you want to be me about it). In the last chapter (or paragraph) of these books, after the authors had just spent hundreds of pages detailing every aspect of development, pre-production, and post-production, they would wrap up by saying you take your movie to Sundance, start a bidding war, and cash the fuck out with millions of chump change in your back pocket. Welcome to being a fucking hotshot millionaire, babydoll! Of course, the process of selling or distributing a movie is no less complex than the process of producing one… and “disingenuous” may be the fairer judgment against these authors because they probably didn’t even know the process of selling or distributing a movie. Film Production is technical knowledge… it’s bare-knuckled, blue collar hard work. It can be taught in technical schools by guys and gals who’ve worked in the field for decades. The processes of making a film don’t really change… and when they do it makes things easier, not harder. Sales & Distribution on the other hand is a bit more nuanced and, to be perfectly frank, sordid… it’s the type of dark arts practiced on Wall Street and East New York streetcorners. It’s far more difficult to write a book about how to sell a credit default swap or a hit of crack than it is to write a book about how to fix a 1982 Buick… not because Wall Streeters are smarter than mechanics but because situations on the ground change moment-to-moment in a dynamic sales environment, whereas the insides of a 1982 Buick stay pretty consistent through the years. Most writers of how-to-be-an-indie-film-millionaire never sold or distributed a film, so they can claim ignorance when their readers lose their cars, blood, or homes. And the ones who did sell or distribute a film? Well, they tend to leave out some pertinent information.

Here’s the real deal on those books: they’re basically the same thing as a book that spends 300 pages teaching you how to buy a lottery ticket and then the last sentence says “now all you have to do is win.”

In the past ten years, the trend has moved away from filmmaking (people caught on to their games I guess) and morphed into get rich quick books about real estate (that worked well), day trading (even better), etc etc etc.

But guess what has happened over the past few years? THEY’RE BACK! The snake oil salesmen have returned to the world of filmmaking… but not that hackneyed old FILMmaking of the 90s… no, the problem with all those books from the 90s was that they came from back before Myspace and Facebook and spam and bots and torrents and all these glorious things that make it so much EASIER for you to make BAZILLIONS of dollars as a DiY FILMMAKER! Hooray! Because look how much good these technologies have done for bands! Sure, record sales are down 90%, record labels are zombies in search of brains, and the highest level of artistic success most musicians seek these days is a put in Grey’s Anatomy. BUT (!) there’s a band I heard about that sold 1 billion downloads just by having a clever YouTube video! You can do it too! Just read my blog about how to shoot a video for YouTube and you figure out the rest!

As you can imagine, I’m pretty cynical about this crap… not just because I’m an oldass veteran of the 90s but because I’ve been releasing movies in the trenches of massmarket retail, new media internet, and DiY face-to-face tabletops for the past few years and I can guarantee you the numbers these self-proclaimed pundits throw around is either completely fabricated or, at best, partially fabricated. The festivals and markets have become echo chambers where false prophets lie to wide-eyed aspiring filmmakers and say “I’m an Internet Filmmaking Millionaire and SO CAN YOU!” The funny thing is these snake oil salesmen, like the millions before them, make their money by selling you information on how to become a millionaire… not by selling their own films. The people who actually make money selling their films are (not so suspiciously) tight-lipped.

Well, I’ve got a big mouth and a bad attitude, so I feel like poisoning the well all these snake oil salesmen are drinking from. I’ll be your indie film Robin Hood, stealing from the stupid and giving to the ignorant. I’ve dealt with every level of this ridiculous business from Best Buy to anarchist bookshops, I’ve crashed major festivals with renegade screenings and also been a guest and award-winner (not simultaneously, of course), I’ve screened films in cinemas with packed audiences and in people’s apartments for a couple of devoted fans (not to mention empty cinemas and packed apartments). And now I’ll tell you how you too can be a Filmmaking MegaSuperstarGodlikeGiverAndReceiverOfPain! Yay!

Why am I going to tell you all this shit? Well… basically, it’s in my self-interest to do so. My company not only produces films, shows, webisodes, lifestyle videos, etc but we also acquire and distribute independently produced films when we see something we dig or when we meet artists we want to champion. Well here’s a tidbit for you… we almost always lose money on our acquisitions and have to make up the difference on our productions. Why? Because filmmakers aren’t generally the shrewdest people in the world and they’re getting a lot of bad information. No one is telling them how to effectively make films THAT CAN BE SOLD. There are so many good films that are just totally unsellable. How is that possible? How can something be good and unsellable? Well, that’s what I intend to tell you.

I originally planned to write a book specifically for the filmmakers we work with so they’ll stop fucking up their movies and making them unmarketable, but I’ve been convinced that it’s probably better to put the information out their for anybody who wants it. So I’m gonna give it a try writing the book on this here blog.

Oh and I’m gonna charge membership for the content. Not because I want your money (although I’ll gladly take it, thank you very much) but for two reasons:
a- if you’re serious about Media Sales & Marketing you oughta know that free information on the internet IS NOT FREE… it is free because it serves someone’s ulterior motive to give it to you for free and their motive may not sync up with your motives so you could wind up with some very bad information;
b- I piss a lot of people off… already in this blog post I’ve probably alienated half the readers and a lot of people I work with. Well, if there’s gonna be any accuracy to my information it’s going to piss off a lot more people, so for my own self-preservation I have to restrict access to the information. The biggest problem with the web is information without context, and I’m gonna say some shit I don’t want just anybody to stumble across in an unrelated google search.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. In the next few days, the site will be revamped with free content and premium members-only content and I shall commence dropping the knowledge and shilling my own unique brand of snake oil. Not only will it make you a millionaire, it’ll also cure that nasty rash you picked up at Cinetic’s Sundance party last year. Non Serviam- Pizzolo

Illustrated Films vs Motion Comics

Back in 2007, it occurred to me that you could scan the images from a comic book, record radio-play style audio of the dialogue and sound effects, and turn it into a pretty badass underground DVD. I brought some of my favorite underground comix to Brian and asked him what he thought… and he said “if that’d work, somebody would’ve done it by now.” We couldn’t think of anybody who’d done it effectively, so we figured there was a reason it didn’t work and moved on to the next thing.

But I’m a comic book geek, so I didn’t give up on Halo-8 doing some sort of comic book type release and a few months later I started writing a few comic books and set up a publishing arm of Halo-8 to make comics and graphic novels. I went online looking for artists and found the incredible Anna Muckcracker (who took on the task of illustrating ‘Godkiller’) and the wonderful Andrea Blanco & Ale Alvarez (who brought ‘How I Lost My Virginity -by Alexandra Jones’ to life).

I immediately noticed that Anna’s illustrations for ‘Godkiller’ were incredibly cinematic… broad, sweeping landscapes; an epic yet subdued pace; and most of the panels were widescreen to begin with. Plus, the surreal flavor she brought to ‘Godkiller’ made me think it was far more broadly appealing than the viciously visceral aesthetic I’d imagined while first writing it. Anna was an odd choice for ‘Godkiller,’ everyone was confused when I said she was my pick… and truth be told I had to do quite a bit of rewriting to slow down the pace of my storytelling to match her visual style. But the whole was definitely greater than the sum of its parts… at least, greater than the parts I contributed–I’m pretty sure anything Anna does is ridiculously awesome all on its own.

So when Anna started delivering illustrations, Brian and I started tinkering with a new filmmaking format we called “illustrated films,” mixing comic book art with voice performances, elaborate sound design, music, and strategically placed motion graphics. Unbeknownst to us, across town the folks at Warner Premiere were developing what they called “motion comics”–and they started with Watchmen.

We had a few extra obstacles than they did… like for example, Anna still had to illustrate the damn thing and I was rewriting it as she went. It took a really long time before we even had enough existing artwork to do our first feasibility tests… and it was pretty slow-going from there. So we were a bit disheartened when we were knee-deep in the Godkiller illustrated film and people started buzzing about the Watchmen motion comic. The nice thing, though, is that Warner Brothers can take a property like Watchmen and use it to convince people that motion comics are a real media format worth watching… we were really nervous that we’d finish our first illustrated film and everybody would say “we’re not watching that thing… that’s… well, that’s not a thing at all!” So we humbly thank Warner Premiere for doing the heavy lifting of convincing people that these are things and should be treated as such.

However, Godkiller is not a motion comic… at least, not as defined by Warner Premiere. We’re filmmakers and we developed our style with a cinematic aesthetic. Watchmen is different. And I find it actually quite fascinating how Halo-8 & Warner Premiere made significantly different creative choices while developing a very similar format simultaneously but in isolation.

Visually, it feels like Warner Premiere went out of their way to make Watchmen *not* cinematic. I don’t know anybody at Warner Premiere so I can’t say authoritatively why this is, but it seems to me that the inspiration was to create a cartoon utilizing existing art–whereas we started with the inspiration to make a film utilizing existing art. I think that’s why our paths stray from one another so immediately.

Watchmen’s visual design takes the original art from the comic, but ignores the visual language of the comic book and treats it like a cartoon. Most of the negative reviews I’ve read of Watchmen seem to focus on the fact that, although the original artwork is used, the liberties taken with animating it aren’t leading to a net-positive in terms of storytelling.

We faced a similar problem of how best to animate elements from existing artwork without compromising the integrity of the visual storytelling. Our assumption was: this is not a cartoon, so it shouldn’t try to be a cartoon. We should use motion sparingly when it serves the story. Other than that, we should let the format rely on the visual storytelling elements already there and only try to augment them rather than replace them. One of my favorite moments in the whole thing is a choice Brian made to have Dr. West’s brow furrow with no other motion in the frame… so subtle, but so effective.

The other thing I found so strange about the Watchmen motion comic is how fiercely it refuses to be a comic book as well. It really doesn’t utilize, even in a self-aware style, the language of comic books in telling the story. Sure it uses word bubbles, but I mean the architecture of the visual storytelling–most notably, the panels. We tried to incorporate the comic book language in our format, often showing the panels on screen and occasionally using multiple-panel reveals onscreen to borrow effective devices from the book. Brian also created some magnificent moments mixing film editing tropes with multiple panel reveals.

But the most confusing part to me about the Watchmen motion comic is Warner Premiere’s decision to use an audio-book style for the dialogue. Having one narrator read all the voiceover, narration, and dialogue is really unsettling. The only reason I can imagine for their decision to do this was to avoid conflict with the casting of the feature… I guess it could be weird to simultaneously cast one actor to play Dr. Manhattan in the movie and another actor to play his voice in the motion comic. But… I dont know, maybe that doesn’t make sense. I mean, Lionsgate put out an Iron Man animated film right before the live-action movie.

Now, let me clarify myself because I think I sound like a dick: I think the Watchmen motion comic is awesome. I was really impressed by what I saw. But they made some creative decisions that I just don’t get. At all. And I think it’s interesting that we made very different creative decisions when developing our “illustrated film” format.

I suppose I can’t really draw a fair comparison until after “Godkiller” is released and all the critics and reviewers and commenters point out all of our misguided choices… then I’ll go back to Watchmen and see how they did all those things right while we totally fucked them up.

This project is exciting in a different way than most, because it’s an entirely new format of storytelling… and each creative decision is a mix of personal inspiration, synthesizing existing methods, and determining the most effective way to serve the story. So two creative teams with different sensibilities, different backgrounds, and different source materials will create wholly different methodologies.

In the meantime, I’m glad Watchmen came out first so we can compare and contrast as we go.

The Television Will Not Be Revolutionized

Back in October when I predicted the tumbling of film companies, I didn’t expect it to start with our very own distributor. D’oh!
R.I.P. Ryko… you’ve been awesome to us and amazing to all fans of outsider cinema.

It’s been awhile since my last blog, mostly because Brian tells me that my blog postings are too antagonistic and bad for business. The funny thing is right after that last post, US retail went into cardiac arrest… so maybe Brian’s right. Ah well, let’s see how much damage I can do this time around.

Like everybody else, we’ve been reeling for about 8 months. Truth be told, it’s all been pretty rocky since Tower went under… but then in August of 2008 things went from being rocky to being Rocky II (…we’re just trying to hold on longer enough to get pummeled by Clubber Lang). A lot of our fellow labels have gone under or at least circled the wagons, and we’ve had to slim down ourselves… but luckily our overhead is already ridiculously low.

Anyway, during my radio silence we’ve embarked on a few experimental ‘Hollywood-2.0′ strategies, so I’m gonna start laying those out and analyzing the results. For some reason I’m magnetized to attract spam, so we have to approve comments until we figure out how to avoid pages and pages of comments about adding inches… but feel free to comment and tell me just how wrong I am about everything and Brian will make sure we approve those hateful rants to teach me a lesson.

What’s good for Wall Street is not good for Street Cred

In the early days of Hollywood, you had passionate filmlovers running studios and making films by gut and instinct and sheer ballsiness. Not so anymore. The infiltration by MBAs and suits into creative positions is systemic to the point of being cliche, of course, but that’s not the point. It’s the Wall Street mentality I’m getting at… the Enronian psyche of inflating worthless properties and cashing out at the right time. The Business has always been a business, but it hasn’t always been a Pump n’ Dump economy where marketing is more often than not just a ploy to trick consumers into buying shoddy product.

If it sounds like I’m aggravated, that’s because I am. I got a 5-page legal threat in the mail from After Dark Films, the pseudo-independent company behind those tacky billboards of the zombie groping the naked (yet inexplicably aroused) wench. See, they do that film series called “8 Films To Die For – After Dark Horrorfest.”

Anyway, we were booking our Halloween series of screenings and parties at The Engine Theater in LA and figured it’d be handy to have a clever name tying the series together so we jokingly called it “8 Films To Kill For: Halo-ween Fest.” I suppose it wasn’t the cleverest name in the world, but no less clever than Slamdance… or Tromeo & Juliet for that matter.

Well, it didn’t take long for After Dark to throw a shitfit and sic their lawyers on us for trademark infringement. Trademark infringement? We weren’t ripping them off, we were mocking them. I don’t think trademark law is intended to prevent people from making fun of you. I tend to assume our audience is pretty smart, so it never occurred to me they might think we were actually part of that festival with the tacky billboards. I mean, we don’t even have billboards… let alone inexplicably aroused naked wenches. I suppose I should thank them for busting our chops with their crack squad straight out of LA Law… I wouldn’t want to cause confusion and accidentally tarnish our reputation with their lack of street cred. We’re not that self-destructive.

Anyhow, this whole stupid episode is silly and pointless. Calling the film series “8 Films To Kill For” was a dumb gag and if they want to whine about it we’ll change the name… it’s not an actual brand we’re using to sell anything, it was just a joke (and since Lionsgate, with whom After Dark has their production-distribution deal, has a DVD out called “6 Films To Keep You Awake” I figured nobody would care… would it have been ok if we’d only been showing 7 films?).

But After Dark seems to have a reputation for not only being tacky but also being a bully. There was that silly beef between After Dark’s Courtney Solomon and Eli Roth a few years back… kind of like 50 Cent vs Ja Rule except they both looked like Ja Rule at the end of the day. And that contrived controversy over the Captivity posters… at least Elisha Cuthbert didn’t look inexplicably aroused in the billboards where she was being graphically eviscerated. I know Courtney Solomon’s Canadian… is it possible they just have a different billboard-culture up there? Has our neighbor to north had generations of billboards with naked women luxuriating whilst being raped by zombies or smearing their mascara as they gaze wide-eyed from their cages? Maybe I just don’t get it.

Ok, so what does this dork have to do with Enron and Wall Street? According to Hollywood Reporter on 8/17/07, Solomon set up a sister company to After Dark Films called Autonomous Films with $55 million dollars from JP Morgan and another $35 million dollars from a private equity fund (mostly from Hong Kong based real estate financier Zeman). Ok… so if you read the newspaper or own a house, you may see a couple of red flags with JP Morgan and real estate financiers pumping $90 million dollars into a high-risk operation. According to the same article, the company intends to produce and acquire 3-4 mainstream films a year, most in the $5 million-$20 million range. Ok fine, I’m not begrudging this guy his cash money… but lets crack this thing open. According to IMDbPro, Autonomous Films’ top-ranked release is “Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006),” which was released theatrically in October 2007, on dvd March 2008, and incidentally had its own tacky billboard controversy. Also according to IMDbPro, the budget was estimated at a reasonably low $1m. IMDb doesn’t know how much anybody spends on marketing, so let’s assume they spent ZERO money on marketing. Why not? Maybe all those tacky billboards were free. Well, IMDb says the box office gross was $104k. Notice “k” not “m” after the dollar amount. Ok, but we all know that box office is a loss leader (Autonomous certainly didn’t get anywhere near $104k back from the theaters), and the real money is in DVD. So… let’s see what Nielsen Videoscan says about “Wristcutter” dvd sales: 11,574. If we’re ridiculously optimistic, we can estimate that Autonomous gets $10 per dvd (and that’s without the per-unit cost of manufacture, but who knows… maybe he pulled a favor and got them manufactured for free). So… without deducting a penny of marketing costs or even DVD manufacturing costs, and even erring on the side of irrational exuberance with what the actual revenue would be… STILL JP Morgan and the private equity financiers are taking a bath on this movie.

Is it unfair that I’m using Autonomous’ arthouse (?) film as an example in this blog since I clearly have a stick up my ass about After Dark and am just using Autonomous as a foil in my meanspirited and reactionary assault? Maybe… so let’s instead look at After Dark.

According to IMDbPro, “Captivity” is After Dark’s top-ranked release. You know that one, the billboards were so unbelievably tacky that they all had to be taken down and replaced with new ones saying “Captivity was here.” Wow, that’s almost as clever as “8 Films To Kill For”–but I digress. (BTW- The difference between those two clever bits of marketing is that the Captivity one cost an unconscionable amount of money since it’s not just expensive to rent the billboards, but the posters themselves are expensive–whether they show graphic images of torture and evisceration or just faux-graffiti text.)

According to IMDbPro, the “Captivity” budget was $17 million. Box office? $2.63 million. Nielsen Videoscan numbers? 50,764 ‘unrated’ dvds and 5,685 ‘rated’ dvds (who the fuck bought the rated version??). So here we are again. Maybe all those billboards were free. Maybe they didn’t spend a nickel on marketing and they manufactured the dvds in a sweatshop where 9 year olds are paid NOTHING to manufacture “Captivity” dvds. STILL this would be coming in at a deficit of about $14million. That’s a loss of $14 on an investment of $17. That’s not good math. Sure there are other revenue streams, but (a) those other revenue streams ain’t making back $14 million, and (b) those billboards weren’t free.

In fairness, “Captivity” was an acquisition and I don’t know how much After Dark paid for it. Maybe he got it for free and turned a sweet profit. If that’s the case: nice job, dude… maybe you made a small fortune by starting out with a large one.

I’m not somebody to go kicking people in the balls for losing money on their investments or for trying to make films that don’t make it into the black at the end of the day. I think it’s cool that Courtney Solomon can get a bunch of funny money and turn it into movies… I hope he directs Dungeons & Dragons 2 & 3 & 4. But, dude, when your movies are losing this much money, maybe you oughta focus more on your films and less on siccing lawyers on my Halloween parties. Jeez.

Business Affairs departments are out of control in Hollywood. More people are paid to prevent movies from being made and events from being produced than are out there actually creating content. And funny money from Wall Street is propping up a few companies who are deficit-spending their way into oblivion… and also using that money to crush competition from companies like ours who actually struggle to turn a meager profit and re-invest that profit in more movies. How quaint and Industrial Age of us.

So next time you hear about our tax dollars buying bad mortgages and guaranteeing JP Morgan financial buyouts, think about the fact that somehow a few of those dollars are trickling down to pay After Dark’s lawyer to threaten my Halloween party.

The last page of After Dark’s legal threat demands I immediately disclose the following information:

Q 1. State the locations of all planned and scheduled events and provide samples or any and all advertising and promotional materials utilizing the “8 Films To Kill For” mark;

A 1. Well, we’re having parties and screenings at The Engine Theater in Hollywood from Oct 23-29, but it’s not called “8 Films To Kill For.” Now it’s called “Halo-8: Films That Kill.” There are no advertising or promotional materials utilizing the name “8 Films To Kill For.” We were gonna buy a billboard, but then decided it would be a bad investment.

Q 2. Describe precisely what steps you plan to take to advise the public that there is no association of your film festival with my client and the actions you are taking for the removal of all uses of the “8 Films To Kill For” mark;

A 2. You’re lookin’ at it.

Q 3. Identify fully the individuals responsible for the conception of the “8 Films To Kill For” mark;

A 3. I thought you guys thought of it… oh wait, that was the other one? The “to die for” one? Sorry, I get confused cuz they’re so similar.

Q 4. Pay my client’s damages and attorney fees in an amount yet to be determined.

A 4. Only if your client pays me back the 2 hours of my life I wasted watching “Captivity.”