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.
Recent Comments