While out at the Film Independent Filmmaker Conference, which I’ll write more about hopefully later today, I sat down with filmmaker Lance Weiler and learned more about his very impressive model for self-distributing and marketing his independent films. One of his achievements is to simply get as an indie the kind of attention from the big box retailers that studios are used to getting when their videos street.

Today, for example Best Buy offers a $5 discount on a package of Weiler’s two films, The Last Broadcast and Head Trauma.

Here’s a short piece from Indie Features 06 that gives more detail:

HEAD TRAUMA is now available on netflix for rent. Over the next few weeks HT will be rolling out to more stores and rental outlets.
Starting Oct. 29th through Nov. 11th, Best Buy will be offering an exclusive promotion. Customers who purchase both HEAD TRAUMA and my first feature THE LAST BROADCAST will receive $5 off the final purchase price.

With brick and mortar retail stores forced to limit the amount of indie DVDs they can carry, this promotion shows a confidence in the films by a major chain. If sales of The Last Broadcast and Head Trauma live up to expectations, they could pave the way to more DVDs from independent filmmakers sharing shelf-space with leading studio releases.