In his novel Enduring Love, Ian McEwan constructs a striking metaphor of the tension between individualism and cohesion that lies at the core of modern society: Five strangers rush to save a child stuck in the passenger basket of a hot air balloon being uplifted by the wind. As the balloon soars, the helpers find themselves in midair, hanging from its ropes. Their cumulative weight keeps the balloon hovering over the ground, but one person letting go would break this fragile pact and put the others in greater danger. This scene, which resembles a social psychology experiment, asks the question: […]

The following article is crossposted with, Short of the Week, a new kind of film festival aimed at discovering the next wave of emerging filmmakers crafting stories for online audiences. Visit them at shortoftheweek.com A few years ago we released our short film online and shared the tactics behind the strategy we used to get views and industry attention in one of our most popular articles titled How We Launched Our Film Online. In the years since, we’ve had the pleasure of working with thousands of filmmakers to release their short films to millions of people around the world and […]

There are many reasons filmmakers might choose to self-distribute their documentaries: they may want residuals to come in throughout their careers, as opposed to what might be just a single upfront payment in an all-rights deal; they may feel a responsibility to their audience or subject matter to shepherd the project and not sell it off to a distributor focused on the bottom line; or maybe no one is knocking down their doors to buy your movie. At the recent DOC NYC PRO Distribution Book Camp, four filmmakers who have self-distributed projects (which can mean they are still self-distributing those […]

Hollywood has been transformed. The six major studios — Disney, Warner Bros., Universal, Fox, Sony, and Paramount — have all changed significantly. Few filmmakers understand how profound these changes have been and how they have altered their opportunities.

  

 What follows is my review of a recently published book, The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies, that opened my eyes to the new configuration of studio filmmaking. It was written by Ben Fritz, who has been covering the entertainment industry since 2004 for Variety, the Los Angeles Times and currently the Wall Street Journal.
  
The goal of […]

As a film programmer who recently made the painful but necessary decision to quit the organization at which I’d worked for 11 years, you might expect me to have a dim view of contemporary film culture. I don’t. Quite the contrary: I feel strongly that this is one of the great watershed moments in the history of cinema. Some of the reasons for my optimism are personal, but most can be generalized.  Working more than a decade for a regional film festival that gradually entered the national discussion around independent film, I became increasingly aware of an alarming divide. On […]

It used to be so simple: Release a movie in theaters and, several months later, it would come to your local video store. Nowadays, each and every film’s release pattern and chosen distribution platforms are—or, at least, should be—idiosyncratic, unique, and specifically tailored. “The first thing you have to ask yourself,” distribution consultant Michael Tuckman says, “is who is your audience, and work backwards from there to figure out what windowing you’re going to do.” If the target audience is a young demographic who spend most of their time on devices, then, according to The Orchard’s Paul Davidson, “a SVOD […]

There are two types of filmmakers: those who will stand on a street corner wearing a sandwich board to promote their movies, and those who will not. Dan Mirvish is fearlessly in the former category, as evidenced by this video, which finds the Bernard and Huey writer, director and Slamdance co-founder outside the Laemmle Monica hustling passersby to come and see his movie this weekend (and also be passersby in a video about promoting via a sandwich board). Writes Mirvish in an email about promoting via sandwich board: It has some historical context: 22 years ago, I wore a similar […]

Back in 2015, I wrote an article for Filmmaker on the best practices for delivering an exhibition copy of your film to festivals. In the ensuing two and a half, almost three years, I’ve received a lot of positive feedback, including a few panicked emails from filmmakers submitting their films to a festivals I worked at. Now in 2018, my editors have asked me to update it. Why the update now? Allow me the use of a clumsy and imperfect technical reference to Moore’s law that computing power doubles every eighteen months and the same has happened to available filmmaking […]

These days, making a good documentary is not good enough. Finding the right good distributor is as challenging a process as making a film, a reality of the business I’ve learned the hard way. I’ve directed and produced two documentary features, the latter of which, Dealt (about a world-renowned card magician who is blind), quickly sold to IFC/Sundance Selects. It has been a solid success. However, my first film took an entire year to find a buyer. It was a total uphill battle and very humbling. What was the problem? We were so focused on just making a good film […]

Sundance Institute’s Creative Distribution Initiative released today a case study for one of its inaugural films that premiered at Sundance last year: Columbus, from :: kogonada, who appeared on Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film list. Opening to strong critical acclaim and grossing over $1 million at the U.S. box office, the film is centered around a Korean-born man who finds himself stuck in Columbus, Indiana, where his father is in a coma. In two weeks, an additional case study for Jennifer Brea’s Oscar short-listed doc Unrest will be released. Established in May 2017, the initiative is aimed at […]