As you may have read, Four-Eyed Monsters co-creator Arin Crumley has launched a new project, OpenIndie, that aims to create a new model for the distribution of independent film. I’ll let Crumley explain it: As Crumley notes, OpenIndie is using Kickstarter to fundraise towards its goal of $10,000. With 17 days to go, OpenIndie needs just over $7,000. If you’re intrigued after seeing the video, please consider heading over there and contributing. A $100 contribution gets you a one-hour consulting session with Crumley on the distribution of your own film. Also, check out this latest podcast from Lance Weiler and […]
Paramount‘s grass-roots Internet marketing of Oren Peli‘s low budget horror Paranormal Activity looks to be working. According to Variety, the film pulled in $7.1 million over the weekend at 160 screens, beating the 22-year-old record of the highest weekend grosser at 200 locations or less, held previously by Platoon ($3.7 million at 174 locations). The film also grossed the weekend frame’s highest per screen average of $44,163, edging out An Education ($40,595 per screen). Without question the film has turned into the hottest ticket for not only the horor fan but college kids who’ve been constantly clicking the DEMAND IT […]
Film Independent‘s Filmmaker Forum is underway this weekend, and we asked writer/director Zak Forsman to attend and report back. Here’s the first of his posts. I’ve just locked picture on my first feature-length motion picture and it seems I couldn’t be entering the world of distribution at a worse time. I strolled into the DGA in Los Angeles for day one of the Film Independent Filmmaker Forum optimistic and eager. I left it determined to batten down the hatches in preparation for stormy seas ahead. Veteran producer Jeremy Thomas (Creation, The Last Emperor, Crash) keynote opened with the concession that […]
I received the following note from a filmmaker who is witnessing the shrinking of what was once a reliable niche — the low-to-no budget gay film. Hey Scott– LOVE your editor’s note “from the future”. I follow your twitter already– just had to write you to react to this piece. Right now, I’m typing in an Atlanta hotel room and tonight my movie, PORNOGRAPHY, is closing the Atlanta LGBT film festival. I flew from the Portland LGBT a few days ago, and tomorrow I’m in Tampa at that fest. (I’m missing our closing night of Dallas OUTTAKES tonight.) I’ve been […]
TOM HARDY AS THE EPONYMOUS LEAD IN WRITER_DIRECTOR NICOLAS WINDING REFN’S BRONSON. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES. At a time when Danish cinema boasts a large number of first rate directors, Nicolas Winding Refn stands out among his peers for his raw talent and ambition. The son of filmmaker Anders Refn, Refn was born in Copenhagen in 1970 but spent much of his teenage years living in New York, which had a great impact on his cinematic sensibility. He started film school at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, but was expelled for throwing a desk at a wall, one of a […]
Through a bizarre anomaly in the space-time continuum, I received the following email in my in-box. It’s dated March 30, 2010, so it’s from the future. Since what’s being discussed hasn’t happened yet, I can’t, of course, vouch for its authenticity, but the internet routing and DNS server codes all seem accurate. I’m going ahead and posting it because this filmmaker’s thinking is interesting, but I’m redacting his name and the name of his film so as to protect his privacy. — S.M. Dear Friend, What a tumultuous but exciting two months since our film, REDACTED, premiered at Sundance! Thanks […]
Here’s Mike Johnston’s second post from the Future of Music Conference. One of the most important considerations for most musicians or filmmakers is to have their work exposed to as wide an audience as possible. The existing model of taking a product to market is still alive but it is no longer the only way to do it. That model depended on the acquisition of funding from a major record label or film studio for production expenses, distribution and major commercial exposure (promotion). Trying to navigate this avenue is full of potholes for the indie artist due to the inherent […]
Susan Seidelman’s landmark 1982 debut feature, Smithereens, recently made its Cable VOD debut on Cinetic’s FilmBuff channel. It will soon be made available on iTunes, Amazon VOD, and more. Seidelman reflects on the origins of her Manhattan indie classic as it finds new audiences today. I moved to New York City in the mid 1970s, to go to NYU film school. At that time the grad school was housed in a funky building on East 7th street and Second Ave — a space it shared with a rock club called the Fillmore East. The mid-to-late ’70s was a transitional time […]
“Thinking back on it,” director Susan Seidelman writes, “there was something wonderfully naive about the way the film came together. We never thought about how (or if) the film would get distributed, or how it would be marketed. This was just a film I wanted to make that attempted to capture the spirit of a certain time and place. Fortunately, it ended up getting accepted to the Cannes Film Festival and then got picked up for distribution by New Line Cinema. But that was never something we calculated or even thought about when we first set out to make Smithereens.” […]
Several familiar faces, including my own, spoke at the Woodstock Film Festival on a panel entitled “The Changing Face of Independent Film.” I moderated, and the panelists were directors Rick Linklater and Ira Sachs; Cinetic’s John Sloss; and Big Beach’s Peter Saraf. As four of the five of us attended the Indiewire/MoMA/Zipline summit on the crisis in independent film production and distribution, I began by asking what the term “crisis” meant for them. Sloss spoke about the vanishing studio specialty divisions and with them the erosion of the indie film business model that requires a marketplace with well-funded buyers. He […]