Indie Filmmakers Told To Sell It Themselves

2010-01-27 (수) 12:00:00

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By MANOHLA DARGIS

Last November inside a conference room at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, a film consultant named Peter Broderick was doing his best to foment a revolution. Mr. Broderick, who helps filmmakers find their way into the marketplace, was spreading the word on an Internet- era approach to releasing movies that he believes empowers filmmakers without impoverishing them economically or emotionally. Mr. Broderick divides distribution into the Old World and New .

In the Old World of distribution, filmmakers hand over all the rights to their work, ceding control to companies that might soon lose interest in their new purchase for various reasons, including poor ticket sales opening weekend. In the New World, filmmakers maintain full control over their work from beginning to end: they hold on to their rights and, as important, find people who are interested in their projects and can become patrons, even mentors.

The Old World has ticket buyers. The New World has ticket buyers who are also Facebook friends. The Old World has commercials, newspaper ads and the mass audience. The New World has social media, YouTube, iTunes and niche audiences. “Newspaper ads,” Mr. Broderick said, “are mostly a waste of money.”

For consultants like Mr. Broderick and filmmakers like Jon Reiss (the documentary “Bomb It”), the answer lies in self-distribution, in filmmakers doing it themselves or, more accurately, doing it themselves with a little or a lot of help from other people, including consultants like Mr. Broderick and Richard Abramowitz.

Last year Mr. Abramowitz, a filmindustry veteran who runs an outfit in Armonk, New York, called Abramorama with one full-time employee (him), helped shepherd Sacha Gervasi’s documentary “Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” about a 1970s metal band and its rebirth, into a success, with almost $700,000 at the North American box office. Consultants guide filmmakers on every angle of distribution. They can develop a marketing strategy, book theaters and collect the money.

Mr. Broderick advocates what he calls hybrid distribution, which, as he has put it, “combines direct sales by filmmakers with distribution by third parties.” Thus filmmakers hold on to their sales rights and sell the DVD retail rights to one buyer and the video-on-demand rights to another and so on ? rather than handing them all over to one distributor, as has been traditional.

The do-it-yourself world is opensource. Participants refer to one another in conversation and on their Web sites and blogs, pushing other people’s ideas and projects. By sharing information and building on one another’s ideas, they are in effect creating a virtual infrastructure.

One guiding principle is transmedia, a word borrowed from academia, in which stories - think of the “Star Wars” and “Matrix” franchises - unfold across different platforms. “Star Wars” helped expand the very idea of a movie, because it involved a constellation of movie-related products, from videogames to action figures .

The new generation of filmmakers might not be pushing toys on their Web sites , but they do peddle DVDs, posters, CDs, books and - much as Spike Lee did before them ? are learning to sell themselves alongside their art.

For Mr. Reiss and other do-it-yourselfers, the most important thing is to reach their audiences, any which way, niche by niche, pixel by pixel, in theaters or online. “This is the other voice of film,” Mr. Reiss said with urgency, “and if this dies, all we’re left with is the monopoly.”

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