Sundance Infographic 2016: Ample Distribution, Paltry Deals, and the Cost of Piracy

Originally published in Cultural Weekly on January 20, 2016.

For the myriad filmmakers descending on Park City this week we have good news and bad. The good news: If your film is in Sundance, it will get distribution. The bad news: Your financial return on distribution will probably be minimal and your film is likely to be pirated, further diminishing your income.

Those key findings come from our annual survey of the independent movie landscape, on view below in our Sundance Infographic. Each year, we crunch the numbers on the Sundance Film Festival and use it as a bellwether for indie filmmaking at large. When Sundance’s Transparency Project begins to share data (later this year, we hope), we will all have even more information for analysis.

CLICK HERE TO SEE ANIMATED SUNDANCE 2016 INFOGRAPHIC

Distribution Dynamics

The overall number of distribution deals at Sundance is staggering. Last year, 105 of the 125 films achieved distribution of one kind or another. That’s a twenty percent increase from the year before, and a stark contrast to 2010, when only twelve films got distributed. What changed? Massive penetration by streaming services like Netflix and iTunes and the increased appetite for cable players like CNN and Discovery to take on feature-length documentaries.

Filmmakers at the Slamdance Film Festival, which runs concurrently in Park City, will have the same experience – all will get some distribution opportunities and most will be financially minimal.

When I say minimal, I mean minimal. Based on my conversations with producers and sales agents, many offers from distribution companies have zero minimum guarantees and rely entirely on back-end participation. When a deal is made with a digital-only distribution company, filmmakers will be expected to show up with a marketing plan in hand and will be expected to help sell tickets or streams themselves.

Why are distribution deals so paltry? Two reasons. First, there is too much content in the marketplace. Last year, there were some 700 feature films released theatrically in the US, of which about 150 came from studios and their subsidiaries. Those studio films accounted for 92.1% of the total box office, leaving approximately 550 independent films to fight for less than eight percent of the box office. Then, there are hundreds or thousands of movies that get digital-only deals, via companies like Amazon or Gravitas. In addition, 2015’s audiences had the opportunity to watch 409 scripted television shows – not hours, but actual shows, each of which has four to 22 episodes. Meanwhile, the number of hours of content uploaded to YouTube each minute is approaching 500. This much content is enough to make one’s eyeballs explode, and yet, with all the tonnage, truly excellent work is still rare.

The second reason distribution deals are low is the continuing devaluation of creative content. Increasingly audiences want to pay little or nothing for content in a fixed form – movies, books, music – even as they will pay nearly $1,000 for a three-day pass to Coachella. This is a generational, cultural shift –  and that’s where piracy comes in.

Piracy Costs

We know that piracy is a big issue for studio films, and we wanted to learn how it affects independent movies. For this year’s Sundance analysis, we worked with Excipio – a company that collects forensic evidence against pirates and does analytics. Excipio analyzes data collected from BitTorrent networks and does not extrapolate or estimate.

The results should be troubling to all independent filmmakers. Excipio analyzed illegal downloads of fourteen films that screened at Sundance in 2014 and 2015. All had at least hundreds of thousands of pirate downloads; Whiplash was downloaded illegally more than 12 million times.

What does piracy cost? Some piracy proponents (yes, there actually are such people) say it costs nothing and that it even helps build awareness for films, but that argument is false on its face. There is already a surfeit of content and one more free movie does not make a ripple. Audiences must be targeted carefully with specific marketing campaigns to build awareness and want-to-see; pirated films subvert that process. Piracy directly affects the bottom line, because some percentage of people who download illegally would have paid for the film if there were no illegal no-cost alternative.

How can we estimate the cost? We decided to be conservative. We’re estimating that if the illegal option were not available, five percent of customers would have paid for downloads and that they would have paid only $3 per transaction, which is a low number for digital downloads. Using this formula, we found that the fourteen films we sampled lost between $57,000 and $1.83 million in revenue.

Jonathan Sehring, president of IFC Films and Sundance Selects, and a producer of Boyhood told me: “Obviously piracy hurts every film company and any owner of intellectual property, regardless of size and scope. It is painful to look at those numbers and try to rationalize why people do this, especially to indie films.” Boyhood has had 10,383,141 pirate downloads. By our estimates, that cost the film $1.56 million. Life and death money for an indie filmmaker.

$3 Billion Invested

Each year, we estimate the budget of all the films submitted to Sundance to get a ballpark on how much is being invested in independent movies. Based on my conversations with producers, distributors, financiers, and people familiar with the festival circuit, this year we are estimating an average budget of $1 million per dramatic feature and $400,000 per feature documentary. The aggregate total tops $3 billion.

Does investment in indie films pay off? Clearly not, in most cases. But it is difficult to calculate on a case-by-case basis. For example, our infographic shows the sales price and the US box office gross, but most often films are bought for many territories – not just for the US. With Netflix now available in 190 countries, they often buy the world. Further, digital revenues are not transparent and are closely guarded. Unlike theatrical box office figures, which are publicly available, the amount of total views and income from all aggregated digital sources is not possible to track. Even insiders who run streaming companies tell me there is no way to get a clear figure beyond what they see from their own services. That lack of transparency has to change for independent filmmakers to get a fair understanding of today’s distribution economics and be able to strike deals that are fair all around.

Given the state of things, film distribution is ripe for continuing disruption. Increasingly, independents are exploring alternatives and finding entrepreneurial ways to do it themselves. Filmmaker James Kaelan, whose virtual reality experience The Visitor is in Slamdance, and who produced Hard World for Small Things in Sundance’s New Frontier section, told me, “With the advent of crowdfunding, with the efflorescing of free range distribution platforms, you don’t need to wait to get picked anymore. You can make your film on your own terms, and exhibit it directly to your audience without signing away your most-cherished rights. That’s a monumental shift.”

That shift is a trend likely to be even more prominent when we survey the independent film landscape a year from now.

SEE ANIMATED AND INTERACTIVE SUNDANCE 2016 INFOGRAPHIC

Sundance Infographic 2016

Sundance Infographic 2016

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Infographic sponsored by Macmillan Learning. Produced by Entertainment Media Partners for Cultural Weekly. Tod Hardin, special features editor; Ahmad Zaeem, designer.

Top image: Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang directed by Kevin Macdonald in World Documentary section at Sundance Film Festival. Photo courtesy Sundance Institute.

My TIFF List

Originally published in Cultural Weekly on September 2, 2015.

TIFF (the Toronto International Film Festival) is my very favorite of all film festivals. The studios use TIFF as a launch-pad for fall awards-season movies, so the festival has glamour and stars. At the same time, you get the opportunity to look through global windows of films you will not see anywhere else.

Along with great curation—a cinema-lover’s mix of Hollywood red carpets and unique movies from all over the world—the festival is impeccably organized. Films screen within easy walking distance of each other, and the industry panels are just a few blocks away.

I never know what I will see at TIFF, but I know what I will hope to see. I just never get to every film on my list. Or even half the films. The lines may be too long, or the times may conflict, or I may run into a friend from London or Paris or Rome and decide to catch up.

But every year, I resolve to see as many films as I can. Here is my alphabetically-ordered TIFF list, with comments extracted from the TIFF program guide, and a few trailers along the way. If you’re going to TIFF, please let me know what’s on your list, and maybe I’ll run into you outside the Bell Lightbox.

AMAZING GRACE

I’m a sucker for music documentaries,and I loved Sydney Pollock’s work.

The late director Sydney Pollack’s behind-the-scenes documentary about the recording of Aretha Franklin’s best-selling album Amazing Grace finally sees the light of day more than four decades after the original footage was shot.

In January 1972, Aretha Franklin gave two days of gospel performances at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles, recording what would become her bestselling album, Amazing Grace. The sessions were captured by a film crew led by Sydney Pollack, but the footage wound up shelved in a vault and has remained one of the lost cinematic treasures of twentieth-century music.

ANOMALISA

This film first caught my attention as a Kickstarter campaign. Now it’s ready, and it has a great and strange title. Charlie Kaufman, the celebrated screenwriter of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation and director of Synecdoche, New York, and Duke Johnson venture into the world of stop-motion animation with this fable about a motivational speaker seeking to transcend his monotonous existence.

HARDCORE

How much fun will this be? A cybernetic super-soldier kicks, punches and parkours his way across Russia to save his wife from a psychotic paramilitary psychic bent on world domination, in this non-stop, white-knuckle, crackerjack thrill ride.

HEART OF A DOG

Renowned multidisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson returns with this lyrical and powerfully personal essay film that reflects on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother, her beloved dog, and such diverse subjects as family memories, surveillance, and Buddhist teachings.

HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT

True cinema history. Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, James Gray, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and others discuss the importance of the epochal book that transcribed the week-long 1962 interview between Alfred Hitchcock and French New Wave luminary François Truffaut.

In 1962, François Truffaut conducted a week-long interview with Alfred Hitchcock, going through the master’s career film by film. The resulting book, Hitchcock/Truffaut, remains one of the most influential cinema publications ever written. It was a project of lasting importance for Truffaut: seventeen years after the book’s first publication in 1967 and just before his own untimely death, he went back and prepared an updated edition. This documentary deepens the legacy of the project, bringing in contemporary directors to discuss the galvanizing effects of both Truffaut’s book and Hitchcock’s films.

JANIS: LITTLE GIRL BLUE

I was entranced with the Amy Winehouse documentary, and I can’t wait to see this one. Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Amy Berg (Deliver Us from Evil) delves into the life of late rock legend Janis Joplin.

OUR BRAND IS CRISIS

Directed by the ever-intriguing David Gordon Green (who shot a video for my upcoming filmmakers’ resources project, being launched soon), this movie features Academy Award winners Sandra Bullock and Billy Bob Thornton in a story inspired by true events, in which rival American political strategists work to fix a Bolivian presidential election.

Our Brand Is Crisis would be cause for cynicism if it weren’t so stubbornly hopeful — and so entertaining. This wry drama, telling the fact-based story of American strategists hired to bolster an unpopular Bolivian presidential candidate, encapsulates the ethical chasms of twenty-first-century electioneering.

PARCHED

In a rural Indian village, four ordinary women begin to throw off the traditions that hold them in servitude, in this inspirational drama from director Leena Yadav.

This year has seen a cultural shift that puts more women at the active centre of Indian films. At the vanguard of this trend stands Parched, in which director Leena Yadav turns her lens on a group of ordinary women who, like the desert lands they inhabit, thirst for more than what life has given them. The film is lensed by Academy Award-winner Russel Carpenter, a visual artist of the first order, who also shot a video for my soon-to-be-launch resources project.

RETURN OF THE ATOM

This incisive and often savagely funny documentary chronicles the black comedy of errors that transpired when a remote Finnish island was selected as the site of the first new nuclear power plant in the West following the Chernobyl disaster.

Filmed over the course of more than a decade, this vital new documentary by Mika Taanila and Jussi Eerola examines the now-notorious construction of a nuclear power plant on the remote Finnish island of Olkiluoto.

SPEAR

We haven’t seen a great, cinematic exploration of autochthonous Australian world in a long time, and I’m looking forward to this one. In Spear, a young man reconciles ancient tradition with the modern, urban world in this debut feature from Stephen Page, artistic director of Australia’s renowned Bangarra Dance Theatre.

SPOTLIGHT

Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Michael Keaton star in this true story about a team of Boston Globe reporters who uncovered a massive scandal of child abuse and cover-ups within the local Catholic Church.

An urgent procedural concerning one of the most painful scandals in recent memory, the latest from writer-director Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent, The Visitor) tells the true story of how the Boston Globe revealed the Catholic Church’s cover-up of widespread child molestation within the Massachusetts priesthood.

THE ASSASSIN

A beautiful assassin (Shu Qi) is sent to kill the powerful lord who was once her betrothed, in this sumptuous martial-arts epic from Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien (Flight of the Red Balloon).

“Exquisite,” “astonishing,” and “masterful” are only some of the superlatives one could apply to The Assassin, a work so magnificently accomplished that it restores one’s faith in the power of filmmaking.

THE LOBSTER

If there were an Academy award for best premise, The Lobster would take home the statuette. Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz and John C. Reilly star in the deliciously bizarre new film from Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, ALPS), about a curious hotel where the residents are charged with finding a new mate within 45 days — under penalty of being transformed into animals should they fail.

Winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes, the new film from Lanthimos is another journey into one of his singular universes.

TRUMBO

The Red Scare and blacklist are a black mark on America’s history, and one that has relevance and resonance today. In this film, Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) stars as the famous screenwriter and Hollywood blacklist victim Dalton Trumbo, in this engrossing biopic co-starring Helen Mirren, Elle Fanning, Diane Lane and John Goodman.

A fascinating portrait of one of the most emblematic figures of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Trumbo stars Cranston as the prolific screenwriter who paid a terrible price for his political convictions.

VICTORIA

I was hooked the moment I saw the trailer: Victoria looks like a cross between Run, Lola, Run and Birdman: It is a 140-minte action thriller all composed in a single, seemingly continuous take. A beautiful young Spanish nightclubber in Berlin becomes wheelwoman for a quartet of bank robbers, in this stunning heist thriller shot in a single extended take.

WHERE TO INVADE NEXT

You may not love Michael Moore, but he is always entertaining… and no one makes political documentaries like he does. Academy Award-winning director Michael Moore returns with what may be his most provocative and hilarious film yet: Moore tells the Pentagon to “stand down” — he will do the invading for America from now on.

YOUTH

Two old friends (Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel) reflect on their past, present, and the beauty and absurdity of the world during a vacation in the Swiss Alps, in the lovely and heart-warming new film from Academy Award winner Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty).

Top image from Parched, directed by Leenz Yadav, courtesy Toronto International Film Festival.

The Distribution Equation

Originally published in Cultural Weekly on April 22, 2015.

Congratulations! You just finished your movie, which puts you at the edge of the winner’s circle—lots of people start movies and are never able to bring them out of post-production to the light of day. You finished yours.

You made it micro-budget, for $400,000, and it’s awesome, or so your friends tell you. Your investors are happy, but also nervous: Will they get their money back?

Let’s say your friends are right, and your movie is awesome. You even manage to go further, and get your film into a festival, maybe Tribeca. Grateful festival audiences will see it, and distributors, too. Because that’s what you need, distribution.

Distribution is the fulcrum of the financial equation, because without distribution audiences cannot see your movie and investors have no hope of financial return. This is where most independent films fall down: they do not have a distribution plan before they start production. Hence they are vulnerable. Of all the feature-length films that are completed each year in the US, fewer than 10% actually get any form of distribution. Ninety percent or more repose uselessly on hard drives, gathering dust in someone’s garage.

You don’t want your film to be among the 90%. Your investors certainly don’t want that. How do you solve the problem?

In the first place, you need to make a good movie, and I mean really good—a film that works for its genre, delivers for its audience, is excellent in its execution and boasts a brilliant cast. Whether you cast known or unknown actors, they’ve got to be great.

Let’s go to the next step and assume your movie really is good, but you enter the festival with no distribution set. At this point, there are two possible outcomes: either a distributor will want your movie and offer you a deal, or not.

If it does happen, you may feel as though you have won the lottery. In one sense you have, in terms of an opportunity to be distributed by a legit company. But your investors likely will not be pleased. Unless your film sparks massive attention, which in turn attracts the interest of more than one distributor, hence fueling a bidding war, you will be offered pennies on the dollar.

As evidence of this, you can look at the films that played this January at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. Even now, deals are still being discussed, and most of the films in the festival will be picked up for distribution. But very few will have had the chance to raise their sales price with a bidding war; most will sell for $100,000 or far less.

That is not a good financial outcome. However, if you did not pre-plan your distribution strategy, pre-plan it even before you started shooting, this is the situation you will be faced with.

Is there another possible outcome, a way to improve your side of the distribution equation?

There is. Today, wise filmmakers and their investors are planning and budgeting for a distribution strategy from the moment of their first fund-raise. For a low-budget movie, they raise an additional $300,000-$500,000 and keep it in the bank, so they can cause distribution to happen if the perfect distribution company does not make the right offer.

Let’s take a look at two scenarios to see how this might play out.

Scenario 1: Traditional Distribution

You made your movie and also have a $500,000 war chest for marketing and distribution. If distributors see your movie, love it, and offer you a fair price, you can take it.

At that moment, though, you have terrific bargaining leverage. You don’t need the distribution deal because you have the resources to do it yourself. Of course you want the deal, because a legit distribution company is in the distribution business and will do a far better job of distribution in most cases than you will—it is their métier, after all.

But now you have leverage. Either you can take that $500,000 marketing war-chest and give it back to your investors; your investors will be happy. Or you can strike a more aggressive deal with the distribution company, offering to co-finance the marketing spend. Some distribution companies won’t let you do that—they will want to keep full control over marketing and the opacity of its accounting. On the other hand, some will let you co-venture P&A, and they’ll admire your foresight. Depending on how much marketing money you actually have to co-invest with the distributor, you can potentially drive the standard distribution fee of 30% down to about 15%. That will make your investors delighted.

Let’s run some numbers.

When distribution companies offer to buy your movie, what they are really doing is giving you cash as an advance against potential future earnings. Let’s say you get an offer of $1 million for your $1 million movie. Of course you will take it, because now your investors will come close to breaking even. You’ll also be offered 50% of the proceeds after distribution fees and expenses are recouped by the distribution company; the company will keep the other 50%. Will you ever see more money than your initial advance? Not likely.

The amount that cinemas keep, versus the amount that goes back to the distribution company, is called the “settlement rate.” The settlement rate averages 42%, which means that the cinema keeps 58% of every ticket sold, and the distributor gets 42%. But that is the average across all movies, including studio movies. In the indie world, the settlement rate is far less, sometimes dropping as low at 20% for documentaries.

Let’s say your settlement rate is 40%. After the distributor gets its share (40% of the tickets sold), the distributor will charge its fee (typically 30%) and then subtract the cost of advertising, marketing and publicity, a number that can be surprisingly high, even in the independent landscape. If the box office is good, the distributor will keep spending marketing money to chase a higher box office return, and the net result will be that theatrical run will lose money.

Enter home entertainment sales, the big basket that includes cable, VOD, SVOD, Amazon, iTunes and the like. The average settlement rate here is higher—70% will go back to the distributor, then the distributor will still charge its 30% fee off the top, plus subtract additional expenses.

As you’re about to discover, it is good to be in the distribution business, and not so good to be in the movie making or movie financing business. Here’s the math:

Let’s assume your movie will make $1 million at the theatrical box office, and an additional $1 million in home entertainment. 215 movies made at least this much money in 2014.

If you are working with a traditional distributor, the $1 million box office revenue will bring back $400,000 to the distributor, because of the 40% settlement rate. The distributor will take its 30% distribution fee, leaving $280,000. Marketing expenses will probably have been $750,000, so that means the film is at a net loss of $470,000.

Home entertainment could begin after, during, or before the theatrical run. Assuming an additional $1 million in home entertainment revenue, and a 70% settlement rate, $700,000 will come back to the distributor. The distributor will take its 30% fee, leaving $490,000. The distributor probably spent an additional $100,000 in home entertainment marketing, so the film is now at a net loss of $80,000.

You and your investors will not get anything more than the initial advance, whatever that was. Note that although the film is showing a loss, the distributor will still have made $330,000 in its distribution fees.

If you had access to your marketing investment war-chest, you could have co-ventured the P&A spend with your distributor, with each of you paying for half of the total $850,000 marketing spend (or $425,000 apiece). Now, in addition to getting that money back, you could have been able to shave the distribution fee to 15%, which means your investors would have been able to get back an additional $165,000.

Will your investors make a profit? It all depends on the advance you got from the distributor in the first place. If the advance was only $100,000, and your movie cost $400,000, your investors will be in a losing position.

Scenario 2: Free Range Distribution

However, let’s say you choose to be responsible for distribution yourself. Now you will work harder, because you will have executive responsibility for keeping everything on track, even though you will hire top-caliber people to handle distribution for you. But you will spend less. The settlement rate will be the same, but the distribution fee will be less (distribution professionals work for a percentage) and you will keep far more money.

You would play out this scenario if you don’t get a distribution offer or you don’t get one that’s financially exciting. Now you can take your marketing war-chest of $500,000 and guarantee distribution by hiring one of the stronger companies that can book theatres, handle marketing and publicity, and make VOD, SVOD and cable deals. In this case, because you are the “client,” you will have full transparency into costs and spends, and distribution expenses will be far lower.

This financial scenario can be even better. Given the same financials, your P&A cost will be less— likely $500,000 all-in, for home entertainment and theatrical marketing, and also including the for-hire distribution professional’s upfront fee.

Why will your marketing expense be less? Because free range distributors do things more grassroots, and have cleverer ways of using their resources.

The total revenue will be the same, $1.1 million ($400,000 from theatrical and $700,000 from home entertainment). Assuming you now pay the professionals you hired 10% of the generated revenue, you will spend $110,000 in additional distribution fees, leaving you with $990,000. Now let’s subtract the marketing expenses of $500,000: you’ll end up with $490,000.

As you can see, that is a far better financial outcome. Your movie would be in profits.

I must end with a bunch of disclaimers. There is no regular ratio anymore for theatrical-to-home entertainment revenue in the indie sector, so any film’s specific performance will vary widely. I’ve simplified a complex process for this article, and there are other factors to take into account, such as international revenue, but it is probably safe not to include it, as American independent films don’t traditionally make that much money overseas. Finally, of the 693 films released last year, only 215 of them made more than $1 million at the theatrical box office, so the movie business is as risky as ever and financial success is no sure thing. Which means, again, your movie needs to be exceptional, with a clearly-defined and big enough audience before you start making it.

All the more reason, therefore, to build distribution costs into your business model from the beginning. Without them, you and your investors stand even less of a chance of being in the winner’s circle.

My thanks to Glen Reynolds and Sebastian Twardosz at Circus Road Films for their expertise and checking my numbers and formulas.

Top image from the self-distributed film ‘Particle Fever.’

What I Loved About the Oscars

Originally published in Cultural Weekly on February 25, 2015. 

The Oscars are the best and the worst of television — they are appointment viewing worldwide, yet everyone hacks them to pieces as the show plays on.

I thought the 87th Academy Awards was a good event: producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron struck the right balance of honor and irreverence, and Neil Patrick Harris made his hosting duties look effortless. Not every line zinged, but it never does, and there were enough buoyant moments to keep the evening afloat.

Indies Rule

The Oscars were yet another moment to applaud independent cinema, as the indies swept every major award category. (For a list of all the winners, with indie movies highlighted, see below.)

The studios are not creatively bankrupt. They can still make great movies, and execute scale in a way no one else can. Guardians of the Galaxy and Interstellar, two films from 2014 that represent unique and unconventional creative choices, albeit in vastly different ways, are only possible with massive studio budgets and operations supporting them.

Yet the demarcation between studio films and independent films has never been clearer. Studios make gigantic movies with known brands, with a brand being a franchise, like the Divergent novels or 50 Shades of Grey, a famous director, like Christopher Nolan, or comic book heroes from the DC or Marvel universes.

Indie movies are more personal and do not need to achieve global box office success to make back their investment. This is true even as the average budget of independent movies has grown, thanks to smart, entrepreneurial new financiers willing to take risks on creative vision.

The ratings for the 87th Academy Awards were down 16% from the year before, owing largely to the fact that fewer people in America saw the movies that were nominated and won — because, again, most of them were indies. So while the Academy is still one of the oldest, whitest, most male organizations around, and has a big blind spot when it comes to race, Academy voters do validate the quality of independent cinema over routine studio fare.

It’s further demonstration that there is no relationship, positive or negative, between commercial viability and artistic accomplishment.

Highlights and an Internationale

What else did I love?

The Oscars were also a celebration of the international presence of cinema, with Mexican and UK citizens grabbing gold in abundance. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s shout-out to his Mexican countrymen, on both sides of the border, was as welcome a wake-up call as Patricia Arquette’s demand for equal rights for women in America.

Julianne Moore finally won. She is the bravest actress I know, and her honest, fearless portrayals of characters others would shun earns my continuing admiration.

“Heil fucking Hitler”” “Heil fucking Hitler!” Yep, they said the F word twice in The Imitation Game clip, showing once again that The Weinstein Company has no truck with parochialism… and that the Academy didn’t prescreen those clips carefully. Thank God. Which is in contrast  with bleeping out the “God” in “God damn!” coming from JK Simmons’ mouth in the Whiplash clip.

Paweł Pawlikowski, the director of Ida, who demonstrated how to keep the orchestra from playing you off: Just keep talking. The orchestra relented.

Now we know Common’s and John Legend’s real names.

Lady Gaga won’t become the next Barbra Streisand… she will become the next Bette Midler.

John Travolta owning it.

Jessica Chastain calling out “Chiiiiivo!” with sweet affection; that’s cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki ‘s nickname. Every single one of the nominated cinematographers is a personal hero of mine.

More people from technical areas and executive management in the In Memoriam segment, and deservedly so.

What didn’t I love?

Not enough acclaim for Boyhood, which will stand as a landmark cinematic achievement for decades.

The Grand Budapest Hotel was still my favorite film of the year — it is 100 minutes of pure cinema joy. It would have been my pick for Best Picture… but overall, the awards this year were well distributed and honored exceptional people and movies.

 

Here is the full list of winners and nominees, in the order the Oscars were presented, with independent film winners in GREEN.

Best supporting actor

WINNER: JK Simmons for Whiplash
Robert Duvall for The Judge
Ethan Hawke for Boyhood
Edward Norton for Birdman
Mark Ruffalo for Foxcatcher

Achievement in costume design

WINNER: The Grand Budapest Hotel – Milena Canonero
Inherent Vice – Mark Bridges
Into the Woods – Colleen Atwood
Maleficent – Anna B Sheppard
Mr Turner – Jacqueline Durran

Achievement in makeup and hairstyling

WINNER: The Grand Budapest Hotel – Frances Hannon, Mark Coulier
Foxcatcher – Bill Corso, Dennis Liddiard
Guardians of the Galaxy – Elizabeth Yianni-Georgiou, David White

Best foreign-language film

WINNER: Ida – Paweł Pawlikowski
Tangerines – Zaza Urushadze
Leviathan – Andrey Zvyagintsev
Wild Tales – Damián Szifrón
Timbuktu – Abderrahmane Sissako

Best live-action short film

WINNER: The Phone Call – Mat Kirkby, James Lucas
Aya – Oded Binnun, Mihal Brezis
Boogaloo and Graham – Michael Lennox, Ronan Blaney
Butter Lamp – Wei Hu, Julien Féret
Parvaneh – Talkhon Hamzavi, Stefan Eichenberger

Best documentary short subject

WINNER: Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1 – Ellen Goosenberg Kent, Dana Perry
Joanna – Aneta Kopacz
Our Curse – Tomasz Sliwinski, Maciej Slesicki
The Reaper – Gabriel Serra
White Earth – Christian Jensen

Achievement in sound mixing

WINNER: Whiplash – Craig Mann, Ben Wilkins, Thomas Curley
American Sniper – John T Reitz, Gregg Rudloff, Walt Martin
Birdman – Jon Taylor, Frank A. Montaño, Thomas Varga
Interstellar – Gary Rizzo, Gregg Landaker, Mark Weingarten
Unbroken – Jon Taylor, Frank A. Montaño, David Lee

Achievement in sound editing

WINNER: American Sniper – Alan Robert Murray, Bub Asman
Birdman – Aaron Glascock, Martín Hernández
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies – Brent Burge, Jason Canovas
Interstellar – Richard King
Unbroken – Becky Sullivan, Andrew DeCristofaro

Best supporting actress

WINNER: Patricia Arquette for Boyhood
Laura Dern for Wild
Keira Knightley for The Imitation Game
Emma Stone for Birdman
Meryl Streep for Into the Woods

Achievement in visual effects

WINNER: Interstellar – Paul J Franklin, Andrew Lockley, Ian Hunter, Scott R Fisher
Captain America: The Winter Soldier – Dan Deleeuw, Russell Earl, Bryan Grill, Daniel Sudick
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes – Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon, Daniel Barrett, Erik Winquist
Guardians of the Galaxy – Stephane Ceretti, Nicolas Aithadi, Jonathan Fawkner, Paul Corbould
X-Men: Days of Future Past – Richard Stammers, Lou Pecora, Tim Crosbie, Cameron Waldbauer

Best animated short film

WINNER: Feast – Patrick Osborne, Kristina Reed
The Bigger Picture – Daisy Jacobs, Chris Hees
The Dam Keeper – Robert Kondo, Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi
Me and My Moulton – Torill Kove
A Single Life – Joris Oprins

Best animated feature film

WINNER: Big Hero 6
The Boxtrolls
How to Train Your Dragon 2
Song of the Sea
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

Best production design

WINNER: The Grand Budapest Hotel: Adam Stockhausen, Anna Pinnock
The Imitation Game: Maria Djurkovic, Tatiana Macdonald
Interstellar: Nathan Crowley, Gary Fettis
Into the Woods: Dennis Gassner, Anna Pinnock
Mr Turner: Suzie Davies, Charlotte Watts

Achievement in cinematography

WINNER: Birdman: Emmanuel Lubezki
The Grand Budapest Hotel: Robert D Yeoman
Ida: Lukasz Zal, Ryszard Lenczewski
Mr Turner: Dick Pope
Unbroken: Roger Deakins

Achievement in film editing

WINNER: Whiplash – Tom Cross
Boyhood – Sandra Adair
The Imitation Game – William Goldenberg
The Grand Budapest Hotel – Barney Pilling
American Sniper – Joel Cox, Gary Roach

Best documentary feature

WINNER: Citizenfour – Laura Poitras, Mathilde Bonnefoy, Dirk Wilutzky
Finding Vivian Maier – John Maloof, Charlie Siskel
Last Days in Vietnam – Rory Kennedy, Keven McAlester
The Salt of the Earth – Wim Wenders, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, David Rosier
Virunga – Orlando von Einsiedel, Joanna Natasegara

Best original song

WINNER: Glory from Selma – Lonnie Lynn (Common), John Stephens (John Legend)
The Lego Movie – Shawn Patterson (Everything Is Awesome)
Beyond the Lights – Diane Warren (Grateful)
Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me – Glen Campbell, Julian Raymond (I’m Not Gonna Miss You)
Begin Again – Gregg Alexander, Danielle Brisebois (Lost Stars)

Best original score

WINNER: Alexandre Desplat – The Grand Budapest Hotel
Alexandre Desplat – The Imitation Game
Hans Zimmer – Interstellar
Jóhann Jóhannsson– The Theory of Everything
Gary Yershon – Mr Turner

Original screenplay

WINNER: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo – Birdman
Richard Linklater – Boyhood
E Max Frye, Dan Futterman – Foxcatcher
Wes Anderson, Hugo Guinness – The Grand Budapest Hotel
Dan Gilroy – Nightcrawler

Adapted screenplay

WINNER: Graham Moore – The Imitation Game
Jason Hall – American Sniper
Paul Thomas Anderson – Inherent Vice
Anthony McCarten – The Theory of Everything
Damien Chazelle – Whiplash

Best director

WINNER: Alejandro González Iñárritu for Birdman
Richard Linklater for Boyhood
Bennett Miller for Foxcatcher
Wes Anderson for The Grand Budapest Hotel
Morten Tyldum for The Imitation Game

Best actor

WINNER: Eddie Redmayne for The Theory of Everything

Steve Carell for Foxcatcher
Benedict Cumberbatch for The Imitation Game
Bradley Cooper for American Sniper
Michael Keaton for Birdman

Best actress

WINNER: Julianne Moore for Still Alice
Marion Cotillard for Two Days, One Night
Felicity Jones for The Theory of Everything
Rosamund Pike for Gone Girl
Reese Witherspoon for Wild

Best picture

WINNER: Birdman
American Sniper
Boyhood
The Imitation Game
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Selma
The Theory of Everything
Whiplash

Free Range Distribution It’s Viable for Sundance and Slamdance Films

Originally published in Cultural Weekly on January 21, 2015

Inside Track for Independent Filmmakers, my new book that gives step-by-step instructions for filmmakers to get their movies made and seen, shares important tips on the newest distribution frontier. Call it Free Range Distribution, which captures the energy and Wild West experience you’ll find here. (It’s a term I learned from my friends at Seed & Spark, an organization that supports and facilitates independent filmmaking.)

If you’re a filmmaker with a film at Sundance or Slamdance, or if you want to be, you may find that Free Range Distribution is a viable option for getting your work in front of your audience. If you’re in the audience, and you want to see films that aren’t “big” enough for traditional distribution, you may find that Free Range Distribution is the best hope you’ll have of encountering movies that fit your taste.

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What is Free Range Distribution?

Free Range Distribution platforms are websites that make it possible for filmmakers to sell or rent their movies. In a digital setting, a “sale” can be defined as a download that the customer can keep forever, and a “rental” is a streaming or viewing opportunity that expires within a certain period of time, usually 24 to 72 hours. Sale prices are typically higher than rental prices.

These distribution platforms go well beyond the monetization strategies of more basic sites like YouTube, where interaction is limited to advertising or requesting a donation. Instead, these platforms allow you to have a direct, transactional relationship with individual audience members.

Some Free Range Distribution sites are open to everyone, such as Vimeo, which allows you to upload and sell your movie as long as you subscribe to its Pro service. Other ones are more selective and require a submissions and acceptance process. I prefer these selective platforms because there are fewer movies on them, and their curation procedure establishes a certain level of quality. At the same time, they charge more for their services, through either a setup fee or a share of revenue.

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If you’re a filmmaker interested in exploring the Free Range Distribution option, you need to do your homework. There are many Free Range Distribution platforms available (some are listed in the Essential Resources section of my book), and because this is an emerging and fluid marketplace, their terms and offerings change frequently. Look for a platform that has been successful for films similar to yours and that has the features most important to you.

If you select a platform that has a submissions procedure, study it carefully and make sure you have all your materials in order. Often, staff members are available by email or phone to help guide you through the process, and to answer questions as you determine if this is the right platform for you.

It’s a good idea to be in touch with your potential Free Range distributors early on in your filmmaking journey, even before your movie is finished. You’ll learn what is possible and what is not, and it will be just one more step in planning your release strategy well before you premiere your film—which is exactly what the big studios do.

A frame from the Indiegogo campaign for 'Across the Sea,' a first feature directed by Esra Saydam and Nisan Dag. screening at Slamdance 2015

A frame from the Indiegogo campaign for ‘Across the Sea,’ a first feature directed by Esra Saydam and Nisan Dag. screening at Slamdance 2015

However, no matter which Free Range Distribution platform you choose, be prepared: you must be your own marketing department. For any creative entrepreneur, in any field, this job requirement is the most important and the most uncomfortable.

Let’s look at discomfort and importance.

For creative people, those of us who work primarily alone in coffee shops or studios, it is truly difficult to step into the public sphere and trumpet their own stuff. This is true for filmmakers as well, even though there’s a lot of social activity involved in on-set camaraderie. When your movie’s done, you’ll probably feel the film will speak for itself.

Newsflash: it won’t. It’s your job to speak up for it. You must demonstrate to the world how important your film is, and you do this by talking about it, in every medium, at every chance you get.

If you choose Free Range Distribution, marketing is 100% a requirement, and you must build out and execute your own marketing plan. Movie tickets—or downloads—are not going to sell themselves. You must bring the audience to your film, hold their hands, entice and encourage them, and, finally, get their money.

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How do you prepare yourself? Fortunately, marketing is not magic; it simply requires that you plan for it, and that you have a clear understanding of your film. You need to:

  • Know what your film is about.
  • Know who your audience is with great specificity. Your film is not “for everybody.” By definition, each independent movie has a clear-cut, distinct niche audience, not a general demographic.
  • Know the size and duration of your social media following (and the social media following of your actors and creative team). You need to build it up over the year you are making your movie, so they are waiting for you on the day you release.
  • If you did a crowdfunding campaign, which is a good idea as an audience-engagement tool, maintain a strong relationship with the contributors (and the people who peeked but did not contribute), so you are ready to turn them into your core advocates.

If you and your team take these steps, you’ll be well on your way.

In case you didn’t notice, you have just become the Chief Marketing Officer of your very own film company! That, along with persistence, talent, passion and big ideas, is one of the essential attributes of successful independent filmmakers today.

Buy Inside Track for Independent Filmmakers here.

This article is adapted from Inside Track for Independent Filmmakers by Adam Leipzig. Copyright © 2015 by Bedford/St. Martin’s. Used with permission of the publisher.

Top image: ‘Western’ / U.S.A., Mexico (Directors: Bill Ross, Turner Ross), screens in the Sundance 2015 U.S. Documentary Competition. Photo courtesy Sundance Institute.