Jon Reiss Interview

Jon Reiss has become one of the main voices on DIY and alternative distribution (along with Ted Hope). He’s a filmmaker and the author of the book Think Outside the Box Office, an invaluable resource for anyone who’s made or (more preferably) is thinking about making a film.

In the podcast we talk about different distribution options, alternative screening venues, building an audience, the closing of B-Side Entertainment, Tribeca’s VOD announcement, and more.

Check out Jon’s blog at www.jonreiss.com/blog

And get the book at www.thinkoutsidetheboxoffice.com

If you happen to be in Miami on Saturday, Jon will be on a panel on DIY Distribution that’s part of the Miami International Film Festival. More info here.

Remember to subscribe in iTunes.

(Direct M4A File)

This podcast episode has a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Basically you can share and reuse this episode however you like, but all I ask in return is that you also share it and you Coffee and Celluloid by linking back to this page.

Share This!

45365 is a documentary that was at Full Frame but I never got a chance to watch it. This week it’s been on Hulu for free, which I’m very excited about (but today is the last day so watch it now). But for the film itself, I thought it was great. It’s very Cinema Verite, so I can understand why some people didn’t like it. There’s no narration, no formal interviews; just an amazing portrait capturing an entire small town (45365 is the zip code of Sydney, OH).

Now for the business side of the film being on Hulu. As I said, this makes me very excited. SnagFilms, a video sharing site designed soley for documentaries, has their watermark on the whole film. I’m glad to see they’re growing, and I’m also glad to see they’ve joined with Hulu. I watched a film on SnagFilms once and their player wanted to make me gouge my eyes out, it was the worst thing ever. The ads would play and then send you to a different point in the movie, and then you couldn’t go back to where you were without watching more ads. So painful. I hope they’ve done some serious changes to it. But at least this is on Hulu, which on the opposite end I think is one of the best online players, even better than Netflix.

So I’m curious as to what the distribution deal is, because it was on Hulu for a week. SnagFilms says it’s part of a series to watch a film a week for free before it goes to TV of Theater (I’m guessing TV). I’m glad Hulu has been embracing documentaries (Crawford premiered on Hulu a few months ago). 45365 has been in the top banner all week. It’s gotten hundreds of comments and I’m sure thousands of views. This is a film that probably wouldn’t have worked too well in a theater, but now it’s online for free and ad supported (most of the ads were for a Honda documentary series) and tons of people are seeing it who probably would have never heard of it had it not been for SnagFilms, Hulu, and of course this new-fangled internet distribution model.

Share This!

I’m in Sarasota right now, on what I believe is my first paying video job. It’s operating a HI-POD, basically a 30 foot pole with a camera on top, for filming a soccer tournament. I’ve seen more soccer matches in that past two days than I’ve seen in my life, and there’s still two more to go.

The weather hasn’t been too friendly. Friday we were shut down due to lightning (because, you know, with a 30 foot pole you kind of turn into a lightning rod), so we packed everything up, hung out under cover as the storm skated by without a drop falling on a field, and then went back out and resumed. About a half hour later I hear rain falling. I turn and see a wall of rain heading towards me, like something from a cartoon. It came, drenched us, then passed. Only in Florida.

In between the rain trying to make up its mind, I thought I was safe from the sun with the cloudy, moody weather.

Wrong. I got destroyed. I am so, so burnt. My shirt on Saturday was a little shorter than the one from Friday, so you could clearly see the line where I go from mild white to golden crispy. I lost count of all lame jokes I got, mainly from referees. However, the joke was on them when they came out to the field and one says, “Oh shoot, we forgot the balls.”

Plus the crazy, screaming coaches and fathers are bringing back suppressed memories from my embarrassing sports attempts in childhood. While the most they’ve done is yell at each other, filming a fight like this from an aerial view would mix things up a bit.

So while I’m here, baking and trying to get vegetarian lunches, a project from my documentary has gone viral. It’s a Typewriter program. Basically I came across an interesting quote from Will Self on how he liked the restrictions of a typewriter and the fear of knowing there was no going back – if you wanted to make a change you’d have to rewrite the whole thing.

So I had someone make a simple text editor that couldn’t delete or copy and paste.

Well, it only takes one mention from a big site to get things going, and that came from Lifehacker. It’s very exciting when something catches on and the idea of the program seems to have resonated with a lot of people, which is very cool.

And tonight I just saw I got a mention in The Guardian, however they wrongly attributed Will Self’s quote to me. While I do remember playing with my mom’s typewriter at work, I never used it for any real writing. Plus her’s actually had a backspace.

Next thing I’m hoping to go viral is an interview I did with Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. Here it is, please pass it on:

Share This!

I’m somewhat familiar with the world of advertising, though admittedly most of that knowledge comes from watching Mad Men. Either way I love advertising (well, advertising done well), so I was excited to see that Art & Copy was at Full Frame.

Art & Copy features some of the most influential art directors and copywriters behind some of the most famous ads of all time. These are the ads that have shaped pop culture – Apple’s 1984, Budweiser frogs, Nike’s ‘Just Do It.’

People scoff at advertising. Like, literally – when a factoid popped up in the film that said the average city dweller is exposed to 5000 ads a day, peopled scoffed. But advertising is what makes the entertainment system work; it’s what puts TV on the air and magazines on shelves. This isn’t really a surprise – publications are folding or downsizing all over the place because advertising revenue is down. This is even flooding over into online news media.

People want everything free and uninterrupted. I like free stuff (and I believe news should always be free), so I think giving 30 seconds of my attention is a fair trade off to watching The Daily Show online for free. It’s pretty simple – you don’t watch ads, advertisers stop spending money because no one’s watching them, and then studios don’t have money to make shows.

Of course part of this is to blame on advertisers. If all ads were great and entertaining, we’d be just as excited to watch the ads than the program, like the Super Bowl (though now that the Super Bowl ads are all online I just gained four hours one Sunday a year).

For every car dealership who puts their screaming kid in a commercial, or Billy Mays yelling at me about how my detergent sucks, there’s a fair balance of mediocre commercials as well as those few gems, and I’m okay with that. I’ll put up with it for good, free TV.

If you get one thing from Art & Copy it’s that advertising is hard and good ideas are rare. “Oh, it’s only 30 seconds, how hard is that?” Well, in that 30 seconds you need to cram a beginning, middle, end, send out your message, create a scene, create characters, emotionally connect with the audience and, oh, sell your shit. And after reading this paragraph, your time is up.

And for print ads, as you just read above 5000 ads are competing with each other a day. Talk about trying to stand out.

ART & COPY trailer from Baldwin& on Vimeo.

One very cool story in Art & Copy was the idea of bringing the Art Director and Copywriter into the same room (thus, Art & Copy). The Art Director is mainly responsible for the visuals while the Copywriter handles the copy, or text. Having the two work together is standard practice today, and you’d think that should just be common sense – they’re producing one final product, the visuals and text should work harmoniously together, but no, which is why a lot of old ads are sketches of happy family with big blocks of text under it. The revolutionary firm that did put the two together was new, scoffed at by the old, large firms (lots of scoffing), and, of course, they kicked ass (Think Small).

Art & Copy is on the festival circuit now. Catch it if you can.

Post script – found this behind the scenes footage from Apple’s 1984 commercial:

Art and Copy Still Copyright © 2009 The One Club for Art and Copy

Share This!

YouTube – NBS Nightly News with Ted Philips, March 11th 1970.

This. Is. Amazing. Marketing.

Who watches the Watchmen?

Share This!

The Cobra: Inside a Movie Marketer’s Playbook – The New Yorker

This article from The New Yorker is one of the best things on marketing I’ve ever read. Yes, it’s a bit long, but if you’re interested in the business side of movies it’s a must read.

The article follows the release of W. and it’s marketer Tim Palen as a narrative for the piece. It makes tangents, explaining the marketing of other movies (such as the Saw franchise), why bad movies are intentionally made, and movie marketing in general – all the way to how many times they want you to see a trailer of their movie on TV (15).

Below are some interesting clips, but do yourself a favor when you have some down time and read the whole thing.

Modern campaigns have three acts: a year or more before the film débuts, you introduce it with ninety-second teaser trailers and viral Internet “leaks” of gossip or early footage, in preparation for the main trailer, which appears four months before the release; five weeks before the film opens, you start saturating with a “flight” of thirty-second TV spots; and, at the end, you remind with fifteen-second spots, newspaper ads, and billboards. Studios typically spend about ten million dollars on the “basics” (cutting trailers and designing posters, conducting market research, flying the film’s talent to the junket and the première, and the première itself) and thirty million on the media buy. Between seventy and eighty per cent of that is spent on television advertising (enough so that viewers should see the ads an average of fifteen times), eight or nine per cent on Internet ads, and the remainder on newspaper and outdoor advertising. The hope is that a potential viewer will be prodded just enough to make him decide to see what all the fuss is about. It’s the “belt and suspenders and corset and parachute harness” approach.

*************

An unexpected corollary of the modern marketing-and-distribution model is that films no longer have time to find their audience; that audience has to be identified and solicited well in advance. Marketers segment the audience in a variety of ways, but the most common form of partition is the four quadrants: men under twenty-five; older men; women under twenty-five; older women. A studio rarely makes a film that it doesn’t expect will succeed with at least two quadrants, and a film’s budget is usually directly related to the number of quadrants it is anticipated to reach. The most expensive tent-pole movies, such as the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, are aimed at all four quadrants.

The collective wisdom is that young males like explosions, blood, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, “you’re so gay” banter, and sex—but not romance. Young women like friendship, pop music, fashion, sarcasm, sensitive boys who think with their hearts, and romance—but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it). They go to horror films as much as young men, but they hate gore; you lure them by having the ingénue take her time walking down the dark hall.

Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies: they are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit. They enjoy seeing an older woman having her pick of men; they hate seeing a child in danger. Particularly once they reach thirty, these women are the most “review-sensitive”: a chorus of critical praise for a movie aimed at older women can increase the opening weekend’s gross by five million dollars. In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them.

Older men like darker films, classic genres such as Westerns and war movies, men protecting their homes, and men behaving like idiots. Older men are easy to please, particularly if a film stars Clint Eastwood and is about guys just like them, but they’re hard to motivate. “Guys only get off their couches twice a year, to go to ‘Wild Hogs’ or ‘3:10 to Yuma,’ ” the marketing consultant Terry Press says. “If all you have is older males, it’s time to take a pill.”

*************

Each maneuver and ad buy in Palen’s campaigns is detailed in a confidential playbook. For marketers, much of the science of marketing is determining which old movie your new movie is most like, so you can turn to that movie’s playbook as a rough guide. Much of the art of marketing is developing a campaign that reassures moviegoers that the new film is very similar to (or at least “from the director of”) another one they liked.

Share This!

Movie posters are the main visual representation you have to get someone to see your movie. Most are safe. Some, however, push beyond a simple advertisement to a work of art.

These are 20 posters that dare to be different, all from films released in the past year or so. Be inspired and enjoy.

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father

IMDb

Bottle Shock

Trailer | IMDb

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Trailer | IMDb

Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging

Trailer | IMDb

Burn After Reading

Trailer | IMDb

Back to Africa

IMDb

Blindness

Trailer | IMDb

The Air I Breathe

Trailer | IMDb

JCVD

Trailer | IMDb

Charlie Bartlett

Trailer | IMDb | [amazonify]B00175VSBC::text::::Amazon[/amazonify] | Netflix

Choke

Trailer | IMDb

What We Do Is Secret

Trailer | IMDb

The Dark Knight

Trailer | IMDb

Flow

Trailer | IMDb

A Girl Cut in Two

Trailer | IMDb

Goliath

Trailer | IMDb | Netflix

The Intervention

IMDb

Man on Wire

Trailer | IMDb

Shoot Down

Trailer | IMDb

Taxi to the Dark Side

Trailer | IMDb

Share This!

To continue my tail of un-hiring woes, we must first go back a few months to the first time I drove Geoffrey Gilmore around.

As I said in summation, driving Geoffrey around brought me a lot closer to Paul Cohen, an independent distributor¹ who is the business side of show business in one man.

I guess I did a good job with Geoffrey because Paul really seemed to like me. Over the next few months (the Geoffrey chauffeuring was back in February), we met and had coffee a few times and finally had a ‘thank you’ dinner.

Paul moved to Tallahassee not to leave the business but to move to a less expensive town, so he’s starting up a new distribution company in conjunction with the school to serve as a learning environment for the business side of filmmaking.

He asked if I wanted to intern and work on distributing and marketing real movies. How about ‘yes.’

So to skip a bit, and because we’re under non-disclosure agreements so I can’t talk about it much, there’s about eight of us interning, working in a separate building virally marketing the Germs biopic What We Do Is Secret.

You can see some of my handy work if you search for the What We Do Is Secret group on Facebook (over 400 members) as well as some write-ups on music blogs.

Oh yes, this internship also involves a trip to the Toronto Film Festival.

1. That means he buys films and releases them in theaters, on DVD, etc, with the idea being he makes more money back than the purchase price. ↩

Share This!

Imagine this – you stop by a big studio, maybe to try to get a few minutes with an exec to pitch your next idea. As you get back on the elevator to leave (with the no scheduled meeting), the door opens to reveal the Head of the Studio already riding down. “Great Zeus, this is it, this is where my career starts.”

So you get on, and before the doors can even close you go into your well rehearsed 30-second elevator pitch.

The Studio Head grins and nods to be polite, tells you to talk to his secretary (whom you just did), and leaves. No six figure deal, no let’s have lunch. Why? Because you were the same as every other schmuck that pitches to him 20 times a day.

We’re required to have an elevator pitch at Director’s Prep. We’re also supposed to have a 5-minute pitch, which I think is absolutely ridiculous. 5 minutes for a 7 minute film? You can see the teachers glaze over as they sit through it.

The elevator pitch is a little more reasonable, but I’m glad to finally see someone take a stand against it, namely Stephanie Palmer, a former Studio Exec and author of Good in a Room. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with her on tompeters.com:

Tom Peters has espoused the elevator pitch as one of the supporting columns of Wow Projects. The goal of the elevator pitch being, if you get into an elevator on the first floor with your boss and you’re trying to sell an idea, you want to sell it by the time you get to the 35th floor. You say the elevator pitch is a myth. Why is that?

SP: I think the term “elevator pitch” incorrectly implies that it’s appropriate to pitch in an elevator. Communicating quickly and concisely is important, but you should never pitch when you don’t have time to continue the conversation. A moment’s access with someone who doesn’t know you is not an opportunity. Your first interaction with someone sets the stage for the relationship to come. You shouldn’t start pitching your idea to someone before they know who you are enough to care about what you’re saying in the first place.

High-level buyers are pitched all the time. They know when they are hearing something that’s been repeated to dozens of other people. If you haven’t taken the time to build rapport and customize your pitch to that person’s specific needs, it’s a sign that you’re an amateur. Every buyer is unique, and your pitch should reflect that.

I think there’s three things to take here:

• Communicate quickly and concisely. I’m a fan of one sentence synopses. I think anything after that and you lose the person. Read Made to Stick (here’s a post on their blog on pitches).
• Use your first interaction to get to know the person. Find out who they are, what they like. The goal is to get to know them as a person, and find similarities between their likes and your project.
• Customize the pitch. If they like cars, heighten the race car subplot of your film. People buy what they like, so customize it and adapt it for their likes. You’ll also come off as more natural and less of an automaton.

Photo by Marco Wessel

Share This!

I like presentations. Let me correct that. I like good presentations. People seem to have finally woken up and realize that good presenting requires a good story (and no bullet points).

Presentation Zen, both the book and blog, utilize the visual power PowerPoint/Keynote provide to make presentations better.

Of course you don’t have to be a Venture Capitalist to pick up a few useful tips. Here’s what a filmmaker can get from Garr Reynolds’ insight:

Planning Analog (45)

“As wonderful as digital technolog is, I don’t think anything is as quick, easy, and immediate as a simple pad and pencil, and nothing gives me sapce to jot down ideas quite like a massive whiteboard.” (47)

As pretty as a nicely formatted Word Notebook outline, or bubbl.us mindmap looks, a pad of graph paper (I like to draw in the boxes during blocks) and a Sharpie are my outlining tools. Bottom line: plan with pen and paper, post-its, or whiteboards. Not software.

What’s your point? Why Does it matter? (62)

Dakara Nani? So What?

“It may be cool, but is it important to further your story, or is it included only because it seems impressive to you (but few others)?”

Elevator Test

“You run into an executive in an elevator. Or your meeting is cancelled and he needs you to describe your project as you walk to his car. Can you get your message across in 30-45 seconds.”

What Makes Ideas Stick? (76)

Kanso, Shizen, Shibumi (107)

Kanso (Simplicity)

Shizen (Naturalness)

“Graphic desingers show restraint by including only what is necessary to communicate the particular message for the audeince. Restraint is hard. Complication and elaboration are easy…and are common.”

Shibumi (Elegance)

Share This!