Adventures in Self-Releasing: Is There a Better Way?

by Jeffrey Goodman | Published April 3, 2009

Before I forget, we have just launched our trailer for The Last Lullaby. If interested, please take a look here.

Okay, now on to my thoughts for this week. Some people have questioned my model. Is it sustainable? Isn’t there a better way? I don’t know. Is there?

I know I’m having to get out there and speak a great deal about the movie. But, I go on indieWIRE and see that Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy), Lance Hammer (Ballast), Azazel Jacobs (Momma’s Man), David Gordon Green (Snow Angels) and now Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo) are all doing the same thing. And all of them are much more established than I am. So that at least tells me, in this current landscape, you can’t be an anti-social moviemaker.

You can no longer just make your movie and know that people will be there to see it. Like a politician running for office, you have to be out there, among the people, talking about your work.

Speaking of some of the movies above, I’m a little disheartened by the numbers of Ballast and Medicine for Melancholy. Here are two movies that, in my book, totally hit home runs. Both are critical darlings that gained acceptance into pretty much every top-tier festival. Yet, look at the numbers: Ballast couldn’t do over $100K in domestic box office and though Medicine for Melancholy is still in play and will probably cross the $100K threshold, in its nine weeks of release now it still hasn’t done so.

What do these two examples tell us?

First off, they depress me. If movies like this can’t be real financial successes, then I’m not sure what can be. I can tell you, at least for me, having critics champion my work and festivals recognize the quality of my movies are things I’m striving for in my career. Yet, to realize that even when these two things happen there’s no guarantee of financial success… it certainly makes me question some things.

So, does it tell us that festivals are no longer important?

I’m not sure. I personally think they’re still important. Without them, how do you convince people that your movie is good and worth their time? Also, festivals give us the opportunity for critics to see our work and to meet other moviemakers who are struggling with the exact same questions. Festivals are costly, time-consuming and often exhausting, but I still see their usefulness in this changing landscape.

Does it tell us that critics are no longer important?

Once again I’m not so sure. Nothing sells something more than third-party validation. I can go around until I’m blue in the face talking about my movie and how great it is, yet none of that will hold a candle to a reputable critic saying the same thing. Sure, there are too many critics nowadays and I’m not sure anyone in this overly crowded, noisy world has quite the import that Pauline Kael once had in the ‘70s. But a great review by J. Hoberman, Amy Taubin, Scott Foundas, Manohla Dargis, to name but a few, still carries a certain amount of weight.

It’s tough out there, folks. No doubt about it. Yet, personally, I still feel like I’m doing the best thing for my movie. But, please, if you have a better suggestion, let’s hear it.

After living in Los Angeles for seven years, Jeffrey Goodman returned to his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana to direct The Last Lullaby. Co-written by the creator of Road to Perdition, and starring Tom Sizemore and Sasha Alexander, The Last Lullaby was filmed entirely in and around Shreveport and financed by 48 local investors.

COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT

Comment by Timothy on 4/03/09 at 1:56 pm

I think critics are only important for movies people already know about. Look at trailers for blockbusters with all of the positive quotes by reviewers. Much more people see those than actually read full reviews, which I think are for a smaller and slightly more intellectual market. I don’t have the info to back this up, but I’m willing to bet that celebrities are the number one thing that sell movies. People see movies because an actor they like is in it. This is even true with indie film. Big stars do indie films for street cred, and those films usually make enough money back solely because of the actor. The quality doesn’t matter.

I think a good review for an indie film and good festival support for an indie film are good things, but more as a means of building your name, and associating it with quality. But not necessarily as a way to make money with a large audience. It’s more helpful in getting investors for your next go around because you have this portfolio building up.

There’s an extreme imbalance in making movies. They cost a lot more to make than they’ll likely return. Given that, I think your two options are to make it cheaper, or make it more marketable.

Indie films as a rule don’t sell and aren’t marketable to large audiences. Some make it, but the vast majority don’t.

Judging by the trailer, it doesn’t seem like a very mainstream film. A modern noir, that’s slow paced. People’s attention spans aren’t what they used to be, and your cast isn’t famous enough to bring people in on their merits alone. I don’t know if the trailer reflects the pacing of the movie, but that was one of the slowest paced trailers I’ve seen in a long time. And the modern film audience is used to lots of quick flashing images and bright colors and explosions.

I think of the movies you listed above, Snow Angels, had the best shot because it has Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell in it. It’s financial success, I would be willing to bet was mostly due to those names. The actually quality of the film is secondary and not necessarily up to them.

The two instances of purely independent films with no star power that became financial successes are “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Slumdog Millionare”, both of which had lots of money to pull from to market them because they got big distribution deals from studios, which is a result of their particular appeal.

In my personal opinion, it seems like you spent too much money making an unmarketable film and are trying to sell it via a grassroots type of model because nobody would buy it because it’s not marketable enough (i.e. the studios predicted what you’re finding out right now when they didn’t offer you any good deals for it), when I feel like the grassroots audience mostly probably won’t be that interested in this kind of movie. Grassroots equaling the lowest common denominator of film interest, meaning you have to have the most Hollywood of films for it to work well.

You have to sell specifically to the indie film crowd. That’s your only audience for this. They’re the only people that will care to see your movie. And in terms of making millions they’re a small crowd and you need to be screening at indie film theaters across the country to have a chance (along with your trailer with review clippings stamped on it posted on big trailer websites and indie film websites, which are different from indie filmmaking websites).

These days, the best tool for creating buzz about an indie film on a national level is the web and I don’t sense that you have enough presence there/here. This blog helps, but it’s also directed at indie filmmakers, not indie film watchers. This is for your comrades, not your audience. Having town hall meetings about your movie feels like aiming at the wrong audience too. Do viral web marketing and stuff. The indie crowd are people who enjoy discovering new things that aren’t force fed to them, so make it fun to discover your film, and more importantly make sure it’s a worthwhile discovery.

You need to be more realistic with yourself and more critical of your film. You started this blog with a list of films you’re modeling your distribution after, but you admit that what they’re doing doesn’t get the result you want....So then why are you doing it? Likewise, no studios offered you good enough deals or anything. But you’re pushing forward telling yourself your movie is appealing to a wide audience and will sell. It sounds like a classic case of denial.

And I want to reiterate that I do not want you to fail. But if it were me I would have tried to realize why my movie wasn’t selling and then get moving as fast as possible on my next film taking that information into account and hoping for a better result. It’s about growing and moving on. Everybody makes mistakes. And everybody’s first film is not supposed to make money.

Hollywood makes bombs all the time. It just happens that a bomb to them would be a success to us, but they balance it out and have another movie in the pipeline ready to go so that at some point they’ll have a movie that’s succesful enough to cover all of their recent failures. If they’re lucky they’ll have more successes than failures, but that’s not always the case. And it’s even lesser the case that they’ll have critical successes.

I think you should take your critical acclaim as a sign that you’ve got something worth developing in more films. I think you should take your financial failure as a sign that you should try and make something a little more marketable. Mix your talent with more universal appeal and you should be successful.

And obviously at this point, I think you should keep trugging forward with your local release since it’s so close and you’ve worked so hard on it. But if that doesn’t work out, I think you should look into just moving forward with your next film. Be wary too that in Shreveport, you’re probably just a big fish in a small pond. Success there could give you an inflated sense of the success of your film that isn’t accurate and could mislead you.

In the long run if you become an established director, then people will actually want to seek out Lullaby as your first film.

And I’ll end this by saying that’s just what I think. And that’s only what I’d be doing in your situation. If that means I’d be giving up on myself or something so be it, but I like making movies and I like getting better at it with each one, so I don’t see moving on to the next one as being bad in anyway.

Comment by Jeffrey Goodman on 4/04/09 at 8:15 am

Hi Timothy,

Thank you so much for your comments.

You make some excellent points, many of which I totally agree with.  However, I did want to mention a few things:

1.  This is very well said.  I wish I had said it:

“There’s an extreme imbalance in making movies. They cost a lot more to make than they’ll likely return. Given that, I think your two options are to make it cheaper, or make it more marketable.

Indie films as a rule don’t sell and aren’t marketable to large audiences. Some make it, but the vast majority don’t.”

2.  This sentence, unfortunately, is not true anymore:

“Big stars do indie films for street cred, and those films usually make enough money back solely because of the actor.”

Many indie films nowadays with A-list actors still don’t make their money back.  You mentioned SNOW ANGELS below.  That movie lost heaps of money.  And there have been so many similar examples in the last three or four years.

3.  Your comments about the trailer are apt.  It (and the movie) are a little more slowly-paced than your average multiplex fare.  I set out to make something that was a bit of a hybrid (artful enough for the indie audience while still being entertaining enough for people who only frequent the multiplexes.) Those are the kinds of movies I like.  And I’m hoping there is an audience for them.  That, obviously I’m still in the process of determining. 

4.  What are some of those big trailer and indie websites you mention?  I should definitely work on posting my trailer to them. 

5.  This sentence below is not entirely correct:

“You started this blog with a list of films you’re modeling your distribution after, but you admit that what they’re doing doesn’t get the result you want.”

The model I put together came from observing other movies for the last year to year and a half.  But none of those movies offered up the appropriate model for LULLABY.  So, I devised my own, the one that seemed to have the best shot at maybe working. 

6.  This sentence below is also not entirely correct:

“It sounds like a classic case of denial.”

From the get-go, I have said that this is a roll of the dice.  That I have no idea whether it will work out or not.  I’m not in denial.  Denial would be saying that it’s enough to walk away from this movie because the next time I’m going to encounter an entirely different landscape.  If I don’t take the time and try to figure out how to market this movie, I’m going to raise the money, make the next movie, and then suddenly find myself in the exact same predicament again.  I strongly believe that a moviemaker, in this day and age, that does not understand the distribution process, no matter how indie they think they are, is still a “dependent” moviemaker. 

7.  Lastly, this point is very well made:

“I would have tried to realize why my movie wasn’t selling”

There will be (and already is) a great deal of evaluating and accessing that I am doing, trying to determine how to slightly modify the movies I want to make and give them an easier shot at success.  However, I don’t feel that I have enough information yet (without really entrenching myself in the distribution process) to know what adjustments I need to make.

As always, Timothy, I totally appreciate your comments and hope that you will keep up the dialogue.

All the best,

Jeffrey

Comment by Timothy on 4/04/09 at 3:04 pm

I’m curious how long you imagine yourself going with “The Last Lullaby” before moving to a new project. You seem very relentless in trying to sell it and that’s admirable, but at what point if it keeps underperforming do you ditch it and move on. Would you keep this up for another year or two? After having done it for what I’m guessing is over a year already? Do you have an absolute deadline at which you will move on or is it not over until it’s over?

As far as indie movie sites would go. I would try and get some coverage and maybe an interview on aintitcoolnews.com and/or comingsoon.net. I’m not sure what the screening process is like, but I’d also first and foremost try and get my trailer on Apple Quicktime, which I think is the most popular trailer site on the web and nowadays also includes itunes circulation. And they have a lot of super low budget trailers on there so I don’t imagine it’d be too hard to get yours on there, but again, I don’t know what their specific criteria are (i.e. you may have to have some form of distribution).

Comment by Jeffrey Goodman on 4/05/09 at 8:41 am

Hi Timothy,

Thanks for all the great suggestions.  I’ll work on all three of those sites (Apple Quicktime, aintitcoolnews, and comingsoon.net.)

As for your first paragraph, it’s a good question, how long do I do this?  Really the best answer I have is until it’s no longer financially self-sustaining.  I believe that the model I’m using, at least in the beginning, will not lose money.  And, if I can stay in the black as I move from city to city, I will keep it up.  But, I also know that at a certain point some of the cities will be more unknown entities and require me to put more money at risk.

Truthfully, I see myself working hard on LULLABY, at most, for another nine months or so.  I just want to be able to look back and say I explored every avenue for this movie and did everything I could to make people aware of it.  I’m just not quite at that point yet.  But, I would imagine after this theatrical run, and some deals for the ancillary rights of the movie, I will have that closure.

I just wanted to mention, too, that the movie has not “underperformed” yet.  Our real entry into the marketplace doesn’t begin until May 1st.  Up until now, we have simply been on the festival circuit with it.  And, the movie has definitely met our expectations there. 

Thanks for all the dialogue, Timothy.  I hope it’ll continue.

All the best,

Jeffrey

Comment by Rachael on 4/07/09 at 12:44 pm

Hi Jeffrey -

I have some details about an upcoming event, Produced By 2009 Conference, that I think you would be interested in sharing with your readers. Do you have an email where I can send you the information?

Thank you!
Rachael

Comment by Jeffrey Goodman on 4/07/09 at 3:14 pm

Hi Rachael,

Thank you for your e-mail.  I would love to learn more about your event.  Please e-mail information to: 

Thanks, Rachael. 

All the best,

Jeffrey

Comment by Jeffrey Goodman on 6/26/09 at 7:03 am

Hi Tiffany,

Thank you so much!

All the best,

Jeffrey

Comment by jonathan on 7/18/09 at 2:30 am

While there are many tools that facilitate the proactive discovery of individuals who share similar interests..thanks for posting this blog..

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