By Jay Webb
Step 1 to building a street: Clear the Brush and raise the land.
1. The Tycoon.
So it seems appropriate to start this series of posts by explaining how IndieStreet came to be. Last year, I was completing a screenplay that I had been working on for a few years, and was about ready to start the daunting fundraising process. Before I started sending out the business plan for the film, a friend of mine, Chris, told me that he wanted me to first meet his old boss who had just sold his contracting/tech company for a cartload of cash. He said that this Tycoon was looking for an alternative investment, so maybe this film raise was going to be simple. HA!
By the second month of presentations and dinner meetings, it seemed to both my friend and I that the Tycoon was our guy. He met with us on numerous occasions and seemed in many ways to actually be courting us. More importantly, each meeting resulted in more synergy and productive dialogue than the previous. We decided not to send the film plan out to anyone else, as our new executive ‘partner’ began helping us to mold a different, more large scale, multiple film production business plan that we all came to believe would limit the company’s risk compared to just investing in my single film. To make a long story short we met with him for another four months, and then it did NOT happen. We had to move on and start a new company without him as he lost focus and dragged his feet on multiple occasions for what really could have been many different reasons: maybe he had some other pressing investments that were more in his intellectual comfort zone, maybe his financial counsel recommended against it due to the uncertainties of the future of the film industry, or maybe the Tycoon lost half of his new found fortune on the Facebook IPO. Could be a combination, but all that mattered is the Tycoon, our proposed big-biz partner, was not going to be our partner (at least for the start-up phase).
Sounds like a horrible story and a frustrating waste of time for my film’s fundraising progress, right? Happily I can say this is not the case.
While the last month of our dealings with him did make me have a few disturbing knee-jerk mental reactions, after a little time to reflect on the decision to move away from him I realized it was a valuable and necessary experience. Not only did this numbers-minded individual challenge me to think about economies of scale & distribution models beyond getting one film complete, but through our exhaustive meetings and hundreds of modifications to our business plan, my friend Chris (who brought me to the Tycoon in the first place) decided he was going to invest and become the business development side of our new company Indie Street Media.
So even though I could have lived more by my fundraising rule of ‘a quick no is always better than a long cloudy maybe’, Indie Street would have never been born without this misleading, but very intelligent, Tycoon.
2. The “That’s it!” moment.
Our business plan was shaping up after months of Chris and I trying to find real-world answers to the Tycoon’s onslaught of industry questions: We had multiple films in different stages of development for our production slate and we had a solid idea and projections for a streaming and theatrical release distribution model. We knew we were looking for the most innovative, high concept dramas, documentaries, and comedies to fill the IndieStreet library, but what was the “that’s it” differentiating factor that would help attract these films. What was going to be the thing that made filmmakers and customers say, “that’s pretty damn cool” when they heard about the company? While Facebook, privacy loss, and invasive technology are a rant I would gladly undertake for another day, I did learn something important from the Zuckerberg story: In the new social media world, the cool factor can sometimes outweigh limited initial capital. Like most worthwhile things, the ‘that’s it’, or cool element, that we were missing would arise organically.
One of my first steps was to bring the idea for the new IndieStreet production/distribution studio concept to two indie filmmakers who I love, Rodrigo Lopresti and Zak Mulligan. They had a film they co-directed that I wanted to include in the library, and Zak had been a cinematographer on multiple acclaimed films that we thought could be good fits.
After a Bare Burger and drinks, I ended our talk and laughs by offering them really all that I had at my disposal in terms of currency. I said, “…of course since you guys are my boys and are going to be some of the first filmmakers in the library, I’m happy to give you some ownership in the company.”
What started as a thank you token & in my eyes a start-up phase necessity, grew into what we now believe is the only responsible and plausible way to run a boutique size, niche based, indie film company in the future. You make the filmmakers owners in the distribution company. It’s direct distribution with a cooperative kick in the ass. It’s being Independent, but not doing it alone. It’s our “that’s cool!” that will propel us to work harder and push our company to the next level. Shared resources and networks of a small group of extremely talented, like-minded filmmakers will make it possible to reach wide audiences and grow a brand that has critical acclaim, significant audience reach, and a financially positive result for all parties involved. We have some exciting content to produce in-house, so being able to attract some of the higher end innovators in our industry to help build this road needed this important change in our business’s underlying structure.
“A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.” – Ayn Rand
If this holds true, then our model should work very well for filmmakers who have more desire to create and achieve than they do to win (which is the root of a big-biz studio model).
Our next steps to building our street are now in full motion. We are in the process of developing the website and streaming service, fine tuning the license agreements, searching for brilliant Indie filmmakers that think we may be on to something, and continually brainstorming ways to keep our partners, contributors, and audience excited and engaged. All of these challenges make up a run-on sentence that we will dissect into our blog report on hopeforfilm.com. I will add in some stories and insight from our team, as well as some questions to the readers. We are completely open to suggestions for film inclusions and feedback on our posts. We are proud that many filmmakers are already taking responsibility for learning the business side of distribution; joining stimulating programs like A2E, exploring forward thinking crowd-funding platforms like Seed&Spark, and entertaining progressive models like ours on IndieStreet. Feel free to email me at jwebb@indiestreet.com with any constructive communication. Hopefully some of our stories and growing pains will be helpful or intriguing…but now it’s time to get back to working on something we love.
“Word on the Indie Street” will be a bi-weekly report on the exciting challenges that arise during the start-up phase of Indie Street Films and our distribution channel, IndieStreet.com. IndieStreet is a growing group of film producers and directors who have come to believe that a cooperative group mentality applied to self-distribution can help redesign the future of our industry. By providing sophisticated technology, marketing support, and company stock to a group of like-minded filmmakers, IndieStreet hopes to stimulate the most effective combination of control, care, and customer reach to maximize distribution-happiness for filmmakers and their audiences. More direct marketing and release care than a studio, but more marketing punch and audience reach then self-distribution. By creating a trusted brand and carefully selecting other talented filmmakers to join our movement, we believe our “group distribution” model will be the most financially rewarding and fair option for serious filmmakers of the future. Happier, incentivized filmmakers means more films to be made for the targeted consumers who seek the exact types of films being created by the group. The IndieStreet team has worked diligently to come up with objective ownership algorithms and revenue sharing that we believe can even be valuable to other filmmaking groups outside of our brand’s niche. Topics of our blog report will include library curating, social media navigation, film production notes, industry trend reactions, and other thoughts on the changing world of technology and its effect on filmmakers.
Next Up: Post #2: “Word on the Street”
Jay Webb – Jay Webb is an independent film producer/writer and small business entrepreneur who has discovered through trial by fire that it is literally impossible for him to choose personal capitalism over passion. Always balancing a life on both sides of the tracks, he has discovered that helping good people succeed (success=happiness) is the core of what drives him. The IndieStreet direct & “group distribution” film initiative is his personal Autobahn.
Web: IndieStreet.com
Twitter: @indiest_films
