Author: Ted Hope

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Truly Free Film

You’re Killing Me: Filmmakers Making Bad Deals Hurt Us All

By Jon Raymond

Ted Hope posted about the poor state of indie film distribution, his frustration with deals that pay out so little that screw indie producers, and how he’s decided to stop producing. This marks a turning point. I had to respond with this comment:

The main reason indie films have distribution problems has to do with compulsive behavior to take whatever deal you can get. [Distributor-Sales Agent] Lists are good, if they are vetted. There are a lot of unscrupulous players out there. And even with good distributors and sales agents, you have to hold out for the terms you want.

If indie filmmakers keep signing all rights deals, then that becomes the norm. If we give distributors 20% off the gross, or add P&A expenses first, then that becomes the norm. These things kill independent film.

I’m pretty sure that in any other industry, the manufacturer is paid a wholesale price for product. If it’s not all sold there may be some return. But you don’t see retail outlets deducting advertising costs from sales or taking 20% off the remainder sales gross before the manufacturer sees a dime. No manufacturer would agree to those terms. Why do we?

I’m pissed that the guy who produced 21 Grams doesn’t want to produce more films, and because I think it’s the fault of most indie filmmakers who take bad deals.

JR2a

Every time a producer signs an all rights deal without a six month performance agreement, or with a back-end 20/80 split after unaccountable P&A (publicity and adverting), they are hurting all of our chances to make a sustainable living with film. Maybe filmmakers need more education.

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Truly Free Film

Beer Buzz #2: Philip Seymour Hoffman

By Steven C. Beer

Philip Seymour Hoffman 1967-2014

I received the tragic news about Philip Seymour Hoffman like a punch in the belly.

Unlike most celebrity deaths, the pain has lingered for days and has not diminished in intensity. I cannot remember the last time that friends and colleagues reached out to one another like this to connect and share their profound loss. Hoffman was our hero, a soldier at the vanguard of cinema — and like losing a family member, we are each seeking to find our own way to make sense of it.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Start-Up: Post # 43: Hard Work, Innovation & Blind Alleys

By Roger Jackson
KinoSmall

Previously: The Importance of Subtitles & Closed Captions


Post-Script

In my last post I wrote about Closed Captions and recommended you get them made by ZenCaptions. Now Amazon Prime has announced that captions are mandatory from March 1st. It’s already mandatory for iTunes. And has long been a requirement for Cable TV video-on-demand. It makes sense, it’s a good thing for people with hearing difficulties, and it makes your film more viable to watch in a noisy cafe or bar. At $1/minute it should be a no-brainer…get it done.

Hard Work, Innovation & Blind Alleys

Kinonation has come a long way in the past year. We dived into the very complex video-on-demand ecosystem. More complex than we expected, to be honest. We’ve invested heavily in technology and signing new outlets and content acquisition.

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Truly Free Film

Screen Forever 2013: Google’s Approach to Watching Content Owners’ Backs

by Andrew Einspruch

Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch attended Screen Forever 2013, the conference of Screen Producers Australia, this past year and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s kindly allowing us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.

The world of content and culture is moving online. And search giant Google is in the driver’s seat to know what the trends are. But the digital world unfolds in a fraught way for many creators. In the opening session of this year’s Screen Forever conference, Derek Slater, Global Public Policy Manager, Google USA, gave a glimpse into this changing world, as viewed by the advertising behemoth. Andrew Einspruch reports.

100 hours.

That’s how much content currently gets uploaded to YouTube every minute. That`s a week`s worth of viewing in less than two minutes, and a year`s worth in less than two hours. That`s the supply side.

On the demand side, six billion hours get watched every month, or just under an hour per person on the planet, whether they have an Internet connection or not. It is a staggering change to the world, especially when you consider that YouTube did not exist nine years ago.

Google USA`s Derek Slater, a self-confessed fan of the Australian show “Frontline,” discussed this boom in creativity, and put it in the context of creators and money. Put simply, you have more content creators than ever before, and more ways for them to make money from all the connected consumers out there. He cited statistics that said digital music revenue was more than $5.6 billion in 2012, and that digital movies were nearly 30% of revenue in the US in 2012, up from 19% in 2011. Ebooks show a similar jump, with 457 million sold in 2012, up 43% from 2011.

It is still a developing market, but it represents a massive shift from the previous decade.

Slater also described Australia as a huge net exporter of video, with eight times as much Aussie video consumed off-shore than on-shore. Looked at differently, twice as much Australian content is consumed in the US than in Australia. From Slater`s perspective, it shows that local content is thriving, and contributing to a trade surplus in that category.

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Issues and Actions

Your Suggestions For Today’s Film Institutions Are Needed

I was asked by the New York Times to contribute to a think piece on how to improve the  Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Ted Hope, chief executive of Fandor, a film-streaming service and former San Francisco Film Society executive director, recalled his first encounter with the organization: a showing of the Coen brothers’ “Blood Simple” at the New York Film Festival. “I was so excited to be in such a beautiful room with so many people who seemed to love cinema as much as me,” he said. “I want every program to recreate that excitement, and it comes from providing context, community and a sense of event — something both fleeting and permanent.”

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Truly Free Film

How Chris Christie and Ira Deutchman made me a SEO Master of the Universe

By Reid Rosefelt 

When you finish reading this post you will possess the key to becoming a mighty internet power user.

For no charge, I’m going to share a huge breakthrough I made. That’s the kind of guy I am.

Chris-Christie-Ira-Deutchman 1It all started just as the Chris Christie Bridge-ghazi scandal was gathering steam. Like many, I googled the besieged Governor to see if there were any new developments.

One day, I saw something that surprised me: on the first page, right under CBS News, MSNBC, Chicago Tribune, the Office of the New Jersey Governor, Christie’s Wikipedia entry, the Chicago Tribune again, and the Washington Post, was a link to something from my friend, celebrated indie film man Ira Deutchman. “Wow,” I thought.  “Ira must have generated something pretty big to generate a search engine smasheroo like that.” As you might imagine, I was on pins and needles to find out what Ira had come up with.

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Truly Free Film

Tell Me Something: Advice from Morgan Spurlock

Jessica Edwards of First Film Co. gave us some excerpts from the excellent new book she edited Tell Me Something: Advice from Documentary Filmmakers. This week’s advice is from Morgan Spurlock: 

Photo by Jon Pack
Photo by Jon Pack

I feel like it was junior high when my parents REALLY started giving me advice. Maybe it was because they thought I desperately needed it, or maybe they believed I was finally smart enough to actually absorb some of it. Whatever it was, from the moment I became a “teen,” my folks bombarded me with a deluge of southern-fried logic that helped deep-fry my brain and make me the crispy human I am today.

When I turned 13, my mother said, “You’re officially a little man today, time to start acting like one.” What exactly she meant by that, I don’t know. I mean, I’m sure I did plenty of stupid things before that, but come on, Mom, when you say something like that, you’re only setting me up to do even MORE stupid things afterwards! Parental logic is confusing to me sometimes—speak up but don’t run your mouth, do your best but don’t try too hard, have fun but not too much fun.

Is there really such a thing as “too much fun”? For my parents, that essentially meant “Don’t do anything stupid,” a.k.a. “Don’t do anything that would get you arrested.” 

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