Film Industry Has to Be Reinvented

Recently filmmakers got an innovative and powerful tool to promote their pieces: Web 2.0. Susan Buice, Arin Crumley and Lance Weiler showed participants of the workshop “An Indie Filmmaker’s Guide to the Internet. Online Distribution Case Study”, how to become well known while staying out of the official distribution circuit and yet make good money of it. Susan Buice and Arin Crumley with their film “Four Eyed Monsters” are hitting charts on MySpace in America. Basically they were taking care of every step of production themselves. Now they are organising screenings in the different cities all over the country.

“We build our audiences mainly through internet: on the MySpace- and YouTube-sites, for instance the trailer of the movie can be seen. It really works and that is thanks to the promotion tools you can get totally for free”. Everybody who thinks they are missing out on living celebrities’ lives and they would accept a proposal for official distribution is wrong.

“We have already been offered a distribution but we turned the proposal down after we made a fast calculation. The company wanted to give us 15,000 dollars for worldwide copyrights. We counted that we could get the same amount of money just by selling 750 DVDs through our website, so we took the risk”, declared Susan.

They built an entire net-society on their cinematographic project. Everybody can put the trailer of their movie on their own website, they also make podcast screenings and update them constantly. This way the message spreads all over the net: friends recommend their movie to friends; people are starting to buy DVDs. Today Susan and Arin have over a million visitors at their site and they've already got back the money they had invested.

“There’s so many interesting videos on the net. The problem is that you cannot find the way to them. That’s why promoting has so much importance. I think the whole Internet will be searchable in the future”, said Susan.
She also noticed: “We were told a few times by industry people at film festivals that the best films find distribution and that there’s nothing down there, what is not distributed and should be. They are obviously wrong. Really innovative, groundbreaking movies don’t get distribution. And that’s even better because directors will profit more from it, not the distributors.”

According to Arin, “Film industry has to be reinvented and it has to happen pretty much from ground up. Firstly, there are too many goalkeepers who don’t usually find your movie valuable. Also there’s no room for all the films because there aren't so many theatres. The final thing which is not right with film industry is that it is not fun. It just gets you down so that you cannot get to the public and you loose a lot of your energy through this. That’s why we decided to change it.”

Malwina Grochowska

© Berlinale Talent Campus 2007