by Sam Mestman
Okay, I want you to close your eyes now and picture… now that I think about it, this approach probably won’t work in an article format. It might cause you to stop reading, and you won’t know what to actually picture. Let’s try this instead. Read the next paragraph as if your eyes were closed, picturing in your mind what I’m talking about. It’s not quite the same, but will work for our purposes. Okay, moving on…
Now that you are reading this with your eyes figuratively closed, I want you to imagine that you are at the premiere of your movie at a film festival. I want you to reflect on everything it has taken for you to get there. The wondering if you’d ever raise the money to make it. The running out of money shooting it during production. The too many locations/not enough time equation of production. The credit card debt. The post production nightmare you went through. ALL OF IT. Really reflect on it all now, CAUSE THIS IS YOUR MOMENT! You made it, and you are now premiering in front of a packed house of your closest friends and family in a nice theater at a prominent film festival. In this few minutes before showtime everything you’ve gone through now seems worth it…
… And then the movie starts.
Your film looks like a desaturated, olive green horror show. The aspect ratio is wrong, and your actors look like Oompa Loompas. That beautiful 5.1 mix you slaved over with your sound designer is garbled and sounds like it’s coming out of shitty car stereo speakers. About 10 minutes go by, and people start getting up to go to the bathroom (YOU HOPE they are at least… but they might be leaving). Midway through, the sound cuts out entirely for an agonizing few minutes as your picture plays like a silent movie. This is agony. You look around the theater, and people look bored and disappointed. You sink into your seat, just wishing it would end. You regret ever getting into the film business. You plot to kill the projectionist, and contemplate moving to the far east and joining a monastery.
The film finally ends, and you have already passed through the 5 stages of grief. Acceptance hits as you look around the now half empty theater, people seeming like they’re actively trying to avoid you. A few come up with a lukewarm “Congratulations, that was great…” as they hurry to the exits. You run over to the festival director complaining how they butchered your movie. She halfheartedly apologizes, and subtly blames it on you for projecting in a digital format and not on film… or that maybe your film really looks that way. YOU CAN”T FIND THE PROJECTIONIST ANYWHERE… not that killing him would really make you feel all that much better.
You find yourself sitting in a bar, desperately trying to explain to the few friends willing to stick around after that your movie really doesn’t look that way. They smile politely and order you another shot, and then start talking about sports. As you have your 5th shot of Jager, the following dawns on you:
“I just packed out a theater with all of my closest friends and family to screen the movie I just spent the last two years of my life trying to make. Not only did my film not make a cent back from having them all there, my movie looked and sounded terrible, and everyone now thinks I’m a talentless hack.”
You have another shot, and the following thought crosses your mind before you black out:
“Film Festivals fucking suck.”
(Please note: The following is only for filmmakers who want to actually make a living making their own films. If you’re the type of person who just makes movies for the sake of making them and just wants to share them with the world, and you can afford to do it as a hobby, none of the following should matter to you. For those people who don’t care about the bottom line, film festivals are awesome. However, if you’re one of the types that feel that becoming a filmmaker shouldn’t equate with taking a vow of poverty, then the rest of this should make you think twice before you get yourself too far down this road.)
The problems with big fests:
1. Real indie movies can’t get in.
In case you didn’t know, the top indie fests that distributors actually attend (Sundance, Toronto, Cannes, maybe SXSW and Tribeca a little bit) just want your application fee, and could care less about you. Unless you got stars, are screwing the programmer, or know someone who knows someone, or have a real buzz about your film already (and if you already do, you don’t need these guys), you’re not getting in here. People might tell you that you have a chance, but you also have a chance at hitting the lottery… that doesn’t mean you should play. Many of these films that play here are just smaller budget studio pics with indie names looking for indie street cred. Its an incestuous, bullshit world that has very little to do with the reasons people actually make the films. The worst part of it is that filmmakers don’t even seem to care and they buy into the bullshit too. I can’t tell you how many people I talk to whose movie has absolutely no chance of getting into the festival but still insist on submitting their film there (hell, I used to be one of those people). You’re wasting your money. Bottom line, unless you’ve already figured out how to play the Hollywood game (which if you’re an indie filmmaker, you probably haven’t), the chances of your little movie getting into one of these places, having a buzz built around it, and getting a fair distribution deal out of it are almost zero. The sooner you accept this, the sooner you can start doing something about it.
2. You can’t make your money back with a Sundance deal.
Rumor has it that this is starting to improve just a little bit as the economy begins to improve, but the fact is that distributors are not paying what they used to pay for indie films anymore. The 1990′s are over. Clerks doesn’t happen anymore. There’s too much competition, too many movies, and too little money to go around. It’s a buyers market. Deal with it. The whole “let’s just go make a great movie and sell it for millions at sundance” fantasy has come to a screeching halt in the last couple years, as distributors have come to realize that indies don’t have options, and they officially have you by the balls. Movies that win awards at Sundance are being sold there for pennies on the dollar of what their budget was. If you don’t have your distribution pipeline (and a budget for it) already planned out before your big festival premiere, you are literally walking around with a “kick me” sign on your back, asking to be raped by a sales agent or distributor. Sorry to phrase it that way, but it’s the truth and you need to know it. Now, the really dirty secret about all this is that those giant deals people used to hear about coming out of Sundance during its heyday still weren’t even all that filmmaker friendly when you look back at them (ask the hundreds of filmmakers who sold their films to places like Miramax and had them shoved in a vault never to be released). Whether it was due to accounting practices, or how the deal was structured, most of these “great deals” that studios were giving out weren’t as awesome as they seemed to be, for the most part. Anyway, Sundance is turning more and more into the new wild west gold rush, with filmmakers playing the parts of the characters in The Grapes of Wrath.
3. You have to be able to make Sundance, etc. work for you, and it costs a lot of money (that you probably don’t have).
Just getting into Sundance or one of the other premiere fests doesn’t really help you, believe it or not. Getting into Sundance only helps your business end if industry types flip over your movie and you’ve got a huge buzz surrounding it. That means publicity. It means packed screenings. It means getting your screening to be a hot ticket that people can’t get easily. That isn’t cheap. It means probably hiring a publicist, and having some sort of street team. It means posters, postcards, and all kinds of other merchandising/publicity stuff. Most filmmakers are out of money by the time they submit their film to a festival. If you’re one of these people, you’re behind the 8-ball before you ever arrive there. While it may be a big deal to friends and family that you’ve got a Sundance film… distributors don’t really care. They only want it if it’s a HOT sundance film… that takes time, money, and planning. And it’s the money part that gets in the way for most indies. You don’t want to get lost in the shuffle of screenings there. There are tons of movies that premiere Sundance every year and don’t make a cent from it. They just end up with a cool story (which, admittedly, is worth something… just not to your investors).
The problems with medium sized festivals:
1. All those laurels you accumulate don’t really translate into dollars
So, let’s say you’ve made an indie movie that racks up a bunch of awards at second and third tier fests You did it this way to build a pedigree, and because you didn’t get into the top tier fests for whatever reason. You heard from a lot of people that the only way you were going to attract interest from distributors would be to play every festival you could and rack up as many festival wins as you could get. Then, you’d have a killer presentation you could make to distributors with a lot of good reviews that would allow you to get the offer your film deserved. Well, guess what, you can do this (we did this with How I Got Lost). And you know what? Fuck that. First off, the industry does not really care about any of these fests. At all. At least not when it comes to actual dollars. You know why they don’t care? Because the only thing smaller distributors and foreign sales types care about is the faces on the box. They have a formula they use about how much a name is worth, and that’s all that matters to them. You may have made a great movie (and this is a very subjective thing) but unless you got someone like Michael Madsen or better on the box, you can’t sell your movie to a smaller distributor for a lot money. It doesn’t matter how good it is. So, yes, you may be able to prove you’ve made a great movie, but unless you can prove to a distributor that you’ve made a great movie that can actually SELL, they don’t care. And you can forget about the bigger studios… they’re only interested in the movies at the bigger festivals… that you didn’t get into.
2. You could have actually been selling your movie to all those people that came to your screening
Hey, guess what? You know how it’s supposed to feel magical to be sitting in a packed audience with people who are all ready to watch your movie at a festival? Well, here’s how I felt when I sat in a theater that had 300 people in it, many of which were close friends and family, who were all there to watch our movie. It hit me right between the eyes that we had just lost out on selling 300 copies of our movie to a large portion of our fan base (because these people would have already seen it by the time it was for sale), and that the God damn film festival was keeping all that money that should have been going back to the investors, and the people that actually worked on the movie. I call bullshit on all of this. If you pack out a screening for a festival, you should be entitled to a cut of the proceeds. End of story. And maybe it can be on a sliding scale or whatever, based on how many people attend the screening, but there should be some amount of money going back to the filmmakers for busting their asses to get people to show up at a festival screening. This isn’t fucking college sports. We’re not earning a degree doing this shit. It is not an honor to screen at a festival. Why do movie theaters have to split proceeds with studios, yet film festivals don’t have to split proceeds with filmmakers? What am I missing here? Film festivals can hide behind the “magic of screening in a theater” crap all they want, and how they’re granting you exposure, etc.. but they’re full of shit They’re actually taking money from you, and it’s your fault for letting them do it. Not only that, but when they keep your money and then totally fuck the projection of your movie, thereby making you look bad in front of all of your friends and family, it makes you want to kill someone. This brings me to my next point…
3. Film Festivals routinely fuck up the projection of your movie
Unless you deliver a film print of your movie, which in our digital age is becoming less and less practical (and even then, if the theater’s projector isn’t well maintained, you might still be in for a world of hurt), God knows how your film is going to look. Unless the festival you’re in has managed to get their hands on one of those $100,000 digital projectors, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have your movie not look the way it did in the Color suite, especially when the festival projectionists tend to be poorly trained, or worse, they’re just volunteers pushing buttons.
Not only that, but the especially galling thing going on right now is that there’s no real standard in terms of how all these places are going to project your movie. The good festivals will want an HDCam SR tape (the highest quality HD screening format). Others will just want an HD cam or Bluray. Others can’t even screen in HD, and still project in digibeta or off a DVD (this blows, and you shouldn’t even bother with these places). For more information about the pros and cons of the various formats screened at festivals, click here. Hilariously, virtually none of these places will project from a quicktime file, which is how 95% of all indie movies are actually mastered these days.
What very few people tell filmmakers is how much it’s going to cost to master your film to all these different formats. When it’s all said and done, expect all of this to cost you at least a couple grand to have an HDCam SR master, and a few HDCam dubs, blurays, Digibetas and DVD screeners made of your movie for screening at festivals. This is all so you can have the privilege of watching your movie not look very good when it’s actually screened in front of an audience.
Unless you’ve experienced watching your own film butchered first hand, it’s hard to truly understand how exposed you feel when you’re in a packed audience watching your movie play and knowing that you’re not really seeing the movie you made on the screen.
The Problems With The Smaller Out Of The Way Fests
Well, take everything I said above, and then add to it the fact that no one goes to these festivals (except the people that you bring), and that the projection and quality control of these festivals will likely be even worse than at the better festivals. The industry doesn’t care about them, they’re largely poorly run, most of them are just scams to get filmmakers submission fees, and if you’re a filmmaker actually trying to make a name for yourself, these places are basically a complete and total waste of your time.
“Wow, I’m depressed now, and am tired of you complaining. What happened to the part where you said you were going to offer suggestions about how to make this better?”
Right, that is a very good point… and I apologize for being such a bitter, negative douchebag. Since you made it this far, here are some of my ideas on how film festivals can make themselves relevant to indie filmmakers again, and filmmakers can use some of the tools at their disposal to not feel so taken advantage of once they decide it is time to start screening their movie to the general public.
How to make Film Festivals Better:
1. Standardize the screening process
This is my one true complaint with the festival circuit. If it is a festival’s intent to showcase independent films they are supposedly passionate about, how are they serving that intent by botching the projection of these films? With the advances in projection technology, there is simply no excuse for a film to have its projection botched. It is not that expensive to put on a good screening if you know what you’re doing. There are currently home projectors on the market retailing for $1200-2000 that if used correctly could reinvigorate the festival experience and deliver a high quality picture, especially if it’s being played through nice speakers (which most theaters already have). Here are some technology suggestions for the festival programmers out there:
A. Allow filmmakers to screen from quicktime movies, save yourself the expense of renting expensive decks and low quality screeners, and then just screen your movie from a Macbook pro laptop and an external hard drive through final cut with a DVI to HDMI cable (or displayport).
Just so you know, what I’m advocating isn’t impossible. We already do this at our own WMM screenings. Here’s all you need: Ask your filmmakers to deliver a high res version of their movie (ideally a 1920×1080 Prores HQ file, the now defacto FCP standard… you can even get away with a super high quality H264 export to save hard drive space). Then, all you gotta do is hook your HDMI ready 720p or 1080p projector up to the laptop through the monitor out of the macbook pro, drop the video file right into a FCP timeline, turn on Digital Desktop preview, and you’ve got a beautiful looking picture coming straight out of your laptop with minimal loss in video or audio quality. Want to make it even better? Get a mac pro and a Blackmagic card, and run it all out from the HDMI out, and it will look perfect! There’s no messing with tapes, decks, or any other complicated things that just get in the way, and you’ll still be delivering video in it’s highest possible quality form, and the way it was meant to be seen. Why is this so hard for festivals to grasp? It’s simple, cheap, with practically no compromises. Not only that, but you can take all that money that goes into renting decks and all that other crap, buy yourself some really high quality theater speakers, and make every filmmaker in attendance thrilled that they screened at your festival, because of how easy (and cheap!) it was to deliver their movie to you, and how nice you made them look on the big screen. THIS IS NOT HARD!
B. Formally retire Standard Definition video in a theatrical setting.
Standard def video in a theater just doesn’t look good projected on a big screen. Why put filmmakers in a position where no one will be happy when the movie screens? By keeping your standards of quality high, it will force filmmakers to shoot higher quality movies. Remember, there are thousands of indie films out there… most of which are now in HD. You’re not asking a lot at this point to make HD a requirement.
C. Teach your projectionist how to use the damn projector
You know, seeing as how you’ll now be projecting your movies from quicktimes, and getting quicktimes from filmmakers in advance, there’s no reason you can’t set up your screening projects ahead of time and do a dry run so that your projectionist can calibrate the projector so that everything looks decent. I mean… seriously. Learn how to use your equipment… your only real job as a festival is to get a theater space, maybe do a little publicity, and actually know how to project the films you’re screening. Hell, as filmmakers, we don’t even necessarily expect you to make people attend these screenings for us. All that we ask is that our movie looks good on the screen. Knowing how to get the most out of your projector is the least you can do.
2. Give the filmmakers who pack their screenings out a cut of the proceeds.
Look, I’m not saying filmmakers should get everything. I know that as festivals, you gotta pay the theater, you gotta pay for publicity, you gotta pay for parties and all the other crap that goes into it. There are costs involved. HOWEVER, if you haven’t noticed, at most festivals, most of the screenings tend to be empty. Why do you think that is? It’s because there’s no real incentive for filmmakers to publicize their screenings or really work to get people to show up, as they know that they won’t see any money back from it (and also because the quality of most festivals is poor). If festivals would put a graduated scale in place based on attendance, I guarantee you filmmakers would work their asses off to get people to show up, as they’d be costing themselves money for not doing that. It’s a win-win for everyone. Festivals get packed screenings and money. Filmmakers get high quality screenings and money. I’m proposing a 50-50 split of proceeds (after the theater takes their cut) between the festival and the filmmaker. The only caveat to this would be that if there’s a screening and the theater is empty, the filmmaker shouldn’t get anything. I’m only proposing this if the theater is half full or better. Cause if that’s the case, it means that everyone did their job. When people do their jobs, they should get paid for that.
At the end of the day, the festival and filmmaker should have each other’s best interests in mind. Right now, the dynamic is all messed up on both sides. Festivals are using filmmakers for their application fees, and ripping them off at screenings. Filmmakers aren’t doing shit to help promote the festivals so that they can get people to show up for the screenings. All a filmmaker wants from a festival at this point is a little laurel to put on their poster, with the irony being that most of these laurels don’t even really matter anymore to the distributors. Right now, the way things are, this is lose-lose for everyone involved, and is why the festival scene absolutely sucks, and is rapidly dying.
3. Lower your overhead by screening at alternative screening venues
The fact of the matter is that with technology being as good as it is now, you can get your own projection set up and throw your own festival in a regular auditorium if you wanted to. Right now, exhibitors charge too much money to rent out their theaters (just ask an indie filmmaker who has tried to self release their feature in a theater) with the hilarious thing being that most of the festivals can’t even use the theater’s projection equipment, as their films aren’t designed to work on it (You can’t play a quicktime or an HDcam tape through one of the multiplex theater projectors… you need an obscure file called a JPEG2000). You don’t need all the concession stand and all the other crap the multiplex offers. You can just as easily, with the right equipment, throw an outdoor festival (with live music and other attractions) or at a nice school auditorium or a traditional playhouse theater (just bring a screen and projector… they’ve already probably got a nice audio set up for you to use) at a fraction of the price, and have your festival actually feel like an event, instead of having it feel like a not-as-high-quality night out at the movies. Be a little creative. Allow people to view movies in a setting they wouldn’t normally go to. Make it cool, make it cheaper, and make it more fun, and I guarantee your attendance will improve. Not only that, but you’ll have more money to give back to your filmmakers!
And Now, Some Tips For Filmmakers:
The Fact That Festivals Are Screwing You Is Your Fault
You don’t want to hear this, but the fact that you didn’t plan for distribution, didn’t build a fan base, don’t understand how your film gets projected, and don’t have any money left over to publicize your movie is no one’s fault but yours. Not only that, but no one cares that you don’t have these things. In fact, they’re happy you don’t, because it means that no matter how good your movie is, they can screw you over and take advantage of you, and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it. You know why the festival and distribution game is the way that it is? It’s because we as filmmakers allowed it to get this way. We’re the ones who are looking for some distributor to save us. We’re the ones who are desperate to get into the top fests. We’re the ones who sit around complaining “I’m an artist, I don’t want to worry about any of this business shit… I just want to make the films and let someone else deal with it”. And then you know what we do? We complain when the guy who is running the business shit is screwing us over, or is telling us how to make our films so that they can sell them better.
You want artistic freedom? You want people to not take advantage of you? You’ve got to be accountable for every step of the process, and not sit around pointing fingers about how it’s someone else’s fault that you’re getting screwed. Take some responsibility for yourself and your investors, think through the entire process of making your movie (distribution and publicity included), save some money for the end, know your craft AND your business, and you’ll find you’re suddenly not getting screwed over as much anymore. Yes, the world is not fair… get over it. We picked a tough business… it’s about time as filmmakers that we took some responsibility for the business end back on our shoulders, took a cue from what’s happening in the music industry, and started to be smarter about how we reach and sell to our own fan bases. Once we figure that stuff out, we’ll find that the festival thing won’t even be a problem anymore, because we’ll no longer need them. That will force the festivals and distributors to make the changes they need to make if they want to survive and keep filmmakers bringing their films to them.
So, at the end of the day, if you really want to change festivals, distributors, or anything else really… the first thing you gotta change is yourself.
Depending on when and where you’re talking to him, Sam Mestman is a Writer/ Director/ Producer/ Editor/ Colorist/ whatever else he’s got to be that day. If you hate this website, you can blame him… it was his idea. He is the founder of We Make Movies, along with Joe Leonard and Tara Samuel. After spending his formative years on the mean streets of suburban New Jersey, he attended the School of Hard Knocks in New York City, graduating with a Masters degree in Street Cred. He lives in LA now. The weather’s nice.
