Tim Ritter's Production Corner

TIM RITTER'S PRODUCTION CORNER #10
SELF DISTRIBUTION
When I first decided I was seriously going to pursue independent horror filmmaking, way back in 1982 while I was still in high school, I read everything I could about the classics, including Night Of The Living Dead, Halloween, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. A common thread I noticed among most of the classic films was that the filmmakers ended up getting ripped off by their original distributors---big time. There were stories of fixed books, improper accounting, overinflating advertising costs, and hiding profits. Reading all this stuff, I figured I had an upper edge knowing about it. I wouldn’t let my movies get ripped off, no siree!
Of course, as fate would have it, three of my bestselling movies were ripped off in more ways than I thought possible. Things get out of control real fast once you sign on the dotted line and even moreso once you deliver your Master print or video to a distributor. It doesn’t always happen this way, but then again, it usually does. I’m going to go through what I know and what I’ve experienced in this section, but it is by no means the final word on the wacky world of distribution. This is the business end of things and where people will coo at you nicely as they stab a knife in your back. Keep in mind that when it comes to money, people are greedy and in some cases will do almost anything to keep you from getting your share.
As stated, it doesn’t always happen like this. Wes Craven is on record saying that when Last House On The Left finally started generating money, he got some hefty royalty checks that shocked him and he was able to take a couple of years off and just write. So to answer one of the most common questions I get, “is there such a thing as an honest distributor?”, the answer is yes. But they are few and far between. As a famous cartoon character once quipped, “be very, very careful!”
Your movie is done. It’s completely edited and you also have a dynamite three-minute trailer completed to show around, to generate interest. If you’ve followed my line of thinking up to this point, hopefully you’ve only spent a few thousand bucks on the movie, no more than $4,000.00. You’re not trying to earn a living from all this, it’s a sideline. You still have the regular day job to pay your bills.
There’s basically two choices to get a movie out into the marketplace: finding a distributor or becoming your own distributor. Both have their pros and cons, and I’m going to go through as much as I can. The bottom line is this: the market is very, very crowded now and the chances of your movie getting out there and setting the world on fire are very, very slim. With the digital revolution and computer editing, a lot of the mystique of moviemaking has been shattered. A twelve year old with a large allowance can easily compete with any of us “veterans” in the business. That’s the reality of things. What’s going to make your movie stand out? Why is anyone going to want to see it? Hopefully you’ve covered yourself in that department when you originally wrote your script. Hopefully your marketing hook is still viable and firmly in place. Now comes the showmanship side of things, SELLING your movie to everyone, making them want to see it. HYPING it, that is, doing everything you can so it gets exposure. With very little cash behind you.
An overcrowded market. Distributors with little time on their hands, most of whom physically receive a hundred tapes or more every month to sift through. Yes, it has gotten that bad. The first thing I’d say is prepare for a LONG HAUL. Be PATIENT. When I started out, I had none of these skills. The movie business, especially on the distribution side, follows the typical “hurry up and wait” path. Even the big studios will sit on movies like Jason X for years after they’ve been completed for various political reasons. So having to wait things out is one thing to expect. But you want to try not to wait on things TOO LONG, either.
It’s imperative to create a professional press kit for your movie. What is a press kit? It’s a folder that contains the following things: prospective artwork to sell your movie, a few still photos from the movie, and general information about the flick. In the press release, you give the storyline of the movie, a short “making of” article (how it all came together), and biographies of the cast and crew. As various people review the movie, you add those (hopefully positive) reviews to the press kit as you go along and it gets bigger and bigger.
For artwork, if you’re not a good artist, no problem. There’s a lot of graphic artists working in your community. Try the guy who lays out T-Shirts for the local high school or local businesses. Usually someone like this would love to work on a “movie,” for very little or no pay. Offer credits on the poster or in the press kit. Ask your friends---you’d be surprised how talented a lot of people are who have learned to do stuff by just playing around with scanners and programs on regular computers. Come up with an eyecatching logo, tagline, and picture or art that you think best sells your movie. Make about 50 press kits at a time.
My first suggestion, once your movie and press kit are done, is to get it played in some theaters. Big or small, it doesn’t matter. Start with your hometown, especially if it was filmed there. There will be incredible interest from local papers and local people. Hype it up. With many of today’s theaters having video projection capabilities, showing a movie on digital video should be no problem. You may have to search for them, but even most AMC Theaters have this capability. Worst comes to worst, rent a video projection system from an AUDIO VISUAL rental house (in the yellow pages) and set it up at the cinema. They’ll usually help you do this.
Sometimes, you may have to rent the theater. Other times, you can book the movie through the manager and split the profits with the theater. Pass out buttons at the premiere, sell T-Shirts and other merchandise for your flick. Get local reviewers to come to the screening. I have successfully had nearly every movie I’ve made play in theaters all over the world, from Florida to New York to Japan, all using video projection. Need a theatrical-sized poster? Simply blow up your press kit artwork at a print or blueprint shop. No problem---that’s the cheapest way to HYPE your movie and get the ball rolling.
Take video footage of the premiere. Take still photos of the marquee. Compile everything you can into your press books. Then it’s time to make SCREENER COPIES of your movie to send around to various magazines and even celebrities, if you like. At this point, anything is fair game. I know the producers of Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer got John Waters to let them use a quote from him on their movie poster and it helped immensely. Leif Jonker got the director of Phantasm to say some good words about his movie Darkness and used that in the press. There’s no limit to what you can achieve at this stage.
I would make one suggestion, though. With ever screener that you send out, go to the time and expense of making sure that near the bottom of the picture, these words appear: SCREENING COPY ONLY-NOT FOR RESALE. I neglected to do this with an early film and a Canadian company got hold of a VHS screener I mailed them and dubbed a 1” Master from that VHS tape! Then, at a video show in New Jersey, this crook was trying to sell “worldwide rights” of my movie for a flat fee to anyone who was interested. Ironically, the producer of the movie was attending this same show and ran into the guy, chasing him all through the crowded floors to get that tape! (The guy got away, by the way.) So don’t let this happen to you. This “pirate” ended up selling the movie in Canada (illegally) for a full year. Litigation to stop or prevent this kind of thing is LONG and SLOW. You also have to extradite the alleged felon from his native country---something that is nearly IMPOSSIBLE in some cases. So avoid this problem by creating a Master tape to dub copies from that says SCREENING COPY ONLY on it.
Send screeners and press kits to critics and magazines that you think will give favorable reviews to your movie. The idea is to get good press. Try some of your favorite film websites as well. I wouldn’t go overboard on this, because the Internet is so huge that getting a thousand good reviews on obscure geocities websites may boost your ego, but it sure isn’t going to help sales. Over the years, I’ve cut down drastically on the number of screeners I mail to small websites. Most of them are run by fans just looking for a free copy of your movie and all those good reviews definitely don’t add up to money in the bank. Also, some of the website owners then pirate your movie, even with the SCREENER COPY graphic written at the bottom of the screen! So send copies to NOTABLE websites that are legitimate and have a following. Try a few magazines as well.
If you made a drama or a comedy, well, your best bet is to follow this procedure and then veer off into showing your movie at film festivals. This way you might get more acclaim and get a distributor to pick the movie up. There’s not a big niche market for dramas and comedies without stars. Sure, there’s the occasional Clerks, so if that’s your angle, then by all means proceed. But there’s just not a lot of specialized magazines, websites, and fan base that you can tap into, like there is with horror, thrillers, and exploitation movies.
If you made a horror movie, try sending copies to Fangoria magazine, Cult Movies, Shock Cinema, Draculina, Alternative Cinema, and any other mags you can think of. Some of these magazines have video distribution arms (like Fango and AC), so who knows, if your movie is good enough, maybe they’ll offer you a deal. Cross-promoting is a good idea too. Have a heavy metal soundtrack? Get some coverage in some of the metal magazines and websites too. Have a celebrity or a scream queen in the movie? Hype that too. When I made the movie Creep, we had star/celebrity Kathy Willets doing the whole talk show circuit deal to promote the movie---everything from Geraldo to A Current Affair. Again, use the elements you have in your movie and exploit them to your best advantage.
A word about bad press. In the old days, the word of thumb used to be “any press is good press. Even bad press is good, as long as they spell your name right.” Well, that was the old days, because these days, with people’s attention spans being so short and the competition for time between books, sports, magazines, movies, DVD, the Internet, work, school, you name it---bad press IS NOT necessarily a good thing. Case in point: I had a movie that came out a few years ago and it started out really well, coming out with a bang. The underground press gave it rave reviews and it won a lot of awards and claim. Sales were awesome. Taking things to the next level, mainstream press got hold of the title and RIPPED IT TO SHREDS. Negative reviews from places like TV Guide, Movieline, The New York Times, The New York Post, etc. basically killed all sales! I was floored to see this. In the old days, negative press would help SELL the movie, but that isn’t necessarily the case these days. So keep that in mind, sometimes it’s better NOT to hype your bad press. This is a weird, tricky business, and sometimes the same trick won’t work twice. Look at Blair Witch Project. There was a movie that was sold primarily on the basis of the phony Internet site in the beginning. Wouldn’t we all like to see THAT happen again!
Which brings us to another selling tool: the Internet. Yes, I would recommend making a website up that promotes your movie, shows stills, gives bios and a way to contact you. It’s kind of like an electronic press kit in cyberspace and it may help you. But don’t expect TOO much---again, the market is EXTREMELY crowded and these days, everyone and their pet dog has their own website. Try to think of something different and creative to set your site apart from others and don’t spend too much on this venture. We set a website up for one movie and barely got any interest or sales, even when we offered tapes through the site. Very infrequently does the old Internet sales thing work for small movies. People are still very leery of giving out their credit card numbers to companies they’ve never heard of, and with good reason. They stick with making purchases through the proven big boys, like Amazon.com and others.
The best distribution deal you can get is one where the distributor finances your movie, from the beginning. Of course, that would have to be something that was set up AT THE BEGINNING of your project, and usually the distributor will give you the concept or idea they want you to expand on. That’s just the way the business is headed these days, even at the shot-on-video level. Everyone studio head wants to be the next Roger Corman or Samuel Arkoff, with an empire of movies they helped create that they can sell to the various markets. So one way to “get a distribution deal” before you even roll cameras is to involve the distributor at the beginning, in the concept stage.
Of course, that’s impossible at this stage in the game, if you’re shopping your movie around. Also, some of us are independent “pioneers” and just want to share our vision or stories with others, not necessarily wanting to collaborate or get anyone else involved with a “pet” project. And that includes me in some cases, and you wouldn’t be reading this if you hadn’t wanted to go the “lone wolf” route yourself, making a movie of your own from start to finish.
So you’ve got a press kit now. Some good reviews. Some magazine coverage. Some quips from famous people. What now? Here’s where you decide whether or not you want to SHOP FOR A DISTRIBUTOR or BECOME A DISTRIBUTOR.
I have done both, and I’ll give you my firm recommendation in a bit. But here’s where you might try to just shop your movie around, see who’s interested. Or you can spend a year or two entering your movie into various film festivals---everything from Cannes to Sundance to FantaFasia to the American Film Market to the Chicago Underground Film Festival. There’s literally hundreds of festivals a year.
The good things about this? You’ll meet more filmmakers that have advice and possible stars who might commit to your next project. You might get more acclaim, a bigger following. You’ll continue to get word of mouth going about your movie. Occasionally, if you’re REALLY lucky, a buyer from a major distributor might see your movie at one of these festivals and offer you that much-coveted “big deal,” kind of like what happened with The Blair Witch Project and many other high-profile Miramax successes. We all love to languish in this type of Cinderella story, the underdog filmmaker with no money making a sweet deal, getting rich and a studio contract to boot. But the reality of it is that it probably won’t happen. It might, and if you have the patience and want to roll the dice, by all means, try it. Who knows, maybe someone will see your movie and offer you a bigger job. Happened to Vin Diesel, you know the story. Spielberg saw his short film that spotlighted his acting at a film festival and gave him an acting job in Saving Private Ryan. Look where Vin Diesel is now! But generally, small movies like the one you made following my no-budget instructions aren’t capable of competing in this atmosphere. But don’t quote me on that, of course!
The bad things about the festival route? Expensive. Each time you submit your movie, there’s exorbitant entry fees you have to cough up to even just have your movie CONSIDERED for a festival. Sometimes these fees are non-refundable, even if you get REJECTED for a showing! You can quickly spend thousands and thousands of dollars and have no distribution deal in sight. Then there’s travel fees and hotel bills, you name it. I’ve had my movies play in film festivals everywhere from Palm Beach to Italy, and it didn’t do me a bit of good financially. So that’s why I’m leery of the film festival scene all together, especially if you’re just trying to make some dough back from a small exploitation movie. But if you have to money and your movies themes are hard to pigeonhole, you might want to consider it. And again, there’s always that million to one shot that someone like Oliver Stone will take you under his wing after seeing your flick…
Another way to get your film into the festival circuit is to hire a “distributor” or “agent” to do it for you. Sometimes they’ll do it for a percentage of the profits, sometimes you have to pay them to represent your movie (and I sure wouldn’t recommend that!). Be careful if you decide to go with a “distribution agent.” Usually these guys are just middlemen who take years to find a home for your movie and rarely do you see a dime from anything they line up. If they do line something up, they usually take up to seventy-five percent of the moneys you receive on a deal that in reality, you could’ve lined up yourself.
I had one “distribution agent” who took my movie all over the world, to all the fests, for a solid year. A friend of mine went to the Milan Festival in Italy (where the agent was supposed to be promoting my film) and reported that the large poster banner that I had just been billed for by the agent’s company was “underneath their table” where no one could see it! Another time, the agent reported that all the buyers in Cannes walked out of my movie within the first ten minutes so they just shut the movie off! Then, after generating endless NO SALES INTEREST reports all year (despite $200,000.00 worth of “pending deals” with mysterious foreign buyers), the agent tried to bill me $50,000.00 for his first class airfare, phone bills, poster printing, and even a visit with a call girl he had while in Italy! So I would avoid “agents” who shop your film around to the fests unless you have a good lawyer on retainer and want to risk hanging your movie up for years.
If you really want to try for the film festival route, they’re easy to find. Many Internet sites list all the major film festivals and each one usually has web sites set up to promote the event all year long. You can fill out applications on-line (and have your credit card handy!). It’s as easy as going to a search engine and typing in the name of the festival you want to enter. Also, libraries and book stores have many books with all this information listed in them. They’re in the FILM REFERENCE sections.
If you want to avoid the Film Festival route or if you try it and end up still looking for a distributor, you can try SELF DISTRIBUTION. I’ve done this before, with varying results. Again, the first thing you’re going to need to do this successfully is MORE MONEY. It’s a DVD world now, and that’s what you’re going to have to offer to sell. So what you do is use your theatrical run, your good reviews, and your Internet site as a launching pad.
You come up with a commercial ad campaign (which can be what you used in the press kit) and you create DVD covers and video sleeves, if you want to offer the movie on VHS as well. There are many production houses that offer full-service production for discs and tapes. Usually, they will do your covers, make your copies, make stickers, and shrinkwrap your product for you all under one roof. Or you may want to shop around and get the best individual deal you can for each part of the process. Again, your source would be the Internet and there are many companies that do this sort of thing. I know filmmaker Eric Stanze has a setup where he’ll work with indie filmmakers on packaging and DVD authoring. Get in touch with him through www.wickedpixel.com. Again, the Internet search engines will also lead you to various places. For artwork being printed up into video sleeves, try DISC GRAPHICS out of New York. Talk to other filmmakers that have done this sort of thing and see who they’ve used. You can also buy computer programs to design DVD inserts or clamshell video case inserts. Try www.videosleeve.com. All the info is there, right at your fingertips, on the Internet. You might be super ambitious and get the computer software to make your own DVD copies, including the animated menus. That’s cool, too, but again, you’ll be spending money to get this software. Still, you’ll have to go to a production house to mass produce any substantial amount of copies.
No matter how you decide to approach making copies, it has to be professional on all levels, fully shrinkwrapped with a bar code on the disc packaging somewhere so stores can stock it and put it in their computer systems. And these days, the consumer is picky about what they buy. They want animated menus, extra footage, deleted scenes, commentary, and “making of” featurettes on the disc The material less you have on the disc the lower the price is going to be at the retail level. Even if you figure out how to do all this, making one copy at a time is just about impossible. You’ll have to go to an outside house for “replication” (dubbing copies of DVDs). Usually they are done in blocks of 1,000 units and the price includes packaging and shrinkwrapping. The total cost: figure on about $3,000.00, roughly. Then there’s other factors, like shipping and whether you had to pay additional money for artwork.
If you offer VHS copies as well, printing sleeves up (in blocks of a few thousand) will cost about $600, depending on your color separation prices. Professionally dubbing VHS copies in smaller blocks is much cheaper---you can do a few hundred for about $ 400.00, plus shipping. So there’s another grand added to your expenses.
Now you have all your DVDs and tapes sitting in your living room. What next? Well, of course you price the thing and offer it immediately for sale on your web site. You might sell about ten copies that way, if you’re lucky.
So you get in your car with your tapes and try to find all the local mom and pop stores you can that might buy a copy of your movie. Worked pretty good in the eighties, but these days, there aren’t many mom-and-pop video shops left and all the chains will say, “you have to go through our national buyer.” So now the fun begins. Even if you get a business card with the national buyer’s name and number, you’re in for an experience.
First you call the buyer. They’ll want to see the PRESS KIT and the TRAILER. If they’re interested in more, they’ll ask to see a FULL SCREENER of the movie. Sometimes this process of reviewing your movie for a major chain will take six months, or a year. Sometimes it has to go through MANY COMMITTEES and even whole separate companies that do the screening for the big company. (Blockbuster is one such operation that has several smaller companies that screen, acquire, and release movies through them. So you have no choice but to go through “middlemen.”) These committees will sometimes criticize your movie and even ask for CHANGES after you just had a thousand copies dubbed off. (“Cut this scene, it’s too violent, cut this, it’s too sexy. We don’t like the artwork, it needs something more. We’d like to handle that.”) Getting distressed yet? Not yet? How about when they offer you $4.00 a disc for a price, or $2.50 per VHS copy? If you have 1,000 discs that they agree to pay $4.00 a pop for, you’ll gross $4,000.00. Barely enough to make back your DVD expenses…you haven’t even touched your budget or anything else. And that’s a national rollout through a chain.
As you try to deal with the chains, you’re on the phone trying to get other buyers to listen to your pitch, to take a look at your movie. Your phone bill rises and rises (mine hit $450.00 one month when I was doing this!) and still, there’s rejection or NO WORD BACK at every turn. Sales are sluggish on your website, those good reviews are looking like no big deal at all.
While you wait on the chains, who more than likely WON’T buy your movie (for the simple reason that they like to deal with distributors who deal with them on a monthly basis, offering 4-6 NEW RELEASES a month to them, with various revolving credit lines already set up and in place), you decide to take out ads in magazines. Color ads run THOUSANDS of dollars in magazines like Fangoria, Video Business, Video Store Magazine, etc. So you settle on black and white ads, maybe even little classified ads in some cases, and you easily end up spending a couple of grand on this little publicity excursion. A quarter of a page, black and white ad cost me $600.00 in a national magazine…back in 1994. You sell some tapes and discs, but it’s still A LOT of units at $20 a pop, plus shipping, to make back what you spent on the ad itself. Now your bills are mounting…phone, ads, duplication, replication, artwork, oh, and hey…what about what you spent on the original budget? You’ve now spent another $4,000.00-$5,000.00 to simply line up ads and get the software produced to sell. Now some of the smaller chains are asking you for color flyers or small (18” x 26”) posters---and even if you go to a local print shop to have these made up, you can hit the $2,000.00 mark in no time at all.
So now you hit some horror conventions, and hey, all things considered, you sell twenty or thirty tapes and you’re feeling fine…until you see how much you’ve paid to rent a table, to travel to the show, and to eat and stay in a hotel while you’re there. And what about all those goodies you bought while you perused the aisles? You’re still in the hole.
Hey, why not the flea market? Great idea! Brand new movie at a flea market! Let’s try it. And you find yourself at a table all weekend long, trying to sell copies of ONE MOVIE and you quickly discover that the average flea market buyer is not only just looking for VARIETY, well, they’re also looking for a BARGAIN. Twenty bucks is way too steep for a tape or disc, new or not. SO you lower your price to fifteen…and as the weekend wears on, down to ten. Still, despite a few takers, it looks like five would’ve been the magic number, really. But you couldn’t go THAT low, now could you? There’d hardly be any profit in that!
Pretty soon you notice all your grand plans for a follow-up project (a.k.a. “the next movie”) are on hold. Your whole life has become SELLING YOUR MOVIE---from phone calls, to trying to connect with wholesalers and distributors, to packaging up and mailing out individual copies to consumers who respond to your ads. Then there’s the cost of a PO Box rental, what to do about escalating shipping costs, and so forth. This “little distribution hobby” can rapidly turn into a full-time affair, and along with your regular 40-hour a week career (which I hope you’ve kept through all this), there’s NO TIME left! And my how time flies as you wait to make that next “big connection.” One way to get names and phone numbers is through video trade magazines like Video Busines or Variety. Also, bookstores carry many tomes and magazines that list distributors and wholesalers, and Video Business offers a book every year through their publication that lists all the “sub-distributors, wholesalers, and rackjobbers” you’re looking to do business with. Another good volume for getting distrib info is the Hollywood Distributor's Directory (www.hcdonline.com). It's expensive (nearly $100) but has the listings you need. There’s also a magazine called Video Digest that has listings every year (in special issues) of who the players are.
You finally try to connect with the wholesalers that distributors sell to, the guys who might be able to get you into the chain stores, and they start buying, only most want credit terms. In other words, they want copies of your movie to sell without giving you any cash up front, but they PROMISE to pay you in anywhere from 3-6 months, after they’ve sold as many copies as they can.. Anything that doesn’t sell, well, that’s called a RETURN and they want a “full credit” from you on this (even though you didn’t get any money up front from them in the FIRST PLACE!).
And wouldn’t you believe it, some of these hucksters NEVER PAY THEIR BILLS and you have to hire a bill collector to try and get what’s owed to you! (Six months later, perhaps?) Sometimes these companies mail you back checks that are no good---they bounce or there’s INSUFFICIENT FUNDS in them. You have to hire a lawyer get to the bottom of this, but “mail fraud” is a whole different ballgame it seems, and that 800 number you had for the distributor…uh, it’s been disconnected with no warning! So now your movie is getting out there, but you have all these bills to pay…and not a dime to show for it.
Then the IRS starts knocking at your door, asking if you’re incorporated and whether or not your paying things like “tangible” and “intangible” sales tax on the items you’re selling, and oh yes, what about sales tax for each individual state? (If you sold product to someone in New York, it’s a different sales tax that goes to the state than say, Idaho.) So now you’re forced to hire accountants to try to get the IRS off your back and make sure that all these different states are being paid the right sales tax and now you have to get all this bookkeeping down so everyone knows EXACTLY what’s going on. It seems that what started out as a simple idea---selling your movie to a chain or two and reaping the benefits---has turned into an epic nightmare that has accountants, lawyers, bounced checks, and mounting bills. And how are your personal bills doing, by the way, now that you’re having to foot the bill on all these movie-related situations? Had enough yet? By the time you incorporate, cut your losses, and pay off all these new players, you’ll find yourself in an even deeper hole.
Am I making all this up? Nope, everything I described I actually lived, when I decided to distribute a few of my own movies from 1990-1996. I’m sure there are some things I missed, but that’s pretty much how it works. And that’s also what distributors go through when they release your movie! So now maybe you have a better idea of what they do and how much they have to go through to get your product out there. So when some take 50% of the profits and you say that’s too much, you might do a little self-reflecting if you’ve attempted to try the distribution stunt at home like I did. Is it too much? I don’t think so.
Every distributor deals with all the same issues I just outlined to get your movie out there. They spend money on packaging, replication, duplication, ads, screeners, review copies, shipping, the list goes on and on. It just so happens that they have relationships with the buyers at chains and wholesalers and they offer them several titles a month, which they can choose from. The revolving accounts are all set up with lawyers from both sides monitoring things to make sure they don’t get too far out of control. Everything is incorporated, taxed, and accounted for in bookkeeping. Because of these relationships and because the distributor feeds the wholesaler and retailer, it’s extremely difficult for a filmmaker with just one movie to sell to realistically get in the middle of all this and do well. Not impossible, of course, this is a business where NOTHING is impossible, but again, it’s highly unlikely.
Jumping into self-distribution for just one title---or even a few that you plan to make---is not the wisest decision in the world to make. It’s time consuming. Frustrating. Not nearly as profitable as one would like to believe (even though you “control” all the money). And unless you’re independently wealthy, there’s no way you can stay afloat if something goes wrong (like receiving bounced checks) or a wholesaler decides he needs a 180 day revolving account on your product. That’s six months where your product will be held up and they’ll only pay you for product that sold. So what if most of it doesn’t sell? Well, the product comes back to you and YOU PAY THE SHIPPING.
If you’re satisfied selling your product at garage sales, horror conventions, through classified ads, and a few copies off the Internet, then self-distribution is for you. You can get your movie listed on many of the larger b-movie sites and amazon.com going this route, and these companies will order copies directly from you as they sell. (Meaning pretty much ONE TAPE AT A TIME!) You CAN make some minor money this way. But generally speaking, unless you have something in your movie that an audience REALLY wants to see, you won’t be moving that many units. (And people that tell you otherwise, well, usually they’ve got the Enron mentality: they like to “fudge” the books and inflate their sales, right along with their egos.)
Self-distribution is generally a time-consuming money pit if you try to do it on a large scale. With the things I have outlined---duplication, replication, packaging, posters, shipping, phone bills, accounting, lawyers, 180 day accounts, returns policies, bouncing checks---and on and on, do you really want to attempt to do this? If so, I salute you, and good luck! Just be prepared for a long, bumpy ride. And have a lot of start-up money behind you when you jump into this endeavor.
As a final note on self-distribution, I remember when I was selling two of my movies and trying to shoot a new flick at the same time. I was trying to lock in locations, deal with actors, and take orders on the phone at the same time, all while holding down a regular 40-hour a week night job. I was so stressed out that it was unbelievable---printing out bills, shrink wrapping tapes, boxing up orders, running to the post office to mail tapes out, accepting orders, and trying to organize a new movie. I was overwhelmed. It felt like I was being stomped on from every angle because there was always a question, always an issue, always a problem, always a huge duplication bill rolling in. Your creative work will suffer if you try to do all this at once, there’s no question about it. That’s why it’s probably best to get a distributor to sell your movie if at all possible. There is a tremendous amount of freedom involved and you can still try all the things you want to do while using a distributor!
More next time! TO BE CONTINUED!