A Conversation with Chris Dorr- How Filmmakers can go around the Gatekeepers

In our next interview, we talked to Chris Dorr about his insights on how the film industry has evolved in the digital age of distribution.  Chris has a broad background working in both the independent and studio film world. He started his career at Film Arts Foundation where he raised money to support independent filmmakers and then worked on bigger studio films at Disney and Universal Pictures.  Chris is currently working as a media consultant for MTV Networks, Tribeca Film Festival and the Canadian Film Center. Below are three questions our interview with Chris raised that relate to how the film industry is adapting to emerging digital and grassroots tools.

Q1) How do you determine if your film is better on or off the festival circuit?

Chris suggested, “One might argue the only films that really benefit from Sundance are the ones like Beasts that are the few two or three that get big, big attention and [for] everyone else if you went there or not doesn’t really matter…” Therefore if your film is unlikely to win big on the festival circuit and if you already have at least the potential for a built-in audience, you might want to consider self-distribution.

In our recent post on the feature documentary Honor Flight, we learned that they were able to set the Guinness World Record for the largest film screening by tapping into a built in network of veterans who were interested in seeing the film, which documents the compelling story of war veterans who visit the WWII Memorial in D.C. as part of the Honor Flight program.  However, when the Honor Flight team took the film on the festival circuit, the momentum for the film slowed down since they were unable to top the excitement generated by their massive debut.  In addition, festival rules inhibited them from selling DVDs at screenings or online. This makes us wonder if more independent filmmakers should consider ways to distribute their film directly to their audience instead of relying on the traditional gatekeepers at festivals to give their films recognition. Especially since the multitude of ways to distribute your film digitally has changed the traditional process of getting buzz and attention for your film.  Filmmakers can often get more attention for their film by posting a trailer on YouTube or running a Kickstarter campaign instead of waiting for a critic to review their film at a festival.

Q 2) Can you generate your own distribution circuit online?

This next questions Chris raised relates to the possibility of using digital and grassroots tools to not only fundraise, but also distribute your film.  Chris pointed out,

“One of the reasons why people want to go to Sundance is Sundance is heavily covered by all kinds of media all over the world… Now there may be the same way to gain that kind of attention without going to any of the festivals. I think there will continue to be ways to of getting around the typical gatekeepers that people can use to build their own audience. But what you have to be able to do is figure out how to get mass media attention without spending mass media dollars.”

Digital tools like Kickstarter and blogging have enabled filmmakers to avoid the traditional publicity and marketing costs that go into a festival or movie theater run. In our recent interview with self-distributing filmmaker Gregory Bayne, he discussed how he was able to gain publicity for his film, Driven, which tells the story of UFC legend Jens Pulver, by making the film available to watch online during a limited time for free.  This lead to Mixed Martial Arts websites and blogs giving the film free publicity and later Warner Brothers acquired the film so they could distribute it on demand.  Greg was able to save thousands of dollars on marketing by hosting free online screenings that made it possible for more people to see his film than any film festival could provide.

Q 3) Does the independent film industry’s financing paradigm place it in a third category, somewhere between non-profit and for-profit film? If so what does that look like, and are there precedents?

The last question our interview with Chris raised relates to why people donate to projects on crowdfunding sites like Kickstater in the first place.  Chris recognized that Kickstarter is

“Neither for profit or non-profit; it’s somewhere in the middle.  In certain cases, you’re getting X, Y or Z which are actual things, certain incentives that are built in… I think we’re wrong in thinking something is for profit or non-profit.  It’s just different kinds of subsidies.”

This insight brings into question whether people donate out of an altruistic desire to help the filmmaker which is similar to a non-profit, or to simply obtain a DVD or movie poster, or do people donate because it appeals to both their altruistic and consumer desires. The idea that using Kickstarter lies somewhere in between running a for profit and non-profit company reveals that filmmakers should not limit their film campaign to run like either. Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites give filmmakers the potential to attract supporters who wish to donate out of an altruistic need to help others and/or their desire for a material reward.  Although there is not yet a term for this kind of fundraising, it has been utilized by many film campaigns and is especially useful for independent filmmakers who need to take advantage of all available resources to get their films made and distributed.

Conclusion

In conclusion, our interview with Chris lead us to discover that although the emergence of digital tools is changing the film distribution rapidly, it also opens the door for independent filmmakers that are not afraid to go off the beaten path. However, it can be tricky to figure out which path to take when there are so many options.  This leads us to three questions we think will help independent filmmakers determine whether their film is best suited for a traditional or non-traditional distribution model, 1) Is my film likely to perform well at a top festivals? 2) Is there already a built in audience behind my film? 3) Will I be more likely to reach my target audience online or through community screenings?

Although these certainly are not the only questions filmmakers should be asking when distributing their film, it hopefully starts the process of thinking about whether you should go the traditional or non-traditional route. In future posts, we plan to look at the different categories of non-tradition distribution models and explore what models are most adaptable for certain kinds of independent film.

A Study in Film Campaigns, Part 1: The External Action Campaign

To follow up our post on Immersive vs. Inclusive campaigns, we will take a closer look at how three different kinds of film campaigns differ in their focus and engagement strategy. Through this endeavor hopefully we'll discover which works best, depending on a filmmaker's goal. The first film campaign we will explore is that of the Academy Award-nominated film, The Visitor, which drove awareness of unfair deportation processes for immigrants. The Visitor is an example of a film campaign that seeks to motivate its audience to take social action to create change beyond just distributing the film. After the film had been released in theaters, the distributor, Participant Media, launched an action campaign on their social advocacy website Take Part. The website offers a variety of tools to translate a desire to help into clear, actionable next steps.

The main menu of The Visitor website offers “5 Things That You Can Do Now:” 1) Watch interviews of immigrant detainees, 2) write letters to detainees, 3) connect to a virtual immigrant experience 4) learn how to represent detainees if you’re a lawyer, 5) learn about the deportation process. By clicking on the “If you’re a lawyer, connect with experts” tab, you go to a page where lawyers can sign up to attend a free legal action seminar conducted by the O’Melveny and Myers law firm. Interestingly, this not only leads the audience towards taking action but also provides clear goals and metrics that help measure the impact of the film’s campaign. In the podcast, “The Business,” one of the producers reveals that signups through the portal trained roughly 2,500 lawyers, who later represented more than 10,000 detainees. This metric gives The Visitor campaign tangible numbers to show that it was a success, which in turn helps build more of a movement around the film and its social goals.

Clicking on the "Virtual Immigrant" tab leads you to another website called “Iced” that immerses you in the world of immigrants in America who often endure unfair laws that result in their deportation. Once on the “Iced” website, you can download a video game where you walk around a neighborhood and have to make decisions in order to not be deported. Interestingly, the game is similar to the Django video game we explored in our previous post on Immersive vs. Inclusive campaigns. However, playing the game as a virtual immigrant leads the audience to gain a deeper understanding of the real life struggles of immigrants in America. In contrast, the Django game immerses you deeper into the fictional world of its characters. The Django game uses immersion to entertain and motivate the audience to buy the DVD or merchandise, whereas The Visitor action campaign uses immersion to educate and lead their audience towards taking action in the real world.

The campaign for The Visitor is of a kind that has as its goal for the audience to take action external to the film; in other words, the film is positioned as a tool to create change. Even the immersion methods are put into practice to transform the audience into active agents, not passive consumers. A characteristic specificto this kind of campaign is that because it is tied to real-world, tangible action, its impact can in fact be measured -- not in ticket sales, but in statistics like the number of lawyers trained. These social action campaigns are more measurable than social awareness campaigns, which often lack the numbers to prove that they are effective. However, it should be noted that any audience energy that social action campaigns direct towards tangible change is by definition not being directed towards advocating for the film itself; in other words, it's good for the world, but insignificant to the film's life in distribution. To put it bluntly, the number of lawyers that The Visitor campaign trained likely had no effect on how far the film went as a product in the marketplace. However, an actual political campaign can benefit from a "sense of service to others” because its social impact goal and its endgame are one and the same. (See our post on Giving vs. Taking here.)

That's not to say there aren't lessons learned from The Visitor that any campaign can put into use. All kinds of films could do a better job of tracking how many volunteers they engage, how many phone calls they make, and how many groups are reached out to, to help spread the word about a film. In our next post we will look at how the film campaign for Beasts of the Southern Wild focuses on engaging audiences to help with distribution instead of social action like The Visitor’s campaign. What metrics can grassroots film campaigns like Beasts gather in order to gain a better understanding of their audience and help market their film?

-Josh, Michael and Carl

Immersive vs. Inclusive Campaigns

A recurring theme in many of our posts is whether grassroots organizing tools can benefit all film distribution efforts or only films that fit into a specific genre type, or budget level: i.e. issue-based, non-fiction or independent. We will explore this question further by looking at the formative efforts to extend a film’s reach online, and what they tell us about the disparate roles of the internet in the contemporary distribution of different kinds of films. Donnie Darko and The Blair Witch Project were among the first films to break ground in how to expand a film’s presence through the internet. Both films succeed at drawing a deeper connection with fans by using their websites to extend the fictional world of their films. For example, when you click on the Donnie Darko webpage the user becomes like the character Donnie Darko, trying to collect clues and make sense of the mysterious world of time travel. Eerie music plays and the user must answer riddles to learn new information about the characters, themes and ideas in the film. The Blair Witch Project also seeks to immerses the audience deeper into its fictional world by extending the Blair Witch Myth in its website. The “Mythology” tab provides a pseudo history of the Blair Witch myth as if it were true. The “Filmmakers” tab offers a photo gallery of the filmmakers working on the project before they disappeared, making the story seem all the more real.

Over time, many Hollywood releases have emulated what Donnie Darko and The Blair Witch Project were the first to do by immersing the audience deeper into the fantasy world of their own films. For example, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained website offers a variety of games fans can chose from to go deeper into the imaginary world of Django. From the main menu screen, you can play a game where you shoot down slave owners as if you were Django in the film. You can watch an interactive trailer that asks you trivia questions about the film, and another screen lets you click around the Candy Land plantation to discover promotional material from the film. Other Hollywood films like Catfish and Men in Black use a similar approach to stoke fan-dom and develop a deep but passive relationship between the consumer and product. Though elaborate and certainly fun, the main goal of all these websites is actually merely to motivate fans to develop a deeper connection to the fictional world of the movie, such that they buy the DVD, spread the word about the film to their friends, and possibly purchase merchandise.

This leads us to understand that a key difference between how mainstream Hollywood films and what we can refer to as films with “legitimate grassroots” distribution campaigns that use the internet boils down to immersive vs. inclusive. Immersive campaigns seek to gain traction in sales by drawing the audience deeper into the fictional world of the film; this is basically just an isoteric and specialized form of marketing. In contrast, inclusive campaigns deliberately take an audience member out of the world of a film, to acknowledge explicitly that a film is a film, and one that needs support to survive; given this premise, they then actively include the audience in the distribution process. The relationship between the filmmaker and audience member is active and the goal is for the audience to be transformed into advocates of the film to others in their communities.

Four Eyed Monsters, Sleepwalk With Me and Beasts of the Southern Wild are all examples of inclusive distribution campaigns that break from the immersive marketing model, and ask their audience to use grassroots tools to help distribute their film. For instance, Four Eyed Monsters and Sleepwalk with Me ask audience members to transform their support for the film into action online to convince movie theaters to screen their film. The website for Beasts of the Southern Wild asks fans to contact the Beasts team directly to be enlisted to host house parties, community screenings or recruiting a group to see the film in theaters. Interestingly, however, Fox Searchlight created a separate website for Beasts called WelcometotheBathtub.com that uses immersive tactics to sell the film. This proves that immersive and inclusive campaigns do not have to be totally separate; in fact the two can complement each other.

Just as the independent films like Donnie Darko and Blair Witch Project led the way for immersive marketing methods on the web, contemporary films that use grassroots organizing tools could be paving the way for marketing films in the future. This does not mean that immersive campaigns are not still effective, but instead that inclusive campaigns present a new dynamic between filmmaker and audience member that distributors should not ignore. (For example, though Veronica Mars was produced and distributed by a major network, that didn’t stop the show from benefiting from a major grassroots show of support via Kickstarter to greenlight the production of a film based on the show). In our future posts we will continue to explore how grassroots organizing is starting to intersect with the distribution process for mainstream films.

-Josh, Michael and Carl

Introduction: Our Background

At its core, our desire to explore this area of research comes not from our experience as film producers, but from the time we have spent in political campaigns and specifically in our time working for the Barack Obama presidential campaigns of both 2008 and 2012. In fact, ever since graduating from college, both Josh and Michael have oscillated between endeavors in the political realm and producing work in the independent film world. Before our roles as producer and executive producer on Court 13’s short film “Glory at Sea,” respectively, Josh worked in Michigan on a Senate campaign, while Michael worked at the think tank Center for American Progress in Washington D.C. After the short film had its festival run, we both were brought into the fold of the Obama for America apparatus, which at the time was working with grassroots ideas in new, pioneering ways. We both worked as New Media Directors—each in separate swing states—and were asked to return as Digital Program Managers at the national headquarters of the launch of the 2012 re-election campaign. (Between the campaigns we developed and produced “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” as well as worked our own separate film projects). We each have experience in the field organizing aspects of political campaigns, which plays into our prior knowledge of how these methods and structures work. None of this is to imply that politics and film are one in the same as they differ greatly, and a political campaign can and should have a very different audience than a film outreach program; nonetheless, there is much to be taken from and learned from the expertise of these movements in reaching people and generating excitement and advocacy. And more than anything, we would like to explore the relationship between what works in political campaigns and what can work in film campaigns. However, as producers, we have had experience that has led us to want to explore this topic as well. During our time on films, we have come to appreciate that the same skill set that is required to mobilize enthusiastic voters into becoming volunteers or taking action offline or online is very much at work as a producer. Though the focus of our exploration will be on distribution, consider some parallels at play in the stages of a film’s life that come before its release. For example, though the pre-production and production of Benh Zeitlin’s "Glory at Sea" (on which we served as producer and executive producer, respectively) was entirely unorganized, unstructured, and extremely chaotic, there was definite energy and commitment amongst the crew that got the whole project eventually done – it was the kind of personal emotional investment you can find on the best kinds of grassroots campaigns. However, while on Glory this enthusiasm did not have a real structure in which to operate, on "Beasts of the Southern Wild" we were able to formalize an operation that would best fit for it. During development, before we logistically or financially able to staff up our crew, we mobilized would-be crew members around the Herculean task of finding our young star – more than ten different eventual crew members auditioned almost 4000 young girls all across the state. Similarly, we set up pre-production such that the crew would all be living together, on location along the bayous, with a home base at our headquarters that was social as much as professional. This created a community feeling that was key to our success on the film; everyone became familiar and friendly with each other through the task of building what our movie needed. Finally, the structure of various departments was set up so as to allow room for and encourage creative people who wanted to be working on the film to come down and do it. The production had the feel of a summer camp, where we were all committed to the monumental endeavor of pulling the film off, and each crew member was there because they wanted to be there. It was not a job; it was a community project. (More on Beasts in future posts).

So too are all grassroots campaigns community projects – even political campaigns. It takes a well-run structure to properly organize the enthusiasm of many around a common goal, and campaigns tend to be more structured with this in mind than film productions and distribution operations. We are interested in taking this parallel further, by exploring what other of these campaign methodologies we can put into place in the “community project” of putting out an independent film.

-Michael and Josh