Why Studios Don’t Care if Hollywood Movies Tank and How Grassroots Exhibition Could Rescue Independent Film

My name is Carl Kriss, and I have been working as a research associate for Josh Penn and Michael Gottwald’s CRI fellowship on grassroots distribution.  Like Michael and Josh, I worked on the Obama campaign for both the 2008 and 2012 cycles and have been fascinated by how grassroots models from the campaign world shed light on new ways to distribute independent film. In fact, I've noticed a connection in the current struggle between independent filmmakers and Hollywood studios and the challenge Obama faced in the 2007 primary when he was running against the establishment-backed candidate, Hillary Clinton. In the early days, Obama and his team were at a major disadvantage in fundraising and name recognition, but the campaign was able to employ a historic grassroots operation on the ground and online that empowered volunteers to get out the vote and set records in fundraising by reaching out to small donors. This made me wonder whether a film collective could use grassroots organizing methods to distribute a slate of independent films that would normally not be seen in traditional movie theaters. The first step towards answering this question may be to figure out why studios are so interested in funding blockbuster movies over independent films in the first place, especially when many big budget flicks like Disney’s Lone Ranger and Sony’s After Earth continue to tank.

A recent article in the New York Times titled “Studios Unfazed by Colossal Wrecks” sheds light on why studios continue to spend more resources to distribute blockbuster movies instead of indies. In the article, Anita Elberse, a professor at Harvard Business School observed that even though more films are failing at the box office than before, it still “turns out to be a winning strategy.  It makes sense for the studios to spend disproportionately on a select group of the most likely winners. And they are the big budget franchise films with identifiable characters and global appeal.”

So studios seem to be intent on saturating the box office with blockbusters and sequels.  The article notes,"The studios collectively released 17 blockbusters between May and the beginning of August.  The summer season has rarely supported more than nine hits, according to Doug Creutz, senior media and entertainment analyst for Cowen & Company, who predicted this summer would generate numerous box-office flops."

Mr. Creutz adds that,

“The major media companies are so big that nothing but a blockbuster really makes sense. Say you make a low-budget comedy and it brings in $150 million. So what? That doesn’t move the needle. You make a blockbuster, you market and promote it, and it plays around the world. You can do the sequel and the consumer products and a theme park attraction. The movie itself is almost beside the point. All Disney is going to be doing is Marvel, Star Wars and animation.”

This is where grassroots distribution can rescue independent film.  With the advent of digital distribution, it has never been easier to screen movies at a low cost. A collective group of filmmakers and community organizers could distribute a slate of films at venues like drive-in's, union halls and school auditoriums for low costs and help prove to studios that there is a demand for independent films at the local level. We plan to explore this idea further in our next post for our 3rd Concluding Idea Series.

A Conversation with former Digital Politics Guru Nicco Mele- Has the Internet Really Changed the Game?

In our next interview we talked to the former Webmaster of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential bid, Nicco Mele. While working for the Dean campaign, Nicco helped pioneer the use of social media in political campaigns to fundraise. After the campaign, Nicco co-founded a digital strategy consulting firm called, EchoDitto, that offered service to non-profit and corporate clients like Barack Obama’s Senate campaign, the Clinton Global Initiative, and the Sierra Club. Nicco is currently a professor at Harvard where he teaches graduate classes on the Internet and politics. His book, The End of Big: How The Internet Makes David The New Goliath explores the consequences of living in a socially connected society. In our interview, Nicco questioned whether the Internet had transformed political campaigns and the film industry for the better. He referenced three books that he teaches in his Internet and Politics class to outline how the Internet has impacted political campaigns: The Move On Effect by David Karpf, Taking Our Country Back by Daniel Kreiss, and Victory Lab by Shasha Issenberg.

The first book Nicco discussed in our interview was The Move On Effect, which proposes a three-pillar theory for running an effective digital political campaign. Nicco recalled,

“One is build a big email list. You need a big email list because people live overwhelmingly in their inbox. The average American spends more than 30% of their time in their inbox… The other thing about email is that it’s measurable and repeatable and you can build behavior models to increase interaction. You can’t do that on Twitter or Facebook. If I tweet something I have no idea if you saw that tweet or not and so I can’t go back to you in a contextual way to tell you a greater story. Whereas with email I know if you opened the email, I know if you clicked on it and I can build a model to deal with you.”

“The second core pillar is online community. Karpf talks about this pretty exclusively in terms of blogs but I think it is a much broader decision besides just blogs. Online community is some sense about feeding the most rabid people in your community. The care and feeding of evangelist is essential in online success.”

“The third pillar is online/offline. Politics is really a face to face business and you really have to be able to use the Internet to drive people to meet face to face.”

Nicco also mentioned that to be successful at these three things, you need a nimble operation that contains a willingness to take risk, has strong analytic skills and aggressive in measurement. “Part of being successful on the internet is taking advantage of when things go viral. But who knows what makes things go viral? That’s obscure and impossible to measure. So you have to try a lot of things hoping some of them go viral and you have to measure them so when something starts to go viral you can poor gasoline on the fire and then you have to be able to measure that.”

Nicco then contrasted Karpf’s three-pillars theory for running a digital campaign with a list of 5 key elements that go into running any campaign (regardless of its digital component)

   1) Raise money    2) Have a message    3) Communicate the message through media    4) Deal with press    5) Field or turnout operation

Examining the list, Nicco posited that perhaps the internet has only had a significant impact on one of those elements: Raise money.

“It’s fundraising and that’s where both Dean and Obama broke through. They used the Internet to build an alternative vehicle for fundraising. And the message is still crafted with polling. The message is still delivered by television… And I bet if we made a list of the 5 essential elements of pulling off a film we could figure out how the Internet or digital changes those things. Pretty clear Kickstarter and Indiegogo, etc., are having some impact on the funding of films. Although exactly how much impact and whether it’s good is a big question for me.”

This causes us to wonder if the only thing filmmakers can really learn from the Dean and Obama campaigns, as far as digital goes, is that the internet makes it extremely easy to raise money. However, the Obama campaign was known for recruiting a historic number of volunteers to knock on doors and make calls for the campaign, and many of these volunteers were recruited through offline phone calls and one-on-one meetings with organizers on the ground -- not email. However, translating money into action is usually harder. Nicco pointed out that out of the approximately 6 million people who donated to Obama’s campaign in 2008, only approximately [400,000] people or around 10% made phone calls to their members of Congress to support Obama’s signature healthcare bill 8 months later. Nicco noted,

“There is this bizarre paradox which has probably never been true in American or maybe human history which is [that right now] giving 100 dollars is easier than doing anything else. Which is kind of lunacy and probably bad for democracy. It is definitely not healthy.”

Nicco is suggesting that although the internet has made it easier to contribute to political and film campaigns than before, it has not had a significant impact in motivating people to take action in politics or in film. For example, an astonishing 80% of Kickstarter films that get funded are social issue films, but how many Kickstarter donors volunteer to bring about meaningful change for the social issue film they donate towards?

This led Nicco to draw a contrast between the internet, which he views as an intentional medium and TV, which he defines as a persuasive medium.

“From a political tactical perspective, TV is persuasive in a way that the internet isn’t. I think the reasons are: 1) the internet is intentional and requires focus and television is not and the second thing is just scale and repetition. Television’s reach and scale still dwarfs the internet and everyday it’s shrinking. But I could buy commercials on 300 television channels and effectively reach two thirds of America. And to reach two thirds of America the online ad buy is essentially inconceivable [as far as] what would be required, and probably practically impossible. At that equation of scale and repetition is where TV trumps the internet. And the gap is so giant that TV could decline for 10 years and still be a more effective way in reaching people in a mass media kind of way than the internet because the internet simply isn’t mass media at all.”

In this quotation Nicco offers 2 insights about the new media vs. old media. 1) The Internet causes people to dwell overwhelmingly in the present. This leads to people not caring about traditional narrative structure -- everything from reality TV to how it influences the message. 2) Television is still the most effective way to persuade and reach a mass audience since TV networks and shows have a much larger audience than websites. Although the audience for TV is steadily decreasing, it will take a significant amount of time for websites on the Internet to pass viewership on TV.

Conclusion

In conclusion, our conversation with Nicco causes us to wonder if online organizing is perhaps not the most effective platform for driving people towards action. Although the Internet has been proven to be an effective tool for fundraising, the intentional nature of the medium results in people searching for ways to contribute through small actions like donating instead of offline action like volunteering for a cause. From our experience working on the Obama campaign, complementing online organizing with old fashion door knocking, phone calls and one-on-one meetings played a key role in motivating supporters to act beyond just simply donating online. This makes us wonder if filmmakers should consider how offline meetings or phone calls with their online supporters could motivate the audience to get involved in distribution beyond just donating or watching a film. We plan to explore what approaches are most effective for building offline relationships with audience members in order to propel them towards the action of distributing films in future posts.

Jeremy Bird, 2012 Obama National Field Director, Talks Grassroots Organizing and Film: Part 1

Recently we interviewed Jeremy Bird to get his thoughts on grassroots organizing and how it can be related to film.  Jeremy Bird has become the ‘keeper of the flame’ when it comes to lessons learned from the Obama campaign. He studied under Marshall Ganz who was Obama's community organizing mentor and later worked as the Ohio General Election Director for Obama’s 2008 campaign, and served as the National Field Director for the campaign in 2012.  Jeremy recently co-founded a political consulting firm called 270 Strategies with former Obama Campaign Battleground States Director, Mitch Stewart.  270 Strategies helps clients connect with key constituencies and design innovative programs. Their current list of clients includes Cory Booker’s Senate campaign,  Ready for Hillary and Battleground Texas. Jeremy discussed the definition of grassroots and how organizing and targeting strategies from the Obama campaign could be adapted to help distribute film.

MG: What are the essential grassroots elements of the Obama campaign that you think can be translated to other industries like film. Is it going against an establishment, is it about empowering people, is it structure…What makes something a true grassroots operation?

Jeremy Bird: 1) Access to data and information.

That seems like something that just everybody does but people didn’t do that before. They would give access to their staff…but they wouldn’t give access to data and information down to the individual volunteer.

2) Real responsibility and goals at the local level.

Instead of saying here’s a packet call these people it’s, ‘let me talk to you about how we’re going to win your neighborhood and I want you to be a member of the team that’s going to do that.’ Now you’re going to do tactics, you’re going to do specific tasks but I’m going to think of you as someone who is responsible for this instead of someone who’s just going to do something because I tell you to.

3) The ability to scale and make your campaign accessible.

Ultimately what you’re trying to do is have people talking to people individually face to face as much as possible. You can’t do that if you’re centralizing the whole operation in D.C., Chicago or a different place.

4) A fundamental philosophy that volunteers can change the outcome.

I think the big difference starting in 2008 is that Plouffe and other people really believed that volunteers had the ability to change the outcome. So it all starts with that kind of philosophy and what you want to give people at the local level.

MG: In the film world there is a stunning lack of data about who is going to see what and how they are seeing it and that creates a problem immediately from a grassroots perspective. Have you ever had an experience where there is very little awareness about the candidate or issue and you’re starting from total scratch to see where they’re at? How do you handle a situation like that?

Jeremy Bird: When I first got to South Carolina no one knew who we were and no one knew how to pronounce our name so we did everything. We paid for TV ads, we did mail, we hired organizers on the ground to up our name idea, the full gamut of everything digital etc.

If you were trying to figure out who is most likely to go see an indie film for example as opposed to a Hollywood film, you want to figure out how big of a universe you need to talk to who tell you ‘yeah I like independent film’ and how can you build a model to say other people who look like them are likely to like independent film using a data set that you have on folks. You know we have it on voter file a lot of other people have it on consumer information.

But really, if somebody in Ohio had told us in 2010 that they supported Governor Strickland, that superceded any other piece of information we could ever get on them. It didn’t matter what car they drove, it didn’t matter where they lived, it didn’t matter what race they were…If they had told us in our worst year that they supported a Democratic candidate they were going to vote for Barack Obama.

The question is how do you actually ask people in some scalable way what movie they like to watch or what they like to eat or these things you want to know about them and then ask enough people that question that you can then build a model.

MG: A lot of filmmakers are stuck wondering if they should try to sell their film appealing to the broadest number of people possible like ‘this is a film that everyone can embrace’ or if they should try to target and isolate the audience that might like their film specifically. In your experience is it smarter to break up the audience and go after targeted constituencies or is it smarter to appeal to the broader elements of your candidate?

Jeremy Bird: Both. You have to have an overarching narrative that appeals to the largest audience possible, especially in a political campaign, then within that frame you figure out what are the things you really want to stress with specific constituencies…you want to have a broad narrative that ties it all together but then you want to highlight actually specific pieces for constituency to really speak to the issues that really matter to them. So I think it’s both.

MG: Have you ever had to do a campaign where people had to take action at home? That’s sort of a thing we have to deal with when it comes to people renting a movie on a certain day.

Jeremy Bird: That’s what we did for bad voting Democrats, sporadics. We called it commitment cards, or basically an ‘I’m in’ program. We would go to them and say, ‘do you commit to voting on Election Day?’ and have them fill out a card either online or in person saying ‘I will commit to vote.’ We wanted to know that they lived there still, that all the data was right but also that they were going to turn out.

The best was in Ohio we would send them back the card they actually filled out with their own handwriting reminding them that they committed to vote. In the states that did that in 2010, it upped turnout by like 4 to 7 points because people were reminded of something they previously committed to.

Part 2:

Our interview with Jeremy Bird gave us many key insights into how the Obama grassroots model could be utilized to distribute film. In our next post we will reflect more on what we learned from our conversation with Jeremy Bird, and present new ideas for how grassroots organizing methods can be used to empower audiences and improve targeting for film.

-Michael, Josh and Carl