The Blame Game and the Glut-ter Punks

The favorite thing to do on the internet amongst indie film journalists this week seems to be to tear apart Manohla Dargis' piece in the New York Times, "As Indies Explode, an Appeal for Sanity." We don't want to uselessly add to the cacophony, but rather it might benefit to consider the problem that Dargis poses from the perspective of grassroots distribution. And it is a real problem; however, the glut of films she bemoans at  Sundance and then in New York theaters does not just manifest itself out of nowhere. It's simply a natural byproduct of the glut in production that there is generally right now. In fact in a recent survey of film professionals by Thom Powers, Janet Pierson mentions off hand that it seems like there are more people interested in making films than in walking to their local theater to see them. Basically, let's not pretend like the bottleneck is clogged up just at Sundance or New York theaters, and it's not that buyers are trigger-happy. Quite the opposite actually - every year Sundance programs more films and a smaller percentage acquire formal distribution (hence the increasing importance of exploring self-distribution through grassroots methods).

A directive like "take a moment and consider whether flooding theaters with titles is good for movies and moviegoers alike" assumes a couple things and overlooks some others. A simple raised hand might point out that this situation might only describe the situation amongst the traditional theater houses of New York or Los Angeles, dismissing what the spread of films is like in venues in every other city in America. But the easiest criticism has been to say that this statement neglects "four-walling" -- when a film's promoters buy out a theater in New York for the opening weekend. The next logical leap is to point the finger back at Ms. Dargis' own publication, because many use four-walling to exploit the Times' policy that they will review any film that opens theatrically in New York.

But let's look a little deeper. One thing we've often asserted in this fellowship that the glut of production makes branding, or curation -- anything that filters the massive choice that a viewer has to make when gazing upon this sea of films available -- more important and front and center to "distribution" than ever (and in fact distances it from the actual practice of distribution). For better or worse, a New York Times film review (due to their policy) is a form of that curation, precisely because it says "This film had a theatrical release." So the massive number of films available don't render that review less relevant; in fact it exacerbates its importance. And because it's essentially purchase-able via four-walling, it becomes an increasingly artificial symbol of success.

That is the real problem -- that the theatrical release is still being endowed with that (false symbolic) power. But the dynamics of self-release and grassroots distribution only add to it; a film's release in a New York theater is an event, and if grassroots campaigning depends on events to motivate action, a New York release is the equivalent of Election Day! However, if a film's calendar is peppered with events -- ie regional releases supported by the filmmaker doing a Q & A in person, selling merchandise, offering something special, like a candidate on a campaign trail -- then the importance of New York, as just one city, can be slightly diminished. A film's release should be a constant campaign with momentum consistently maintained around various benchmarks, not one long one that leads to a singular box office day and one write-up in the Times.

But what's most striking is the zero sum game that seems to be at play in Dargis' article between theaters and films (not to mention the false dichotomy of "good film = theater / bad film = VOD" that's assumed here). It's as if the number of theaters has stayed flat while the number of films we're trying to cram in them has skyrocketed. Probably the latter is outpacing the former, but the real opportunity for grassroots bottom-up disruption in the film industry might be located in the exhibition space. We've considered this in our idea for a Yelp-type app for film venues. If a filmmaker, after much deliberation, decides that a theatrical release is really important to their film's campaign (and not just a quick four-wall cash-grab for a review), then they have to open their mind to what kind of space their film can play in. Money that goes to four-walling traditional venues could instead go to promoting the actual run of their film in a less traditional space, or creating and building a real volunteer force to get word out based on that constant fuel of grassroots anything: sheer enthusiasm.

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On behalf of Josh, Michael, and Carl, we just want to say it's been a great year writing about the film industry as it continues to change in unexpected and interesting ways. We're extremely grateful to John Tintori and everyone on the board at the Cinema Research Institute for the fellowship and the opportunity to think out loud in this corner of the internet for the last 12 months. And thank you to anyone who has tuned in, shared their thoughts, sent along articles, agreed to being interviewed. Grassroots filmmaking is all about community, and you all, along with the people that make CRI happen, are our community. Thank you.

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.

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

Speaking in Tongues: Case Study

Background & Context In this post we report on an interview with Marcia Jarmel, director of the documentary film Speaking in Tongues. Marcia shared a generous amount of insight from her own experience with grassroots distribution.

Marcia and her co-director Ken Schneider partnered with Working Films, a national nonprofit that focuses on audience engagement to work strategically with particular documentaries to make a social impact. As Speaking in Tongues deals with issues of secondary languages in schools, the campaign attempted to raise awareness of the importance of bilingualism through community screenings, educational distribution, and community action. In other words, they explicitly imagined and positioned their film as a tool for social change.

The Speaking in Tongues team utilized two grassroots methods to distribute the film nationally: (1) reaching out to advocacy and issue interested groups and (2) community screenings. To coordinate outreach for community screenings, they identified six key audiences: Policymakers, Legislators, Parents, Educators, Youth, and Language Advocates.

To promote sales online, Marcia and her team sent out alerts electronically and reached out to a network of partner organizations that posted the trailer on their websites and blogs.  The outreach resulted in more than 250 community screenings across the United States, many of which were hosted by community groups, advocates and conferences.  The highest attendance for a screening was over 300 and the film has sold close to 3,000 DVD's to date.  It continues to screen and reach new educational audiences 4 years after its premiere.

Key Takeaways

There are four key themes to be considered through a grassroots/campaign lens, from the film: 1) clear goals for interpreting and formulating metrics from the start, 2) the advantages of positioning a film as a social instrument, 3) the need for a specific kind of workforce, and 4) the current potential of gathering and reusing valuable data for future film campaigns. Finally, we’ll end with some concluding ideas on how some of Marcia’s challenges could be rectified.

1) We showed in our past post on Participant Media that using a film as a tool for social action can usually create a metric system for impact that a standard film cannot. External action is simply easier to measure – and the case of Speaking in Tongues is no different. The filmmakers used a service called Sparkwise that tracked all the data that they selected as relevant to the film; this could be everything from number of likes on Facebook to what states had passed H.R. 6036, the Excellence and Innovation in Language Learning Act. In other words, the filmmakers tied the film’s success to the success of the larger social movement it was supporting.

However, the film did not begin tracking these metrics until the campaign was waning; the platform wasn't available yet, and it was unknown at the time how useful they would be. The Speaking in Tongues filmmakers did do substantial work to connect with advocates and set up community screenings, as well as email blasts to thousands of educators interested in the issue. They screened at about 20 conferences to audiences large and small. The idea was that these audiences would then bring the film and its materials and messages back to their own communities. Of course, the social impact of one film can be extremely tricky to measure, especially with a film like Speaking in Tongues, which was one voice in a broader debate. To isolate & measure impact would mean isolating the film from its social movement; instead, Marcia says, "our strategy... was to connect with campaigns already in process rather than try to create and implement our own campaign... because we didn't have the people power or organizing expertise in house."

2) Marcia considered the film’s status as an instrument for change not as a hindrance to its popularity but rather as helpful in the distribution opportunities they were exploring. In the personal contact required to build the community screenings, the film’s agenda provided a common goal for citizens previously unaffiliated with the film – as opposed to trying to get them to advocate for a film that does not take on a cause they care about. Marcia reflected:

“It’s really about relationship building, which is probably very similar to political campaigning… Instead of offering [just] a film which people can see as a request to promote a film for free, you frame it in terms of what the organization needs.  What are they trying to do.  Can we create an event that can serve to push their own agenda forward? ... These relationships take time and management.”

This is Community Organizing 101: sharing your story and framing the challenge at hand in terms of how its resolution can move toward a common goal. In order to do this, however, you need organizers that can reach out to supporters through intimate, one-on-one meetings on the ground. Which leads to our next takeaway:

3) If there was one thing that Marcia kept coming back to, was the need for a larger workforce to collaborate with. With the campaign for the film so oriented around community screenings, it was clear that more direct, on the ground, hands-on attention to these screenings could have made them exponentially more popular, which would have been good both for the film’s political goals and for it as a thing in the marketplace.

As anyone who has worked in a campaign regional field office knows, it’s fundamentally important to engage volunteers to build whatever you are staging in the area. Local volunteers can also provide tactical advice and event-building support in a much more customized and impactful way than mass emails. Finally, organizers on the ground could also have helped conduct press outreach, which is an activity unfamiliar and uncomfortable to many volunteers but vital to a sustainable promotional campaign.

“Having more people nurturing those relationships, checking in with contacts regularly, having the budget to travel to meet people face to face, all of that would have made a big difference in what could have happened and the pace at which things happened,” reflects Marcia. When asked what the most important factor is in the success of campaigns like hers, she concluded “I think it’s people.”

The interns that Marcia did have were not, in fact, people interested in advancing in the film industry, nor were they up and coming political activists with a particular interest in the cause. Rather, they were folks interested in marketing. Marcia conceded that anyone interested in documentary film should be much more versed in this kind of ground-level organizing skill set. We’ll revisit this idea in the last, concluding takeaway.

4) A brief but simple takeaway: Marcia’s film is a textbook case about how valuable data can be in the modern self-distribution landscape. Throughout the course of her film’s campaign (and all of its outreach, community screenings, and publicity), innumerable names, phone numbers, and email addresses were acquired. However, at the end of the ordeal, there was not a logical place to pass it on to, when it seemed like there very much should be. Marcia reflects,

“It’s not the data that I don’t know what to do with, but the universe of the film…website, Facebook and Twitter followers, newsletter subscribers, blog followers.  There’s a universe there that I don’t have the bandwidth to sustain.  I will continue to include the contacts in my outreach for future films, but the network of people following these issues through us, seems like a resource that shouldn’t be let go.”

We’ve established in other posts that information like this is pivotal for self-distribution. As Marcia mentioned, it seems like it should have a life beyond one film’s outreach – as it did with B-Side. However, B-Side was an organization; this is one group of filmmakers. But what if there was a legitimate way for filmmakers to share information like this?

Conclusion

“At the beginning of this I had zero experience … I started out thinking I could do everything myself, and made myself pretty nuts for a while. It is much, much easier to have an army of people helping you. I think most filmmakers do not have that.”

If there has been one recurring theme from our conversations with Marcia and other independent filmmakers is that filmmakers often feel overwhelmed by having to create their own digital and community outreach campaign from scratch. Not only does this create more work and stress for the filmmaker in areas that are not their expertise, but it also results in the important data gathered from audiences who are already engaged going to waste once the distribution run of the film is done.

This makes us wonder if a film collective could be formed so that when audiences ‘opt-in’ to a film project – i.e. they give their information at a community screening, or to a volunteer -- the information is shared and passed onto a group of filmmakers that later use the information for their future campaigns. Taking it further, this collective could also share best practices, organizers, and even volunteers so that filmmakers like Marcia do not have to start from scratch every time they make a film. Especially for filmmakers who want to use their film as a tool for change, the skills necessary for organizing an engaged populace for voting and for filmgoing overlap in a major way. We’ll end with this quotation from Marcia:

“I think there is a huge disconnect between people who are doing advocacy and political work…they don’t understand how film can be a tool for them. Everybody wants to have a video for their website that promotes their own agenda but people do not understand how powerful stories can be in moving that agenda forward. The more independent those stories are from the advocacy organization itself,  the more powerful they can be in bringing people in beyond the choir.”

What would such a “film organizing” organization look like? Would it consist mostly of filmmakers or include community organizers and activists as well? This is an idea we plan to explore in future posts.

Marcia and the Speaking in Tongues team will be putting up a new section of their website this summer that will include information on best practices and case studies about the successful impact of their film.  Anyone interested in following the Speaking in Tongues campaign can join their mailing list at (www.speakingintonguesfilm.info) and / or their Facebook page at (https://www.facebook.com/Speaking.in.Tongues.film).  The website also has many free and useful resources for organizing community screenings of Speaking in Tongues.

-Michael, Josh and Carl

Motivation and Transparency

In our previous post, “Data and Metrics in Film,” we discussed how filmmakers could gain a greater understanding of how to market their film by applying the same data and metrics methods commonly used by political campaigns. However, in order to gather information from audiences, people have to be motivated to participate in a campaign first. In this post we will look at how the Obama campaign used transparency to motivate people to participate in its campaign and compare how transparency in film can empower fans to get more involved in the distribution process. In both the 2008 and 2012 election, the Obama campaign pioneered efforts to be transparent about process and goals from the top down. Early in the 2012 election, Jim Messina shared the campaign’s strategy for winning the election in the video, "Paths to 270 Electoral Votes." Here is the link.

In the video, Messina uses 6 different electoral maps to make the campaign’s intended path to victory in battleground states completely transparent. Messina then makes a clear and direct ask for supporters to get involved. “We fund this campaign in contributions of three dollars or 5 dollars or whatever you can do to help us expand the map, put people on the ground to build a real grassroots campaign that is going to be the difference between winning and losing.” First, Messina makes the campaign strategy easy for supporters to understand then he provides clear direction for how they can get involved. The video empowers supporters to become active participants in the campaign by making them feel like they are an integral part of its success.

Similar to the Obama campaign, filmmakers are pioneering new efforts to make the goals and process for distribution transparent so fans can get more involved. For example, the filmmakers of the romantic comedy Sleepwalk With Me released a list of targeted IFC movie theaters that they wanted the film to play in, thereby being entirely upfront with their distribution goals for the film. With these targeted venues totally public, they enlisted fans to call, tweet or facebook message to request a screening of the film in the theater in their neighborhood. The website reads, “If your town isn’t on the list…you don’t have to take that lying down. Below is a list of theaters that run indie films, with their phone numbers, email addresses, and twitter handles. Call them, email them, tweet at them with the hashtag #BringSleepwalk.” Similar to how Messina empowered supporters by illustrating which battleground states they need support from volunteers to win, the filmmakers of Sleepwalk With Me were 100% transparent about their goal to have the film screen in targeted movie theaters. Also like Messina, the filmmakers make a direct ask for fans to get involved by calling, facebook messaging or tweeting their local movie theaters. Sleepwalk With Me was able to transform their fans from being passive consumers of the film to active distributors by being transparent about their goals and making a direct ask to their audience.

Whether a campaign is for a political candidate or to distribute a film, being transparent about strategy and goals is the gateway for making people feel empowered. What other parts of the filmmaking process can be made transparent to empower more fans? This will be a theme we explore in future posts.

-Josh, Michael and Carl