Read Part One
Read Part Two
Let me speak a bit about offers. In the world of independent film, especially piddly little ones like the ones we were dealing with, which really (with the exception of a Canadian zombie movie) would be a waste to put into theaters, the most desirable deal is cash up front. That's probably the most desirable deal in any event but with movies in which there is a good chance that they won't perform, everything other than cash up front is more or less a last resort.
Cash up front minimizes the risk of the sales company losing money and puts the entire onus on the distribution company. The other kind of deals (the only kind I was ever offered) are what I will call 50/50 deals (although they can break down into any percentage and usually have a third number thrown in there to cover expenses). In this situation the distribution company takes it's cut in order to cover the expenses of releasing the movie and then the profit would be split between the sales company and the distribution company, that way, essentially insulating there investment. In the event that the movie did no business they would only be out their expenses.
As you can probably understand, such a deal is not desirable being it is essentially the equivalent of throwing the movie into the wind and seeing how it will land. If it does well, then great we've made good money and if not all our effort in not only selling the movie but preparing the delivery has gone down the tubes. Unless there is a lot of hot buzz around the movie or you have a big star to sell it's name on, this is risky business. Cash up front ensures that we get paid for our work and whether or not the movie does any business is someone else's problem. That's the best place to be in the movie business: put the risks on someone else, take the money, and run. X always used to say that the movie business was the "F**k Business." You have to f**k them before they f**k you.
The problem that I was running into while X was away on vacation was that the majority of the companies that I followed up with had indicated that they were going to pass because they were currently trying to focus on bigger titles. No company after all wants to focus forever on the cheap stuff no one wants to see, unless of course they are a niche company that focuses on either a certain genre (horror for example) or just gets by releasing the cheap stuff. X did talk about one day moving into bigger stuff and I truly hope that he does because it's certainly hard to get by peddling the stuff that you only got because no other sales company wanted to touch it.
Before I go on let's have a word on the actual definition of independent film. A lot of time the terms independent and Hollywood film get thrown around without the users actually knowing what distinguishes the two. The simple misconception is that if we see it in a multiplex it must be a Hollywood film and if we see it in an independent theatre it must be an independent movie. Not so much the case. An independent film is a film that is produced outside of a Hollywood studio. One of the summer of 2010's big hits The Expendables was an independent film.
I'll do my best to explain while keeping things as simple as possible (because nothing is ever simple or straight forward in the movie business). Big studios have different divisions one of which is Production in which there is a President of Production and maybe a VP and so on and then it hires on producers and gives them production deals. Ultimately it is for a producer to go out, find material, bring it into the studio and oversee it's development from buying the rights to the book (or whatever) hiring the screenwriter, getting rewrites, hiring the director, etc. Joel Silver is a Hollywood producer as is Jerry Bruckheimer, Steven Spielberg and Brian Grazer. Art Linson used to have a production deal with Fox but I'm not sure of his status now. Julia Phillips and Don Simpson used to be hired studio guns as well during their lifetime.
An independent film is produced by a company that has no ties to one of the big studios. The production company, often owned or co-owned by the filmmakers themselves, makes the movie and then tries to sell it to distributors (sometimes if you're good you can have all the foreign rights sold before the film is even completed. Atom Egoyan's Chloe had made it's entire budget back before even opening in North America). This is why you often get so many logos and so many credits at the beginnings of movies these days (one for the production company, the sales company, the distributor, etc). In the olden days, when everyone was under contract, the studios did everything from hire their writers, their actors, their directors and release the movies into their theaters. Today, with the increasing cost of getting a film made, it's safer business to include more people into the pot. Mirimax (back before Disney took them off the independent market) used to produce their own product until they realized that it made better business sense to simply acquire already completed films.
Kevin Smith's View Askew is a good example of an independent production company. Smith writes and directs and co-produces with Scott Mosier under the View Askew name (although, and maybe I'm wrong on this, they change the company name on every film for insurance purposes so that, if anything happened on one film, they don't bankrupt the whole company). After the film is finished they (or a sales agent, I don't know how it works for them) sells the film to a distribution company (in this case we'll continue with Mirimax who made Smith a household name) who will get the movie into theaters, advertise it, etc.
That's why festivals (except for maybe Toronto which, despite being one of the world's biggest film festivals, stills holds onto it's image as a public festival and not a major North American market) are so important: it is a place where filmmakers try to get their product acquired and where sales companies go to get their product distributed (be it to theater, video, TV, airlines, etc). Before I leave this topic, I don't want to have made things too simplistic. There are many independent distribution companies that have production departments and so on and so forth. Again, nothing is as simple as black and white.
There's also one more option for a sales company which is to shop the film to an agent (a very last resort), who will try to sell it to their specific client base. It's essentially adding another middle man into the mix and is only to be considered after there has been no interest generated in a title from our own efforts. The advantage to this is that they assuredly know their own territory's market better than we do and their connections may be able to reach farther than our means had allowed us to on our own.
So, while X was away, I got a nibble on a zombie movie, but it was a 50/50 deal (I think this one was around 35/35/30 or something), but mostly people weren't interested in our poor little movies that could. I don't blame them. The movies, on a whole, weren't very good. That's not to say there isn't an audience for them, there probably is, and we weren't there to like the movies, we were there to sell them.
Part of the job was in trying to come up with unique sales angels and so some of those three weeks at home were spent making notes on certain companies in certain territories and coming up with angels. If we wanted to sell Y title in the U.K. I would search for TV, Video and Theatrical companies in that territory and make notes on what kind of titles they dealt with or any like titles they had recently acquired: Hey, I see you just picked up Paper Heart with Michael Cera, I bet you'd like Youth in Revolt with him too, want to have a look at a screener? We had a zombie movie that, once we had exhausted the possibilities on the horror market, started selling it in the gay market as two of the characters were homosexual and started making even more sales that way. One of the producers for one of the films had come up with the idea to announce that the sequel had been greenlit. Hey, if you like this one, get the rights to the sequel before it's even out. Between you and me, the sequel very well could have been greenlit, but there is currently no intention of it ever being made. Two sales for the price of one. The F**k business.
At the end of those three weeks I was feeling pretty good and ready to get back into the meat an potatoes of things once X returned. I had made some minor mistakes along the way but I was still in the learning process and each of those mistakes was a learning experience. It was time to really get into the swing of the sales thing and also time to prepare for TIFF. I couldn't wait.
To Be Continued...
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