The Top 10 Reasons For Going The Truly Indie Route

The jam-packed audience that greeted our recent TIFF case study panel on 51 Birch Street's "long road to distribution" was mostly a testament to the fact that indie filmmakers are desperate for new models of distribution.  They know that the present ones are pretty much broken, and there seemed to be a palpable hunger in the room for details of our deal with Truly Indie, a still very young company which offers an innovative theatrical release alternative.

Rather than try to summarize the somewhat scattershot remarks of the panel (which included my producing partner, Lori Cheatle, our sales rep Josh Braun, exec producer John Priddy, and Truly Indie head Kelly Sanders), I thought I'd cut to the chase and elaborate on how we came to the decision to go the Truly Indie route.  Here are the top 10 reasons, in no particular order of importance:

1. Seperation of rights.  Instead of giving a small distributor all your rights in all territories for 10, 15, 20 years, you hold on to everything.  TV, DVD, VOD, whatever.  Years down the line, when the rights to, say, serializing your doc on iPods go for 5 figures, you'll be mighty glad that you didn't give it away to someone who lost interest long ago and can't be bothered.

2. You make the key decisions. You choose the cities you'll show in.  You choose the art campaign.  You decide if you want to make a trailer or not.

3. Kelly Sanders.  Helpful.  Friendly.  Returns calls and emails promptly.  Genuinely wants the filmmaker to be happy.

4. The company of sisters.  Truly Indie's sister companies (under the umbrella of Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's 2929 Entertainment) are Magnolia, Landmark Theatres and HDNet, and they all pitch in and contribute.

5. The costs and revenues are transparent.  Truly Indie presents you right off with a list of the 20 U.S. cities they cover, the local Landmark theater you'll screen at in each city, the number of seats the theater holds, the ticket prices they charge, and then a fee in exact dollars. If you're trying to get investors to back your theatrical release, needless to say it really helps if you can show them exactly what they'll spend to the dollar, as well as a pretty accurate prediction of the revenue that can be generated.

6. It forces you to be entrepreneurial.  In order to go with Truly Indie, we needed to raise a considerable amount of money in relatively short order.  It was a huge ordeal, but it resulted in a partnership with Priddy Brothers Entertainment that will go well beyond the film at hand.  We not only expect to make money for them, we expect to be in business with them for a long time.

7. It's relatively affordable.  All TI asks is you do a minimum of 5 cities, and it could be any 5 of the 20.  Crunching some numbers, it's possible to do it for as little as 35k.  For less than 50% more, we're opening for a week in NY, LA, Chicago, SF and Minneapolis.   

8. It gives you a real chance to make money.  The fee includes a terrific national publicist (Melissa Raddatz) who oversees local publicists in most of the 20 cities (a good publicist would normally go for at least 5K/month).   It includes 2 ads and listings in each of your city's "papers of record".  Then throw in the fact that you keep 100% of the box office. 

9. Mark Cuban.  Deep deep pockets.  Really smart.  Bold ideas.  Big mouth.  Great blog.  Answers all his own email.

10. It's new and different.  Face it, theatrical distribution can be a total disaster under the best of circumstances.  So, if you do go down in flames, do you want to do it the tired, old-fashioned way, or do you want to try something new and bold?

Comments

[Linda M.]

Breathlessly frank, as usual. Many thanks, Dougie, for shining your light on the road ahead.

LM