Ascent Hollywood Speaking Engagement on Film Finance and Distribution

Hi All,

Announcement: I will be speaking at Ascent Hollywood on November 18th on Film Finance and Distribution and if you are in LA you should come check it out!

 

 

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Ascent-Hollywood     Time: November 18, 2009 from 6pm to 9pm
Location: East-West Lounge
Organized By: e-Scension.com

Our featured guests for this month’s event:

Rachel Miller
Talent Manager
Tom Sawyer Entertainment & ShowMeTheScreenplay.com (IMDB)

&

Simon Lamb
Entertainment Attorney
SRL Law, A Professional Corporation

Rachel & Simon have been doing joint presentations on the art and science of independent film finance, distribution, and sales at film festivals all over the world during the last several months, and have agreed to recreate this presentation for our audience.

East-West Lounge
featuring
2-for-1 Drink specials on all drinks & Food specials for Ascent – Hollywood attendees from 6:00 – 7:30 pm
8851 Santa Monica Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90069
http://www.eastwestlounge.com

$15 – Flat Rate

6:00 PM – 7:00 PM – General networking
7:00 PM – 7:30 PM – Featured guests presentations
7:30 PM – 9:00 PM – More Mixing, Networking

General Notes of importance:

~ Valet Parking is available for $8 beginning at 6 PM
~ Self-parking is available in lots immediately behind East-West Lounge on both San Vicente Blvd and Larrabee Street for $6
~ A limited number of Residential Guest Parking Permits (3R & 5R) will be made available on a 1st come,1st served basis – Simply stop at the front door and pick one up from Registration when you arrive.
~ Street parking is available after 6 pm for free of charge at all metered spaces
~ Easy access to mass transit Lines 4, 304, 704, 105, 705, and 302 along Santa Monica & San Vicente Blvds.

See more details and RSVP on e-Scension.com:
http://www.e-scension.com/events/event/show?id=985095%3AEvent%3A33720&xgi=4ERfVdSs78XjCP

The Boy In the Balloon: Or What Lengths People Will Go to for Publicity

I am sure you have been following the “boy in the balloon” news story and all the hype, drama and craziness surrounding it.  Now, I am not going to weigh in on whether it was a hoax or if it was really just a desperate ploy to get a television show, but it does bring up an interesting point:

And that is: If the only way to sell anything these days is to generate publicity, how far is too far in trying to generate your own publicity?

Because to be fair, if indeed the parents staged the whole escapade to generate publicity to sell a tv show,  they are correct in understanding how hard it is to sell anything these days and the only way to do so is to generate a lot of “buzz.”

In fact, if you study the past 12 months of what has been selling in the book, tv or film arenas — almost everything is based off something that generated a lot of publicity.  Take one recent example — my friend Andrea Wachner.

Andrea hired a stripper to pose as herself at her 10-year-high school reunion.  She filmed the experiment,  edited it into a 40-minute documentary, and posted a trailer on Youtube.  Suddenly the trailer was spreading virally and the press ate it up. She appeared on news outlets everywhere and now has an agent, a manager and is shopping a movie script, reality series and more.

Another example is our own client Spencer Walker and his blog cooktobang.com. Spencer started this blog for fun and suddenly audiences around the world found it and were posting their own success stories due to his recipes.  He started getting incoming calls from media outlets (Cosmopolitan, Playboy, etc.) and we ended up selling his book to St. Martin’s Press and it will be coming out in May.  More importantly, because of all this press, studios and networks have been interested in developing a movie or a tv show based on his site.

Clearly publicity can help or hurt you. My own opinion is that you have to be honest with your audience and you can’t come off as contriving anything –  audiences are just  too smart to lie to. You have to believe in your product and push as much as you can (by designing a great site or telling all your friends and using social media to help you) AND THEN you have to let viral word of mouth do its work for you.

You must let the process unfold naturally — you can’t just make it happen by lies and false pretenses.  But if you are patient and do it correctly, you could reap the rewards.

The Do-It-Yourself Ethos of Hollywood

It’s a crazy time in Hollywood:  You could be the head of a studio one day and out of a job the next.  In fact, a lot of my friends are scared about their jobs (because if your boss gets canned, most likely you are soon to follow).

And on top of this, studios are making less and less movies, and if they do make movies it is usually a sequel, prequel, or some sort of re-do.

So how do you break in?
Now is a great time to embrace the DIY model.  In fact, right now there is a great success story in theaters of filmmakers who did not wait for a studio to greenlight their movie but went out and did it themselves — and it resulted in a huge success for them!

The film PARANORMAL ACTIVITY was made for $11,000, and it was picked up by Paramount for a very limited release.  However, the film generated such great response and word of mouth that it quickly expanded to a wide release and is doing incredibly well.

Another example can be found in the two webisodes that David and Ian Purchase made for a total of $500. (See the link http://tinyurl.com/ykfpfbp)

These webisodes were filmed guerrilla style with no crew; they were made as a spec “advertainment” for the filmmakers’ demo reel. The webisodes garnered 1.5 million hits in three days and launched the brothers’ careers.  Now they are working on a feature film with a major producer.

This is clear proof that you don’t need a lot of money to go out and make something.  You can do it yourself.

That being said, make sure that you can make the movie you want to make for the budget that you have. In other words, know your limitations, know what works on a low budget and what doesn’t.

There is nothing worse than watching a a bad movie that just looks cheap and is done poorly.  And there is nothing better than watching a great movie and then going back and realizing how little it was actually made for.

Take destiny into your own hands and follow the DIY ethos of Hollywood!