Cinematical

What's it really like to self-distribute your film? If Arin Crumley and Susan Buice were coming out with a new film tomorrow, how would they go about sharing it with the world? Who are the major players helping young filmmakers today? Does technology get in the way of inspiration? What's it like to be in a failing romantic relationship and a failing business relationship at the same time? And is our future really only one click away? These are some of the topics Arin and I discuss in part two of our interview, which you can watch in full above (from Arin's point of view). If you haven't done so already, I urge you to also watch Arin and Susan's film, Four Eyed Monsters, over on YouTube (where it's playing for free through August 15). Additionally, you can help the filmmakers out by joining Spout.com (which also happens to be a really cool website), and Spout will then give Arin and Susan one dollar for everyone that creates an account; money that will go towards helping them climb out of the $100,000 debt they've accumulated over the past three and a half years. Feel free to check out part one of our interview here, and enjoy.

Cinematical: If and when you make another film, will you go about the process differently now that you've learned so much since first debuting Four Eyed Monsters at Slamdance in 2005?

Arin Crumley: Well it's kind of irrelevant until we have another film completed. But to completely speculate, I really can't say. I can say what I would do today if I had another film. So completely hypothetically, if I had a film right now I would try and submit it to Sundance. Sundance and Toronto and Cannes are still a good platform for the industry to become aware of a film. Now chances are that it won't get accepted, so the very next thing I would do would be to release it. Now this would have to be a final complete thing -- and this was hard with Four Eyed Monsters; we actually changed our edit all the way up till we posted it at YouTube. So we're crazy, and I don't know if I'll be that way the next time. I'll probably be a little more confident in the footage, and I probably won't need to make so many tweaks ... I hope. But provided the thing is actually done and complete -- I wouldn't show it at festivals unless it was done and complete. So if it didn't get in and I have this item sitting there, I would then release it on DVD and download; probably with B-Side because we've been working with them and they have a solid platform for selling your stuff easily -- you can get it up and running quickly.

Then with DVDs available I would message all of the festivals and say, 'Listen, this is a good film -- I don't want to submit. I just want you guys to look at the film, and if you want to buy a DVD -- take it and put it in your festival -- whatever.' I'd focus on really small regional festivals that have strong core communities. I wouldn't focus on winning awards at the larger regional festivals -- to me, I don't feel like that does anything anymore. So with festivals doing their thing, and DVDs selling -- hopefully to some kind of core audience of people who are interested in the concept behind the film, or the filmmaking. When that kind of pears out -- because you can only sell so many films online -- I'd give the film away for free on the internet. And then, like we've done, ideally attached to some kind of sponsorship. But that can be a rare thing; I hope that more things like that can happen for other films, but I really don't know if it absolutely will. Podcasts do this all the time; they thank their sponsors and they make some of their expenses back by having sponsors. I think it's okay to put films out that way, especially short films. I would hope that giving away a film for free would spark a broader release, because keep in mind not everyone wants to sit around and look at this little matchbox of a window and see crazy life unfold in front of them.

Cinematical: Do you see self-distribution becoming more popular down the line?

AC: I see self-distribution definitely becoming more popular every single day. And ultimately becoming the standard. Because anybody who makes content would prefer to not have to use some third party to get that content out. Even mainstream entities. If there was a system that kind of mimicked what are world is capable of today -- which is distribution worldwide everywhere from one click -- then I think every content producer, large, small, independent, whatever, would all ultimately find the value in embracing that ... even though it could be a little rough in the transition there. Because whether you're creating content for mainstream network and you're just sort of this content machine, or if you're operating on your own integrity and your own ideas that you'd like to express and explore -- either way, that getting to an audience is very critical. So the way for that to happen most efficiently is something distributes itself. I don't mean the filmmaker spending two years of their lives taking money from credit cards, family members, broken relationships and friendships; a disastrous life. I don't mean a nasty scenario; I mean the work is self disseminating -- like the way bit torrent works is brilliant. If there was an industry that could be based on that, that would be amazing.

Cinematical: How have theater chains responded to self-distribution, because I know you've done some work with theaters across the country? How did you find that worked out for you?

AC: Well theater chains are not super into the concept of self-distribution ... yet. We were lucky to find six amazing theaters to work with that were very forward thinking and totally got behind the Thursdays in September concept. Really because most of them said they were just curious to see what would happen. And everybody was pretty impressed with what happened. Each Thursday the film showed once a week, and each Thursday had more people coming out than the previous Thursday. And that kind of shows -- wow, you can show a film once a week and word of mouth can actually grow ... versus the normal model where you try to create word of mouth with publicity and marketing dollars and all this stuff that most people don't have access to. Then you put it in a theater and hope that opening weekend is strong, and then it only gets worse from there. But you hope that it started out so strong that getting worse is not so bad. Most films only decline. So to see something getting stronger and gaining momentum -- that's kind of a good concept. And the most important part of that experiment was to show that you can have the audience decide what films play in theaters. We did this just for our film; we let people request our film, and by doing that they're creating clusters of interest all over the country. Then we picked out the top six areas with the most amount of interest and we booked the film there. It was a lot of work and effort, but at least we weren't booking the film in the wrong places. We were booking it in places where we knew it would do well. Because of digital projection, you can really be showing anything on a screen. You're not limited to what film prints were mailed to you. You're also not limited to whatever company owns the thing that installed the hardware.

Theoretically, you should be able to have a theatrical jukebox to where anything can be shown there. It's just a matter of, well, what do people want to see? Who knows, maybe they'll decide via text message two minutes before the movie starts. All kinds of crazy things could occur, and just like every other screen -- our cellphones, our iPods, our televisions, our computers -- we have taken over the surface of any screen we can get a hold of. The thing we have not been able to get, as audience members and human beings -- we don't have any control over what's going on the movie screens. It's just whatever Hollywood pumps out for the most part. It's really about someone else deciding that this what you have as an option. I think that the ability for a really important documentary to be made in some bedroom somewhere, or in some other country, and get out on the internet -- and everyone wants to see it -- and they might want to see it in a theater. That should be something they can check off and publicly share, and theaters would be much better off knowing this kind of information. They would maybe even stay in business instead of closing down like so many of them have to do when they're art house theaters trying to show non-mainstream content. I don't know what would have to happen politically for that to take hold, but I do know that moving in that direction is a great avenue for exhibitors, especially ones nervous about the longevity of their industry.

Cinematical: Who are the major players right now helping young filmmakers without a lot of resources?

AC: The major players right now are any service that helps someone release their content. Usually a company that is trying to benefit from the long-tail. The concept that there is a lot of profitability in the collective proceeds of the obscurity. [laughs] Netflix totally benefits from the long-tail; Amazon is a company that totally benefits from the long-tail. Now those are companies that are not actively seeking out to help -- and make it an enticing environment -- for independent filmmakers, but other people behaving in that same spirit of, like, 'Hey, let's build a platform that's profitable from the perspective of what can collectively be done.' Those are the environments that are very helpful to filmmakers because they present a turn-key solution to everything that you need. So examples are YouTube, of course. They would live every video in existence to be on YouTube. That would be ideal, because everything is indexable, and searchable, and they're owned by Google now so it's all about finding stuff and value of being able to discover what you're looking for has advertising potential. And that's what Google is really excited about. So their interest seemed to coincide with our needs, which was to be able to publish anything we wanted for free ... and for anyone in the world to be able to find it and see it. So that's a great set-up for what most people need. B-Side, as I've mentioned, is another amazing tool to have at your disposal because if you want to start selling DVDs, you just send them a DVD. And they make a DVD ours for whoever orders it. There's other services that do the same, and they're equally valuable to a filmmaker. B-Side also lets you sell downloads at higher quality than you can put out there on YouTube. StageSix allows you to put amazing quality on the web for free. Podcasting is also an amazing tool. Blip TV is another service that we don't currently use, but are about to start using. They're probably the closest to the one-click publishing that I've been talking about. You publish it to Blip, and you get one high-quality flash version you can put on your own website. People are starting to bring it all together to make publishing content to the web as easy as possible. Why? Because they're the long-tail platforms.

Cinematical: Who or what inspires you?

AC: That's a good question. Who or what inspires me? Well I'm kind of a geeky guy in case you couldn't tell, so sometimes just the ability to do something inspires me. Like, wow, I can get a DVX-100 and make a movie? Awesome, I should do that! My opinion is that you shouldn't get too wrapped up in technique, technology or abilities, and find all your inspiration there, because your stuff is probably going to suck. But at the same time it really doesn't matter what gets you started as long as you have really good follow-through and are really good at executing things. If it's an instrument you just bought, a new camera that you're playing around with or a faster computer that gets you going, then I think it's okay that that's where your inspiration might come from sometimes.

[Susan Buice calls in on the other line; Arin attempts to conference her in. It doesn't work. He asks her what inspires her.]

AC: So Susan said she's inspired by people. I asked her as well.

Cinematical: Was it hard mixing a fairly new romantic relationship with a fairly new business relationship ... and everything in between?

AC: [laughs] Oh my gosh, that's a hilarious question. Thanks. So mixing a failing business relationship with a ...

Cinematical: [laughs] No, no, no -- I said 'fairly new,' not 'failing.'

AC: [laughs] Oh, I thought you said failing. Fairly new. Ha ha. What's it called -- a Freudian -- not sure if they have a name for that where you hear something wrong.

[Arin answers my real question, but provides a better response for the question he thought I originally asked]

AC: I'll also address what I thought you were asking. [laughs] Which was, what is it like to be simultaneously in a failing relationship and a failing business. Because it feels that way almost all the time. On the outside, if we ever pull off anything that works, in terms of business -- like, we're happy to have gotten the film on YouTube with a Spout sponsorship, but do you know how many sponsors we tried to talk to? Do you know how long our list was? You know how crazy it is to have to tell Susan's parents that 'You know, we're thinking eventually a company is just going to give us all the money we're in credit card debt for.' You seem like you're nuts and you're pursuing a failing operation -- and it just feels like it's a complete mess. And there's evidence all over the place that that's the case. And so, yeah, you do feel like you're in a sinking ship. But now and then there's a little bit of light that glimmers through, and it seems like things are coming together slightly. And it's worth keeping on, and you continue. And that dynamic is pretty similar to being in a relationship.