Advice To First-Time Filmmakers On Distribution by Jay Silverman
Film Courage: Advice to first time, second time filmmakers on seeking a distribution deal and then actually committing to it?
Jay Silverman, photographer and director of OFF THE MENU: It’s a tough question for me because every time you make a deal you learn about new deals. I’ll give you an illustration, when we made my first movie we didn’t have people knocking on my door to distribute my movie. We had sales reps. I never knew what that was but there are a lot of companies in L.A. and in Hollywood that are sales reps (the rep movies) and they would take your movie to Netflix and they would take your movie to Fox and they would make deals. I totally believe in that scenario. It never even occurred to me that my next movie would be good enough for someone to want to distribute it.
Of course, there is no money exchanged. You have to wait to get the movie distributed and then eventually make your money back. If you’re lucky enough to hypothetically wake up in the morning at Sundance and someone buys your movie to distribute it they might say say we’ll give you X dollars not to mention that after advertising dollars are spent we’ll give you 50 cents on the dollar (you know, whatever it might be).
I did not have that luxury, but I did have the luxury this time of getting a reputable distribution company and taking it up a notch so each time I learn more.
But distribution (and I’m saying this redundantly because I said it before) is an ever-changing medium and I’m learning right as we speak that filmmakers are expected to do things that have nothing to do with filmmaking and that is if you really want to succeed with your movie social media has to be played, you have to market yourself, you have to do interviews like this.
I’m really grateful, but I’m not a social media guy. You have to learn how to do that. It’s fascinating because I have a number of people on my Facebook that are filmmakers and every once in awhile I see a filmmaker promoting their movie and I’m empathetic because it requires just an inordinate amount of collective collaboration with the distributor to succeed because the distributor who picked up my movie puts out four movies a month. That’s 48 movies a year. That’s a lot of movies for a small company.
And one of the ones I passed on has 30 to 40 movies a month. There is the volume aspect, so I thought that the one that I picked was more desirable because they would give it more energy and more time and I don’t have a regret for that.
Here again speaking from first time experience, I met a gentleman just last week who is doing our social media and he’s also a director. Smart, young guy and if I was able to tell him what I learned now on his first movie he would have done something differently. And it’s not like he made a horrific mistake but he ultimately took his movie off the market and there are other ways to do it, no different from the woman who told me on my last movie wasn’t ever exploited on social media. The content matter itself should have been an easy pitch but we didn’t do it. So is it a missed opportunity? Not really because the source material is timeless. It’s happening everyday and it still continues to happen.
But this movie that I just finished comes out basically a week before Valentine’s Day. It’s not accident, it’s a romantic comedy (I like that idea). It helps take the movie to a noticeable level. Otherwise you are just going to get in the mush.
There’s a great story in the trades about Netflix buying movies at Sundance last year (not this year, last year). It’s written by empathetic filmmakers who said here is a movie that everybody knows the title, everybody would like to see it, it was on Netflix for one week and one the first page and then it just disappeared. So you have to really know a lot about the movie, properly spell it and source it…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
