Studio

My Adventure in Theatrical Self Distribution: Part 2 of 4

12/10/2009 at 6:19 AM by Jon Reiss

Needless to say I ended up taking over the theatrical release of Bomb It myself.

Henceforth some of the lessons that I learned distributing my film – in a somewhat chronological and a bit priority order:

Lesson 1: Research Most information you need to book your film is readily on line. There are lists of theaters at places like workbook.org. Most theaters have websites with the office number.

Lesson 2: Make the call. Bookers are generally nice people who love film. If you have a compelling reason for them to look at the film – chances are they will at least listen. You can find the phone numbers of bookers of most independent theaters, go to Workbookproject.org for a list. Even though Landmark is a chain – at times they book indies – but you have to have a lot of lead time.

Call first. I would always follow up my phone calls with an email (not the other way around!) You can find one of my standard email pitches on the Filmmaker website.

And BE PERSISTENT. And don’t leave more than one or two messages. Ask when the person is likely to be there and call back then. (also ask for “the person in charge of programming ______ theater”)

And don’t listen to naysayers.

Lesson 3: Have a good pitch from the theater’s perspective. Be able to tell the bookers who your target audience is and how you sell to them.

Lesson 3A – Get that First Booking I can’t stress enough how much getting that one respectable booking helps. Bookers are not unlike most people – they see someone else made the plunge – so why not take a look.

Lesson 4: The Two Month Window rocks. There are two major reasons for the success of the Two Month Window:

A. Theater owners will not book your film if your DVD has been released commercially (or is even within 2 weeks of your DVD release).

B. Very Important: The Two Month Window allows your theatrical publicity to roll over to your DVD. A long window between your Theatrical and your DVD release is the kiss of death for publicity on your DVD. And while things are different now – there are more press avenues for DVD only releases – nothing beats a theatrical release for press, even one as small as ours. It is not just mainstream press and mainstream marketing – eg print ads – it is all the whatever work you do to promote your film – in our case it was mostly press, parties, streat teams and email blasts. If you think you have the energy to do this twice – your kidding yourself.

C. Two months (which in essence was 6 weeks) was just enough time to do a rollout release which gave me some time to focus on individual markets. (more on this later)

Lesson 5: Unexpected Festival Benefits Festivals are essential for brand creation. The SF Indi Fest that was crucial for our theatrical release. Our press from this festival in February 08 helped convince the Red Vic to book us in April.

We also incorporated festivals into our broader theatrical release – and while we did not claim them as cities in our 17 city count – they helped give us something to crow about.

Jon Reiss Producer, Director