An American Way of Death

Healthcare is not really heath care, is it? It is actually sickness maintenance. It’s theoretically about providing resources for sickness: Drugs, medical devices, doctors and nurses. You only need those things when you’re sick. If you actually wanted to ensure people’s health you would make sure they did healthy things, like breathe fresh unpolluted air, drink fresh unpolluted water, eat organic carcinogen free foods. You’d ensure that people got exercise, took yoga classes, or that they maintained a stress free life as in doing meditation every morning and evening. You’d keep them out of stressful polluted traffic every day. You’d have them walk daily. You’d make sure they had respirators or masks in air polluted areas. If insurance did those things, it would be health insurance. It would be sickness prevention.

In America sickness is a profit center. Cancer alone is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Consider all the money required to maintain a person through cancer treatments. It easily averages over a million dollars (about the same amount required to support each troop in Afghanistan for a year). Industries profit on that. The insurance industry, the medical device industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the nursing home industry (and of course the war profiteers), all profit from Americans’ pain, suffering, and death. Call it PSD.

We have a lot of people who complain about the sick industries and the expense of PSD. People pay a lot for insurance. Even if a claim is honored, people have co-payments. They fight daily to get hospital bills paid by their so-called insurance. There is a profit incentive for the insurance industry to deny care. Their business model is to find ways to avoid paying claims and to take in as much in premiums as possible. They know that Americans willingly pay for insurance. Even when they raise their rates by double digit percentages, Americans pay. Even if insurance companies deny claims and people suffer and die for lack of care, they will still pay. Tens of thousands of Americas continue to die annually but they still pay for insurance. It’s an incredibly profitable industry that easily takes in a 30% margin over its costs, and makes huge profits. Very few industries do that.

Americans are conditioned like lab rats to pay hundreds every month, thousands every year, for questionable and often worthless insurance. Obamacare got more people to buy insurance. Authored mainly by Elizabeth Fowler, a prior insurance company executive, either Obamacare is a genius piece of legislation or it’s taking Americans for a ride (depending on if you’re an investor or not). Now millions more Americans pay for questionable sickness insurance. When they get sick, you can bet the first order of business for their insurers is to find ways to deny their claims. And now the government requires by law that all people pay for sickness insurance or they will be fined. So if you have insurance you pay to be denied sickness coverage, and if you don’t have insurance, you pay government fines.

The theory is that if people don’t have insurance, they will be taken care of anyway and everyone else will have to pay for it. That’s only true for legislators, government officials, and the active military who are all 100% covered by government funds at no cost whatsoever. For everyone else this would be true if insurance companies actually paid to help people through sickness. But they don’t. The reality is the opposite, which is to say insurance companies don’t pay. People with insurance suffer and die for lack of care because insurance is not care. It is a business. People without insurance also suffer and die, but at least they don’t pay premiums. They pay government penalties.

And what do we do to insure health? Nothing. Healthy Americans are a liability for the American PSD industries and their stockholders. Those industries depend on pain, suffering and death for their livelihood and profits. In fact PSD enterprises comprise about one sixth of the national economy. Without PSD our country would suffer a great monetary impact. Entire industries could go out of business. Do you work for the insurance industry? Do you willingly work for blood money? Those who have pain, who suffer, or die for lack of sick care, do so for our protected PSD industries to maintain high profits. It’s a uniquely American way of death.

Who Needs Hollwood? Not these guys.

There's a new movement in filmmaking. It's what you might call a "who need's Hollywood?", DIY approach. A number of new filmmakers have had some awesome success with this. The thing is there is no one way for everybody. Each filmmaker seems to find their own road. But there are some commonalities, like social networking, self-distribution, and audience interaction, and always hard work.

Arin Crumley and Susan Buice successfully produced, directed and distributed their feature film, Four Eyed Monsters, through the internet and a lot of Google time. One thing about this is that technology moves so fast, and things are ever changing, so that what worked for them is already outdated. But their independent spirit in going down their own road, even paving their way through a wilderness, was the thing we can all take away from their experience and apply to ourselves. By the way, Four Eyed monsters garnered two Independent Spirit Award nominations.

The road they took started with vlogs on YouTube. I think they planned this as part of their strategy in marketing their film. Their vlogs were about the behind the scenes "making of" stuff that you might find in typical DVD extras. But there is nothing typical about these guys. The film itself was kind of a similar docudrama of their relationship, much of it in a vlog fourth wall style. That sounds a bit repugnant on paper. But the film is really beautiful. Check out the trailer to get a feel for it.  So while the film was about their relationship's birth, life and death, as the tagline reads, the vlogs were about that too, along with the making of the film and with more reality.

The interesting this is that their "making of" experience is like none you've ever seen, or maybe never will. They forged their way to gather a YouTube and social network audience, which they translated into theatrical sales, by capturing emails and zip codes and persuading  theaters across the country to show their film during four Thursdays September in 2005, I think it was. That itself is quite an accomplishment. But it doesn't end there. in fact it still hasn't ended.

They acquired support form a number of online web film distributor ventures, including YouTube, where they were the first online feature release, and Spout.com, who paid them a dollar for everyone who they referred to Spout, amounting to $35,000. Their vlogs were so popular that they included them as a series of episodes on the DVD, along with the film and a soundtrack CD. The DVD has sold around 1500 copies through their website, mainly. Now they are talking to DVD distributors and I think they are available at Borders and maybe on a cable movie channel in the future.

This is backwards from what the conventional Hollywood big business model professes. In that model, you never release to the DVD market and certainly not the internet, until you have exploited the theatrical market. Not these guys. They offered their film for free on YouTube, along with the vlog episodes, which built interest for the DVD and generated the theatrical and DVD markets.

I've heard filmmakers worry about exposing their film like this, as a quick way to kill all chances for conventional distribution. but what Arin is saying is that conventional distribution is a pipe dream. Susan calls it the prince with the glass slipper. This is so true, and so obvious, it's amazing filmmakers haven't seen this before. We are wasting our time submitting to festival after festival, where are chances are a few hundred out of 5000 to 6000 for the big festivals. Even if we have a good film, and even if it;s picked up by a festival, the chances of finding a distributor this way are so remote. There are usually one or two film at any festival, if that, that get a distribution deal. Then what? Our films are shelved. We don't have to accept this treatment.

Like Arin and Susan we have the greatest marketing tool at our fingertips, and it's free. The internet. Lance Weller and some others have a website, WorkBookProject.com, where these kinds of things are discussed openly. You'd be surprised at how many filmmakers are finding audiences this way.

Here are some websites to check out:

FourEyedMonsters.com
WorkBookProject.com
Spout.com
YouTube Screening Room
Blip.tv
IndieGoGo
BraveNewTheaters.com

At these sites you'll find a lot more links.

Check out my own venture at OutInTheStreetFilms.com, and my film project, Stop War.

The Film Distribution Gamble: 9999 to 1

I attended a Film Financing Conference on Saturday and learned what it takes to finance your film.

Money.

But more importantly how to get millions of dollars from perfect strangers to help you make your film.

The answers are actually quite simple, and you don't have to spend the $200 (or $150 for FIND members) for the seminar, nor can you. It's over. But I can tell you everything I learned that you need to know. Though you probably won't take it seriously coming from me, because I don't have the years of experience of the industry panelists of lawyers, producers, casting directors, and distributors represented at the conference.

Anyway these are the elements you need as I understand them:

• A damned good (no make that great) film ( or script. It doesn't have to even be started, just written.)
• A film that has a clearly defined audience
• A film that has a defined audience meaning you didn't just make it for yourself
• Marketable roles
• Marketable roles that name actors will want to play
• A film that is low budget, though that could mean up to $10M now.
• Names
• Credibility - who are you?

OR

• A damned good (no make that great) film.
• Your own money ( to the tune of tens to hundreds of millions)

Doesn't this all sound too familiar? Us high and mighty altruistic indie filmmakers, in service to humanity, don need no steenkin marketable shit, do we?

Well, ah, yeah. We do if we want people, beyond the cast, crew, their friends, and family, to actually see and get something out of our films?

Now you could make that script of yours and it could get seen and even win some festivals. Then you have your world premier, and the cast and crew would be there, and your parents would be there, and you'd be happier than a pig in shit along with all your cast and crew.

Yuk.

But, would you get a distribution deal? The chances as put on the table at the conference are 99.99%, no you won't.

So don't bet the farm on making your film unless you have no problem losing it. You see it worked for Kevin Smith because he had an audience. He had a great film. It was unique. It hit home with people. But did he know who his audience was in advance? Maybe. But that's easy to say in hindsight. He certainly didn't have any distribution or marketing until way after the film was completed and Weinstein decided to pump some cash into marketing and post, something like $300K.

How many filmmakers went out and had similar films targeted (or not) to a similarly undefined audience, but failed?

99.99%.

Getting into a festival is great. Winning there is great. But how about a year or two down the road when you still haven't had a distribution deal? You go straight to DVD and no one ever hears about you or your film again. That sounds so useless. Why even bother going straight to DVD? So you can tell people, "I made a feature and it's on DVD?

Whop-de-doo!

That and the lack of marketing that goes along with it, plus another $4.55, will get you a nice Grandé at Starbucks to celebrate. Then you'll never be heard from again. Why bother? You'd do better to hold out for a deal with marketing, like at least an HBO run. I don't care if no one ever sees it, because they won't anyway.

Still I think it's not wrong, or even a bad thing, that filmmakers don't necessarily have a defined market. Distributors often don't either. They just have the money to make people think they do. One of the conference speakers mentioned that when distributors don't really know what they're doing, or can't define a market, they just lie. They just put out marketing that makes the film seem like something it's not, to get people into the theaters. They'll pick a market and go after it, even if it's the wrong market.

See, a lot of these guys are aware of this stuff and not happy with it either.

Well, No shit. Isn't this the rule and not the exception? So if they don't really know what they're doing and they have to lie about the film content and make like it's for some certain market segment of people, why then do they demand that filmmakers have to figure this out before making a film? I'm talking about those trailers you see that get you all hyped to see a film. Then when you see it, it's a big let down. It's something completely different than what the trailers lead you to think.

When a filmmaker goes to a distributor, what's the first question asked?

Who is your target audience? Where's the market? How can we sell this film?

They want filmmakers to do the legwork for them. Know your audience and you'll have a shot at getting s distribution deal. But it has to be an audience beyond cast, crew, family and friends. The film has to have universality. That's a screenwriting term that means masses of people will relate to the story and want to see it. Sounds reasonable. See, you have to do this part before you make the film, while writing the script. If you have a great film, a great story, but no universality, your film ain't going nowhere.

On the other hand, what is universality? Some think it means having a solid genre. Eht! I don't think so. That's just a smoke screen, a trick to get people in the theaters.

I think universality simply means that people have to relate to the subject. But people are sophisticated and complex. They aren't all 16 year old teenage boys trying to get into their date's pants by taking them to a horror flick that scares them into their arms, the epitome of genre.

No. People can related to those abstract weird unusual concepts, and they wll, if the story is great and the execution is excellent. You need to make a great film. You need to have a great story. Those are really the only two things you need before you start. But you do need them. You can't forsake them for a deadline. You make a film with a half baked script because you want to make the Sundance deadline. That's a waste of everyone's time and money.

So the distributors' and the filmmakers' definitions of universality are very different. Still, that element is necessary.

Now, not only are all these factors at play, but the indie industry is in a downturn. These industry pro guys say this because three major Hollywood indie subsidiaries are folding, the biggest being Warner Independent.

Here's where I really differ with them.

I say any indie company affiliated with a big studio isn't really an indie company, I don't care what's in their name to tell me it is. These companies tried to jump on the indie bandwagon when they saw indies taking off. So yeah, they bought some real indie films at the festivals. But they aren't truly independent. They bought films that they think fit into their predefined marketing strategies. Indie films, good indie films, aren't bound by that narrow definition.

David Lynch is independent. He distributes his own films. If any of these guys were really indie, they'd distribute David Lynch. But they won't touch him. They're too hooked on the whole conservative business model that requires them to make well educated decisions based on marketing factors. Yet, their failure rate is astronomical. Duh. Even the .o1% of films that get distributed films have a very poor rate of success, something like 30% t0 50%. They just don't get it. Guys, the business model you use doesn't work. Do you need to be hit over the head with a sledge hammer to see this?

They still think you have to hit a certain market. Well I guess I agree. It's works in theory. It's just I don't know if they can ever know what that market is in advance, because the film market can rarely be defined before the film finds it after it runs a few weeks and word gets around. Markets are not really sp clearly defined as 18 to 35 year old males or whatever. No, they are dynamic and change with the wind.

This comes back to Goldman's statement that no one in Hollywood knows anything, meaning no one can predict what film, what story, what genre, or what concept will be a hit. Subsequently, they can't accurately define a market or target audience. They can try, and they do, and they fail a lot. They go out of business.

It's the nature of filmmaking. This isn't a widget business. That is, film is art first, business second. You can't market concepts. You can't market art before it's been completed and before you know what it is that you're marketing, and no you don't know what it is. You can't know this stuff until audiences have seen it and decided with their wallets whether it's worthy or not. Because art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, not the marketing depatment.

Goldman was right. No one knows anything. It is an unknown. Why can't this fact be accepted. Do they have to be so self centered and pompous to believe that there can't be a thing, like this, that they can't grasp? I'm sorry, but all the experience, MBAs and education in the world will not give you the ability to know or second guess the markets, or see the future. Accept it. Admitting this is the first step.

"Hi, I'm Jon and I'm a filmmaker. "

"Hi Jon."

Writer's Strike: Age Old Issues come to Light

The writer's strike has brought to light some very interesting issues. Though these issues have been plaguing filmmakers since the start of the industry. You can boil this down to the age old debate about whether film is a business or film is an art. Producers generally treat it as a business, while writers and other creative contributors treat is as an art. They have to. Otherwise what you get is crappy films, which may account for the other age old debate about how so many films are trash. Even the producers will tell you that 98% of the stuff produced doesn't turn a profit. But then there are those corrupt accounting practices that make every expense imaginable part of a film budget, probably including the studio execs' nooners.

The ultimate idiocracy is the perpetual sequels and parodies, obviously based on a simple retarded business logic that if a certain film production was successful all you need to do is make the thing over again with new packaging. Duh.

Don't work too hard there, studio execs. We don't want you to break a sweat or anything over having to take a risk on something too original.

But hey, isn't art supposed to be original? Isn't that pretty much necessary? I think it's something like this, to put into simple studio-exec-ease. When you make cars they have to have wheels and roll down the road. When you make art it has to be original. O-RIG-IN-AL. Sound it out. Lots of syllables there. I know it's a big word with lots of implications. But look it up. Add it to your vocabulary. It can make you money! $$$$$

Historically we had Chaplin splinter off from studio control to form United Artists. Now Cruise is rejuvenating that entity. Coppola and Lucas formed American Zoetrope, and along with numerous other great filmmakers, went to northern California's bay area to escape the Hollywood rat race. They all have the same complaint. Studio execs get into creative control over the art they know nothing about.

Now we see some WGA writers and colleagues, out of work over the strike, forming up their own new media companies based on the United Artists model. Way to go WGA.

There's no argument that great artists are great because of their unique talent. So then why must studio execs take creative control or impose upon artists to bend to their business logic based on marketing concerns? They're not the ones with the talent. Why do this, especially when we see that the results are this 98% failure rate in the industry. Even if it's not 98%, it's not better than 50%. Just look at the-numbers.com. For 2007 you see 200 to 300 films making over one million USD, out of a total of over 700 films. Making a broad assumption that a film needs to make at least one million to be profitable, you can see that much less than 50% are successful.

So clearly, the business people don't know what they're doing. But most of us have known that, since, like forever.

You can't sell art by having business people control it based on marketing strategy. You have to first allow artists to do what they do, on their own, with full creative control. Then when they have a product, you sell it. If you go with the conventional business model that business people apply across the board to any industry you end up with cheap crappy films that amount to what MacDonald's does in the food industry. Coppola, Lucas, Chaplin and most any artist won't be happy in that world, no more than Wolfgang Puck would be content running a MacDonald's chain. It's just good business sense.

Why is this so hard to fathom?