Latest / Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast / BPS 358: Inside the Multi-Window Distribution Model with Simon Swart

Transcript

BPS 358: Inside the Multi-Window Distribution Model with Simon Swart · Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast

• 0:03
  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
• 0:08
  podcasts, just go to ifahpodcastnetwork dot com. Welcome to the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast,
• 0:14
  Episode number three fifty eight. Do not pray for an easy life,
• 0:19
  Pray for the strength to endure a difficult one. Bruce Lee broadcasting from a
• 0:24
  dark, windowless room in Hollywood when we really should be working on that next
• 0:28
  draft. It's the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast, showing you the craft and business of
• 0:34
  screenwriting while teaching you how to make your screenplay bulletproof. And here's your host,
• 0:39
  Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to another episode of the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast.
• 0:44
  I am your humble host Alex Ferrari. Now, today's show is sponsored
• 0:48
  by Bulletproof script Coverage. Now. Unlike other script coverage services, Bulletproof Script
• 0:55
  Coverage actually focuses on the kind of project you are and the goals of the
• 1:00
  project you are, so we actually break it down by three categories micro budget,
• 1:03
  indie film, market, and studio film. There's no reason to get
• 1:07
  coverage from a reader that used to reading tempole movies when your movie is going
• 1:11
  to be done for one hundred thousand dollars, and we wanted to focus on
• 1:15
  that. At Bulletproof script coverage, our readers have worked with Marvel Studios,
• 1:19
  CIA, w MEE, NBC, HBO, Disney, Scott Free, Warner
• 1:23
  Brothers, The Blacklist, and many many more. So if you need your
• 1:26
  screenplay or TV script covered by professional readers, head on over to covermiscreenplay dot
• 1:34
  Com. Well, guys, Today on the show, we have film producer
• 1:38
  Simon Swart. Now. Simon has been working in film production and distribution for
• 1:42
  over thirty years and was a leading studio executive at Warner Brothers, Walt Disney
• 1:49
  Studios, and twentieth Century Fox. After leaving his last job, he decided
• 1:53
  to venture out and start producing his own films, and he created some very
• 1:57
  profitable films, including Six with Josh Hartnett and the mega indie film hit I
• 2:04
  Can Only Imagine, which grossed over eighty three million dollars at the box office.
• 2:08
  With those releases, he created a multi window distribution model and he created
• 2:15
  new markets for the ever shifting distribution space for competitive smaller studios. This third
• 2:23
  party distribution model started with Lionsgate and then grow into MGM, Relativity, DreamWorks
• 2:30
  and Maribacks and generated substantial fees and greater, greater efficiency and kind of knocking
• 2:37
  down the old distribution model. Anytime I can have somebody who is championing a
• 2:43
  new way for filmmakers and production companies and studios, small studios to be able
• 2:47
  to make money with their films, I am all about it. I was
• 2:52
  very excited to talk shop with him and re really get into it in this
• 2:57
  episode. So, without any further ado, please, in my conversation with
• 3:00
  Simon swart I like to welcome to the show, Simon swart Man. Thank
• 3:05
  you so much for being on the show. That's great to be here.
• 3:07
  I appreciate it. Man, you are you, You've been around the block
• 3:10
  a few times. I know that you have some shrapnel in the from the
• 3:15
  business, without question, and experience cars, some battle scar some shrapnel.
• 3:22
  Absolutely. So before we get into it, how did you get into the
• 3:24
  business. Wow, I've got to tell you. I got into the business
• 3:30
  by sending my resume to every record company and music company on the West Coast
• 3:34
  and being completely rejected. And I ended up meeting and guy at a party
• 3:38
  and turns out they were hiring somebody they were looking for someone at Warner Brothers,
• 3:42
  and that was it. That's generally, isn't that the way it works?
• 3:46
  The younger generation out there, You've got to send your resumes out there
• 3:49
  and do that stuff, but ultimately it's probably your relationships and your contact so
• 3:52
  they're going to get you a job. And by the way, you don't
• 3:54
  get your dream job out the gate. You take whatever job is going and
• 3:58
  you do it to the best of your abilities. Wait a minute, so
• 4:00
  you so you mean to tell me that out of film school, Kevin Fahy
• 4:05
  is not going to call you to direct the next two hundred million dollar Marvel
• 4:09
  movie, like right out of film school as a ten year old, a
• 4:11
  fifteen year old, twenty year old. Probably not. I think it's a
• 4:15
  long shot, just as happened. The golden tickets do exist, they're just
• 4:20
  rare. But and I've spoken about this golden lottery ticket mentality of filmmakers for
• 4:27
  so long because that's the one story that you hear. I mean, we're
• 4:30
  still talking about El Mariachi. I mean it's I mean, it's like that
• 4:33
  these mythical stories and these filmmakers think that that's the way it's going to work,
• 4:38
  and that's not the way this business runs. You You've got to put
• 4:41
  it in your ten thousand hours plus and you might be getting coffee, you
• 4:45
  might be driving people to and fro, But you do what you got to
• 4:48
  do, and you learn along the way without question. Now, what did
• 4:53
  you do when you got over to Warner Brothers. Well, so here's the
• 4:57
  funny thing. By the way, I studied accounting and auditing. I was
• 5:00
  actually a charged accountant by trade. So okay, you know how did that
• 5:03
  all work out? Well? I was an art student who realized that I
• 5:06
  could probably emigrate better with a business degree than with an art degree. So
• 5:12
  I did that basic math and I forced myself to learn business and things like
• 5:15
  that. And when I started Warner Brothers, I was a manager of international
• 5:19
  Finance, which was a glorious position. It sounds very creative. It was
• 5:25
  very creative, not as much as you would think, but I would say.
• 5:30
  I worked through Warner Brothers. I then worked for a small independent,
• 5:34
  I worked at Disney, and then I spent the last twenty years at Fox
• 5:39
  and doing different roles in different functions, but gradually getting into more and more
• 5:44
  creative roles, where I eventually became the head of sales ahead of sales and
• 5:47
  marketing, and then I ran the distribution division for the home entertainment side at
• 5:51
  Fox for the last decade or so. So since you were at Fox,
• 5:57
  there was a few movies that they had they had ownership of that of course
• 6:01
  now Disney because the Disney owns everything, but at the time you were responsible.
• 6:06
  Soon yeah, soon, I think I should be getting my check from
• 6:09
  the Mouse at any day now just to buy me out at this point.
• 6:13
  But while you were there, you got to work on a very prestigious,
• 6:17
  you know, franchise which is called the Star Wars. So how was that?
• 6:23
  What was the stories behind marketing Star Wars? And you were there when
• 6:27
  the re release was happening, which was the ninety seven re release, which
• 6:30
  was basically our first look. There was a whole generation we've never even seen
• 6:33
  Star Wars in the theater before. Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. I mean,
• 6:38
  actually, what I loved about the gig at Fox on the that side
• 6:42
  of the business was you were the curator of the studio's history. You're and
• 6:46
  the great filmmakers all understand that their movies will be remembered, not necessarily on
• 6:54
  the big screen. The launches on the big screen, and we're all making
• 6:58
  movies for the big screen because it is such a remarkable experience as a consumer,
• 7:01
  as a fan when the lights go out and you've got your popcorn and
• 7:05
  this the imagery, the journey you go on is is so remarkable. But
• 7:11
  the legacy is going to be on the home screen, whether it's digital and
• 7:15
  whatever format you're going to get it. That's the legacy issue. And you're
• 7:18
  the curator of all this film history. And yeah, ninety seven we had
• 7:21
  a whole generation of Star Wars fans that you know, your access to the
• 7:27
  movies were so limited. Now you get to re release it and you're creating
• 7:31
  a whole new group of fans, you know, whether it's Star Wars or
• 7:35
  it's a Fair to Remember or sound of music, you know, it was.
• 7:40
  I loved that part of the job was working on the older movies and
• 7:44
  working on these classic franchises and keeping them alive. And it's a privilege to
• 7:48
  get to reintroduce them to new audiences. Frankly, now, how can you
• 7:53
  talk a little bit about the marketing mindset about around relaunching Star Wars in the
• 7:59
  theaters, because that I remember in that time that it was considered a risk.
• 8:03
  I still remember it was considered a risk and they were talking to like,
• 8:07
  why would they do this. It's available on VHS, you know what,
• 8:09
  and it killed obviously admitted the scene amount of money. Sure, you
• 8:15
  know, Honestly, Lucasfilm was integral in everything that we did. And you
• 8:20
  know, one thing that one thing about George Lucas and the guys at Lucasfilm
• 8:24
  is they were so protective of their fans, right, they wanted they respect
• 8:28
  their fans. They everything was about protecting the fans and giving them, giving
• 8:35
  them what they wanted. Uh, and you know listening. I mean,
• 8:37
  they're one of those brands that always had a dialogue with their fans and they've
• 8:41
  had those super fans for a reason. So everything we did was about servicing
• 8:46
  the fans. And yeah, releasing the movie out there. I want to
• 8:50
  say, if I remember correctly, we did something like a million over a
• 8:54
  million units of a trilogy. People like, there's no way you're going to
• 8:58
  sell a million units of a trilogy that's from a movie that was released sort
• 9:03
  of you know, thirty years ago. You know, everyone's moved on.
• 9:07
  It's like not so much, you know, like we were saying, and
• 9:13
  we love proving people wrong. Yeah, Like we were saying, like I
• 9:16
  was saying before when we were off air, is like I've purchased the Star
• 9:20
  Wars movies on pretty much every format ever released. Yeah, And honestly,
• 9:24
  the marketing challenge in that right was always making sure you were giving the fans
• 9:30
  a reason to buy it again. You're not buying just the same product again,
• 9:35
  right, So when there were technological advances, like we were able to
• 9:39
  digitize and remaster, like when we moved to DVD and Blu ray and re
• 9:43
  release them on those formats, you know, we were able to go back
• 9:46
  and actually, you know, Lucasfilm went back and fixed some of the scenes
• 9:50
  because the VFX weren't translating properly and technology had advanced so much, and that
• 9:54
  was pretty controversial as well. We'll be right back after a word from our
• 10:00
  sponsor and now back to the show. So, I mean, one of
• 10:07
  the marketing decisions we had to make is I think when we did the DVD,
• 10:11
  we released it in the original format and the original resolution and in the
• 10:16
  enhanced version where it had been digitized and some of the digital effects have been
• 10:20
  cleaned up, and so on, So you know, the fans were very
• 10:24
  clear they wanted both. They wanted to the original the way I saw it
• 10:28
  and did as way back when, but I also would like to see the
• 10:31
  new, updated version too, So it was kind of rare we did.
• 10:33
  We did some some some pretty creative things back then, you know, releasing
• 10:39
  the releasing, releasing both movies in the same package. You know you can
• 10:43
  have both versions. Now you you you were in charge of a lot of
• 10:46
  marketing of a lot of big franchises during your tenure at Fox and at Disney.
• 10:52
  Can you talk a little bit about what it's like working with the studios
• 10:56
  and what a typical marketing plan is for a blockbuster film, because you know,
• 11:00
  the roll outs to the understand because we'd on the show, we've talked
• 11:03
  a lot about independent film marketing and your niche audiences and grassroots and all this
• 11:07
  stuff. But I would love to hear from the inside, what is the
• 11:11
  plan, Like, Okay, we're going to spend X dollars on billboards and
• 11:16
  this kind of ads, in these kind of ads, And of course technology
• 11:18
  has changed a bit since probably a lot of those earlier releases, but just
• 11:22
  curious, so I think one of the biggest things is you know, back
• 11:26
  back in the nineties, you had a slightly more homogeneous plans. Right,
• 11:31
  you would have your billboards, you'd have your radio, you have your print,
• 11:33
  you have your trailering, right, and you had television, so you
• 11:37
  knew who the audience was that you needed to open the movie. Obviously,
• 11:41
  there's a lot of testing done in those days, even pre digital. We'd
• 11:46
  test the movie against the audiences, so we knew what the rating was.
• 11:48
  And every marketing plan was different depending on the genre, the size, and
• 11:52
  the scope of the movie. Okay, so you know the worst thing you
• 11:56
  can do, and sometimes you can see studios getting a little as you about
• 12:00
  it, as there's a cookie cutter approach, Right, this is the way
• 12:01
  we've done it. And that kind of strategy went out the window quite a
• 12:07
  long time ago, especially now with the challenges of mass market marketing. So
• 12:13
  if you're buying media on TV, you now have to supplement it with social
• 12:16
  media and online media and that becomes a much bigger piece of the budget.
• 12:20
  So the marketing of these movies has always been dynamic, and it's always been
• 12:26
  risky, right. That hasn't changed. It's just a matter of where you're
• 12:30
  spending the money and where you're taking the risk. And it also depends on
• 12:33
  who your target target audience is. If you go back twenty years ago,
• 12:37
  the sweet spot of opening blockbusters was males eighteen to thirty four, Right,
• 12:45
  Like, if you could get the fanboys in to go see a movie you
• 12:46
  were made, you knew you'd make your number, you'd get the butts and
• 12:50
  seats. And now you know, twenty nineteen, you know that's just not
• 12:52
  the case anymore, because those fan boys are you know, they're add basically
• 12:58
  on the media world. You've got to They're everywhere. And I think one
• 13:03
  of the coolest things that's actually occurred in the marketing space is, you know,
• 13:07
  the old school marketing demographics don't work. Don't work anymore. We don't
• 13:11
  identify the audiences don't identify based on ethnicity, social class, gender, as
• 13:18
  much as we'd like them to. Audiences identify based on interests, behaviors,
• 13:24
  passions. So and it's very hard to do mass marketing anymore. You know,
• 13:30
  the it's diminishing returns and what you're getting out of TV. You know,
• 13:35
  you've got to advertise on certain cable channels and you've got to be in
• 13:37
  certain events. I mean, Super Bowl ads are probably one of the rare
• 13:41
  exceptions where everybody is probably going to see your ad and then you've got to
• 13:45
  supplement it with online and social media. But your online and social media can
• 13:48
  just be a replication of what you're doing on radio and what TV. They've
• 13:52
  got to be unique to that format. And I think that's one of the
• 13:56
  one of the cool things that's going on in the marketing space right now.
• 13:58
  But is it. I've noticed this just from just being a watcher of the
• 14:03
  industry. I've noticed that from the days of when I was coming up in
• 14:05
  the nineties to today, the studios are having a more difficult time, even
• 14:11
  them with their massive resources to actually get to the audience to get because there's
• 14:16
  so much more competition. I mean, those fan boys, a lot of
• 14:20
  them are just sitting in front of a video game for fifteen hours a day.
• 14:24
  They're not interested in going to the movie theater anymore. So it's much
• 14:26
  it's even difficult and challenging with hundreds of millions of dollars, how do you
• 14:31
  break through even with the eighty million dollar spend, and by the way,
• 14:35
  you've got to recoup that too. So you know, you spend three hundred
• 14:39
  million dollars making the movie. Now you've got to spend maybe another one hundred
• 14:43
  and fifty million dollars marketing it. So most people don't understand that whatever the
• 14:46
  box office is, you've got to cut it in half right off the bat,
• 14:50
  because exhibition takes half, and then you've got to recoup your marketing costs,
• 14:54
  and then you've got all these other expenditures in there. So it gets
• 14:58
  pretty crazy because when you start having to spend against social media and stuff,
• 15:03
  is that an incremental spend or you're taking a dollar away from your your mass
• 15:07
  market TV. Yeah, And the reality is you can't take away the dollar
• 15:11
  because you still need that mass market TV. And by the way, you
• 15:15
  still need those cable spots because that might be where your target audience is as
• 15:20
  well. Right, And you've also got to spend money on PR and publicity
• 15:24
  to break through. So really kind of your your your marketing campaign is almost
• 15:28
  a military campaign of sorts. But it's all here towards opening weekend, right,
• 15:33
  right. But I've noticed that opening weekends, I mean depends of course
• 15:37
  on the on the on the franchise or on the blockbuster that's coming out,
• 15:39
  But opening weekends aren't what they used to be. Sometimes they will explode and
• 15:45
  will have the two hundred million dollars, one hundred and fifty million dollars,
• 15:48
  a ninety million dollar like The Joker did recently. You know, you know
• 15:50
  those are that was a surprise, But those those numbers aren't as much as
• 15:56
  they used to be in box off like look at that Will Smith movie.
• 15:58
  The Gemini Man just tanked, you know, which is a whole conversation about
• 16:03
  movie stars. Did they even matter anymore? I think movie stars definitely matter.
• 16:07
  I think that the model is changing where you have those you know,
• 16:10
  the classic star driven vehicles. The content still needs to be really good,
• 16:15
  right, you can't just do those vanity projects. I think what's happened is
• 16:18
  there's this massive you know, the days of the studio chief being the thought
• 16:25
  leader or the you know, the taste maker for the whole country. Yeah,
• 16:27
  I'm going to do I'm going to I'm going to create a relationship with
• 16:30
  a movie star and I'm going to give them thirty to forty percent of the
• 16:33
  budget or something crazy like that. Because it's there in it, it's automatically
• 16:37
  going to open you know, those days are long gone, right. The
• 16:41
  content needs to deliver, it needs to be good, right, And I
• 16:45
  think that's that's one of the many changing things that's going on in the film
• 16:49
  space. I mean, you know, in the industry, we laugh about
• 16:52
  the back end participation, right because it's invisible. The whole point behind the
• 16:56
  backhand participation was that you would allow your talent to share in the upside of
• 17:00
  a movie, so you keep them engaged. The reality is, with the
• 17:03
  studio accounting being what it is, that back end never materializes, okay,
• 17:10
  so stars have to figure out a different way to get paid. So what
• 17:12
  they would do is they'd take a disproportionate share of the budget. All that
• 17:15
  does is shift all the risk back to the studio in essence. So I
• 17:19
  think these economic models are all changing as the realities change, and the technology
• 17:23
  is changing that as well. And the reality is everybody doesn't fully understand,
• 17:29
  or i'd say nobody fully understands what the future of media consumption is going to
• 17:33
  be. It's not going to be one thing. It's not going to be
• 17:37
  just theatrical, it's not going to be just streaming. It's going to be
• 17:41
  a balance of all of these technologies and now where does the humble independent filmmaker
• 17:48
  fall into all of this conversation in general? Well, it's fascinating. I
• 17:52
  think the challenge for the independent filmmaker has been that as studios have moved away
• 17:57
  from the mid level star driven movies and the smaller movies, they're focusing more
• 18:02
  on the big franchises. Right. The reality is to in my mind,
• 18:06
  that's a Disney game. Disney wins that game every time because they're a licensing
• 18:11
  franchise machine. That's what they do. Right. Even Bob, I guess
• 18:15
  is I love I love the movies we're making, but I also love great
• 18:18
  indie films and those art house films, which is ironic, but he goes,
• 18:21
  but he's clear that those are not the movies that Disney is going to
• 18:25
  be making, right, Okay, And and that's that's obviously very very revealing,
• 18:30
  but it's it's insightful. He knows what their core strength is and he
• 18:33
  plays to it, and he's brilliant at that. But for the other studios,
• 18:37
  that leaves a lot of in between. Right, if you don't have
• 18:40
  the theme parks and you don't have that big licensing machine for all the toys
• 18:44
  and the T shirts and all the other stuff that goes with it. You
• 18:48
  know, where does that leave you with the independent films and those mid level
• 18:51
  movies, because there is still a market for them. But but the risk
• 18:56
  is the risk is what it's always been. The reality is the studios aren't
• 18:59
  going to put out that money. So as an independent producer, you have
• 19:03
  to go raise the money to make the movie. You can then partner up
• 19:06
  with the studio for a distribution deal or a service deal, and that's the
• 19:11
  way to go. Then the challenge is when you have to raise as an
• 19:14
  independent filmmaker, you've got to be thinking about how am I going to raise
• 19:17
  the money to actually make the movie? But at the same time, how
• 19:19
  am I going to raise the money to actually market the movie? Because if
• 19:22
  you don't think about that until you finished the movie, you're at risk because
• 19:29
  that guy who comes in and puts up the p and A will then take
• 19:32
  control of the project. That is the model right now, and I think
• 19:36
  the innovation is going to come with your releasing strategy. So the challenge for
• 19:40
  the independent filmmaker is, I'm not making a movie for Netflix per se.
• 19:45
  I'm not going to make a movie for Amazon, per se. But I've
• 19:48
  got a structure of my financing in such a way that I know how I'm
• 19:51
  going to get to market. We'll be right back after a word from our
• 19:56
  sponsor. And now back to the show. And the higher your budget goes
• 20:03
  over ten million dollars, the only way out is a theatrical release, or
• 20:08
  you've got to have covered your most of your negative with your foreign pre sales,
• 20:12
  right, so you structure your financing creatively. But most people don't think
• 20:17
  that way, right. That's that's not always There's a few people that get
• 20:21
  that, but for most indies, like you've got to figure out what your
• 20:23
  strategy is. To me, Netflix is a is a great strategy, but
• 20:27
  just remember with Netflix, there's not a lot of upside. There's a great
• 20:30
  business model and they're okay paying the premium if they own the idea, if
• 20:34
  they own your ip. That's that's the way they're working right now. But
• 20:38
  they're predominantly focused on big, big names too. You know, if you
• 20:42
  can get that Golden ticket, you know, Martin Scorsese with The Irishman,
• 20:47
  you know, that's a good deal. They pay you a big chunk of
• 20:51
  money for the movie and the rights and you make it for less than that.
• 20:53
  You know, the margin is what you get to keep the type of
• 20:56
  thing. So the independent film model is actually a pretty exciting place to be
• 21:00
  right now. But you've got to really understand the distribution opportunities that are ahead
• 21:06
  of you at the point that you're creating your budget and you've got another your
• 21:10
  audiences. That was about to say, because I mean, I speak to
• 21:14
  the independent filmmakers on a daily basis, and I'm going to say ninety five
• 21:18
  percent of them are the creative producer, the creative director, and they're not
• 21:22
  the business person. They're creating a product and have no idea where to sell
• 21:26
  it. And I'm yelling at the top of my lungs from the top of
• 21:29
  the mountain I can and going, Look, if you're a real estate developer
• 21:33
  and you make condos, you know who you're going to sell those condos to.
• 21:37
  You don't just make a condo, you know, a twenty you know,
• 21:41
  twenty unit condo and go now, let's see what we're going to do.
• 21:44
  You don't do that? Yeah, what what's your business plan? Who's
• 21:48
  your audience? Who are you making this for? What are you hoping to
• 21:52
  accomplish by making this movie right, Because if you can answer those questions,
• 21:56
  and you're the first question I'll ask any independent producer or not a dependent producer
• 22:00
  director, is what is this movie most like? What? What do you
• 22:04
  believe your end product is going to be most like? Can you name five
• 22:08
  movies for me that you think this movie is like? And part of that
• 22:12
  is understanding expectations, right, It's also understanding tone. But oftentimes, if
• 22:18
  you've got an indie filmmaker coming and saying I've got an eight million dollar budget
• 22:22
  movie or a four million dollar budget movie and it's most like Star Wars,
• 22:26
  or it's most like Avatar, you go, okay, that had like a
• 22:32
  three hundred million dollar budget, and you're going to do it for eight and
• 22:36
  James Cameron it's probably and James Cameron and and you know, and John Landau
• 22:41
  and a studio behind you and so on. It's like you've got a level
• 22:45
  set expectations, right. Whereas if you're making a movie that's a ten million
• 22:48
  dollar budget and one of your compcious Juno and one of them's Napoleon Dynamite,
• 22:52
  perhaps now you go, okay, now I'm listening, right now, I'm
• 22:56
  listening, because you know, if you're going to spend ten million dollars making
• 22:59
  a movie, you've laid off half of it with foreign your net exposure is
• 23:03
  five million dollars, and maybe you've got a one one and a half million
• 23:07
  dollar tax credit. Take advantage of all that, your exposure for you and
• 23:10
  your investors is three and a half million dollars at that point. A great
• 23:14
  streaming deal gets you into a pretty good place and gets everyone to see your
• 23:18
  movie. It's kind of like understanding how you're going to go to market,
• 23:22
  what's your perfect end goal? Right And here's the thing is for us and
• 23:27
  for where my company's at right now, for NTV Pictures and Tiba, is
• 23:33
  we really want to make movies for the big screen. And I know that's
• 23:37
  counterintuitive with what people are talking about in the industry and so on, but
• 23:41
  we're going to make them for the big screen. We want them to be
• 23:44
  big and cinematic. We're not going to do the big budget. You know
• 23:48
  that our biggest budget's probably ten to fifteen million dollars because at ten to fifteen
• 23:53
  million dollars, you can get a great cast, you can get a great
• 23:56
  director, you can make something that's beautiful and deserves to be on the big
• 24:00
  screen. And by the way, if you fumble and the movie doesn't end
• 24:03
  up as good as you wanted it to be at that budget range, you
• 24:07
  can make money still without a theatrical release with a certain cast, obviously with
• 24:11
  a certain cast, and if you passage, if you know who your audience
• 24:15
  is, you know you know. Again again the challenge is you need probably
• 24:19
  a minimum and there are a lot of people that will say you need twenty
• 24:23
  five million dollars minimum to open a movie in the US. I disagree with
• 24:29
  that. I think if you know who your audience is, and you build
• 24:32
  your audience early and you're creative on the social side, you can open for
• 24:36
  much less than that. You know, probably around eight to ten for a
• 24:40
  relatively wide release. You know, but you've got to figure out where you're
• 24:45
  going to get that money from and how you're actually going to get that get
• 24:48
  that into the marketplace, right, Yeah, And you could also, I
• 24:51
  mean, there's there's so many different ways of doing it. I mean,
• 24:52
  I have I've had multiple I've had multiple guests on and have done case studies
• 24:57
  of films. At heart are low budget. They were a mill or two
• 25:00
  million dollars. But they knew their audience so well, and they targeted them
• 25:04
  so well, and they worked on them for a year, year and a
• 25:07
  half cultivating that audience. By the time that movie came out, they killed
• 25:12
  it. They were pulling three four theatrical and a lot of it. It
• 25:17
  was self theatrical where they were doing, you know, neither four walling or
• 25:22
  on demand screenings, and they were just killing it. It was but there's
• 25:27
  a lot of work and you really need to understand so many elements for that
• 25:32
  to happen. And most of those films, by the way, were not
• 25:33
  star powered. They were genre powered or story power. I think for an
• 25:38
  end, you build an audience while you're shooting or before you're shooting. Start
• 25:42
  yeah, don't, don't give up the movie, don't don't trip anything that
• 25:45
  would turn off a potential future distributor. But stop building an audience as soon
• 25:49
  as possible. Now, can you tell you, I mean, you've had
• 25:52
  great success going after niche audiences, specifically your film I can only imagine,
• 25:57
  which was a and away blockbuster in the realm of what you do, which
• 26:03
  is faith based films, And can you tell everybody a little bit about that
• 26:07
  film and then how much are grossed? And because it was a fairly impressive
• 26:11
  movie, and what was the budget of that film? If you don't want
• 26:14
  me tell you ask it. I think a lot of all the credit on
• 26:18
  that movie should go to, you know, to the Owen brothers, Cindy
• 26:19
  Bond. I mean, they made something amazing. And you know, the
• 26:22
  Owen brothers I'd worked with when I was at Fox and we set up our
• 26:26
  whole third party distribution model at Fox. And the Owens were young filmmakers who
• 26:33
  I came across there and they had a little movie called October Baby, and
• 26:38
  it was very much a faith based movie, but it was really beautiful and
• 26:42
  well shot. And that was where our relationship with them started. And they've
• 26:47
  just come along so much as filmmakers. You know, they've got two A
• 26:52
  cinema scores going in the faith based space, two general market A cinema scores.
• 26:57
  They're great filmmakers. And I think I can only imagine what worked with
• 27:00
  I can only imagine is we had a built an audience. It was based
• 27:03
  on a number one contemporary Christian song of all time, so it was a
• 27:07
  massive audience. Most people didn't know the story behind the song. Generally,
• 27:12
  most people don't care about this is this story by the song, but for
• 27:15
  this song. But this song. Did I even know the song? And
• 27:18
  it's not that's not the music. I listened to YouTube, but I heard
• 27:21
  that song a thousand times. Oh it broke, It broke out of the
• 27:25
  out of Christian music because people just loved the song. It was inspirational and
• 27:29
  just for for for for giving people hope in music. I mean, it
• 27:33
  is the power of the medium. So we knew we had a built an
• 27:36
  audience on that one. And you know, the Irwin Brothers did magic,
• 27:40
  you know, they they they grew up shooting, you know, doing sports
• 27:44
  and music anyway, and they were the right guys to do this project.
• 27:48
  In this in this movie is a universal story. It is about So you
• 27:52
  got a built an audience. That's a major plus factor. Our budget was
• 27:55
  less than ten million dollars. They started building the audience a year over,
• 28:00
  a year out with limited screenings and so on. And you know, the
• 28:04
  movie's kind of a bit of a love letter to Nashville as well, but
• 28:08
  it deals with these fundamental issues of forgiveness. It doesn't become overtly preachy,
• 28:14
  but it's really a father son's story, but there's a love story in there
• 28:17
  also, And I think when you look at that movie, it delivers on
• 28:21
  all the beats that it's set up, so no matter what you believe,
• 28:26
  it doesn't force you into a certain belief paradigm. You do believe in forgiveness,
• 28:30
  you do believe in love, you do believe in redemption. Right.
• 28:33
  We all love those kind of underdog stories, and that's what this is,
• 28:37
  you know. It was basically a story about a kid who gets beaten by
• 28:41
  his father, who's a heavy drinking, you know, abusive dad, and
• 28:48
  eventually he has to come to a point where he can reconcile with his father,
• 28:52
  and he does. There's this beautiful reconciliation. It's based on a true
• 28:56
  story, and I think, you know that's the power of a true story
• 29:00
  too, is that you go, yeah, that actually happened. That guy
• 29:03
  got through it, He did that. This is what he accomplished. If
• 29:07
  he can do that, I can do that, you know. And that's
• 29:10
  that's something that's kind of cool about the story driven pictures. Yeah, and
• 29:15
  that movie, If I'm Not Mistaken, made about eighty four million domestic in
• 29:19
  the theatrical which is for a faased automatic. And again it was a very
• 29:25
  limited marketing spend. The team at Lionsgate Roadside did a great job releasing that
• 29:32
  and you know, we had a lot to the producers had a lot to
• 29:36
  do with the releasing of that movie. But you understood, but the producers
• 29:41
  also understood their niche so well that they understood that. I'm assuming that any
• 29:48
  marketing spent wasn't just billboards and TV advis They were going out to churches,
• 29:53
  they were going after that where that niche audience lived. We'll be right back
• 29:59
  after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show. Yeah we
• 30:07
  we Uh. Some of the best sort of agencies in the in the business
• 30:11
  were hired on that and helped guide that with with Roadside and Lionsgate. And
• 30:17
  you know that was an example of everything going really well. Uh. And
• 30:21
  you know, I think I think the Owens have another movie coming out.
• 30:22
  I forget the name, I still believe I think uh, which is coming
• 30:27
  out in March, and every every indication is it's going to be another hit.
• 30:30
  It looks amazing, the anticipation is there. If you look it up
• 30:33
  on social media, you can see the kind of following it's got already.
• 30:37
  And again, that's just an example of building an audience early on. And
• 30:41
  it's a story that people know about in the community, and you know it's
• 30:45
  going to be a well made story because you know what this these filmmakers brand
• 30:48
  is. And and yeah, exactly, and they are building a brand around
• 30:53
  there themselves as Oh look, the Irwin Brothers. It's like Spielberg is a
• 30:56
  brand and Scorsese is a brand. Yeah. And they're also doing it for
• 31:00
  a smart number too. It's like it's not like they're making this for one
• 31:03
  hundred million dollars, right right. Budgets are very the budgets are very rational
• 31:08
  if you've got a very targeted audience. You know, again, I think
• 31:11
  as an indie filmmaker, you've always got to rationalize your budget. That's part
• 31:15
  of knowing who your audience is and how you're going to go to market.
• 31:18
  So making a movie for twenty million dollars when you can get the same result
• 31:23
  for age or nine, you know, that's just asking for trouble. I
• 31:26
  mean, you know, one of the most famous indies of of recent memory
• 31:30
  is Get Out. I mean, look at how look at Jordan Peel's brand
• 31:34
  look at how he's exploded, you know. But he didn't just show up.
• 31:38
  He paid his dues. You know, he took some creative risks.
• 31:41
  But you know, I want to say, get Out was made for what
• 31:44
  less than five million dollars, you know, and that did I think they
• 31:48
  did over one hundred and you know it didn't. I think it did like
• 31:51
  two hundred something. It was some crazy number. And what a brilliant movie
• 31:56
  it was. It was just so fresh right in. But with that,
• 32:00
  that's one of those you know, he was with the Bloomhouse guys, so
• 32:04
  then that's a whole other conversation with Bloomhouse has been able to do and they've
• 32:07
  been so smart. So that that's one of my other points as an indie
• 32:12
  filmmaker. Don't comp yourself to a lightning strike. Okay, oh that's great.
• 32:17
  I like that. Yeah, like, oh yeah, my movie's just
• 32:21
  like ceronormal activity. My movie's just like Blair Witch projects. Yeah, we're
• 32:25
  all aware of the outliers, right, It's like, you know what,
• 32:29
  Actually, when I was working at Disney, the first movie I got to
• 32:31
  work on was Lion King. Okay, and this is something I learned every
• 32:37
  other movie, animated movie that came out after Lion King was the next Lion
• 32:42
  King. And the problem is they were all very successful, but they didn't
• 32:46
  do what Lion King did, so they were deemed failures. And so it's
• 32:50
  kind of like, don't benchmark yourself for an outlier. I think the key
• 32:53
  thing in an independent film is that you've got to set yourself up where singles
• 32:58
  and doubles are a good thing. But if you hit a home run,
• 33:00
  you're great, right, But you're playing for the singles and doubles, like,
• 33:05
  get on base, just get on base. You know, that sets
• 33:07
  you up for your next project, your next thing, And if you hit
• 33:10
  a home run, you're ready to go. And it's kind of like every
• 33:15
  project I look at now, it's like, how do I get back to
• 33:17
  break even? Right? Failure should be break even, and I want to
• 33:22
  know that I've got a plan for break even, and then how do I
• 33:25
  set myself up? Will this is this movie capable of a disproportionate return,
• 33:31
  right, And the disproportionate return is that big you know, the Juno type
• 33:36
  number, the Napoleon Dynamite type number, the get out type number. It's
• 33:38
  like, but you're not banking on the breakout. You're banking on a single
• 33:43
  or a double. Have you been Have you been listening to my podcaster,
• 33:46
  because you literally said the exact thing I've said so many times. With my
• 33:51
  baseball analogy, I go, everybody wants to go up to bat and hit
• 33:54
  a home run, but most people when they make their first movie haven't even
• 33:59
  been in a baseball stadium or picked up a bat before, and they're expecting
• 34:04
  to hit a home run at the beginning, where there's that other guy or
• 34:07
  girl who's been in the batting cage just hitting away, hitting away, hitting
• 34:12
  away, and just practicing until they finally get their shot up at bat.
• 34:16
  You know, it's fascinating that the egotistic mind of the filmmaker, which there
• 34:22
  is a few egos in our business, just a few, not many,
• 34:25
  but we have these delusions of grandeur as filmmakers. I definitely had for many
• 34:30
  years. You know, I was going to be the next this, or
• 34:34
  my film was going to do this thing. I'm sure you've run into this
• 34:37
  many times, so I'm fantasy to Indie Hustle. I won't reveal my sources,
• 34:40
  okay, but I appreciate that. Yeah, I run into it all
• 34:45
  the time. It's a process, right, and you're gonna pay your dues.
• 34:47
  You've got to learn right. And by the way, there's a ton
• 34:50
  of people out there that will help you as an indie filmmaker. You've got
• 34:53
  to build up your network, find the people that can help you and advise
• 34:57
  you. There's a lot of people that will give you advice for relatively free.
• 35:00
  Don't pay for the advice yet, you know, you know verify.
• 35:04
  It's like, I see a lot of people getting suckered by paying people to
• 35:07
  market their movies when they haven't fully vetted them, and they make bad deals
• 35:12
  and so on. There's a lot of people out there that will advise you
• 35:15
  as an indie filmmaker. There's a lot of resources out there available to you.
• 35:17
  But remember it's a slog and you know, I mean, my hat's
• 35:22
  off to anyone who actually makes a movie. Because a movie, even if
• 35:25
  it's shot on your iPhone and it's edited and put together, it's a it's
• 35:29
  a pretty significant creative accomplishment, no matter, you know, just to actually
• 35:34
  pull that all together right, getting people to perform and so on. I
• 35:37
  mean, when when you've been on sets of on indies, you know,
• 35:40
  I enjoy indies because there's there's a lot of less, there's a lot of
• 35:44
  les, less, roomful waste. So everybody's very mission focused and usually that
• 35:49
  crew is tight man. It's like they will do that. They're in battle
• 35:52
  man, and they're going to get the shots, they're going to get the
• 35:54
  coverage. And you know that your indie director is the ultimate team leader because
• 36:01
  he doesn't have money to throw around the way a big studio director might have.
• 36:06
  Right, like, you got to do this for the passion. You've
• 36:07
  got to enroll your entire cast and crew in your vision for what you're doing.
• 36:13
  And that isn't easy. That takes a lot of practice. That's why
• 36:17
  it's like working on other people's movies is really one of the best ways to
• 36:22
  learn because you're in this together, your problem solved together without without questions.
• 36:28
  Preach, sir, preach, preach. Now, we wanted to talk a
• 36:32
  little bit about distribution and distribution options for dependent filmmakers. You know, I've
• 36:36
  talked a lot about distribution on my show and on my other show, Film
• 36:40
  Entrepreneur, where is about how to get your film out there, And the
• 36:45
  landscape is changing so rapidly every other month, there's something new What was true
• 36:52
  last year is no longer true today in every its streaming and theatrical and on
• 36:57
  demand and DVD, all of it. You know these legacy models, I
• 37:01
  call it the legacy distribution models, which were basically designed by the studios and
• 37:06
  the larger distribution companies to keep more money in their own pockets because they're businesses.
• 37:09
  I get it. And we've all heard those kind of predatory stories of
• 37:14
  the filmmaker signing the their movie away for fifteen years and never seeing a dime.
• 37:17
  We've all heard those stories. What are the distribution options that we have
• 37:22
  as independent filmmakers moving forward? From your point of view, Well, look,
• 37:28
  the number one predictor of downstream revenue, you know, ironically, right,
• 37:32
  everyone's talking about all the disruption, all the stuff that's going on,
• 37:37
  the chaos of streaming with Amazon, Hulu, Netflix coming on board, how
• 37:40
  the studios are struggling and so on, but still the number one predictor of
• 37:45
  downstream revenues for a movie is the US domestic box office. And it's like
• 37:53
  that brings a lot of clarity to all the discussions that are happening around the
• 37:58
  world and in the space. Right is the number one predictor of overall profitability.
• 38:04
  And what I mean by that is it still sets most of the downstream
• 38:07
  revenue streams. So if you have a guaranteed domestic release with a reputable domestic
• 38:13
  distributor on say one thousand screens, your foreign value goes up by four or
• 38:17
  five x, maybe even more depending on the package. Right, So that
• 38:23
  is still the number one way to go, But the problem is it's really
• 38:27
  hard to get there, which is why you want to have the option of
• 38:31
  bringing your own P and A if you can, because that gives you the
• 38:35
  option to release yourself and manage it yourself. However, if your budget's right,
• 38:39
  you can still get enough money out of foreign and if you structure it
• 38:45
  taking advantage of tax credits and things like that, you know, you can
• 38:49
  then release also directly to an HBO or a Netflix or a Hulu or an
• 38:53
  Amazon. Right now, you can also get ordered. You can also get
• 38:57
  your product ordered and paid for ahead of time in some case by those guys
• 39:00
  if you if you're hitting something that they know that they have a need for
• 39:05
  or a niche. But if you're an unknown that's pretty hard, you know.
• 39:09
  So at the end of the day, you can you can self release
• 39:13
  digitally. You can put it on a digital platform yourself. The problem is
• 39:15
  you still need someone to find your movie, you know, the marketing.
• 39:22
  You can't release a movie without marketing. You have to have a marketing plan.
• 39:25
  You might have the best movie in the world. You might have the
• 39:30
  you know, you might have the next Napoleon Dynamite, for example, but
• 39:32
  if people can't find it and don't know about it, you're never going to
• 39:36
  build up that word of mouth. So you've got to have some kind of
• 39:38
  strategy for releasing when you're making the movie, right, so you've got a
• 39:44
  couple of marketing in with it. I mean, the distribution landscape is really
• 39:47
  complex. Right now, you've got windows collapsing. We'll be right back after
• 39:52
  a word from our sponsor and now back to the show. So it's kind
• 40:01
  of you know, it used to be that you would make a fair amount
• 40:05
  of your money on the theatrical release. If you could recover most of your
• 40:07
  marketing money and the theatrical release, that was a good thing because then you
• 40:12
  could try and recover your negative in the downstream. Right. You know,
• 40:15
  the streaming services used to pay a percentage of the domestic box office this TV
• 40:21
  syndication would pay a percentage of the domestic box office and then your your your
• 40:25
  digital and DVD in Blu ray. You know digital being transactional. If you
• 40:30
  pay to watch it again like a pay per view, or you buy it
• 40:32
  digitally on iTunes. That used to be most of the profit of a movie,
• 40:38
  right, But that's collapsing with the advent of streaming. That's that's that's
• 40:43
  where that that's where the industry is in a scramble because all that that secondary
• 40:47
  transactional revenue is shrinking. And what I call transactional revenue is again if a
• 40:53
  consumer pays to watch it again, either by renting it on video on demand
• 40:59
  or buying it on iTunes, or buying a DVD or buying a Blu Ray.
• 41:02
  And by the way, you know people are still buying DVDs and Blu
• 41:06
  rays. You have a if you have a big screen TV and you've got
• 41:08
  the biggest ultra high definition screen, the best way to watch your best sci
• 41:14
  fi movie, these Marvel movies, I would argue, it's still on a
• 41:17
  Blu Ray. It's the best way to replicate what you saw in theater.
• 41:22
  Because of transfer rates, buffer rates and all of that stuff is changing,
• 41:28
  but you know, each of these are individual segments that I still think.
• 41:31
  I still think physical media of some form or digital media is that's the legacy
• 41:37
  platform. That's where as a filmmaker you get to explain your journey, you
• 41:40
  get you know, that's where people will discover your movie. And I think
• 41:43
  that's something we do have to solve for. And I know previously a lot
• 41:46
  of talk going on about blockchain and how that can apply to how consumers can
• 41:52
  transfer rights and how they can renew right. Explain explain that to people,
• 41:55
  because I know a lot of people don't understand blockchain, so I don't underst
• 42:00
  stand it fully, so I'm going to qualify it. But what I understand
• 42:02
  is that it's basically it's this amazing certification where if you have a share certificate
• 42:07
  or it's like having a dollar and I'm not talking bitcoin, but if you
• 42:12
  buy the right to a movie, So let's say you buy the right,
• 42:15
  I can only imagine you pay twelve dollars or fifteen dollars right through blockchain technology,
• 42:20
  it will identify that I'm the legal owner of that digital copy of that
• 42:23
  file. That means it can't be pirated. It can't be taken away from
• 42:28
  me. But that blockchain also identifies that the Urban Brothers own the copyright to
• 42:31
  that file as well, right, So it's kind of like this perfect aligning
• 42:37
  of rights where it's encrypted and protected. So I have the right to that
• 42:42
  movie. I can now sell that to you if I want to. I
• 42:45
  can sell it to you for seven dollars or eight dollars, but I own
• 42:49
  that right and I can certify that I have that right. So like DVD's
• 42:52
  Blue RESERVEE just any physical media you could do that with as well. Yeah,
• 42:57
  except for with blockchain, you won't be able to rip it and I
• 43:00
  won't be able to share it. So for the studios and for the people
• 43:02
  that are making movies, I mean, let's face it, piracy has been
• 43:06
  a bane on the business since you know, its just since smart cams and
• 43:12
  bhs, right, and piracy is not is a major issue because the creators,
• 43:19
  we have so many challenges actually making money on our movie anyway getting it
• 43:22
  through the traditional system. People are taking it for free and actually making money
• 43:27
  off of what you've created. So you know, piracy is not one of
• 43:30
  those victimless crimes. I really I don't believe it's a victimless crime. People
• 43:36
  are selling it and making money without actually putting the investment in the time in
• 43:39
  and people that have worked on the movie are therefore not getting paid. I
• 43:43
  mean, that is a fundamental problem, and I think that is one of
• 43:45
  those things that the blockchain technology can actually help address and fix. I don't
• 43:51
  think it's there yet, but I think that's the promise of it. That's
• 43:53
  the way studios are looking at it, that's the way content creators are looking
• 43:58
  at it, and distributors are going, Okay, how do I make sure
• 44:00
  this happens. I mean the irony is, you know, you broke the
• 44:05
  story about the digital platform, the aggregator, Yeah, the Disugar product form.
• 44:07
  Yes, that kind of went sideways or went under and people lost a
• 44:13
  lot of money. The funny thing is is that when you're selling Blu rays
• 44:16
  and DVDs, there's an audit trail that goes with that. It's like I
• 44:20
  know that I shipped these discs to that retailer, and that retailer then sold
• 44:24
  them and I got paid, and I can trace the money all the way
• 44:28
  coming back. Right with digital technology, ironically, even with the downloading and
• 44:31
  the you know, the digital downloading on iTunes and Amazon. It's almost impossible
• 44:37
  to audit even though there should be a one relationship, there should be a
• 44:42
  trail that says, my credit card was charged fourteen dollars for the movie.
• 44:47
  Therefore, the studio should be able to know that. You know, I
• 44:50
  can follow that revenue all the way through the system. It's not it's not.
• 44:53
  That's how it should be, but it doesn't work that way. Yeah.
• 44:55
  I was always wondering that myself, because I'm like, who, Like,
• 45:00
  how do I really know how much money has come in? There's no
• 45:02
  way to actually check it. There's no way to audit it. I'm trusting
• 45:06
  Amazon, I'm trusting iTunes, I'm trusting all of them. They could easily
• 45:09
  be siphoning off I'm not saying they are, but easily by either by error
• 45:14
  or whatever. But we can't really prove that we got all the money that
• 45:16
  we get, right. There's there's quite a few opportunities for leakage in the
• 45:22
  current system. Yeah, there was a well there was there was leakage when
• 45:27
  you were shipping DVDs because people could make copies of DVDs and they could rip
• 45:31
  them and then they put them they put them on the internet. And then
• 45:34
  they're sharing them through bittarrents and all that kind of stuff, and you know
• 45:37
  that that's a constant process. And you know, that's where I think,
• 45:40
  again, just coming back to my limited knowledge of blockchain, that's where blockchain
• 45:45
  is the promise to actually shut that down. But it also will I think
• 45:49
  it also has the potential to create a whole secondary and tertiary market for the
• 45:52
  content that we've all bought. Right, So, the days of us having
• 45:55
  our big physical libraries, you know, of us owning all favorite movies and
• 46:00
  having them on DVD and Blu ray, I think what's going to happen is
• 46:05
  we're gonna have a digital library. I think our absolute favorite movies we're gonna
• 46:08
  want on whatever the hottest format is that's going to give us the best experience
• 46:13
  at home. So there's a handful of movies that we're gonna want to own
• 46:16
  physically and we'll rebuy a'lla Star Wars. Right, going back to your first
• 46:20
  question, right, when Star Wars comes out again and it's ultra high definition
• 46:25
  and there's all these interactive features and you've now got a you know, a
• 46:34
  holographic George Lucas who talks through the entire movie for you exactly, and your
• 46:37
  TV is the size of the wall in your house, and it's super high
• 46:42
  definition. You're gonna want to buy it on that format for that movie,
• 46:45
  but the vast majority of other movies, you're probably going to be okay just
• 46:49
  to stream it right exactly, or to wait until it comes on syndicated TV
• 46:52
  or pay TV that type of thing. If there's even TV, then who
• 46:57
  knows. It's all to be a series of channel apps and everything's going to
• 47:01
  be over the top without without question. I mean, things are changing so
• 47:06
  rapidly. I mean, I mean, I again, I talked to this
• 47:08
  independent filmmaker so often, and I'm always getting these questions like how do I
• 47:13
  make money? What do I do this or that? And I've really tried
• 47:15
  to stay on the cutting edge. And I love this this blockchain idea of
• 47:20
  yours, you know, or the or the other promise of it, because
• 47:22
  it's basically, well, you know, for people who' understand block blockchain,
• 47:25
  it is the basis of cryptocurrency. So it so that that then you have
• 47:31
  to you know, whoever wants to learn about cryptocurrency please go do so that's
• 47:35
  a that's a deep well that we will not cover in this episode, but
• 47:38
  that, but that technology does have so much promise that I always got pissed
• 47:45
  about that too, because I come from the video store days. When I
• 47:46
  worked in a video store where I could buy my VHS or buy a DVD.
• 47:51
  I'd hold it and then when I didn't want it anymore, I would
• 47:53
  sell it on Amazon or eBay. Digitally, that does not exist anymore.
• 47:59
  You can't sell a digital copy unless they bootleg it. And even if you
• 48:02
  bootleg it, you can't really sell it in a digital way. You can
• 48:07
  there's other ways, there's other business models. Inherently, as a consumer,
• 48:12
  I should have the right to sell that right, I should be able to
• 48:15
  sell it to you, and you know, and that's that's the stuff that
• 48:19
  I think blockchain actually enables, and I think it's it's high time because the
• 48:22
  reality is when you do buy a digital file, now you're not actually buying
• 48:25
  it. You're kind of renting it. Oh yeah, it's not I don't
• 48:29
  have it all to put on your hard drive. But it's not like something
• 48:31
  else you buy that you can sell to someone else. It's basically, yeah,
• 48:35
  I'm renting it. Oh and by the way, if I change my
• 48:37
  cable company or something like that. God forbid, I'm probably gonna lose it.
• 48:39
  It just that's it's that's the reality. Yeah, with our question,
• 48:45
  now, do you do you think and I believe it is, but do
• 48:49
  you believe that niche based films are the future of independent filmmaking Because I always
• 48:53
  tell people all the time that film independent filmmakers can't do a giant like aromantic
• 49:00
  comedy, a broad spectrum film, you know, a ten million dollar romantic
• 49:04
  comedy, unless there's some major star power in it, and that story has
• 49:07
  to be really you're now you're you're really trying to hit that target so perfectly,
• 49:13
  you risk a lot. Whereas in if you I always use the vegan
• 49:15
  chef movie, you make a vegan chef movie that's romantic and you could target
• 49:21
  that demographic a little bit. But I'd love to hear your thoughts. Yeah,
• 49:23
  I think you have to have a clear idea about who your core audience
• 49:27
  is. But you know, the exception to that is, you know,
• 49:30
  you take a movie like The Big Sick last year, right, Even Napoleon
• 49:36
  Dynamoe just one of my favorites because it's illustrative, it's a small movie.
• 49:42
  You know who your core demographic is, but it has the ability to break
• 49:45
  out because it deals with the human experience, right, And that for me,
• 49:52
  so it depends on you on your genre and what you're doing. Right.
• 49:54
  So I tend to focus on content that unites and inspires people. We'll
• 50:00
  be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show.
• 50:08
  And I gravitate towards stories which have a broad appeal, even though I
• 50:14
  will know exactly who my core audience is, right, So, if you're
• 50:17
  going to do a sci fi movie that's a high tech and that's going to
• 50:22
  appeal to that subset, Yeah, you've always got to know who your core
• 50:25
  audience is, and you've got to know where they are and how to get
• 50:28
  to them. And you've got to know that at the script stage, frankly,
• 50:31
  but you're always hoping that you're doing Like again, for me, I'm
• 50:36
  looking for movies that have that breakout potential, and they only breakout if they
• 50:39
  connect beyond that niche. Now, now, faith based movies are interesting because
• 50:45
  in a way they're ultimate niche. So much like horror movies are kind of
• 50:49
  a niche, they're a bigger, more commercial niche. Right, But if
• 50:52
  you're going to do a faith based movie for a niche, then you must
• 50:53
  do it for a budget, a smart number, A smart nat You've got
• 50:58
  to do it for a rational number because that's your core and you know that.
• 51:01
  You know it's going to be narrow and deep. Right, it's like
• 51:05
  horror. You know that if you get the core, and it'll be narrow
• 51:07
  and deep, but it has the ability to run, right, it's like
• 51:10
  get out, Like get out, yeah, exactly. I mean that's just
• 51:15
  a I wouldn't even consider that exactly horror. But you're right. It was
• 51:17
  that Blumhouse model and it's like this is they know what to do? You
• 51:22
  know? So so yes, I think I think independent I don't think independent
• 51:27
  film is just is just niche. But I think you've got to have a
• 51:30
  hook that you can hold onto, right, Like when I read a script,
• 51:34
  I'm I read script backwards from most creatives. I'm thinking, if I'm
• 51:37
  thinking of it from a distribution standpoint, and how am I going to market
• 51:42
  it? Where are the scenes that are going to be in my trailer?
• 51:45
  You know what I'm thinking is that's what I'm looking through. That's what I'm
• 51:51
  looking through. A script looking for Does that help? Yeah, it helps.
• 51:55
  I mean I think that I agree with what you're saying and that,
• 51:59
  but potential to break out is that home run. So we you know as
• 52:02
  well as I do, we get one maybe two of those a year,
• 52:06
  you know, if and then there's maybe multiple levels of that breakout. So
• 52:09
  it could you know, if I if I could only imagine made twenty five
• 52:13
  or thirty million dollars, you would have been, you know, they would
• 52:15
  have been ecstatic, like, oh my god, you know, because it
• 52:19
  was a super hit. But then you occasionally get the grand Slam, which
• 52:22
  is, you know, tenfold of what the budget is or something along those
• 52:25
  lines. But I do, I truly believe that, again, keeping that
• 52:31
  when your budget goes higher, you've got to have something to to hedge your
• 52:37
  bets. So it's either cast. It's either it's either cast, story,
• 52:42
  niche, genre, something that's going to hedge those bets to higher that budget
• 52:46
  goes. And then and I'm always telling people to drop the budget as low
• 52:51
  as you possibly can while still being able to create an MVP, a minimal
• 52:55
  viable product to get to realize your dream, realize your vision, but get
• 53:01
  a product to the marketplace and not just look at this as an art form.
• 53:05
  It is an art form, but it is a business, and it
• 53:07
  is a very expensive art form to work with. Do you agree? Absolutely.
• 53:13
  I mean, there's so many independent creatives that I've come across that know
• 53:15
  exactly how to make a movie for a budget, and that's that's a massive
• 53:20
  skill by itself. Got it. But these days, you have to know
• 53:24
  how you're going to get that money back to You can't just know that,
• 53:29
  you have to know the other part as well. So it's kind of like
• 53:31
  like you're saying, if I'm going to do a niche movie, you know,
• 53:35
  I'll use an example. If you're going to do an inner city basketball
• 53:37
  movie, Yeah, okay, it's probably not going to travel very well.
• 53:43
  You're going to have to make your money in the US. Now. The
• 53:45
  markets are changing. Don't get me wrong, it's changing. Maybe you can
• 53:49
  sell it in China if they stop tweeting about it, you know, the
• 53:52
  NBA and they settle at hash. But but you know what I'm saying,
• 53:54
  It's like, if you do a very local movie, you've got to know
• 53:59
  that it's probably not going to travel well. Therefore you make it that way
• 54:04
  and your distribution plan fits that accordingly, right, So you know that you're
• 54:07
  going to make all your money in that local market and then anything you make
• 54:10
  overseas is going to be gravy. It'll be incidental, but that's not core
• 54:15
  to my business plan. Right. It's like a baseball movie. Do a
• 54:19
  baseball movie. There's only a few countries in the world that it's really going
• 54:22
  to work. If you do a movie about NFL football, you know,
• 54:27
  Blindside's probably like an exception that traveled really well because it wasn't really about football
• 54:31
  and it was CenTra Bullet too, and Canta Billick is a international star.
• 54:36
  Yeah, so that's not the example. But it's like, there are certain
• 54:38
  genres that you know that you know are pretty niche and they're probably not going
• 54:43
  to break out, and you've got to You've got to you've got to have
• 54:45
  that plan and that understand you've got to be honest in the development stage of
• 54:50
  your movie. It's kind of like, you know, if I use another
• 54:52
  analogy, if you're in a let's say you're in Colombia and you are a
• 54:57
  baker and you make this certain Colombian pace that is very well known in that
• 55:01
  segment of the country, not even the whole country, just that segment of
• 55:05
  the country. It's a niche product. But then you say, I'm going
• 55:08
  to throw in thirty million on this pastry because I think the rest of the
• 55:13
  world is gonna and we've seen how many products like that We've seen that are
• 55:15
  culturally great. But the second they tried to break into the American market or
• 55:21
  another market, they just like, I would never eat pig like it's trying
• 55:23
  to sound like a big mac in India didn't go well yeah, well,
• 55:29
  well see now that gets into the heart of the DNA of the creative right
• 55:32
  again, coming back to what our company strategy is. Our game plan is
• 55:37
  to make movies that will work in the US marketplace. That is one of
• 55:42
  the lenses that we use. It's not everyone's lens, that's just our lens.
• 55:45
  They're going to be filmmakers that are going to go, I only want
• 55:49
  a movie that's going to appeal to the African audience, or it's only going
• 55:52
  to work for the Indian audience. And by the way, I've got a
• 55:54
  business plan. It's going to work just fine. Right, there's nothing wrong
• 55:58
  with that. That's that's totally Those all viable options and plans, but you
• 56:02
  calibrate and scale your production appropriately. Okay. But again for us, we're
• 56:09
  we're creating content that we believe well and we're going to cast it and we're
• 56:13
  going to package it. We wanted to work in the US marketplace because generally,
• 56:17
  if you can break it in the US marketplace, it is a pretty
• 56:21
  good indicator that it will travel elsewhere. Yeah, and it's it's it's just
• 56:25
  fascinating. I've just seen. I mean, I know of filmmakers like Isaac
• 56:31
  Nawaja who is a filmmaker in Uganda and he makes films locally, and he
• 56:38
  created a whole industry in Uganda and he makes his films for two hundred dollars
• 56:44
  two hundred dollars US. I think that's really exciting for us exactly. And
• 56:49
  now Africa is turning into a whole thing. I mean, there's a lot
• 56:51
  of Nollywood and all these kind of wonderfuls. There's so much media growth potential
• 56:58
  right now, and it's a it's a great thing. But the funny thing
• 57:00
  is, with Isaac's example, he made these little two hundred dollar movies that
• 57:05
  were action really just fun and action, and the visual effects are horrendous and
• 57:10
  you know, according to our standards, but his audience has loved it.
• 57:14
  And then he cad a cult following worldwide. So now he travels the world
• 57:19
  with these little movies. But he had break up potential. But I promise
• 57:22
  you, because I interviewed him, he had no indication of ever getting out
• 57:27
  of his little town. He but he's going to break out. Yeah,
• 57:30
  he did already. He already is. And people like, where did this
• 57:34
  guy come from? Well, he's been doing this for a long time.
• 57:36
  He didn't get forty here it is, right, forty features under his belt.
• 57:40
  Tyler Perry's a brilliant example of that. Yeah, just brilliant trot,
• 57:45
  just unbelievable. He saw a niche that was completely underserved, which is the
• 57:51
  African American woman, right, Nobody was catering to them at all. And
• 57:55
  he saw that opportunity and he saw the opportunity for positive messaging and he filled
• 58:00
  that gap. And it's like, kudos and credit to him as he saw
• 58:06
  that niche and he recognized what it was worth and he committed himself to it.
• 58:09
  And it's just one of those amazing success stories. But it wasn't an
• 58:13
  overnight success. It was a lot of blood, sweat and tears and just
• 58:20
  a lot of courage. Frankly, no, I remember seeing Diary of a
• 58:23
  Mad Black Woman when it first came out, which was a big, huge
• 58:27
  deal. When it came out, it was like, how can they make
• 58:30
  this movie? And there was a lot of controversy and all this stuff.
• 58:30
  I remember that was like in the nineties, if I remember, it was
• 58:34
  in the nineties when that came out and he was just getting started. And
• 58:37
  now fast forward twenty nineteen, he's got a studio in Atlanta that's bigger than
• 58:43
  Disney, Warners and Paramount all put together. Yeah, isn't it cool?
• 58:46
  It's insane Those stories that get me really excited. I mean, you know,
• 58:51
  Frankly, I mean there's a lot of that stuff going on. So
• 58:53
  like ntb our Company to talk about my company a little bit, sure our
• 58:58
  headquarters in South Africa, because there's exciting stuff going on South Africa. What
• 59:01
  most people don't know is that all the major studios Netflix and Amazon included are
• 59:06
  shooting down there because it doubles for just about anywhere in the world. The
• 59:10
  exchange rate is fantastic. There's an incredibly strong local crew down there, and
• 59:15
  there's a great accent centive. You know. The problem is it's a long
• 59:20
  way away, but it's like there's something exciting to me about building these industries
• 59:23
  and places in these more remote places where technology is possible. It makes it
• 59:30
  possible, right and you get these great crews and the quality of the production
• 59:34
  happening down there is remarkable. So we're not exclusively producing movies down there.
• 59:38
  We just have a very strong proclivity to want to do more down there because
• 59:44
  all the studios are doing it down there. They see what we see.
• 59:46
  But what happens is all the IP and all the upside comes back to the
• 59:51
  States or goes back to Europe, etc. And it's like, we can
• 59:53
  do this, we can cast it this way. We can create movies that
• 59:57
  are made for the American market because it's already happening insideth Africa. Now we'll
• 1:00:01
  be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the
• 1:00:08
  show. And you know, South Africa has just been a country that has
• 1:00:14
  consistently hit above its weight class, shall we say, and with its message
• 1:00:20
  of diversity, it truly is a remarkable place right now given its history,
• 1:00:24
  and I actually think South Africa being a former South African has a message for
• 1:00:30
  the world right now in terms of diversity, in terms of unity, in
• 1:00:32
  terms of kind of a message of humanity and bringing people together. And I
• 1:00:37
  think it's what we all need right now. And I don't know again,
• 1:00:40
  you can tell that's the kind of content that really draws me, that draws
• 1:00:45
  me out, is stuff that brings people together, where we share our common
• 1:00:49
  humanity and challenges us. And there needs to be more producers like you out
• 1:00:53
  there, sir, doing doing the good work that you're doing. So I
• 1:00:57
  thank you. I thank you very much. I wanted to ask you,
• 1:01:00
  can you tell me about your new project? I Am All Girls. Yeah,
• 1:01:05
  this one's a very cool little project we did. It's a great INDIEA
• 1:01:09
  had a very talented director, Donovan Marsh who did Hunter Killer with Gerard Butler
• 1:01:14
  that released last year, and coming off that big movie, he wanted to
• 1:01:17
  do something that was kind of small and personal but had an impact. And
• 1:01:22
  in South Africa, I don't know. A story had broken a couple of
• 1:01:27
  years ago about this human trafficking that was going on in South Africa, and
• 1:01:31
  it became very clear that human trafficking is a global plight. It's a massive
• 1:01:36
  problem that people don't want to talk about, and it's happening in the US.
• 1:01:38
  It's not a South African problem, it's not an Asian problem or a
• 1:01:42
  Middle Eastern problem. It's truly a global problem. And your slavery has been
• 1:01:45
  a problem since the beginning of time. So we wanted to create a movie
• 1:01:50
  that was commercial, it was entertaining, but we wanted to explore the world
• 1:01:53
  of the people that actually go into the human trafficking world to try and stop
• 1:01:58
  it and ascertain what the impact is on those people. So this is kind
• 1:02:02
  of a crime thriller. It starts off as kind of a vigilante movie,
• 1:02:08
  and you realize it starts off as a serial killer movie, but then you
• 1:02:12
  realize it's a vigilante movie. And there's a conflict between the investigating police officer
• 1:02:17
  who realizes that this killer might actually be doing her work for her where she's
• 1:02:23
  constrained by the rules and the regulations. This vigilante is going to the place
• 1:02:30
  that she can't go, and you know, she's she's torn by duty and
• 1:02:34
  she wants to do it the right way. Now she's like, Okay,
• 1:02:37
  do I bring this person in? And then she discovers the identity of the
• 1:02:39
  killer. So it's kind of a very commercial thriller. We have. It's
• 1:02:45
  two female leads are two great South African actresses, and it basically is based
• 1:02:52
  on real events. It's based on stuff that actually occurred in South Africa in
• 1:02:54
  the nineties, but when you look at the Me Too movement, you look
• 1:02:59
  at what going on. We wanted to create a movie that would wake people
• 1:03:02
  up and want to get them more involved in anti trafficking and just being aware
• 1:03:07
  of what's going on in their own communities, and that's one of the reasons
• 1:03:10
  we created this movie. But we recognized its entertainment as well, so we're
• 1:03:15
  going to entertain people. The cinematography is stunning. We tested it in front
• 1:03:21
  of a US audience. We tested just above the norms and above and well
• 1:03:24
  above the norms against the female targeted audience. But you know, it was
• 1:03:29
  really gratifying to us, as more than eighty five percent of the recruited audience
• 1:03:32
  in the US said they wanted to get more involved in anti trafficking activities,
• 1:03:37
  and ultimately, for us as independent filmmakers, that's the good housekeeping seal of
• 1:03:42
  approval for us, and actually We've got a song from Pearl Jam on the
• 1:03:47
  soundtrack that that hit daughter and Nancy Wilson from Heart saw one of the rough
• 1:03:54
  cuts of the movie and she was so moved she actually did a cover of
• 1:03:59
  it that will just blow you away. And she is so talented. But
• 1:04:02
  this song just captures the energy and the defiance and the brokenness and the strength.
• 1:04:08
  But just it really epitomized what we created in the movie. And you
• 1:04:11
  know, and then happens. It's really magical. That's amazing. I look
• 1:04:15
  forward to seeing that movie. So you're doing good work out there, and
• 1:04:17
  I'm so I'm so glad that you will be able to come on the show
• 1:04:20
  and talk drop some knowledge bombs on the show. Now, I'm going to
• 1:04:24
  ask a few questions I ask all of my guests. Sure, So,
• 1:04:27
  what advice would you give a filmmaker trying to break into the business today?
• 1:04:31
  Get into the business, do something and find people to learn from. Build
• 1:04:35
  a network. Start building your network right now where you are. Whoever you
• 1:04:40
  went to film school with, those are probably the guys you're going to work
• 1:04:43
  with again in the future. And make sure your networks are all supporting each
• 1:04:45
  other. What is the lesson that took you the longest to learn, whether
• 1:04:49
  in the film business or in life. Sure, if it's not coming together
• 1:04:56
  correctly, you know, be patient and sometime it's not. Sometimes if it's
• 1:05:00
  not coming together, there's a reason why, and you've got to be open
• 1:05:04
  to the possibility that maybe it's not meant to be, and then you move
• 1:05:08
  on to the next So cut your losses. There's kind of a balance between
• 1:05:12
  cutting your losses and being the stoic champion of the movie. Right. If
• 1:05:15
  you're hearing the same answer again and again from many people, it's probably about
• 1:05:19
  right. But you know, but but don't don't let that crush your creative
• 1:05:25
  instinct. And I know that balance. But yes, and you don't have
• 1:05:28
  to win every battle, yes, yes, especially in this in this business,
• 1:05:33
  it's very difficult to win every battle. Figure out which ones you must
• 1:05:36
  win and be okay to lose a few. It's okay. Now, what
• 1:05:41
  was the biggest fear you had to overcome when making your very first feature film?
• 1:05:46
  Uh, the biggest fear I had to overcome and making it was actually
• 1:05:51
  it was based on a true story and for me, my biggest fear was
• 1:05:56
  that we would accurately portray the line of this person whose movie we did,
• 1:06:00
  and that was a movie called six Below, okay, And we wanted to
• 1:06:04
  accurate, you know, because because to me, when you're doing a true
• 1:06:08
  story of someone's life, it's a sacred trust. And and I really wanted
• 1:06:12
  to make sure that we delivered on that and and of course made it on
• 1:06:15
  time, of course, and on time and on budget, sir, And
• 1:06:17
  on time and on budget. Yes. Now, what are three of your
• 1:06:21
  favorite films of all time? Oh, that's a rough question. I've got
• 1:06:27
  to say. Apocalypse Now is up there? Patterns up there. There's definitely
• 1:06:30
  a Copola thing going there. Apocalypse Now, mainly because one of my favorite
• 1:06:35
  books growing up I was a peculiar kid, was Heart of Darkness. You're
• 1:06:39
  very peculiar kid. I love that translation of it. It was just stunning
• 1:06:45
  and and uh, yeah, that's that's probably it. And I've got this
• 1:06:50
  is this is not good but probably dumb and dumber. Hey, you know,
• 1:06:55
  dumb dumber and something about Mary. I mean, I love the far
• 1:07:00
  early work. Uh and and the fact the fact that Peter Farley had just
• 1:07:04
  did The Green Book too is stunning to me. And as a filmmaker,
• 1:07:11
  I love. I love his work, and he always has something more in
• 1:07:15
  his movies. Even he's crazy comedies, there's there's something just there's just such
• 1:07:18
  a great heart in there. The wouldn't have been interesting though, to see
• 1:07:23
  Apocalypse Now by George Lucas, who was originally slated to direct that movie.
• 1:07:28
  Yeah, that would have been an interesting film. Well, you know one
• 1:07:31
  of my anecdotes with Francis Ford Coppola, so we were working on the DVD
• 1:07:35
  set. This might be the segment you want to cut, but it's like
• 1:07:40
  what I'd say to young filmmakers, just remember the thing that you're doing that
• 1:07:45
  gets you fired might be the thing you were remembered for. And the reason
• 1:07:49
  why I say that is that mind we did this whole thing with Francis Ford
• 1:07:54
  Coppola around the making of Pattern, and you know, we did a special
• 1:07:58
  edition and so on, and he talked about that opening scene and Pattern and
• 1:08:01
  that opening monologue and he was actually fired. He was about to be fired
• 1:08:06
  off of Godfather. Apparently the South story goes he was fired off of Pattern
• 1:08:13
  and he was about to be fired off of Godfather when he won the Academy
• 1:08:16
  Award for Patent Okay, and that So it's kind of funny how that works,
• 1:08:21
  right. This industry is not as predictable as you would see him.
• 1:08:25
  It's not a straight line. And you look at what a great filmmaker like
• 1:08:29
  that and the creative risks that he took, and conventional wisdom at the time
• 1:08:32
  was that this scene sucks. Why are you doing this? This is terrible.
• 1:08:35
  He got an Academy Award for it, and he got to finish The
• 1:08:39
  Godfather as a result of that, and that's that's true story stuff. And
• 1:08:44
  imagine imagine The Godfather without Francis Ford Coppola. You can't. There is no
• 1:08:49
  Godfather with out fresis for Copola, you know. So I guess to the
• 1:08:55
  young filmmakers out there, it's not a straight line. It can be a
• 1:08:58
  pretty bumpy road. And that just stay the course, man, without the
• 1:09:01
  question. I promise you everyone listening right now, whatever you think is going
• 1:09:05
  to happen in your career, it is not going to happen, not like
• 1:09:09
  that. It's got to be different, exactly. And if it does happen
• 1:09:12
  like that, God bless you, be thankful. But if it doesn't,
• 1:09:15
  just remember it. It's a marathon, not a sprint, exactly. Without
• 1:09:19
  question, Simon, where can people find you and more about your work that
• 1:09:23
  you're doing well. I'm pretty much on LinkedIn and we have a company website
• 1:09:27
  and Tiba Pictures, so it's a bit of a mouthful. I'll I'll put
• 1:09:30
  it in the show notes somewhere on the show antiv Pictures you can see more
• 1:09:33
  about us and the stuff that we're working on. So time. Thank you
• 1:09:38
  very much, Simon. Thank you so much for being on the show,
• 1:09:40
  and I do appreciate you taking the time out man terairis. Thanks Alex.
• 1:09:44
  It's been a lot of fun. I want to thank Simon for coming on
• 1:09:46
  the show and dropping those knowledge bombs on the Tribe today. Thank you so
• 1:09:50
  much, Simon. If you want links to anything we spoke about in this
• 1:09:53
  episode, including links to his films, head over to the show notes at
• 1:09:58
  Bulletproof Screenwriting dot tv. Forward slash three fifty eight. Thank you so much
• 1:10:02
  for listening, guys, As always, keep on writing no matter what.
• 1:10:05
  I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Bulletproof Screenwriting podcast at
• 1:10:11
  Bulletproofscreenwriting dot tv.