So they try to protect you by shielding you from the possibility of failure, which, in effect, also shields you from the possibility of making your dreams a reality.

As our friend Steve Jobs says:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.  Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.  Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition.  They somehow already know what you truly want to become.  Everything else is secondary.”

Read the rest on MarcandAngel.com

Long Live The Golden Calf

When Moses went up to Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments, he left his brother Aaron in charge of the children of Israel. While Moses was away, the people panicked and lost their faith. They collected all their jewelry, melted it down and created a golden calf to pray to.

When Moses returned he found them dancing about the calf and doing a lot of unsavory but titillating pagan stuff.  God realized that these people, still slaves at heart, would never have the courage to be free men. He needed a new generation to enter the promised land. So the Israelites were obliged to wander the desert for forty years, waiting for the old guys to die off, and for a new unscarred generation to grow up.

Please forgive the Old Testament stuff, but I fear we are having the same issues in the indie film community. We’ve rebelled against the masters, the big motion picture studios and their odd distribution strategies, and became self-empowered — free to make films the way we want to make them, absent unfair sales and distribution practices. We create our own destinies.

Free of the masters, however, meant free of their rules. But so many of us are still reeling and smarting from past industry hurts and failures. It’s not enough to become free of the master, we must also free ourselves of the slave mentality. When DIY stops meaning do it yourself, there’s a problem.

In the absence of the old masters we’ve created new masters, masters spawned from our own community: the new gatekeepers. In effect these new masters are now our Golden Calves. They lead us, guide us, direct us. They create new rules and systems for the indie film community and we accept these new commandments without question. We defend them when they are challenged. We spread their DIY ministry as if it were our own until it ultimately becomes our ministry.

But few, if any, of these new masters are as selfless as, say, Moses was. Yes, there is a lot of new information out there. To quote an overused phrase, “the landscape has changed” and we must adapt or die. But the essence of DIY filmmaking hasn’t changed. The essence of DIY lies not in the strategy but in the passion.

An industry professional gave me some advice. He said, “As soon as you start believing your own hype things do downhill.”

Who has the answer to our challenges? No one because the answer is different for every film and every person. Be wary of the person who believes they’ve found the Rosetta Stone of DIY distribution. Yes there are many things to learn, many tactics to master and many people to reach.  But when someone tells me that I must adapt a new and unproven strategy, my warning lights flash. I believe it’s wise to remember your passion above all else. It’s the one thing that will get you through to the next day.

I chatted with a filmmaker a while back. He happens to be the only filmmaker I know personally who derives 100% of his income solely from self-distribution of his self-made films. He didn’t charge me for a seminar or a book and he explained to me the full details of his distribution strategy. Why? Because I asked him. I didn’t agree with some things he mentioned and you know what? It didn’t matter. We agreed to disagree and we moved on, kept talking, and today he’s still one of my most ardent supporters.

I dare you to challenge a so-called thought leader, or even question his/her suggestions. You will be ignored. Then, watch the troops rally and attack on the new gatekeeper’s behalf. There will be no respectful exchange of ideas. There will be no give and take. People will defend the Golden Calf as if it were the Indie God.

The indie film community will only be a community when there are no leaders and we share and exchange ideas freely and respectfully. Naturally there will be people we admire, people who’ve done what we want to do. But if we do not allow the voice of dissent to be heard for even a moment, the indie film community will wander fruitlessly until a new generation of filmmakers are borne who just want to make goddamn movies.

And guess what? If you disagree, it’s okay. We must find our individual path through the wilderness.

Just click on the links on the left to join my other amazing backers for “Legend of Black Lotus“

For the record, I don’t agree with  the PMD thing. It’s not that I believe it’s a bad strategy, quite the contrary. It’s an excellent strategy — but it’s a strategy that has been in place for decades…and typically handled by publicists and PR professionals.

Here’s the thing: public relations and publicity is deeper than most people understand. I believe many, not all, but many of the folks touting the PMD thing haven’t personally witnessed the results of an exceptional public relations plan. I have. I’ve watched recent college grads get thrown into the PR mix at a Top 10 PR agency and come away smelling like a rose. How? They leveraged existing agency relationships with BIG media like the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, and NY Times. I’ve seen skilled PR veterans take an obscure medical device developed by an obscure company that just finished an obscure clinical trial, and secure front page coverage on major news outlets.

I’ve seen PR professionals leverage existing relationships with talk shows and get their client or their client’s product on, or mentioned on, Jay Leno, Good Morning America, Good Day LA. The list goes on.

I’ve worked alongside some brilliant PR folks. I’m talking Sabre, Clio and Silver Anvil award-winning professionals. I’m talking about people who have the cell phone numbers for some of the most powerful people in Hollywood, Washington  D.C.  and in the news media.

I know what a good PR person can do. Unfortunately, I have no clue what a PMD can do for me or my films. It’s unchartered territory. Naturally there are expectations of what a PMD should do. But hiring a fledgling PMD with no proven track record is like hiring a hospital intern to perform brain surgery or your two-month-old baby. Should you risk it?

Here are 8 reasons why you should hire an Entertainment Publicist before hiring a PMD

1. You can obtain references and track record information from a publicist to help make your decision. A PMD will probably try to leverage his/her filmmaking and social media skills in lieu of an actual track record of success.
2. A publicist has existing relationships with major entertainment trade magazines, bloggers, festivals — basically they will know all the people you want to know. A PMD will have contacts, but a contact isn’t a relationship.
3. A publicist will possess or have access to all the tools s/he will need to measure the results of their efforts (impressions, click-throughs, clipping services, monitoring services, etc). Chances are, a PMD will have to pay for these services to fully monitor his efforts — and then pass the costs on to you.
4. A publicist is accustomed to providing monthly status updates on the PR program so it can be evaluated and measured for efficacy.
5. A publicist will find the “story angle” of your film for you. Then she’ll tweak it accordingly for the type of media she’ll be pitching.
6. A publicist understands that emails might be ignored, that’s why s/he calls and pitches your film’s “story angle” directly to the person who’ll be writing the story.
7. A good publicist is Internet and social media savvy and well-versed in SEO tactics.
8. A filmmaker-turned-PMD does not a publicist make.

So how does this add up to what a PMD can do for you? I imagine some might say that a PMD will help guide a film through the DIY distribution process, freeing the filmmaker to pursue other endeavors. I’ll say this: by the time your film is finished you should have a distribution strategy in place. To begin, your strategy doesn’t have to be any more complicated than this:

• Make a great film. Enter festivals. Contact distributors.
• Use mainstream media publicity to leverage theatrical distribution.
• If no theatrical, sell DVD, VOD rights. Build website. Use social media and lists to self distribute theatrically.
• If no DVD rights sold, self distribute DVD.

Yup, I know it’s more complicated than that, but you can find much more detailed information on DIY distribution elsewhere. A publicist can be the difference between getting media coverage that changes your life and becoming another cog in the film wheel.

Two years ago if someone mentioned the PMD title we couldn’t have cared less. No disrespect intended, but we would’ve thought it had something to do with 80’s music or menstrual cycles. Basically this whole PMD thing is just another distraction; it’s something else for filmmakers to fight over when they should be fighting over better scripts, better movies and better career choices.

Most notable: not everybody gets it. In the case of film, sometimes the smartest people in the room are the most clueless. I think it’s because smart people cannot readily let go of their preconceived notions. The see a film, it reminds them of another film, and so they expect the films to be similar.

But not so.

It’s fascinating to me that someone would offer the following advice for a hardcore genre movie, like Serious Rogers. “Get rid of the flash, focus more on the characters…” Hmmm, flash and blood and flying bullets were all part of the original story. Okay, maybe they missed the part about this being a neo noir action thriller. This isn’t a character-driven drama. But, hey you gotta at least consider the opinions of your potential audience….

Okay, time is up. Consideration is over. I don’t think there’ll be any editing happening just yet.

Once upon a time  in the West

After a period of time the filmmakers felt frustrated. They realized that the tools only truly became useful under special circumstances. And they realized that the tools were not tools at all, they were accessories. Accessories to be learned, used, manipulated and tweaked after the primary tool was wielded. The learned that they had possessed this primary tool all along, and it was double-sided.  The primary tool was their creativity.

Creativity: it’s that thing inside of us that wants to turn nothing into… something magnificent. For screenwriters it’s the power to turn a blank page into a living breathing world where people come and go, live and die, grow, succeed, fail, do harm, get harmed and hopefully change.

Creativity: it’s that thing inside of us that wants to turn a one-dimensional object– a script — into a four dimensional civilization. A world where the human condition is explored through visuals, sounds and emotions that affect us as if we were born, weaned, lived and died in that very same four dimensional civilization.

Creativity: it’s that thing inside of us that wants to turn a dream into a reality.

Unfortunately I see more focus on the tools needed to exploit creativity rather than the tools needed to expand creativity.  I have been a writing for a very long time, and I’ve written everything under the sun expecting each experience to expand my literary creativity. I take writing seriously. I take filmmaking (directing and independently producing) seriously. I take it seriously because it is truly all I want to do.

Sure I can do other things, and I have. But what I have recently realized is, all the other things I do cannot fulfill me like making a movie fulfills me. I can write articles, but I don’t want to do that anymore. I can watch films and write reviews, but I don’t want to do that anymore. In fact I’m probably not the best film reviewer because I only write positive reviews, that is, I only write reviews for films I like. If I don’t like a movie, I won’t write a review because there are enough people vying for the chance to be pithy and bitchy in their reviews.

Like so many others, I can multi-task and do many different things whenever I am not making a film. But then I realized something. My purpose in life is filmmaking and everything else is taking me away from that purpose.

I need to divide my life into four quadrants.

1. When I am getting ready to make a film
2. When I am making a film
3. When I (family included) am recovering from making a film
4. When I am considering what film I’ll make next

That’s it. And you know what? All the tools in the world cannot help me with these endeavors. And more importantly, tools will never make my movies better.

DREAM

Once upon a time in the West, I had a dream. I dreamed that I’d write a spectacular script and it would be made into a movie.  I dreamed that the studio that chose my script over all the overs became my friend, my ally in this crazy labyrinth called Hollywood. I dreamed the studio made the movie and did it well. Everyone took notice and I became the guy who wrote the script that became the movie that everyone loved.

You know what? That dream probably describes the dream of every screenwriter in the world. It also probably comes pretty damn close to the dream of every filmmaker in the world — at least, once upon a time.

Now filmmakers dream of making a cheap movie and spending the next year or so self-promoting and self-distributing their movie. Oh, and not many of them are making any money. What happened to the dream?

I’m 100% for self-promotion, self-distribution, and utilizing every DIY method on the planet to get your film into the hands of an audience and recoup your expenses. But I think these methods should be employed after the dream has been attempted.

We’re still empowered. We still control our destinies because we can always tell a distributor, “No, I don’t like your deal.” We can always walk away from the deal table. But why avoid the deal table completely?

I’ll share a secret. I think I am completely wrong. That is, I believe that most of the cheerleaders for DIY everything secretly harbor the dream (see Dream above). I think they all want their little indie film to get picked up by a studio, who offers them a 3-picture deal so that they’ll never have to crowdfund or bother with DIY anything ever again. I know for a fact, that this is what I want.

But it all starts with a great movie. Not a good movie. Not a good $10,000 or $50,000 movie. A great movie, period. Beware, while you’re pondering whether or not you should aspire towards great filmmaking some filmmaker in a little town in South Dakota is already making a great film. And if you are not aspiring for greatness in your moviemaking you’d better become the world’s best DIYer because you’ll have a lot of selling to do.

Cheers to 14 years!

http://www.28dayslateranalysis.com/2010/08/indie-thriller-alert-assassin-on-loose.html

LIKE the Nativity story told at Christmas, or the 30,000th rerun of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the story of mainstream cinema and Christian America has a familiar ring to it: a surprise hit comes along, revealing a huge, underserved audience with substantial discretionary income for entertainment.

“We don’t go into a market unless we already know in advance that it has a decent chance of opening,” Mr. Jenkins, Producer of “What If…?” said. “There are local churches, local radio stations, local sponsors on board who will buy 400 tickets and then sell them, or give them to a local youth group or whatever. So we have some idea of how it’s going to do.”

Read the entire article on the NY Times…

Learn about Legend of Black Lotus here…

Read more on the NY Times website…