Filmmakers Jacques Thelemaque and Diane Gaidry talk about their experiences of indie distribution of their film The Dogwalker. It is written by the filmmakers themselves.
In the August ’06 issue of the FA Magazine, we printed a conversation between Jacques Thelemaque and myself regarding the preparation for the limited theatrical release of our feature film, The Dogwalker. This has to have been one of the most difficult things we’ve ever attempted and as I re-read the part 1 article, I can see how negative and dispirited we were even before we opened in our first market. I wish I could say that the subsequent experience was affirming, but a few months hence, hopefully we can at least offer an objective summary of our theatrical release experience in part 2 of the distribution of The Dogwalker. I will attempt to illustrate which elements of our strategy and experience were more effective and which where less effective. But no matter how valuable these lessons were, I would recommend to 99.9% of independent filmmakers that you treat your festival run as your theatrical release and go directly to DVD without attempting your own theatrical release. The infrastructure to support a commercial release for small independent films does not exist, and your time and money are better spent promoting and selling your film on the internet.
Our goals for this distribution were: a) to hopefully recoup some of the money that we spent on the distribution, b) to build awareness of the film for DVD sales, c) to build awareness of our work in general, and d) to gain a better understanding of distribution that we could apply to future projects and to hopefully help other filmmakers get their smaller, more personal films out into the world. We had varying degrees of success with each of these goals.
Our experience at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael was by far the most affirming part of this limited release. This is the experience that every filmmaker dreams of. Of course, the Smith Rafael is run by the California Film Institute, which is a non-profit organization. They don’t do 4 walls there. Richard Peterson, the director of programming, programmed The Dogwalker. They promoted the film heavily through e-mails, their website, their marquis, prominent poster display, and extensive play of the trailer. They have a loyal audience that they have cultivated over the many years of their existence. We had decent ticket sales and they held the film over for a second week. Sadly, this idyllic scenario was not to be repeated in the for-profit arena during our theatrical release.
The Dogwalker played in San Francisco, Berkeley, San Rafael, Los Angeles, Boulder, Denver, Buffalo,Minneapolis, and Chicago. All of the theatres were Landmark theatres that we booked through their Truly Indie program except the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, the Laemmle’s Music Hall in Los Angeles, which booked The Dogwalker and took a cut, and the Market Arcade theatre in downtown Buffalo which we 4 walled because there is no Landmark theatre there. We had some personal connection to each of these cities, except Chicago, and felt the film could find an audience in each of these markets.
As we mentioned in part 1 of our distribution diary, Truly Indie is a program set up by Landmark to help independent filmmakers do limited theatrical releases of their films. The films are curated, selected by the Truly Indie programmers, but the filmmaker still pays a fee which covers the rental of the theatre, ads at a reduced rate in local papers, and publicity support from the local Landmark regional managers who aren’t publicists but have contacts with the local media. We hired publicists in the Bay area, Los Angeles, and Buffalo. Karen Larsen, our publicist in the Bay area was amazing. We had more coverage in the Bay area than in any other market.
As we began our release, I must say that we had some issues at the Landmark theatres in San Francisco and Berkeley. Truly Indie had us do an encoding process where the film was put on a hard drive that was to be shipped around the country and connected to their projectors. But on opening night, at the Opera Plaza, we saw that the image was very jittery. Nobody seemed to know what was causing that or how to fix it, so we gave the theatre manager DVDs and asked them to project the film from the DVDs at the Opera Plaza and the Shattuck for the rest of the week. Fortunately, due to these issues, they didn’t charge us for the encoding, and the film looked and sounded good projected from DVD because the Landmark digital projection is top notch. However, when we arrived at the Shattuck in Berkeley, the Sunday of our first weekend to do the Q&As, we found out that the projection was the least of our worries. We discovered that they had never played our trailer there nor hung any of our posters. Several months later, we can chalk it up as one of life’s little lessons. Check your venues as soon as you arrive in town or send scouts and spies ahead of time if possible. I think that more care was taken by Truly Indie from then on, because our experience with the rest of the Landmark theatres was much better in the other markets.
Because Los Angeles is our home base, we had high hopes for our week here at the Laemmle Music Hall. We had a good turn out at the benefit screening we did with Arts Fighting Cancer. Friends and supporters came out and we actually made some money for the cancer relief fund. The Laemmle Music Hall staff was great, but the digital projection, which they rented for our 1 week run and which we had to pay extra for, was horrible. We had other challenges, too. Unfortunately, our publicist here in L.A., Mickey Cotrell, failed to get any extra media coverage despite his best efforts. Also, he inadvertently requested a critic at the L.A. Times to review the film who historically hates small female character-driven films like ours. Another lesson. If you request a reviewer from a paper, be sure to first look up their history of reviews at rottentomatoes. com or metacritic.com to make sure they will be in sync with your film. Fortunately, with all of our arm twisting and begging (and offering ? price tickets), our friends came out to support again and brought a few friends with them. Still, the receipts were ultimately dismal in L.A.
In Denver, our next Landmark market, we were offered the opportunity to do a preview screening which was done in conjunction with the local public radio station, which we paid for, but which made a big difference for our ticket sales there. Truly Indie had encouraged us not to hire outside publicists in the remaining markets and just to rely on the general managers to do the publicity for the films, but these guys aren’t publicist and they simply didn’t have the time or resources do it properly. The Denver/Boulder regional manager indeed suggested and set up the preview screening, but he did not follow through with contacting the smaller local media in and around Boulder. Jacques grew up just outside of Boulder and the hometown boy angle would have been attractive to the local press. We know this because we contacted them ourselves while we were in Boulder. They were indeed interested but editorial deadlines had passed. So we missed that opportunity to get that coverage and the sales were much lower in Boulder than in Denver. The good news is that Denver turned out to be the most profitable venue in the entire run. We’re guessing (one can never really know unless you poll everybody) it was due to a combination of the preview screening and strong reviews in the Denver papers.
By the time we got to our fourth market, Buffalo, we had had a strong enough dose of reality and decided that, since we already paid for the theatre rental, we might as well give away as many tickets as we could in order to get people into the theatre and hopefully cultivate word of mouth for the DVD release. And our publicist in Buffalo who also handles publicity for the theatre company where I was about to go into rehearsal for “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”, managed to get us extensive coverage. We did a television interview and we received a rave review on one of the most popular drive time radio shows. And we did get the hometown girl angle coverage there. But still, very few people came to see the film. A cancer relief organization that my mother is involved with did a benefit screening which was fairly sparsely attended. And the projection in the Market Arcade theatre, which is the only commercial venue in the city that has digital projection, was disappointing and did not exactly serve the exceptional cinematography of our film.
After Buffalo, Jacques headed out to Minneapolis and Chicago solo as I began rehearsals for the play. It is considered one of the most difficult roles in American theatre. But it was nowhere near as difficult as self-distributing an indie film. Although the role was indeed challenging, at least it was creative and rewarding. Jacques soldiered on alone.
We have a fan in Minneapolis, Robb Mitchell, who I met when “The Dogwalker” played at the Central Standard Film Festival a few years back. He’s been actively involved in the Minneapolis film community for many years. Upon seeing our film at the festival, he pledged his undying support and we’ve kept in touch over the years. Robb set up an event at the Walker Arts Center, a very prestigious institution in Minneapolis. Jacques showed some clips from “The Dogwalker” and some FA shorts and talked about Filmmakers Alliance and his filmmaking life, including “The Dogwalker”. This raised some awareness for our week long run there, but aside from that we didn’t have any other publicity other than reviews in the local papers, which were for the most part, mediocre. And ticket sales were again, disappointing.
The Landmark regional manager in Chicago, Brian Ross, served as our publicist there, placing notices in local listings and hosting the press screening, but the reviews were not kind. A woman who we hired in Chicago who is connected to all kinds of people there, managed to get Jacques an interview on a big local radio show geared to pet owners and hooked us up with a rescue organization in Chicago, CASA. But even with that partnership, and our pledge of a percentage of the ticket sales to this association, ticket sales were weak. But at least the weather was great at that time of year, Chicago is a fun city and Jacques wound up having a nice week there.
We knew going into this that corporate main stream media, including “alternative” weeklies, were not geared to support small, personal, truly independent films that don’t have any stars or sensational elements, but it still knocked the wind out of us when we read some of the reviews we received. They say that the target demographic of most studio films is teen age boys. It appeared to us that several of the reviews were written by members of that demographic, to which our film is clearly not targeted. And the lack of analysis in the reviews that dismissed or stomped on our film was astonishing. The dumbing down of corporate media should not have come as a surprise, but we’re human and it hurt. We also received love letter reviews with incredibly astute analyses of the film. It was surprising how disparate the opinions were. But the ones that hated it seemed to be responding to the energy of the film, not the film and the filmmaking elements. They weren’t interested in looking at the intent of the filmmaker. If you are interested, I encourage you visit www.rottentomatoes. com or www.metacritic.com and look up some of your favorite films and see what the state of film criticism is in this country. It’s an interesting phenomenon. And I think that it is important to recognize patterns and biases in our media.
We failed, in our pre-release internet marketing to create a buzz which we would have needed in advance of the runs in each market, to have had any chance at financial success. We had hoped to build alliances with organizations that would spread the word about the film, and a good deal of our distribution budget went to paying the people on our distribution team to research information and to cultivate relationships with organizations with which we could potentially partner. However, for all of our hard work, this avenue was for the most part, fruitless. Organizations are slow to respond, if at all, and understandably suspicious of anyone soliciting their support. Unfortunately, we didn’t anticipate this and spent a great deal of time and man/womanpower (= money) trying to make this happen.
Our presence in chat rooms and on discussion boards didn’t seem to spark much interest in or awareness of the film, either - for a few reasons. Mostly, because it needed to start FAR in advance of a film’s release and needed to be consistently done and followed up on. The website, too, needed to be complete far in advance and with all of the community-building elements in place right away (message boards, chats, etc.). We were unsuccessful getting things going or in place with enough meaningful lead time.
Also, our street marketing was not as effective as we had hoped. We hired a marketing company that does “lifestyle” marketing – meaning, they go to lifestyle locations relevant to the film and flyer/card/poster the locations and hand out cards to people. Los Angeles was plastered with our posters and postcards because the owner of the street marketing company lives here, but she wasn’t in the other markets to oversee her teams and we saw much less evidence of their efforts outside of L.A. It’s theoretically a great service, but with many practical challenges. Our advice is to pre scout any market, and find the events and lifestyle target areas that you feel will support your film and you hands-on direct the street marketing. Either by pointing a hired company to those target areas or hiring people yourself through local connections. The key is to make sure you are in direct contact with the people (usually young people) working the streets so that you have some measure of oversight.
We had also hoped to make inroads into alternative exhibition via micro-cinemas and colleges. However, there was no pre-existing database for such venues. We tried to build one, but we simply didn’t have the time/manpower to do it. Between building the database and contacting all of the venues, we could clearly see this would take a very long time. Then, the Truly Indie deal came along, so we took it. However, the alternative screening approach would probably have been the best release strategy for a film like ours. We could have partnered with organizations in various markets to do a one night screening or short run. We could not be at all of them, but we could have provided them with a DVD of us answering frequently asked questions as a bonus extra for the screening. This way, we could build awareness for the film across a broader range of the country – and for less money. We have heard that some people have come together to build such a venue database (and keep it current). We hope that’s true. It’s still a goal of ours to make sure a database like that exists for filmmakers.
So now it’s on to our DVD release. We have a distribution deal with Reel Indies, a division of Mill Creek entertainment, which we hooked up with via Breakthrough Media. They will be primarily responsible for the retail distribution of the film, but may also be managing the internet download availability of the film – the technology for which is rapidly advancing. Also, we are selling the film directly through our site, with low replication and fulfillment costs allowing us to maintain a healthy profit margin. Breakthrough is giving us an amazing deal on replication and will arrange our fulfillment plans. We’re right now in the midst of producing the DVD and doing the pre-marketing of it.
Despite the disappointing theatrical run, we have high hopes for DVD sales. First, because the film is better-suited to this market. Secondly, we’re applying some of the marketing lessons we learned along the way. Yes, the theatrical run was a bit disastrous financially, but it did generate awareness of the film and provided the valuable education, which we’re eager to utilize. Thirdly, there are a whole bunch of new and still developing internet marketing tools and sites that will aid us significantly in building interest in the film. Finally, we are getting a lot of spill-over marketing from the success of “Loving Annabelle”, a sweet and very popular lesbian melodrama in which I play one of the leads. So, we are willing to risk feeling encouraged. Keep your fingers crossed for us.