In the summer of 2006 my producing partner Jacques Thelemaque released his film, The Dogwalker while I was producing a film titled, Within. What ensues is a conversation between filmmakers Jacques Thelemaque and Diane Gaidry about preparing the limited theatrical release of The Dogwalker.
In the beginning of 2006, Jacques Thelemaque and Diane Gaidry began the process of distributing their feature film, The Dogwalker. In this article, we have part one of a conversation between the filmmakers.
Jacques: What did you think we were going to do with the film prior to our current distribution efforts?
Diane: Before we made the film, I was certain that we would sell if for a gazillion dollars and live happily ever after. But that didn’t happen. We had some lame offers while we were doing the festival circuit and working with Stephen Beer, our erstwhile producer’s rep, and then we ever going to do a dvd distribution with Cinema Libre before we realized that Philippe Diaz was a sociopath, so we pulled out of that deal. Ultimately, our options were limited, so we’re really grateful that we have this investment through FA Productions, and are able to essentially self-distribute with the support of our hand-picked, brilliant distribution team.
J: Yes, we always had strong feelings about independent film distribution as a whole, and felt that a lot of smaller films like ours were not treated well by the prevailing indie film distribution paradigm. It seemed that the options were limited. Your film could get picked up by a distributor for no money, where they would take the rights across all media, and try to get it out in the world, usually in a half-assed kind of way, where they hoped it would make money through world sales and home video sales and the filmmaker usually saw nothing up front and nothing on the back end. And the other option was to self-distribute which is a LOT of work. And most filmmakers don’t have the resources to do that for themselves.
D: And we hope to have other things in our lives at some point besides this goddamn film someday. But we’re grateful that we have an amazing team of people that we were able to hire with this fund from our investor.
J: Yeah, we were planning to go the traditional route because we didn’t see any other way. And then luckily we met this investor who we set up a deal with for our production company, FAP. he very much liked the film, and he provided the funds for us to get the film out into the world. So we were able to test our own theories about what we think works and doesn’t work in independent film distribution.
J: I always tell filmmakers to budgety for festivals and distribution. When you’re raising money for the film. raise money for distribution at the same time.
D: That is if your primary investors aren’t Visa, Mastercard, and American Express, like ours were.
J: And if you get picked up and don’t need to spend that money, great!
D: At first, Jacques and I thought we could handle a lot more than we actually could. But we were completely delusional. We had no idea what this effort entailed. We really only had a very general idea of what we were getting ourselves into and didn’t even really know where to start. So we hired Elizabeth Stanley to oversee this effort and she really got the ball rolling.
J: We’re consulting with Peter Broderick who is advising us on how we can roll our film out. And we’ve put together a team, Elizabeth Stanley, who used to work with the Director’s Guild, Elizabeth’s former assistant at the DGA, Michelle Wells, who is co-managing this effort with Elizabeth, an amazing marketing person, Melissa Sweeny, and our friend, Jessica Willamson, who is doing a lot of the research and message board posting.
D: Once we got this awesome distribution team together, we started contacting bookers to help us get the film into theaters. Most of them never returned our calls or e-mails and the ones who did assured us that without name talent or a genre or an award from Sundance, we were wasting our time. So that route was closed to us, but had we had the opportunity to work with a booker, we would have paid through the nose for that privilege. If I”m remembering correctly, I think one of the people we actually spoke with quoted us something like $15,000 for his services.
Fortunately we learned about a new program set up by the Landmark Cinemas, called Truly Indie, which tries to help independent filmmakers get their work out into the world. It’s kind of a curated 4-wall deal where they give a special rate to filmmakers who’s films are selected to be part of this effort. They also help filmmakers get reduced advertising rates and offer some marketing and publicity support. We’re working with Truly Indie ins San Francisco, Berkeley, Denver, Boulder, Chicago, and Minneapolis. And the Dogwalker was also booked at the Rafael in Marin, and the Laemmles’s Music Hall here in L.A. We’re also working with the Dipson theatre chain in Buffalo and 4-walling one of the screens at the Market Arcade theatre downtown. We chose each of these citites in each of them - except Chicago, where we just felt intuitively that that was a good market for our film.
J: We’ve decided to take sort of a multi-pronged, grass roots approach to our marketing. We’ve built a web site that has some community aspects; blogging, chat rooms, links, various community building elements. And off line we are also setting partnerships with various non-profits that work with and for issues that are part of the film: animal rescue, cancer relief (our other lead actress, Pamela Gordon, died of cancer a couple of years ago), domestic violence, and women’s shelters and empowerment. We are setting up a program to donate a percentage of DVD sales to these non-profits who partner with us.
D: We always knew that marketing was key, obviously, to any distribution effort, but again, we had no clue as to how much work this required — the amount of effort and energy and clarity and experience. Our campaign is almost all grass roots. We’re kind of almost pretending that traditional media doesn’t exist but still doing a little bit of print advertising and mabye some cable and progressive AM radio ads. But we’re primarily focuing on partnerships and word of mouth.
J: So we asked ourselves, “Who is our target audience? Who does this film speak to and who would be receptive to what the film has to offer?” And then we created a strategy for how to reach that target audience and how to hopefully, eventually get peopole to organically work on behalf of the film.
D: And we’re still figuring that out.
J: Yeah, it’s an ongoing process. First we thought, who are the taste makers, who are the peop0le who sit at the top of the pyramid and can spread the word to a lot of other people. So we started thinking about organizations for whom the issues in the film might be relevant. And we came up with independent film organizations and non-profits that deal with the issues that we mentioned above, in each area where the film is going to screen theatrically.
D: But sometimes it’s been difficult to get the non-profits to respond when we didn’t have a personal introduction, because organizations like these are understandably careful about who they partner with. We’re the same way with Filmmakers Alliance because it’s a reflection on the organization and its branding and one has to be conscious of these things, especially when running a non-profit.
And early on in our efforts, at the beginning of the year, we took the pathetic approach of trying to get high profile celebrity types to validate us and give us a supportive quote. And I’m sure that works for some people, but it’s just not in alignment with who we are or the spirit of this films. For the record, I was against this from the beginning, be went along with it thinking “what do I know?” But it ended up being a total waste of time and money.
J: So we wound up sending the screeners to people wo work with organizations that had a relationship to the film and who we either knew personally or had a personal introduction to. And we got some responses there and actually got some responses there and actually got some great quotes that we’re putting up on the site. We’re also doing benefit screenings in two or maybe three of the markets that we’ll be in: Arts Fighting Cancer here in L.A., and a consortium of cancer relief and domestic violence relief organizations in Buffalo, including Why Me House, Crisis Services, The Morlock Foundation, and The Mathew Foster Foundation. And we’re still working on trying to possibly set up a benefit screening in Minneapolis. Also, in Minneapolis, the Walker Art Center has programmed an evening which I will be talking about Filmmakers Alliance and collectivism and filmmaking and showing some FA short films and some clips from The Dogwalker.
D: This event was set up by this wonderful man, Robb Mitchell, who runs a film and video workshop there called Screenlabs, and who has been a guardian angel for The Dogwalker and introduced us to all kinds of helpful and supportive people in Minneapolis.
J: And we also have other levels of partnerships with non-profits in which hopefully they will promote the theatrical and DVD and we will donate a percentage of the DVD sales when the purchaser uses the code for that organization when buying the film.
Also, we had hoped to do more additional screenings at college campuses and micro-cinemas as a means of promoting awareness of the film, but that hasn’t panned out as well as we had hoped because we didn’t have a database or road map of who to contact and how that all works. And we gathered a bunch of information and lost it in a server crash and got lukewarm responses if any, when we did make contact, so as we got closer to the release, we put that on the back burner and focused our attention on more pressing concerns.
D: We hope to be able to build out that database at some time, because we see it as the way that smaller films will be able to get seen in the future.
J: Also, a key component of our distribution plan is the services provided by a lifestyle marketing company, FLAG Marketing, run by Christi Crowe. FLAG (fight like a girl) has teams in cities across the country and in Canada as well, who put up posters and put our postcards, etc. at locations strategically selected by Christi and the publicity/marketing people for a given film. In our case, along with the usual cafes and stores, we will ahve our materials at pet supply stores, vets’ offices, dog parks, yoga studios, etc. in each of the markets where our film is playing theatrically.
D: Oh, and speaking of postcards and posters, we recommend that you hire your key art designer as early as possible. We hired a woman who after two months of nothing, gave us three insultingly ugly and thoughtless mock ups. So we had to fire her and scramble to find a new designer. Fortunately, some other filmmakers we know who had had a similar experience with their first designer, gave us the naem of a wonderful, communicative, collaborative, and talented designer, and we had our final key art within three more weeks.
J: The same goes for web designers. Get your website up and working as early as possible. Our design is a little more complicated than some because we wanted to have a lot of community building components.
D: And as of two weeks before we open our film in our first market, we still don’t have a fully usable site because our first designer never completed it. So a fat lot of good those community-building elements are doing us now. We hired a designer who said we should have something up in the next few days, but I’ll have to let you know how that goes at a later time.*
J: So that’s where we’re at. This issue goes to print before we open in our first market, the three theaters in the Bay area, so we’ll let you know how the theatrical release goes and how the beginnings of our DVD distribution is going in the next issue.
(*Note: Website was completed before the film’s launch and can be seen at: http://www.thedogwalkerfilm.com/ or purchase the DVD the Filmmakers Alliance store.)
