Why do indie filmmakers need a Producer of Marketing and Distribution (PMD)?
First of all, what is a PMD? Many may be unfamiliar with the title. PMD was coined by filmmaker Jon Reiss in his book titled, “Think Outside the Box Office.” His blog also explains the role on his blog. The term represents a producer whose primary responsibilities are managing the marketing, distribution, and public relations of a film. I want to put the role in a different light. The way I see it, a PMD is a specialized producer who handles the obligations normally shouldered by the studio.
Two major groups participate in the business of film: production companies and studios. Production companies are internally focused, concerning themselves with the tasks necessary to create the film. Studios are externally focused, busy getting the market ready for the movie and getting the movie to the market.
One reason indie films struggle to find success in the marketplace is the lack of support and expertise found within the studio.
Let’s take one more step back for a moment. Major Hollywood studios do more than just finance summer blockbusters and “interfere with the artistic vision” of a film. They are well oiled machines with great efficiencies in taking a film from concept to finished product. Their major functions include:
- Marketing – This department engages creative people who craft all those fancy posters that adorn billboards and buses. They also create trailers to entice and tantalize.
- Public Relations – PR folks have meaningful relationships with every major magazine, blog, morning news program, and late night talk show.
- Sales – The sales teams regularly meet up with buyers from online retailers, brick-and-mortar megastores, and even the military for the general stores on bases.
- Operations – Prints need to be made and they aren’t going to ship themselves to the theaters.
- International – The international team handles licensing and distribution in foreign markets, which as we know can easily equal or exceed domestic revenue.
- Others – Studios handle many other tasks. When award season rolls around, for example, another marketing and distribution campaign happens to garner nominations and votes among all the major awards groups, from the Oscars to the Writers Guild Awards.
These people work on dozens of titles a year, every year. Most of them are very good at their jobs. There is no direct equivalent of the studio in the indie world.
Enter the PMD.
Indie films need a Producer of Marketing and Distribution because they have no studio support. A PMD fills that void by creating a team of independent marketers, PR managers, and distributors to ensure the film gets out to market and that the market is ready for the film. The filmmaking team must take on all the tasks both internally and externally focused without a PMD. Indie film is already challenging enough. PMDs can help give a film a real competitive advantage though the fundamental principle of division of labor.
This past week, I started thinking that I should watch more short films. There must be great up and coming film makers out there who I’d like to work with, but I don’t always know how to find them. Funny thought, right? We have platforms like youtube and vimeo for self-publishing works. But there is so much noise and so little signal. How can I find what appeals to me without spending every waking moment combing through these sites? If only something like jinni existed where you could tag and link videos from all kinds of sources.
Then I thought about the situation from the other point of view. Let’s say I just finished up my short film that I funded through some nifty crowdfunding site like Kickstarter. What’s next? How do I find the right people to watch my work? Do-it-yourself indie film websites often suggest the basics: building a website, facebook page, and a twitter account. Make a blog. Create a mailing list. You can also do some public relations and pitch your work to blogs and newspapers. Then, fingers crossed, word of mouth will kick you up to the next level.
How many newbie and indie film makers try to do all the marketing, PR and distribution themselves? From my perspective, each of those are dedicated and specialized disciplines. As a filmmaker, you wouldn’t necessarily ask your writer to figure out where the lights should go on set. Nor would you likely ask your director of photography to mix the final audio. So why should the director be responsible for creating the website?
Ideally you have a good producer who thought of all these things ahead of time and set aside some money for these expenses. Let’s say you’re the producer. Where do you spend your money? There must be good independent shops setup to handle marketing and public relations for young talent. Who are they?
I have a vested curiosity in all of this because maybe someone out there can tell me about that talented new filmmaker I’ve been looking to meet all year.
The movie Inception opens in theaters today. The Hollywood community has been buzzing about this movie for a couple weeks now, making noise that it is a big summer movie worth seeing. The market wizards who predict opening weekend box office numbers see the movie easily taking the number one spot.
The first trailer I saw for the film didn’t exactly rock my world. It showed me all the right elements of summer suspense-action tentpole flick: big name star (Leonardo DiCaprio), big name director (Christopher Nolan), big budget special effects (Cities blocks peeling and curling up). At the end I could vividly picture a marketing director emailing a checklist of “must have elements” to the editor who cut the trailer. Not exactly the picture of inspiration.
Then I saw this beautiful behind-the-scenes footage over at the website Making Of that completely changed my view of Inception. No movie trailer can show the kind of craftsmanship that went into creating this movie.
The production team built these massive, elaborate moving sets on hydraulics and rotators for the scenes where the city is in upheaval. The result is natural reactions from the actors, which practically means a more engrossing performance for you and me in the theater. It’s a subtle effect that we might not even consciously realize is there, but our brains grok at a deeper level.
Now don’t get me wrong. I love great computer generated effects. I’ve visited the CGSociety website for years to marvel at the work of the brilliantly talented artists there. My grandmother always said, “All things in moderation.” From what I’ve seen, Inception hits a beautiful balance. I’m stoked to check it out.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love BitTorrent
Anne Sweeney, the President of the Disney/ABC Television Group, said it best: “We understand piracy now as a business model… we don’t like the model, but we realize it is effective enough to make piracy a key competitor going forward.”
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a waste of time. Copy protection is garbage. The best case scenario is that your company wastes time and money that could be spent making better experiences for your customers. Worst case scenario, your DRM frustrates and alienates your customers and sends them off to greener pastures.
Fancifully enough, I’m what many folks in the trenches would call “a suit.” I was a video game producer at a major publishing house. Now I produce in Hollywood. My living comes from my ability to sell entertainment. I’m supposed to protect my content. Right?
Everything I Need To Know, I Learned from Napster
When we were kids, whoever got the latest album from the hottest rock band would make a couple copies for our friends. We recorded songs off the radio. We carefully curated mix tapes for our crushes. This was back in the days where cassette tapes reigned supreme. And the record industry was terrified that all of this “home recording” would decimate their industry, instantly transforming all recording artists to street buskers and putting the management out on their collective asses.
Somehow blank cassettes failed to bring about Armageddon. Blank CDs didn’t fare much better. Granted, the advent of Napster and BitTorrent took its toll on the music industry. The internet hyper accelerated an activity we were all taught in Kindergarten, namely “sharing”. Yet looking back on history, despite the recent losses, none of the major record labels have closed up shop in the past decade. Most of the music industry’s asses are still in their chairs or in the studio, and not on the street.
As a matter of fact, something very interesting happened since music moved online. Apple, the largest legal distributor of music on the internet, removed the copy protection from their product. Despite the resistance from the music industry, we haven’t heard many doomsday scenarios from the record companies lately. I think that’s because they’ve all gone back to work making, marketing, and selling music. New mega acts like Lady Gaga have emerged since then. Executives have purchased brand new Bentley Continentals in the past few years.
Locks Only Keep Out the Honest
Meanwhile, my beloved Hollywood runs around trying to close Pandora’s Box.
No, that’s a bad analogy. It’s like they run a retail a big box retail store like Best Buy. They’re very busy installing new deadbolt locks on the front door and upgrading the cameras to be able to see in the dark. And they’re completely ignoring the fact that everyone in town has a remote control that can open the loading bay doors around back. Anyone can take anything they want and we can’t stop them.
Let’s step back from the analogy back into reality. Anything that can be seen or heard can be recorded. Someone can put a video camera in front of a television. Someone can arrange speakers around a microphone. Any technical device can be circumvented. Every lock can be picked. And it only takes one time to make all the work null and void. Once recorded, everything can be shared.
We cannot stop people from sharing. Let’s say we convince the FCC to let us shut off video output on people’s televisions at will (we just did). Do you think that will stop the pirates? What about the people with older equipment? It only takes one person to circumvent our security to provide clean digital copies to everyone.
A Pirate’s Gonna Pirate
Even if we were giving away our content for a penny, even if that penny went to charity, people will still pirate our goods. That’s exactly what happened with the Humble Indie Bundle. They offered up five top-quality indie games and asked people to pay whatever they wanted. They could donate all their money to charity, give it to the developers, or both. No DRM, no copy protection. It’s estimated that up to 25% of people acquired copies without paying.
So what do we do? Anne Sweeny had it right. We treat piracy as a competing business model. Rather than getting mired in battles we can never win, we work to make our offering better. Our goal should always be to offer our content at higher quality, with greater convenience, and with a better user experience than our customers can get for free. Let’s focus our energies on attracting and retaining our paying customers. That is how our businesses will flourish.
PS – Apparently the Humble Indie Bundle made nearly a cool million dollars.
Hollywood Technology by .
The stories you’ve heard are true. Everyone in Los Angeles is “working on a script”. The trend isn’t limited to aspiring auteurs fresh out of UCLA film school that idolize Jim Jarmusch. Even the temp receptionist working at the non-union editing shop is working on this charming little romantic comedy.
I’ve read a few scripts. Some were fantastic. Many of them were quite terrible. Although I cannot tell you if a script will be genius in the first 20 pages, it generally only takes a few to figure out if it’s garbage.
As such, I want to give a few quick tips from a producer’s perspective on some things that are necessary ingredients for any good script.
1. Grab me, fast!
You have fewer than 20 pages to catch my attention in a feature script. A television script gives you fewer than half that amount. You need to hook your reader and get their imagination going. You can do this in a number of ways, most importantly through raising questions and setting tension points. For example, imagine a script that starts with someone running through the woods clutching a satchel to his chest. He’s stealing glances over his shoulder whenever he can. Upon a beginning like this, my brain immediately starts wondering why this person is running. What’s in the bag? Did they steal something, or are they trying to protect something? Who is after them? And so on.
Learn about almost every trope known to man at tvtropes.org.
2. Trope vs. Trite
Tropes are the building blocks of all stories. They build out your plot and prompt emotional responses in your audience. One example of a trope is where the hero finally professes his love to the girl he’s been pretending not to like, just before he’s about to be hauled off to certain death by the bad guys. Another trope is when the group of bad guys has our protagonist cornered. While these thugs think they have the upper hand, they are about to make a grievous error in judgment and get their asses handed to them by our intrepid hero.
Trite events are the well-worn clichés we all know. The bad guy explains his entire master plan to our hero right before he is about to die. The sidekick bursts onto the scene and rescues our champion. Now armed with this new information, he is able to disarm the doomsday device and save the girl.
Use tropes. Avoid clichés.
3. Study the Classics
Read your Greek myths. Check out all of Aesop’s Fables. Go back and read all those high school literature books you might have missed because you were too busy being a teenager. Shakespeare is great. But I personally think you can skip James Joyce.
Your familiarity with these stories not only gives you a good understanding of structure and character, it can help you with inspiration. Disney built an empire from retelling classic tales. You don’t even have to be so blatant about it. Ponyo, the highest grossing film in Japan by Hayao Miyazaki, is a modern interpretation of The Little Mermaid.
4. Understand Budgets
No one expects a writer to be a producer. You don’t have to create line-item budgets for your script. But you should understand how your choices affect the time and money required to make your script.
The more locations you use, the more time the production team needs to scout, get permits, set up, tear down, move crews, and so on. Shooting underwater requires big water tanks and specially-trained photography units. Explosions need materials, safety experts, and extra insurance. Computer-generated effects require very talented and experienced people to bring them to life convincingly. Keep these things in mind, especially if you’re not working on a big-budget studio film.
Necessary, Not Sufficient
This will get you started. If you’re serious about getting your script made into a real film, take some time to learn how to create relatable characters, engaging plots, riveting dialog, and vivid scenes. Always have your audience as your focus and keep the production at the peripheries. You’ll be a superstar in no time.
Josh Olson, the writer of A History of Violence, wrote an excellent piece for the Village Voice about why he won’t read your fucking script. He provides valuable insight into what life is like for a professional screenwriter and why asking a stranger to read your script is an imposition. Go read it.
Hollywood by .