Working Backward to Move Forward

How the Polish Brothers Are Raking It In With a Stealth, No Budget Movie

Call me jaded but I don’t think established Hollywood players leveraging their ‘old media’ success should really be championed as role models for ‘no-budget’ film making and ‘new media’ distribution.

The brothers said that their hotels and some meals were comped; they shot and edited with equipment they already owned; and they don’t consider the few grand worth of meals, taxis and the like to be part of an actual budget. “There was not one dime that came out of our pocket specifically for this movie — besides the food we ate, but we had to eat, anyway,” Michael said.

Hmmm… that sounds like a typical situation for a no-budget indie.  Spend thousands of dollars traveling and just happen to shoot a feature on the same trip.  When did proclaiming your ability to not pay anyone for anything related to getting your film made become such a badge of honor?  Is your time worth nothing?  Is your collaborators’ time worth nothing?

And once the film was finished, the changing face of distribution enabled them to bypass traditional models.

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The decision, though, brought with it real uncertainty.

“It just goes up, and then you have to find a way to tell the audience that it’s there,” said Michael. “You get a letter from the cable provider that says, ‘Your movie is now available in 45 million homes.’ That’s it.”

Mark continued, “I said, ‘OK, I’m gonna tweet it.’ Then I called Stana and told her to tweet it – and that’s when it took off.”

Have to find a way to tell your audience?  The female lead of your film has nearly 70,000 followers on Twitter!

So far the film has generated $200,000 and that’s quite a profit margin even if you account for things that the Polish Brothers aren’t accounting for like gear, lodging, food, travel, paying your actors, etc.,.  While that is certainly a nice ROI it isn’t, IMO, representative of a new ‘model for the masses’ at work anymore than when NIN and Radiohead released albums direct via the web a few years ago.  All it means is that wealthy, famous people with installed fan bases will have a pretty easy time self-funding and self-distributing their works compared to the rest of us.

The next time I’m looking for some DIY motivation I’ll revisit Four Eyed Monsters or 10 MPH.

Kind of Screwed

“Remember Kind of Bloop, the chiptune tribute to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue that I produced? I went out of my way to make sure the entire project was above board, licensing all the cover songs from Miles Davis’s publisher and giving the total profits from the Kickstarter fundraiser to the five musicians that participated.

But there was one thing I never thought would be an issue: the cover art.”

Copyright law, and to a greater extent Intellectual Property law as a whole, is a bag of hurt (to borrow a line from Steve Jobs).  Unfortunately it is a necessary bag of hurt.  It’s necessary because some people out there are dicks and will pilfer the blood, sweat and tears of others for their own gain.  There are also some other dicks out there that will wield the law as a weapon even though it was intended to be a shield.  This leaves the vast majority of us, whom aren’t dicks, stuck in the middle having to navigate an unpredictable river influenced by forces beyond our control.  It would be awesome if we all agreed not to be dicks to each other and then necessary evils like IP law wouldn’t have to exist.  I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon though.

P.S.  Just to be clear, I’m not calling anyone involved in the linked to situation a dick.