In the recent discussions on how independent filmmakers can make a financial return on their films, since the collapse of what people called "Indywood", the word "donation" has come up frequently. I'm not talking about raising your funding by "donation" but when people use it as a way for the filmmaker to recoup their cost. People will come up with creative ways for the films to get out into the public and then they will say, "ask for a donation"... instead of charging a ticket fee?
I had someone suggest this to me a year ago when I was going on tour. They said I should show the film at a certain college and ask for donations. But this was also a unique situation. The college, because of it's own insitution's rules, could not allow someone to do a paid performance. The filmmaker could screen the film and ask for donations.
My point is this, "It ain't a charity!" (my wife would say that's not proper English and it isn't, but it gets my point across). You can't go up to a gas station, fill up your tank, and then offer to give them a five dollar donation. You can't go to the grocery store, fill up your cart and hand them a five dollar donation either... so why do we, as filmmakers, allow ourselves to get to this point?... where we hang our hopes on the word "donation"?
Ask yourself as a filmmaker: Do I really believe the film I made is worth paying for? If the answer is "yes", why are you giving it away for FREE? Now if you don't think your film is worth someone paying money for then just give it away for free and ask for a donation.
One of the things I learned when reading the book: "My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising" (By Claude Hopkins), was the fact that the word FREE implies valuelessness. The assumption people have when they see the word free, especially if they haven't experienced the "value" before, is that "it must not be good enough to buy". Trust me, I've tested the theory before...
I did some test screenings of my film at a local library, just to see the reactions from the crowd. I was stupid enough to put on the sign, "FREE" screening. Being as determined as I was, I stood on the street corner of this town, holding the sign. But the brilliance was that I stood there holding the sign. People didn't know it was my film, they just figured someone who made it paid me to advertise on the street corner. And standing there I was able to hear people's reactions. Since they didn't know it was mine they were able to tell me their honest opinion. The word "FREE" was killing my chances of getting anyone to show up. They kept saying, "if it's free it must not be very good". The kicker was that I couldn't charge anything for the screening, it was another one of those "situations" (the library rules stated I couldn't do any exchange of money on the premises). That was ok, it was just a test screening.
My point is this: We are better than this! There are so many options out there that we should consider the "donation" option as a last resort to recoup our losses.
Now it's different if you raised the production budget by donation because it was about a certain cause and then you show it for free (like a documentary). But we're talking about feature films where the filmmaker had investors or their own money involved. (Yes, I did show AMNESIA on RebFest.com for free, for a week, and did an encore of the film on the jbmovies.com site for a week too. But this was about building some online buzz. I no longer do this anymore, and RebFest will no longer show entire feature films for free, but will let people watch the first 15 mins for free. Filmmakers need to make a living!)
I know I will make some people angry that I posted this. But someone needs to give a response before this becomes an indie-film-epidemic.
What do you think?
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*I tried posting once before but it didn't seem to go through, but in case it did and this is twice, please delete this one so I don't look like an idiot--thanks!
ReplyDeleteAnyway, here's a refreshing viewpoint on the whole thing by my favorite film theorist to read when I'm feeling discouraged: Ray Carney (posted below).
I think I'm going to try this when my web series Gemini Rising http://www.geminirising.tv is finally complete. It's taken us almost three years to do 8 episodes and we plan 4 more. When it's finally complete, I plan to buy an old bus, turn it into a mobile movie theater, charge people $50 to watch the entire thing from beginning to end. If they don't cough up the dough, fuck 'em, they don't deserve my masterpiece. This could backfire of course, but I'm willing to experiment. That's what's missing in this indie digital film frontier today, experiementation. Everyone is so timid. Where are the risk takers? All I ever read about is branding and product placement. Why are all the indies trying to be industry? I know, it's the money, blah, blah, blah. I want to connect with the artists out there. Not the ones making deals with Ikea or whatever. That's a different animal. Not saying it's not valid and doesn't have its place, but taking creative advice from pencil pushers is a BIG mistake. Any real artist knows that. Anyway, before I go off on my own rant. Here's Carney.
"Let me make what will undoubtedly seem like a bizarre proposal. The best way to improve attendance at independent theaters would be to charge more for tickets. Much more–say thirty or forty dollars a seat. You should have to pay a premium to see art films. What's wrong with that? It makes perfect common sense. Star Wars is like a Happy Meal. You can mass-produce both the meal and the movie so cheaply and sell them in such quantity that you can almost give them away. Art is different. You just can't make great works of art that cheaply and count on selling billions and billions of them. In line with the example of an independent restaurant in comparison with a McDonald's, the independent theater should stop trying to compete with the mainstream theater on ticket price. It can never win that battle. There are too many economics of scale that favor the fast-food artistic operation. People should expect to pay more for the gourmet meal, and if they don't want to pay it, they should be denied the chance to partake. If you aren't willing to pay fifty dollars to see Milestones or Scenic Route, you don't deserve to see them anyway. Every night of the week, people throw down that much or more for a concert ticket, a ticket to a sports event, a dinner in a nice restaurant. Why in the world do they think seven-fifty is the top limit for an experience that is far greater than any of these others? (Cassavetes once said to me–more than half seriously–that he wanted to charge $5000 per ticket for Opening Night, since he figured that was what the film had actually cost him when he divided the budget by the number of viewers who had seen it in the first year after he made it.)"
http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/indievision/fake.shtml