Ryan Reynolds just jogged by me this morning while I was walking to my shitty Non-Hollywood job in Brentwood. He made me feel disgusting, as he was lathered in sweat and muscles, and I was eating a Boston-Cream donut.

Love

John

you make movies because 1.) you want people to watch it and 2.) make money with it. When starting in business (which can take some time as i´m currently experiencing it) you´re goal is to build up a little buzz about you and your movie, the best thing is to go public.

If your first tries to make money from the movie are not that successful you should spread the movie while it´s still fresh. Torrent is a good idea (and i´d also stick to xvid).

The same is more than true if you´re doing short movies, which is not the case here but there is hardly any market for shorts (well except you happen to shoot an independent movie, distribute it and pack the short movie on the dvd as well, right John?) ;)

As far as DVD goes, I would try to get in touch with someone at Heretic Films (they had a lot of success with Lurking In Suburbia, which your trailer reminded me of quite a bit), or maybe even Anthem Distribution, as they both have good reputations and can get your film into brick and mortar outlets as well as the on-line realm (Netflix, Amazon, etc). There’s plenty of other boutique DVD houses out there, but those are two I consistently hear great things about. There’s also Carnivalesque Films, which is a terrific company run by two filmmakers who’ve self distributed their work theatrically across the country, but also have a retail output deal for DVD. You couldn’t find two better people to work with, but I’m not sure if they’re looking for content right now, and they’re also primarily doc oriented, so who knows.

As far as finding a mid-size company that knows how to deal with low budget films for VOD, I’m not sure one exists yet. Cinetic is far from a mid-size company, but they did just launch a digital rights branch, headed by the wonderful Matt Dentler, so that might be a place to look. There’s also a company called MediaStile, and I know they do a lot of work with iTunes and other on-line outlets and they’re pretty filmmaker friendly, so you might wanna check them out too. All that aside, I couldn’t agree more with the fact that your best option would probably be streaming or uploading it on the website and just getting the film out there to as many people as possible. If the film goes viral, you could leverage that hype to net some underwriting or secure better terms on a future release (Similar to what B-Side Ent. does with some of their films), or you could try to organize some sort’ve pay per click scenario with an advertiser if you were able to get them excited about your film and it’s on-line release.

Doing DVD’s yourself is also a strong option, and you could be selling them off your website at very little cost. The harsh reality is that most people don’t buy movies they’ve never heard of when they’re strolling through Target or Best Buy anyways, so the marketing and distribution costs that come associated with a traditional DVD release aren’t as effective or necessarily even worthwhile if your film doesn’t have any way to separate itself from the pack. Odds are that 90% of the people who buy your DVD are gonna be doing so because you or your team did something to catch their interest. You might as well keep your rights (and your profits) and create a more cost effective and personalized marketing campaign for your film, versus handing it off to a company where it’s going to be competing with all of their other material for time and attention.

And selling DVD’s at concerts that bands from the film are playing is just genius. I’d recommend trying to come up with as many unique ideas like that as you can.