Netflix streaming is already available on XBox (Gold), Roku, and a few other devices. I’ve read interviews with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings talking about his goal of making it ubiquitous, and this seems like part of that plan.

The Nines has been streaming for a few months now through Netflix. While I don’t get viewer numbers, a scan of Twitter shows that a lot of people are watching it this way. It’s legal, legit, and actually lets filmmakers get paid.

If you’ve heard other interviews with me, there will probably be nothing revelatory. But it’s amusing to hear how fast we both manage to speak. It really sounds like we’ve been artificially sped-up, but it’s just a lot of caffeine.

A new article by Peter Broderick articulates a lot of the points I’ll try to make. Broderick calls it hybrid distribution, and while he offers ten points, I’d boil it down to three:

1. Don’t bank on selling it at a festival. Anticipate distributing it yourself.
2. Know your audience before rolling cameras.
3. Focus on getting people to see your movie, on whatever size screen makes sense.

As Broderick says:

Today many filmmakers are as determined to retain “distribution control” as they are to maintain “creative control.” Distribution control is the power to determine the overall structure and sequence of distribution, select distribution partners, and divide up distribution rights.

Splitting distribution rights used to seem like a Bad Thing: “They only want the movie for DVD.” The truth is that many movies would be better off letting specialized companies handle specialized jobs.

Sony wanted The Nines for domestic home video, and brought in Newmarket to handle theatrical. If I’d really understood that at the start, I might have pushed our sales reps to draw up narrower contracts. As it is, I have no idea when the movie will show up on domestic cable, because it’s part of a much larger package of movies Sony represents.

Grant each distribution partner only the specific rights they can handle well. For example, if a company is strong in retail DVD and digital, give them these rights, but do not also give them VOD if they have no experience with VOD.

Broderick doesn’t completely discount the Old Way.

If you have a movie that Fox Searchlight knows how to market, you’re in a much stronger position. When it works, traditional distributors have reach and power that can’t be matched, not only theatrically but far down the chain. Yes, you’ll have less control over certain aspects, and may not be able to sell DVDs from your website. But you’ll be able to sell them at Target, which may be the better home for them.

The best distributors have resources, relationships, and expertise, which can be essential to a wide theatrical release. They may also have advantageous deals in place for VOD, DVD, and digital rights. If filmmakers do due diligence (by speaking with other filmmakers involved with the distributor they are considering) and are able to negotiate a fair deal, their best choice may be an all-rights deal. Higher budget, more mainstream features are better suited for an Old World approach.

If you’re thinking about making an indie, Broderick’s article is worth a read.

AMC has the basic cable rights to The Nines for the U.S., but (as far as I know) hasn’t yet aired it. Ryan Reynolds has become a bigger star in the past year, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it works its way into rotation at some point.

A few months ago, I had to oversee a special TV-safe cut of the movie, which replaced the most egregious swearing and excised about three seconds of masturbation. I don’t know which version will be showing in the U.K.

I’ve always wondered why the movie Lars and the Real Girl wasn’t released more widely. I only read rave reviews about it and everyone I know who saw it loved it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. They didn’t even release it widely enough to make a profit, the dumbasses.

Here are the numbers:

The movie had a $12,000,000 budget. According to boxofficemojo.com, it made $90,418 opening weekend in 7 theaters for a $12,916 average per theater.

The Proposal opened this past weekend in 3056 theaters and grossed $33,627,598 for an average of $11,004 per theater.

At 5 weeks, Lars and the Real Girl averaged $2,456 per theater after the number of theaters was reduced from its peak the week before.

The latest Night at the Museum, just averaged $2,636 this week, its 5th.

It looks to me like decent marketing in various markets, in conjunction with a much wider release, could have made this movie -– and everyone involved with it -– a LOT more money. Can you explain why it would not have made sense to release it into more than 321 theaters during its entire run? Other than thinking that challenging, quirky and maddening = noncommercial, I mean?

Apples, meet oranges.

Per-screen average is simply math: a given film’s box office divided by the number of screens it plays on.¹ As a pure number, it tells you nothing about the size of theater, the percentage of seats sold, or what would be typical for that theater on that night.

Bringing in $2,300 over a weekend might be a great haul at a tiny theater in Des Moines, but would be a disaster at Grauman’s Chinese.

The number is only useful when comparing movies in fairly similar situations. If The Happy Harpist made $44,000 at four theaters, and My Third Elbow made $10,000 at three, it’s fair to say that Harpist is outperforming Elbow with an $11,000 per-screen average.

But drill deeper, and you might find reasons why Harpist’s numbers are misleading. For example, it’s possible Harpist made $34,000 on one of its screens, and only $10,000 on the other three. Maybe it’s a hometown director, or other special circumstance.² Take away that one theater, and Harpist and Elbow are now a dead heat.

More importantly, if you’re one of the low-performing theaters for Harpist, your per-screen average is only $3,333. You will make your decisions about whether to keep playing the movie based on that number. Never forget that distributors don’t ultimately decide which movies stick around in theaters; the exhibitors do. They look at their internal numbers to decide which movies will make them the most money.

With a small number of screens, per-screen average is hugely affected by variations between individual venues. The denominator — which screens, and where — matters a lot.

Conversely…

With a big number of screens, per-screen average is relatively unaffected by variations between individual venues. If you’re playing in 4,000+ screens, it doesn’t matter nearly as much which screens those are. You’re a wide release, playing at every other megaplex in the country. Distributors desperately scramble to get as many good screens as they can, simply so they can generate as much money as they can. Per-screen average is the last thing on their mind.

Some movies are able to successfully platform (expand) from a few screens to a lot. Juno, for example. But if you look at Juno’s weekend boxoffice breakdown, you’ll see that it never came close to its opening weekend $59,124 per-screen average again. As it climbed to 2,000 screens, the per-screen average plummeted because the denominator had gotten so big. Trust me: Fox Searchlight didn’t care. They were too busy making gobs of money.

Same for The Proposal. Same for Night at the Museum 2. Unlike the makers of Lars and the Real Girl, who carefully selected each of the seven venues it debuted upon — like Goldilocks, not too big, not too small — the studios releasing blockbusters want as many seats as possible. They’re not looking to expand. They don’t need to nurture. They simply want the maximum amount of money, preferably in the shortest amount of time.

Rebecca points to the fifth weekend of Night at the Museum 2 and its $2,636 per-screen average. She conveniently omits that on that weekend it earned $7.8 million. Money is money. Per-screen average is just a figure.

Back to Lars

While it’s absolutely fair to play Monday morning quarterback on a movie you love and believe could have made more money, the folks who released Lars and the Real Girl are not dumbasses. You can disagree with their marketing and perhaps their release date. I wouldn’t be surprised if the filmmakers feel disappointed. But they clearly tried to platform the movie much like Juno, and it didn’t work.

Courtesy Box Office Mojo, here are the numbers for Juno:

And here’s Lars:

Both Juno and Lars started in three theaters, then expanded to 300 in their third week. But Juno far out-earned Lars at every step. By the time it went wide, Juno also had the advantage of the Christmas holiday.

As you’re looking at the Lars chart, rather than focusing on the per-screen average, look at the red numbers in the % Change column. Starting with Nov 2-4, it was making less each week. It was on a decline. The distributor couldn’t justify the millions of dollars it would take to expand the run when it was earning a fraction of that each week.

In the end, Lars and the Real Girl made just under $6 million domestically. Many indies would love to reach that number.

Could Lars have made more money? Perhaps with a different combination of marketing and luck. But per-screen average has nothing to do with it, and using that figure to compare it to wide releases is specious. Limited releases have high per-screen averages because they’re on so few screens, not despite it.

1. And even then, it’s a messy measurement. Particularly with wide releases, theaters can increase or decrease the number of screens devoted to a picture even over the course of a weekend, based on demand and sell-outs.
2. Or maybe it’s The Nines. We debuted on two screens — one in New York, one in LA. Two-thirds of our money came from LA’s NuArt.

In my post-mortem on The Nines, I wrote that the business model of selling your indie at Sundance for theatrical release was largely mythology. The numbers are stacked against you, and have only gotten worse.

According to Stern:

An astonishing 9,293 films were submitted to Sundance last year. Of those nearly 10,000, only 218 were screened. Of the lucky handful to get bought, so far only three have been released theatrically.

From January through May 2008 … the number of indies that grossed over $1 million dollars went from 16 to six. Less than half.

Fewer indies are making it to the big screen, and fewer of those movies are earning money. And video isn’t the savior it once was. DVD and TV deals are smaller, when you can even get them.

Stern acknowledges that changes in the distribution system — particularly the rise of streaming video — may help out in the next few years. Right now, Netflix is like an infinite video store, but once it becomes possible to monetize each viewing of a movie, there’s suddenly value to being one of its 10,000 movies.

Provided they actually pay us for our content in appropriate ways, these are the once and future friends of independent film.

But to his credit, Stern won’t let filmmakers themselves off the hook. In mythologizing the struggling writer/director auteur, we’ve created a genre of movies that are built to fail. Quoting Patrick Goldstein from the LA Times, Stern notes:

“The real problem with the indie business isn’t quality, but discipline. We have a generation of filmmakers who feel entitled to make personal films… and a generation of executives who’ve been willing to essentially use specialty films as a loss-leader to launch their division or win awards. If people in the indie world want to start making money again, they have to start treating their investment like a truly precious natural resource, not like Monopoly money. Discipline is not antithetical to art.”

That’s an idea I’ve been trying to reconcile while up here at the labs.

My friend Howard Rodman often says, “The point of studio development is to take a script only you could have written and turn it into something anyone could have written.” I’m keenly aware that our goal as writers and advisors is to make projects more unique and specific.

Yet the fact that we can say a script “feels like a Sundance movie” belies this intent. It’s shorthand for challenging, quirky, maddening and (if we’re being honest) non-commercial. We want these movies to exist. But we need to be honest about their prospects.

Stern argues that filmmakers need to keep their audience in mind from a project’s initial conception — even if that audience isn’t a typical mainstream audience.

I was blown away when I found out that the #32 film on the all-time documentary box-office list is a little 2005 film I’d never heard of, called “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.” (It’s about wild parrots living on Telegraph Hill, by the way.) Can you imagine how tiny the market sliver is of people willing to take a night out to go see this peculiar-sounding film?

Well, the filmmaker did imagine them. Rather thoughtfully, in fact. And then proceeded to use viral marketing to rally those people into the theater, by making the film an event for every bird-lover on God’s green Earth.

Audubon Society members. Bird-watching clubs. Breeders. Veterinarians. Humane Societies. Feather-fancier magazine subscribers. There are a lot of people out there who really love birds. And I think every last one of them went to this movie.

Every filmmaker would like her movie to break out of its niche and gain wider exposure and acceptance. But Stern’s point is apt: figure out your base, and develop a marketing plan that succeeds even if it never goes beyond that. If this sounds more like planning a small business than planning a movie, that’s sort of the point.

I wouldn’t make another indie the way I did The Nines. I’d figure out how I was going to make money before figuring out how to get money.

There is more to Stern’s speech, which is certainly worth a read.

Right now, the Advanced Editing class at USC is made up of 11 students who have each taken the dailies of the feature film THE NINES (the really interesting and compelling, Ryan Reynolds/Hope Davis/Melissa McCarthy film directed by John August of whom I’ve spoken about a number of times) and are cutting it into an alternate version of that feature film. I assigned a different section to each of the 11 back in January.

All of them read the script and we talked about the plot, the characters, the subtext, the arc of the story — in short, all of the things that go into editing the film. We were visited by John and his editor, Doug Crise. Then the students started cutting together the film, one scene at a time. We watched scenes in class and I gave notes, along with the class. At one point, about six weeks ago, we finally had the entire film assembled and watched it in class as a full-length first cut of a feature film and stepped back to critique it.

This is the cut I now have on DVD, which I’ll watch this weekend. I’m fascinated and a little terrified to see what they’ve done.

As I said when I debuted the film at Sundance in 2007, I would like to make all the source material for anyone who wants to recut it, assuming legal and logistical hurdles can be overcome. The trailer competition was a start. This semester’s project at USC has been another helpful trial run.

Hollywood has gotten much more aggressive about releasing blockbusters in theaters “day-and-date” — a movie like Transformers will appear pretty much everywhere worldwide simultaneously. But for home video, and particularly for less-than-blockbusters and television series, the disparity in release dates is maddening. My movie came out in Australia one full year after the U.S release. Australia, people.

That’s the point behind “Queremos Cultura” (“We Want Culture”). There is a worldwide audience that wants to watch American movies and TV shows, but because of bureaucracy and myopia, there is no legal way for them to do it.

I was sympathetic about this on The Nines, but sympathy accomplishes nothing. There’s not going to be a filmmaker-driven solution. The studios are all now international corporations, and need to take more leadership in letting the global audience see movies and TV shows in a timely fashion.

– kaz

This will never end. It will continue to be a problem as long as you write. I’m certain that Stephen King, even after umpteen books, wrestles with this problem. In fact, his prolificacy might be a coping strategy; rather than decide which thing to write, he just writes them all.

At this moment, there are no less than fifteen projects competing for brainshare in my head. Five of these are things I’m contracted to write, while the other ten or so are old ideas, recent ideas or things that just occurred to me as I walked up the stairs to my office.

So which projects do I write?

Well, I should write the ones that I’m being paid to write, and more specifically, I should work on the one that is next due. So I spend the bulk of my writing time on the project with the nearest deadline. Honestly, that may not be the project that excites me the most at any given moment. But I’m getting paid to do my craft, so I’m certainly not going to complain.

But what about those other projects, the ones I’m not currently writing?

They’re battling it out in my subconscious, each trying to get my attention long enough that I’ll recognize how worthy it is. Sometimes they’ll even gang up on me: The Nines was three separate ideas that conspired to fit together.

Some “old” ideas get written this way. Others simply recede so far back they’re nearly forgotten. That’s okay. You’re not going to become best friends with every nice person you meet. You’re not going to write every good idea you have.

In some cases, simple timing makes a new project suddenly possible. For the Alaska pilot, I pitched it to the network within a week of having the idea. The Remnants was possible only because the WGA strike meant I couldn’t work on any of my “real” stuff.

If you have four ideas, all equally viable, I’d recommend writing the one that has the best ending. That’s the one you’ve thought through the most, and the one you’re least likely to abandon midway. But whatever you do, just pick one and write it without delay. If you have great ideas for your other projects, absolutely take some notes, but don’t switch. Finish what you’re doing, or you’ll have a folder full of first acts.

Visit itunes.com/Sundance to check out trailers and download. (Link opens in iTunes store.)

I’m happy to see shorts featured this way, and hope it expands to features in coming years. I would have absolutely done it for The Nines. By offering movies for a limited window, Sundance and Apple can give exposure to films and filmmakers far beyond Park City, Utah.

It’s a smart implementation of the festival’s mission.

My initial thought was that one of us had sleepwalked, and acted out some rage issue against fruit. I realize this is a strange explanation to reach for first — maybe I’m the culprit! — but it may explain why I’m a screenwriter.

The much more reasonable instinct would be to assume we had some sort of visitor. A mouse, a rat, a squirrel. Or possibly a raccoon — our housesitter had mentioned seeing one over the holiday. We set a peanut butter-baited mousetrap on the counter, and sure enough, at 4:50 a.m. Thursday I heard it snap. There was no critter under the bar, however.

I know through friends that a raccoon has to be handled differently than a mere mouse or rat, so I was determined to figure out which kind of varmint we had. I set my MacBook’s built-in camera to shoot one frame of video per second, and left the lights dimmed in the kitchen. I also re-baited the trap, this time with hummus.

This morning, I came downstairs and saw with disappointment that the trap hadn’t popped. But scrubbing through the video, I got my answer.

Fans of The Nines may recognize the kitchen, and the accuracy of Margaret’s “they live in the palm trees” line.

UPDATE: Conventional rat trap worked. It snapped four minutes after leaving the room. Cleanup was bloodless, but still more unsettling than I anticipated. Rat Guy comes Monday to figure out how it got in.

FURTHER UPDATE: Here.