How to Get Your Indie Film on iTunes (...It's Not Easy)

If you are a filmmaker who wants to self-distribute your work in digital form, there’s probably nothing more frustrating to you than Apple’s indifference to helping you do that.

You may own a Mac. You may use Final Cut Pro for editing. You may carry an iPhone or iPod in your pocket. You may have a MobileMe or .Mac account.

But Apple doesn’t seem to want to help you do business online.

I’ve harped on this issue since 2005, the year that Apple first started selling movies and TV shows on iTunes. Since then, iTunes has become the dominant marketplace for legal movie sales and rentals; in June, Apple said iTunes users were renting or purchasing 50,000 movies a day. (Apple’s rivals, like Amazon Unbox, Movielink, and CinemaNow, have never disclosed how many movies they sell and rent – but my belief is that they’re bit players.)

So how do you get your movie sold on iTunes?

It’s not easy, and Apple doesn’t make things any easier by supplying absolutely no official information to filmmakers who’d like to sell their work on iTunes. (By contrast, here’s CreateSpace’s crystal clear explanation of how to sell your work on Amazon Unbox – the best non-iTunes option that exists today.)

Here’s the scoop: Apple’s strategy thus far has been to only work with aggregators, or services that will collect a number of indie films and then deliver them to iTunes. They don’t want to work directly with filmmakers. But there is no aggregator yet that will take just any finished film and deliver it to iTunes, in the same way CreateSpace (which is owned by Amazon) will take any finished film and sell it on Amazon Unbox.

So, who (aside from indie-majors like Lionsgate and The Weinstein Company) is working with iTunes today? Here's my list. (If you know of others that would be interesting to indie filmmakers, mention them in the comments below.)

- New Video seems to be getting a lot of full-length features onto iTunes, including “King Corn” and “Bomb It,” both recently-released docs, and Henry Jaglom’s “Eating,” from 2004. They also connected Ed Burns with iTunes for his latest film, "Purple Violets." One filmmaker who got his doc onto iTunes via New Video told me the split is 70/30, with 70 percent going to the filmmaker; he’d initially contacted Apple about selling his movie on iTunes (he has been self-distributing DVDs, and selling tens of thousands), and was told to get in touch with New Video. Here’s their contact info. And here's a recent story from Video Business about their relationship with iTunes.

- Shorts International in the UK has distributed a few dozen short films through iTunes, including the recent Oscar-winner “West Bank Story.” Here’s the page that explains how to submit your film.

- The Independent Film Channel (IFC) has a handful of features on iTunes, including “Four Eyed Monsters,” “Does Your Soul Have a Cold?” and “Before the Music Dies.” Oddly, all of them are priced at $3.99 instead of the usual feature film price of $9.99. Contact info here, here, and here.

- Mediastile is the company that offered Sundance short films earlier this year on iTunes. One of these films, “Sick Sex,” is currently #2 on iTunes’ list of best-selling shorts, sandwiched in between two Pixar shorts. Mediastile also handled “The Tribe,” a short film that played at Sundance in 2006, and was briefly an iTunes best-seller last year. I’m not aware of any feature-length films that the company has handled, and no one at the company’s Lake Tahoe headquarters answers the phones, returns messages, or answers e-mail. (I happened to have the e-mail address of their president, and he did e-mai me to insist that the company is still in business, but didn’t return my phone calls.) I wonder what would happen if you wanted to call them to ask about getting paid? Their Web site, for the bold and courageous, is here.

So this is the best that Apple can offer indie filmmakers? Apparently so.

I’ve been told for the past year that other aggregators will soon, any day now, begin working with iTunes. Some of them may be more open to submissions than the four I’ve listed above. (By open, what I’d like to see is an aggregator accepting any finished film where the filmmaker can guarantee that there are no rights issues that will result in lawsuits… or at the very least any finished film that has played at least one festival.)

Here’s who else could soon be delivering films to iTunes:

- The Independent Online Digital Alliance. Already distributes music to iTunes. Their online application is here. IODA chief Kevin Arnold says via e-mail that they are "working on initial deliveries and ingestion now. No solid ETA yet though."

- Film Baby. Film Baby’s sister company, CD Baby, already distributes music to iTunes.

- IndieFlix. Co-founder Scilla Andreen told me this week that she expects a few IndieFlix titles to show up on iTunes in the fourth quarter of 2008, at the earliest.

- The guys at Cinetic Rights Management say they're close to a deal to work directly with iTunes.

Again, Amazon.com's CreateSpace is the best option today for selling your film in digital form, in my opinion. But you'll have to drive customers to your work -- unlike iTunes, where the customers are already buying movies in big numbers.

And if you know of other routes to getting onto iTunes, or have opinions about the ones I've listed, post them here!

A Conversation with Cinetic: Today's Market for Digital Rights

I spent some time on the phone today with three of the folks involved in building Cinetic Media’s new digital rights group, called Cinetic Rights Management. They wanted to supply a bit more background on the group, which seeks to help indie filmmakers wring the most possible value from their work by selling it to satellite companies, Internet portals, mobile phone operators, etc. (I’d posted last week about Cinetic’s hiring of Matt Dentler and some of the deal terms they’d been dangling before filmmakers.)

First thing: they didn’t dispute the deal terms I’d seen them offering to filmmakers last year (a 50-50 split of revenues after some expenses are taken off the top, like digitally encoding the film, and a 10-year exclusive contract to be represented by Cinetic.) But Cinetic’s Christopher Horton did say that terms are negotiated “on a case-by-case basis.” Horton said they’ve signed up “about 100 films” so far.

Janet Brown, the chief operating officer of CRM, said that the long-term arrangement is important to Cinetic because of the “unproven revenue model in this space”; the resources CRM will commit to marketing a film; and the logistics of encoding films and collecting info about how well they’ve performed in each distribution channel.

But what happens, I asked, if a filmmaker signs up with Cinetic and something goes awry? Cinetic might not find any buyers for the film, or might get out of the digital business in five years. Horton quipped, “This could be our only business in five years.”

Still, when Cinetic reps a film at Sundance or another festival, a filmmaker might sign a year-long exclusive with the firm, or even shorter. There’s a big difference between that and a decade. But the CRM team contend that they’ll be able to do a lot with a film’s rights over that period of exclusivity, as digital markets develop. “Having a sales agent for your digital rights is going to be even more important than a conventional sales agent” handling theatrical and home video distribution, Horton predicted.

Brown explains that CRM will market films to Internet portals like iTunes, Joost, and Jaman; satellite companies; cable companies; telcos; and wireless operators. They’re interested in repping not just new films, but high-quality older films where the rights have reverted to the filmmaker.

I noted that the big kahuna in terms of Internet sales (and now, rentals) seems to be Apple's iTunes marketplace. The CRM trio seemed to agree. They noted that, working with New Video, they helped cut the deal with iTunes to premiere Ed Burns’ “Purple Violets” there last year. (No data is yet available, they said, on how well it has performed.) And Brown said they’re “in discussions now to finalize our deal with [iTunes],” adding that CRM has “a very good relationship” with Apple.

Most of the deals CRM is seeing offered are so-called “consignment” deals: give us the movie, and we’ll give you a share of the revenues it produces. But CRM hopes that some films, in some digital outlets, will receive advances – especially when they’re offered to one outlet on an exclusive basis.

It can take a while for these Internet outlets to produce revenues, Horton explained. “We never tell filmmakers, we’re going to make you a heck of a lot of money through Jaman, Joost, and Netflix over the next twelve months. We’re focusing on the long-term,” he said.

A main emphasis in CRM’s dealings with filmmakers, it seems, will be helping them make sense of the growing number of digital distribution options – and freeing filmmakers up to get started on their next project, without spending years marketing their last one.

“Not every filmmaker has the time or inclination to do what Lance Weiler or the Four Eyed Monsters guys have done,” Brown said.

“Most independent filmmakers out there are still unaware of the opportunities,” said Dentler. "They’re so busy being filmmakers, engrossed in their project, that they don’t see the bigger picture, the bigger landscape.”

‘Four Eyed Monsters,’ he observed, came out in 2005, and directors Susan Buice and Arin Crumley “still haven't made another film. Hopefully, with our resources we can help filmmakers focus on continuing their careers.”

Talking with Brian Chirls about Online Audience-Building

Last Wednesday, I had a chance to sit down for a few minutes with Brian Chirls, the tech guru who helped Arin Crumley and Susan Buice build an audience for 'Four Eyed Monsters.' More recently, he has been working with John Sayles on the online marketing for 'Honeydripper.'

Brian's a smart guy... we mostly talked about the importance of collecting information about your fans (and who's a super-fan versus someone who's just mildly interested in your movie). We also touched on the deal that 'Four Eyed Monsters' did with YouTube and Spout, where YouTube offered the full movie for free, and Spout served as a sponsor, paying the filmmakers a buck for every new member who joined after watching the movie on YouTube.

Digital Downloads Panel at IFP Filmmaker Conference

This afternoon's panel on Digital Downloads was hugely fun for me to moderate.

Joel Heller of Docs That Inspire recorded the panel, and has posted it here.

Some of my impressions and rough notes:

- Digital downloading isn't yet a major revenue-generator for indie filmmakers; Hunter Weeks of '10 MPH' said he has sold about 4000 DVDs of the documentary, and about 700 downloads (both on his own site and on Amazon Unbox)

- Anyone who picks up your movie for distribution in theaters, on home video, or on TV will try to buy the digital rights for it ... even if they don't actually do anything with them; carving out digital rights seems like a good idea

- We all agreed that iTunes is the "hot shop" where digital movie buying happens, but they're not yet open to indies; Peter Broderick of Paradigm Consulting said that iTunes will start selling indie content (handled by aggregators) really soon, but wouldn't say more

- Building a database of your fans' names, e-mail addresses, and ZIP codes is really important, as you sell downloads. Many services won't give you that information, to protect their customers' privacy. But Peter said that getting that information could be as valuable as any profit you earn from selling or renting your movie -- since those are fans you can communicate with and market your future films to. Peter has a great term for that group of people: they are a filmmakers "core personal audience." I like that.

- I predicted, in response to an audience question, that in five years, digital movie consumption will be about equal to consumption on DVD.

- Jaman said they plan to start integrating advertising in short films soon, and sharing the revenue with creators (right now, Jaman's model is simply to sell or rent full-length movies in digital form)

- I brought up Jaman's deal structure: they give filmmakers 30 percent of the rental or download revenues, and pocket 70 percent. That compares to selling movies through Amazon's Unbox / CreateSpace, which split revenues down the middle. Kathleen Powell said that Jaman is more of a concentrated community of cinephiles, and that indie features and docs don't get lost. (She also said that "Black" is the site's most popular film.)

- Then Brian Chris of the 'Four Eyed Monsters' team hammered on Jaman some more, noting that the site requires filmmakers sign a six year non-exclusive agreement ... so if you made another distribution deal, you couldn't remove your movie from Jaman for six years. Kathleen clarified, and said that the length of these deals run anywhere from five to nine years, and said that it's expensive for the site to encode movies (that cost is anywhere from $800 to $2000). So it isn't economical for the site to do that one week, and have a filmmaker pull down the title the next week.

More from the IFP Filmmaker Conference

Lance Weiler moderated a great panel yesterday afternoon that was supposed to be about "Consumer Viewing Habits" but wound up being more about the economics of supporting one's creative work, whether it involves full-length features (Arin and Susan from 'Four Eyed Monsters' were there), short-form funny videos (Andrew Baron from Rocketboom), or documentary (Brett Gaylor of Open Source Cinema).

Some very random notes:

Arin mentioned to Brett how important it is to collect ZIP codes from people interested in your project. That way, when you're doing theatrical screenings or events (or trying to figure out where you should do these events), you have a sense of the geography of your fan base: do people love you in Madison, Wisconsin, while they couldn't care less in Portland, Oregon?

Brett showed the trailer for his doc, which garnered applause -- a good sign. It should be finished next year, he says.

Andrew said that Rocketboom is one of YouTube's advertising partners, and that YouTube will share revenue from the ads it places on Rocketboom. But none of the ads have started showing up yet. Lance suggested that one reason why is that someone created a hack for Firefox that allows you to strip the ads off YouTube's videos. I suspect there may be other reasons, too. Afterward, Baron told me that the ad payments are based on impressions (not click-throughs), and that YouTube would be splitting the revenue roughly down the middle with its creators.

Arin and Susan shared a lot of financial info about 'Four Eyed Monsters.' They've grossed about $135,000 from the movie so far (but are still trying to erase some credit card debt.) About 69 percent of that has come from selling DVDs, movie tickets, and downloads, and 31 percent has come from selling t-shirts, posters, and other merch.

Afterward, Hunter Weeks (director of the doc '10 MPH') came up and we talked about distribution a bit. He said he hasn't really been selling many downloads on Amazon Unbox, even though an Amazon PR rep told me recently that his films was among the best-selling indie downloads on that site. (They had 12 downloads in the month of August through Unbox...and yet a representative for Amazon's CreateSpace division, which handles the indie content on Unbox, told me that month that they were "in the top 20 Unbox titles." What does that say about how well Unbox is doing?) Hunter said he also sells digital versions of the movie on his own site using a service called E-Junkie, which charges $80 a month to host the movie -- and nothing per transaction.

Then there was some hanging around in the lobby...I spoke with a couple knowledgeable folks about when, if ever, indie movies will appear on iTunes. The smart money is on 2008 -- not this year. iTunes is supposedly still more focused on trying to get more studio content. (It is now almost two years since I wrote this opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle arguing that Apple is being hypocritical by not allowing independent creators to sell their film and video on iTunes.)

Then there was a dinner that Slava Rubin of IndieGoGo organized....which brought together the 'Four Eyed Monsters' team, Lance, Brett, and M dot Strange...basically, an incredible about of DIY filmmaking smarts gathered around one long table.

30 Hours in Toronto

Today's panel on social networking at the Toronto International Film Festival was a lot of fun, thanks to five really brilliant panelists and the organizing efforts of Shannon Abel of TIFF. We had a really engaged audience, too -- especially distribution guru Peter Broderick, who heckled from the second row.

The main message, to me, was that we're still in an era when filmmakers are figuring out how all these new online tools can connect them with their audience in a way that makes sense. Some of the points I heard:

- Jason Klein of Special Ops Media said that what works for one film may not work for another. Clients still come into his agency and ask him to duplicate the positive word-of-mouth that spread online when "The Blair Witch Project" was released in 1999.

- Filmmakers Sandi DuBowski and Corey Marr said that they're trying a lot of things on MySpace and Facebook, like reaching out to particular groups (in Sandi's case, gay and lesbian Jews around the world) to introduce them to their movies. It's still hard to tell how much of this effort pays off, in terms of people actually purchasing a DVD or buying a ticket to see a movie in a theater. But both said they'd run into people at festivals who'd heard about their movies via social networks like MySpace.

- There's lots of confusion over how much marketing and commerce you're technically allowed to do on MySpace. I asked Christine Moore from MySpace whether, when a movie is released on DVD, a filmmaker would be allowed to message all his MySpace friends to let them know where they could buy it. She gave that her blessing.

- Sandi said that holding onto as many rights as you can is a great idea; he has a deal with his distributor where he can sell DVDs of "Trembling Before G-D" on his own. (He buys these DVDs at wholesale price from the home video distributor, New Yorker Films.)

- Bill Holsinger-Robinson from Spout talked a bit about the release of "Four Eyed Monsters" on YouTube; the money that Spout supplied to Arin Crumley and Susan Buice helped them eliminate some of the credit card debt they'd accumulated in making the movie. (Crumley and Buice got $1 for every new Spout member who registered at the site after they watched "FEM" on YouTube.)

- Someone from the audience asked about collaborative online efforts to make documentaries, and all of us on stage whiffed. Moira Keicher from the National Film Board of Canada, who was in the audience, pointed us to OpenSourceCinema.org.

TIFF recorded the panel, and I'm hoping they'll make it available online soon.

During my 30 hour stay in Toronto, I got to go to a couple parties, but mostly camped out at the Varsity Cinemas. I saw four really wonderful movies: "The Secrets," an Israeli/French production about an unlikely friendship between two girls in a seminary, and an ex-prisoner they try to guide toward redemption; "The Last Time I Saw My Father," about a tempestuous father/son relationship, starring Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent; "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," an exceptional Western photographed by Roger Deakins and starring Casey Affleck and Brad Pitt; and Helen Hunt's impressive directorial debut, "Then She Found Me," a deep and thoughtful romantic comedy co-starring Firth and Bette Midler. I caught about an hour of "Into the Wild," the Sean Penn adaptation of Jon Krakauer's book, which didn't really appeal to me. (I haven't read the book, though I'm a fan of Krakauer's magazine work and "Into Thin Air," his best-seller about climbing Everest.)

I wish I could've stayed for the rest of the festival, especially to see some documentaries (tops on my list were "A Jihad for Love," which Sandi DuBowski produced, and the documentary about The Who, the title of which escapes me.)

No Flash for iPhone Users ... Peter Jackson Bids Farewell to the Original Alamo Drafthouse ... Ken Burns Wants You ... And More

- For some reason, that fancy new iPhone won't play video in Adobe's popular Flash format. (All of the YouTube videos that you can watch on the phone have been re-encoded into h.264, the video format Apple prefers.)

- Courtesy of Anne Thompson's blog, here's a video farewell from Peter Jackson and Edgar Wright to the original Alamo Drafthouse, in Austin, TX. An "improved" Drafthouse will open in September, in a different location.

- Ken Burns is asking citizen documentarians to go out and interview World War II vets for the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. Here's how you can participate.

- The Wall Street Journal makes note of 'Four Eyed Monsters' on YouTube; the full film remains there until August 15th.

'Four Eyed Monsters' on YouTube: $23,000 So Far

Spout.com just put out a press release with some info on how well 'Four Eyed Monsters' is doing on YouTube. (Earlier post is here..) You'll remember that YouTube is hosting the full-length feature, and that Spout is paying the filmmakers $1 for every new user who signs up for their online community. It'll be available until August 15th, and the upper limit on Spout's generosity is $100,000.

From the release:

The campaign has raised $23,644 to date and will continue through the YouTube run.

"In one week on YouTube, Four Eyed Monsters was seen many times over by more than the amount of people who saw it in two years of traveling to over a dozen film festivals and self-distributing the movie," says Arin Crumley, co- creator of Four Eyed Monsters.

Actually, with YouTube, I'd note that you may know how many people started playing the movie -- but I suspect the site hasn't shared data with Arin about how many people watch 10 minutes of it, or the whole thing.

(So far the movie has racked up 500,000 "views"... but as with all YouTube content, it automatically starts playing when you visit its page.)

First Feature Film on YouTube: 'Four-Eyed Monsters' (and more Saturday news)

- The first (legal) feature film is up on YouTube, all 70 minutes of it. The experiment involves YouTube, the online filmfan community Spout.com, and `Four-Eyed Monsters' directors (and stars) Susan Buice and Arin Crumley.

Here's how it works -- watching the film is free, but before it plays, you get a one-minute message from Susan and Arin explaining that if you go join sign up for Spout.com, the site will pay them $1 for every new member they bring in, up to $100,000. Susan and Arin also ask viewers to post any video responses to the film on YouTube, and promise that they'll interact with viewers there for the next week. (Update: film will stay on YouTube for just one week.)

So this is basically a "bounty" business model, with an underwriter (Spout) promising the filmmakers a bounty for new members they can bring in. 'Four-Eyed Monsters,' of course, has already been on the festival circuit, already played theaters, and is already available for purchase as a DVD or a DRM-free digital download.

I'm embedding the film below. This is the first time you'll hear, on YouTube, the words "and now, the feature presentation..." (But probably not the last.)

Here's the official press release.

- The Visual Effects Society is holding its 2007 Festival of Visual Effects in Beverly Hills this weekend. If you can't make it in person, their list of the 50 greatest visual effects films of all time is well worth a look (here it is in PDF form. As is the teaser video with clips from many of the movies. I love the mix of classic films and recent ones...

The Wall Street Journal has a piece about the VES' top 50 list, in which Joe Morganstern writes:

Special effects don't have to be big to be special. The vast -- and vastly expensive -- motion-capture process behind "Polar Express" (a film wisely omitted from the VES 50/51 list) largely failed to capture emotions, and not just in the case of the glove-puppet-like faces; even the train of the title seemed inert. Yet the fleeting apparition of an almost incandescent train in Steven Spielberg's remake of "War of the Worlds" is a stunning effect, because the train represents escape from fearful danger. In Atom Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter," a film set in a town that has lost its children in a bus accident, the depiction of the bus plunging from a road into an icy river is technically modest, and visually removed; the whole thing is seen in extreme long shot. Yet it's anything but remote. The moment is, in fact, shattering, because we're watching what we're watching, a school bus with its precious cargo slowly sinking beneath a sheet of ice.

Looking at it another way, the more we bring to special effects, the more special they become. Heavy-duty digital genius wasn't needed for the moment at the end of John Boorman's "Excalibur" when the sword is flung back in the lake and received by a hand which, rising above the waters, submerges once again. For many of us, that image epitomizes the Arthurian legend (and maybe even evokes "Camelot," Richard Harris, Richard Burton, Lerner and Loewe and JFK.) Similarly, the effects in Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" are, by the filmmaker's choice, almost homespun -- a few digital creatures and embellishments, yes, but also puppets, painted sets and a monster who, quite discernibly, is an actor wearing a fantastical costume. Yet the cumulative effect is intense, for all of these excursions from literalism are part of a seamless whole that uses reality as a starting point. The end point, and the whole point, is magic.

- Could Amazon be mulling a purchase of Netflix? BusinessWeek.com looks at the possibility, noting:

Amazon could potentially address some of Netflix's subscriber-growth troubles by marketing the service to its large user base. It could also seek to improve [Amazon's download service] Unbox by combining it with Netflix's download service—should that model begin gaining significant traction with consumers.

- Another great BizWeek piece asks, How Big Will the iPhone Be?