“Bigger than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple, and Netflix combined.”

Browsing The Atlantic Wire this evening I came across the provocative headline Why College Kids Need a Course on Porn.

Tracing back to the source I came across this remarkable claim:

“There are an estimate 370 million Internet porn sites, and industry revenues surpass earnings by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple, and Netflix combined.”

Now just hold on a minute. I know, it seems like porn is all around us, especially on the internet, but com’on. Bigger than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple, and Netflix combined? Get out a calculator and run a few quick numbers and ask yourself, does that make any sense at all?

I happen to think how sex is depicted is important. I’ve explored it both empirically by making films about sex, and theoretically over at TheIntentToArouse.com.

But I get a little discouraged when these sorts of claims about the hugousity of porn get tossed off unchecked; at The New York Times, at Time Magazine, by Harvard economics professors, and even at my beloved Atlantic Magazine.

And of course it makes you wonder what else they’re getting wrong.

For about the bizillionth time, some real reporting on the size of the industry:

Forbes Article One

Forbes Article Two

You’re welcome.

Who Defending Craig’s List, Who’s Not, and the Future of the First Amendment

Craig’s List has (once again) come under fire for its Adult Services ads section. These ads are no different from the ads you can see in any Arts & Entertainment “street” paper in any medium sized city.

They used to be free, until a man used the Craig’s List ads as a way to make contact with prostitutes and then kill them. And although the data-trail left by Craig’s List helped find the killer, it’s not surprising there was some uproar about ads offering illegal services being on Craig’s List to begin with, and in the end Craig’s List relented to pressure to remove the adds entirely by beginning to charge for the listings, hiring lawyers to screen the ads, donating some of the ads proceeds to charity.

But apparently that was not satisfactory to a group of 17 States Attorneys General, who sent what amounted to an open letter to Craig’s List, accusing them of facilitating forced sexual servitude of adults and the sexual exploitation of children, and demanding that Craig’s List remove it’s Adult Service listing entirely.

And that’s what happened.

Whether or not people have the right to prostitute themselves is question sure to spark heated debate among those who care to debate it. Whether or not Craig’s List makes the business prostitution more or less chaotic, I don’t know. Whether or not the removal of Adult Services listing from Craig’s List will reduce sexual crimes against adults or children, I don’t know, but I doubt it.

What I do know is that over at Wired.com,  Ryan Single makes a pretty convincing case that the same laws that protect Google from being held responsible for videos that users upload or from being held responsible for comments users leave also protect Craig’s List:

CDA 230 protects Craigslist — and also WordPress, Yelp, Google Groups, Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Topix, Yahoo, The New York Times and Wired.com to name a few. Google’s Blogger isn’t responsible for any libel in any posts, Twitter isn’t responsible for Tweets from drug dealers, Facebook isn’t responsible for uploaded incriminating photos, Yelp can’t be sued if someone posts a libelous review, and no news site is legally responsible for what any commenter says.

Later in the same column, Single accuse the internet’s big players being afraid of taking a controversial position:

Craigslist’s complete retreat was from a compromise position it agreed to, two years ago with same said attorneys general — a few with political ambitions. Despite — or perhaps because of — Craigslist’s unconditional surrender, this group is amping up its assault on the 12-year old law that has allowed the net to flourish. And now Congress is getting into the righteousness with a hearing during which two representatives from Craigslist will face public flogging from politicians in the midst of an election season.

While we can expect this kind of showboating and moral grandstanding from politicians, the reason they’ve gotten this far has everything to do with companies like Google, Yahoo, Yelp and Facebook standing on the sidelines, silently allowing Craigslist to be pilloried out of fear they’ll be tainted as supporting prostitution and child-sex–trafficking if they stood up for an open internet.

But I would like to suggest that that the reason that WordPress, Yelp, Google Groups, Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Topix, Yahoo, The New York Times, etc haven’t spoken up isn’t because their afraid. In fact, quite the opposite. The reason for silence from this who’s who of internet heavies is because they are not afraid. And the reason I say this is because when they are afraid, they pipe right up. Here’s a July 3rd, 2010 editorial in the New York Times entitled The Right to be Wrong:

The Supreme Court has long held that newspapers and other publications have the right to be wrong, as long as they did not err deliberately or with negligence. As Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote in 1974, “the First Amendment requires that we protect some falsehood in order to protect speech that matters.” Unfortunately, the court missed an opportunity to uphold that principle when it refused to take an important First Amendment case last week.

In the case, the publisher of a financial newsletter promised a hot stock tip, based on inside information, to people willing to pay $1,000. About 1,200 people agreed to pay, but the tip did not pan out, and the stock failed to soar. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued the publisher for securities fraud, and the lower courts agreed that the publisher, Frank Porter Stansberry and his company, Agora Inc., should be penalized.

It was the first time the S.E.C. had gone after a publisher who did not have a stake in the stock in question. Normally, the laws against securities fraud are designed to prevent insider trading or manipulation by people who stand to profit through ownership of a stock.

Mr. Stansberry’s actions might seem unorthodox or even unethical by the standards of most reputable publishers, but that does not make them illegal. The implications of the S.E.C.’s action are potentially profound: newspapers or Web sites promising their paying readers stock information that later turns out to be untrue suddenly leave themselves open to fraud charges. Any financial commentator who passes on bad information in good faith could be sued.

A large group of newspaper publishers, including The New York Times, urged the Supreme Court to reverse the decision by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that Mr. Stansberry was liable for his actions. In a friend-of-the-court brief, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press called that decision “a significant threat to the free dissemination of news about the financial markets and specific investment opportunities.”

Without comment, the Supreme Court refused on Monday to review the decision. Congress now needs to fix the problem by adding an exemption for the news media to the securities fraud law, as it has done in other financial legislation. In the meantime, if the S.E.C. does not begin to stick to actual securities fraud and stop whittling at the First Amendment, financial journalism could become more cautious and less robust.

The sorts of listing that used to be found in the Craig’s List Adult Services section have already started showing up in other, less regulated areas of Craig’s List, and elsewhere on the internet. The State’s Attorneys Generals’ actions amounting to little more than a sweep of the internet’s best known, best lit and best tolerated red light district, temporarily dispersing vice until it congregates in another neighborhood that the State can afford to ignore. Ryan Single’s argument maybe be logical, but it’s not practical, so it will be largely ignored.

The Stansberry case is more interesting, or at least it’s more interesting to me. Here’s why.

In recent years, much has been made of the idea of the Citizen Journalist, and I lay much of the appeal of the phrase to the high status of the Citizen Soldier in our national mythology; the Everyman with his cellphone cam replacing the Kentucky Rifleman as our great hero in the struggle between citizens and State and (now) corporate control.

But when I look at the evolution tools of war and the evolution of the Second Amendment, what I notice is a widening gap between what we see as reasonable limits on what the Second Amendment protects and the weapons of professional soldiering. Today, Second Amendment cases revolve around carry laws, or possession laws, but no one makes the argument that the right to “keep and bear arms” includes the right of the average citizen to own grenades, or claymore mines, or a rocket launcher.

So now it would seem that in the face of the growing power of the information and communications tools available to the average person, the courts are faced with determining reasonable limits on what uses of these tools are protected by the First Amendment, with (as now) those who can successfully argue journalist status afforded a greater degree of protection than mere citizens. And as with Craig’s list, where these boundaries lie will be determined both by what we can afford ignore, and what we can afford police.

How Film Festivals and Distribution Deals Kill Independent Films Part 3, A Room Full of Strangers

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There wasn’t enough room in for the full title in the header, so for the benefit of clarity, here it is in all its verbose glory:

How Film Festivals and Distribution Deals Kill Independent Films, Part 3
A Room Full of Strangers: Film Festivals that actually help independent filmmakers and what that means in a post-DVD world

In Part 1 I made the general case for why the dream come true fairy tale story of festival glory leading to a lucrative distribution deal is really more of a nightmare; a system that can’t help but be gamed in favor of everyone except filmmakers.

In Part 2, A Tale of Two Indies I got into specifics. I compared financial trajectories of two indie films; one of them an indie doc that Time Magazine called “one of the 10 best films of 2006”, and the other our virtually unknown ASHLEY AND KISHA. Both films came out on DVD in June of 2007. But by June of 2008, the festival award winner, the film that got great reviews in the NYT (and many other places) and a “ligit” DVD distribution deal hadn’t sold that many more copies than ASHLEY AND KISHA, and hadn’t returned anything to its producer. By contrast, a year later ASHLEY AND KISHA was still selling briskly and still generating returns for its producers (that’s me and Peggy.)

In this installment I’m going to talk about film festivals that actually help filmmakers; what makes them different, and how that difference is an asset to an independent film producer and distributor. I’ll say it again, independent producer and distributor. If you’re not an independent distributor, then you’re not an independent filmmaker. If the previous two installments in this long-winded rant haven’t convinced you of that, you can quit reading and follow your bliss.

Still here? Okay then! Let’s get on with it.

As I said in yesterday’s post, a few hours after posting Part 2, I got an almost providential e-mail from a small Slovenian film festival. Here’s what happened.

The inquiry came through our DVD shop form mail. In polite, even deferential language the note gave a brief explanation of the festival’s history and mission and then asked if we would be interested in allowing our films to be screened. Apologies were made that because they were a small alternative festival with no sponsors they would not be able to fly us in, but they were prepared to either buy screening copies or borrow them and pay for shipping both ways. And oh yes, they also offered a modest screening fee.

Compare this to the usual process for a second-level festival in the US: Fill out e-form on WithOutABox.com, including the $25, $35, $50 fee. Send DVD screener. Wait until five weeks before the festival and then receive a form-letter explaining that there were 2,000 or 4,000 or 10,000 entries this year, and many worthy films were not included. (Or in our case, you might get a slightly more personal note explaining they “really liked your film, but since it’s already out on DVD…”)

Participating in this whole process might make sense if there was a pot of gold at end of the rainbow, but there isn’t. Getting into the “festival circuit” could well put you and your film on the road to financial ruin. Yeah, I know, that sounds like sour grapes; and with all the hype around Sundance, Tribeca, Berlin, whatever, it’s hard to accept that there isn’t any money in it. But fortunately for our fragile filmmakers’ psyches we don’t have to accept that there’s no money in it. We just have to understand where the money is going.

The news organizations covering the festivals are making money; magazines, TV shows, newspapers. Everyone working for them is getting paid. The PR people, the folks – the people charged with turning the screening of a bunch of no-name films in with unknown actors into a media event – they’re getting paid. The folks printing up all the posters, palmcards are getting paid. The venues are getting paid. A few people higher-ups at the film festival are getting paid. The restaurants and hotels are getting paid, and a bunch of people I can’t think of right now.

So yes, a lot of money is changing hands. The problem is: 1) somehow in the middle of all that commerce none of that money makes its way back into filmmakers’ pockets, and ; 2) all that time doing the “festival circuit” is draining the filmmakers war chest and cannibalizing the film’s audience.

So then what did we tell this virtually unknown Slovenian film festival?

Why we told them yes, of course! And we didn’t just tell them yes, we told them we wanted to support their festival and that we’d be happy to send the films they wanted at our own expense; and that their offer of a screening fee was very gracious, but that we’d rather they put the money towards printing their (very beautiful) poster. (see above)

So now maybe you’re thinking, if festivals are so bad for indie filmmakers, why did you 1) say yes to having your film shown, and; 2) turn down their money?

A big part of the answer to that can be found in last month’s screening of ASHLEY AND KISHA at the NYC LGBT Center. What’s worth noting about that screening was that a huge percentage of the women (my editor Michael and I were the only men in attendance) who came out to the screening had already seen the movie on DVD; and of the women who had already seen the film on DVD, a lot of them even already owned the DVD, which means they could watch ASHLEY AND KISHA at home any time they wanted. Those that didn’t already own the DVD were paying $10/person to sit on a folding metal chair to watch the film being projected on a pulldown screen in a boomy concrete room. If you came as a couple, add subways or cab fair and you could buy the DVD from us and come out ahead.

Except it’s not the same thing.

Watching at home is great. Peggy and I are huge fans of the whole DVD thing. We have a 42″ LCD TV, and even when were were on our boat last year, we took along about 100 DVDs and watched one or two of them on Peggy’s laptop most nights. But watching a DVD at home, by yourself or curled up with your lover is not the same experience as watching a film in room full of strangers.

It’s not the same thing, and people are willing to go out of their way to have the experience. Put the right film in front of the right audience and they will sit on folding metal chairs for the chance to be a part of an audience that’s going to get all the in jokes and the asides, that’s going to sigh and tear up at the more subtle passages. It’s not church, but it might be the closest thing we have in secular society, the communal experience of audience cohesion under the thrall of a film that moves them.

But what does that mean for the independent filmmaker?

Well first it helps you set a standard for yourself. YouTube’s proven just how hard it is to monetize even legions of online viewers. Every other day one video or another goes “viral” without putting a penny in the producer’s pocket. The festival circuit? We’ve covered that ground. No gold at the end of that rainbow, not for the filmmaker at least. But if you can make a film that can draw a paying audience, a film that can pack the house, even when they could stay home and watch it on DVD, you just might be on to something.

The second is that festivals like the one being put on by these lovely folks in Slovenia are going to help you better understand who wants to see your film and how you’re going to reach them. Festivals like this will help get you in the mindset of putting your audience first. Not praise from other filmmakers, not festival programmers, not distributors; none of these people are interested in giving you a dime. But if you can make ordinary people feel like watching your movie was time well spent, they’ll be happy to give you their money.

What that means is you need to find film festivals and other curated cinematic events that see their mission as serving an audience. You’re not going to see that in most of the festival hype. They’ll go on about how they really care about filmmakers (they don’t); or how they get x many industry buyers; or whatever. All that stuff is bullshit. You don’t want it, you don’t need it, it’s not going to help you make money off your movie.

The festivals that will help you are festivals that are focused on making their audiences happy because that’s what your focus as a filmmaker needs to be. You need to make films that makes audiences happy.

What will help you make money off your movie is: 1) movie that people want to pay (you) to see; 2) finding the people who want to see your movie. An example:

About year and a half ago I met David Bennencourt, director of the doc YOU MUST BE THIS TALL: THE STORY OF ROCKY POINT PARK on the semi-private professional documentary forum The D-Word. Rocky Point Park was an amusement park in Rhode Island that almost everyone in the region above a certain age had fond and nostalgic memories for. David had pulled together archival footage and interviews in a straight-forward historical documentary style, and and on the forum he was telling amazing stories about the successes he was having marketing his film. He was actually walking in off the street to regional Barnes & Noble stores and selling DVDs by the hundred-count box load.

He was able to do this because once he finished YOU MUST BE THIS TALL he screened it to every church, civic group, school, to any place and to anyone he could think of within driving distance of the now torn down Rocky Point Amusement park. And guess what? People loved it! He got all kinds of local press coverage; newspapers and magazines. He got TV coverage, with clips of the film and shots of people standing in line to see it. He even picked up a few film festivals along the way, including the prestigious Rhode Island International (how could they resist?). But it wasn’t the film festivals that helped sell DVDs. It was making a film that people (all caps now) WANTED TO PAY HIM MONEY TO SEE.

Last I heard David was taking his profits and rolling them into his next film.

Now you’d think that the D-worders would have been fascinated and inspired by David’s success. He made a documentary film, on his own terms, on a subject close to his heart. No investors to charm, no grants to write, no distributors to fuck him over. But they weren’t. They had all sorts of excuses for why David’s success was exceptional; all sorts of reason for why David’s approach wouldn’t work for the kinds of movies that they wanted to make; all sort of reasons why they had to play the funding game, and the festival game, and the distribution game. David quit posting. I don’t know if he was discouraged, disgusted, or just too busy selling DVDs to care, but he quit posting.

(Not too long after David quit posting I pointed out to some of the D-word heavies that they had treated David pretty condescendingly; and that even the D-worders who played the grant/festival/distributor game perfectly didn’t end up with much money in their pocket, or even financing for their next project; and spent an awful lot of time complaining that the system was broken. That wasn’t well received either, so I moved on too.)

The “problem” with David’s approach is that it seems both too easy and too hard. Too easy because he selected a subject with an obvious market; too hard because his approach required a big down payment in money and shoe leather both. People are threatened by that kind of success because it sort suggests that they’re stupid and lazy and afraid to put their money with their mouth is. Nobody, most especially not people who see themselves as “independent” appreciates that!

But what makes David’s approach work is the same thing that made Bruce Brown’s approach work, or our approach for that matter. Bruce, David, me; we all took down every obstacle between us and the one gatekeeper that matters the most – the person with a $20 bill in their pocket, trying to decide whether or not to trade it for a copy of one of our movies. It’s worked for our films, and it can work for anyone who makes a film about something they’re passionate about, and makes that film well enough that people want to watch it.

This is where the rubber hits the road. Not in at an assistant festival programer’s desk, where he’s got a stack of 200 DVD-R screener, fast-forwarding through one after one, looking for a reason to hit eject and move on to the next one. Not in a distributor’s office where they “bottle” and market movies the same way that Coca Cola bottle and markets bubbly brown liquid.

What makes independent film different and special is that it’s a way of doing business that connects filmmakers and the films they make directly to the audience that want to see them. It’s not about Cinderella success stories or all the other Hollywood hype on the festival circuit. And whether the subject matter is surfing, or regional nostalgia, or love and sex, the common denominator is the unmediated connection between artist and audience.

Part four of this already long and threatening to get longer rant is tentatively titled “The Great Internet Swindle”, and will look at what the internet can and cannot do to help independent filmmakers promote and sell their films. Recommended reading before the next installment is “Against Search”, by Christophe Pettus. Christophe has been a computer programmer since forever, an internet merchant since 1993, and for the last few years, an independent DVD producer and distributor. This passage in particular is key:

Remember how people told us that the Internet would completely disintermediate everything, and it would be a direct artist-to-consumer paradise? They lied.

Now go read the rest!

How Film Festivals and Distribution Deals Kill Independent Films: Part 2, A Tale of Two Indies

(First published on February 4th, 2009 at The Art & Business of Making Erotic Films)

In the previous post, I made the general case for how the indie film model — the festival circuit to get a distribution deal/theatrical run as a promotional event for DVD sales — hurts independent filmmakers. And by hurt I mean it’s a system that by its very nature puts filmmakers at a disadvantage in negotiations, and puts less money in filmmakers pockets, making it harder for them to pay their bills, let alone make more movies.

Today, specifics.

A TALE OF TWO INDIES

“It was the best of time, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it ws the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everythying before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, their period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being recieved, for good or for eveil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

In 2006 a colleague released a low budget documentary onto the “festival circuit.” It wasn’t shot with a cellphone in a favela, but it was made almost entirely out of found and handicam-acquired footage, so his shooting costs were low. But he’s not an editor, so shaping his footage into a film cost him some money, and I’m pretty sure he paid his composer as well.

This fellow had a good track record in the doco world, lots of connections and contacts. But as he likes to say, “Knowing people just means you get to hear ‘no’ faster.” But in the case of this movie, he didn’t hear “no” nearly as much as most of us do. He heard “yes” from the right people in the right places. And he should have. He had a damn good film.

The film was about as well-received as one could hope for, playing some of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. On the strength of the festival run, the film was able to attract investors to finance a limited theatrical run. The theatrical run is key because without a theatrical run you can’t get reviews from mainstream film critics (NYT, Time, etc.) or Oscar consideration. In terms of press, the theatrical run was a success as well – called “one of the ten best of 2006”; and the film was on the shortlist for consideration for nomination for an Academy award.

But financially the film was anything but a success. Even with reviews a filmmaker doesn’t dare dream of, the theatrical run lost money. Even as one of “the ten best films of 2006”, the advance for the DVD rights was about $35K, and didn’t go into the filmmaker’s pocket. Well actually it did go into his pocket, and then right back out again to pay back the people who invested in the theatrical run.

The film came out on DVD in June of 2007, months after all the good press. And of course by that time, a lot of the film’s potential audience had already seen it; either on the “festival circuit” or in its theatrical run, so not one dollar from that ended up in the filmmaker’s pocket. Whether any of the people who’d seen the film in the theater also bought the DVD is hard to know, but if they did, none of that money made it back into the filmmaker’s pocket either. By the Summer of 2008 the film had sold about 6,000 units on DVD (a pretty respectable number for an indie doc) but had still not earned out its advance.

After all that work and all that success – making the film, touring the film, promoting the film, a theatrical run with great reviews and DVD distribution deal – the filmmaker had made nothing.

As it happens, our film ASHLEY AND KISHA: FINDING THE RIGHT FIT also came out on DVD in June of 2007.

ASHLEY AND KISHA was a hybrid production shot on Super16 film and 24p video. Everyone who worked on the production was paid union minimum or better. The editor didn’t get paid because (for better or worse) the editor was yours truly. There were no DVD authoring costs because over the years that’s something I’ve learned how to do too (it’s not that hard.) All the packaging and marketing artwork was produced by Peggy, because over the years that’s something that she’s taught herself to do. I’m lining all these things out to give an idea of what it took in terms of creative resources and money to get each of these films to DVD. I think it’s a fair guess that A&K cost more to produce (crew, subjects, equipment, filmstock and processing,) and the other film cost more in post (editor, composer, DVD authoring and package design.)

The DVD release of ASHLEY AND KISHA didn’t have any festival buzz or critical acclaim behind it, but it did have a string of modestly successful, well-branded productions preceding it. People knew the name “Comstock Films” and had a certain level of expectation for a Tony Comstock-directed film. Over the years we had leveraged that branding and expectation into an in-house distribution system, just the way we had taught ourselves to shoot, edit, author and package our films. We even had “investors” of a sort; the first copies of ASHLEY AND KISHA didn’t go out to festival programers, distributors, or buyers. They went out to the 500 or so people who had pre-ordered the film, and paid in advance in exchange for a discounted price (and netting themselves a nice ROI!)

A year later, ASHLEY AND KISHA had played a few festivals and garnered a few honors, which is always gratifying, but most importantly people were buying the DVD. Before the year was over, the first pressing was sold out and demand was still strong. We sent off a reprint order, and Peggy updated the insert artwork to include our festival laurels. Before this year is over we’ll do another pressing and Peggy will update the artwork again.

Our distribution model doesn’t have the same “out the door pop” as traditional DVD distribution, but we also don’t have ultra-discounted copies of our DVDs showing up at places like DeepDiscount.com the day of release either. And because we make money on every copy that somebody buys, we have ongoing incentive to continue to promote our films. Long after a traditional distributor would have lost interest and moved on, we’re still we’re still banging the gong for ASHLEY AND KISHA. Hell, we’re still banging the gong for MARIE AND JACK; which is somewhere in its fifth or sixth pressing.

Now I can hear what some of you are thinking. You’re thinking that our movies have explicit sex in them and that’s the difference. It’s not. If it were, then films like SHORTBUS or 9 SONGS or DESTRICTED would be big hits. Obviously they’re not. Michael Winterbottom hasn’t seen any reason to further explore explicit sex. Within a year of HEDWIG John Cameron Mitchell was already talking about “The Sex Film Project” but more than two years after SHORTBUS there’s no news of his next project. And DESTRICTED, well what can one say about DESTRICTED, except to be thankful that promises of it merely being the beginning have gone unfulfilled.

And despite everything you’re heard about the “adult industry” being a multi-jizzilion dollar business where the studio heads are Roll Royce-driving jizzilionaires, the simple truth is that pornography is a very low volume, low margin business. Most adult DVDs only sell a few hundred copies. Even Vivid, the 800 pound gorilla of the adult industry, typically sells only 5,000 -10,000 DVDs per title.

So there it is. A tale of two indies. A tale of two approaches for getting films out into the world so people can see them (aka distribution.) The traditional approach, playing the festival game and touring your film nets more recognition but not very much money. The DIY distribution approach flies below the radar, but puts more money in your pocket. Which one is right for you and your film depends an awful lot on what you want to get out of being a filmmaker.

But when considering that question, it’s worth thinking about the case of Bruce Brown, director of one of the greatest indie film success stories there ever was, “The Endless Summer.”

Bruce Brown started shooting surf films back in the early sixties. He’d spend half the year making a film, and the other half of the year four-walling it. (Four-walling is when the filmmaker rents the venue, does his own publicity and promotion, and pockets all the sales. 100% of the risk, 100% of the reward.)

Then he’d take the money he made from the previous film, and put it into his next film. After five years of this he felt like if he could take two years to make a film that could really raise his game; and he had built up enough of a reputation and war chest that he had the time and money to do it.

The result was “The Endless Summer”, which was an instant hit on the surf-film circuit. But the story doesn’t end there.

When distributors told Brown that his film would “never play 10 minutes from the coast”, he had the gumption and the money to four-wall it in Witchita, Kansas, a venue as far away from the ocean as he could find. And it was a hit.

When distributors told Brown that Wichita was a fluke, he had the gumption and the money to take the film to New York City and four-wall it there. It played to sold-out audiences for a year.

When distributors finally noticed all money that “The Endless Summer” was making in New York, and tried to low-ball Brown, he said, “Thanks but no thanks. We make more than that in a single week.”

When distributors told Brown, “We have a better idea for how to market your film to a general audience. More girls, less surfing.” Brown told them they were wrong and walked away.

Of course there was no Academy Award nomination for “The Endless Summer”. The Academy is and always has been rather notorious for being blind to films made outside the system. Brown had to make another film, “On Any Sunday” to get his Oscar nomination; which I’m sure he was happy to have, but doubt that he needed to pay his bills.

Next up, Part 3, A Room Full of Strangers: Film Festivals that actually help independent filmmakers and what that means in a post-DVD world

How Film Festival and Distribution Deals Kill Independent Film, Part 1

(First publish on February 3rd, 2009 at The Art & Business of Making Erotic Films)

Back in 2001 when I shot MARIE AND JACK: A HARDCORE LOVE STORY I was, to put it mildly, rather naive about the indie film game. Silly me, I thought in a world where a serious approach to sex on screen was defined by aggressively sex-negative films from directors like Gaspar Noé and Catherine Breillat, the guileless earnestness and sincere eroticism of MARIE AND JACK would be a welcome breath of fresh air. I thought that film festivals were about putting provocative new works in front of cinephilic audiences, and that a film that made audiences feel good about seeing true love in all its glory was about as provocative an idea as a filmmaker could have about sex and cinema.

Silly me. I hadn’t yet learned about the “intent to arouse” doctrine. I didn’t yet know that in Utah, home of the Sundance Film Festival, sales of a film like MARIE AND JACK are prohibited by law. I didn’t know about these sorts of things and how they still affect the way that people — including festival programmers — think about what they can and should put in their festivals. After 18 months of sending off screeners to every festival I could think of, I had more or less struck out. Not even a no-name festival in my hometown was interested in screening MARIE AND JACK. (Yes, I know, there are laurel leaves on the box cover. The very few venues we played were very different festivals with a very different mandate and mission. More on the value of these sort of festivals in a post DVD world in the next entry.)

But as ignorant as I was about the social and legal climate that dictated our collective understanding of what it meant to be “serious” about sex and cinema, I was even more ignorant of the business of independent cinema; by business I mean quite plainly box office grosses, DVD units, and how much money ends up back in the pocket of a film’s producers.

The fairy tale narrative goes something like this:

Scrappy gang of young artists put together a film on a shoe-string budget. Invariably a key to their success is a just-now available to consumers product (high limit credit cards, “prosumer” video cameras, desktop video editing, etc.) Said shoe-string budget film goes on to be the darling of the film festival circuit. From there it’s a distribution deal for the film, and a three picture deal for the film’s director. The film pulls in about $16M at the box office. Not a big deal by Hollywood standards, but a stunning 50:1 ROI. Another rags-to-riches, hard work and derring-do success story!

Thank God my ignorance saved me and my films from such success. Here’s how it really works.

Naive young artist makes film. If she’s smart, she uses whatever the shiny new prosumers gizmo is in her production. This is important because if she uses (for example) the new Sony HDV camera and makes something that isn’t crap, Sony will give her a lot of free publicity. The shiny new gizmo could be FinalCutPro, MagicBullet, or a Panasonic HDX 200. The important thing is that it’s not the shiny new gizmo that everyone already has. There’s no marketing value for Sony in cheering a film shot on last year’s model. Next stop, the film festivals.

When you stop and think about it, film festivals are some kind of amazing. They get their films for free. They get a lot of volunteer labor. They get sponsors and underwriters. In some countries they even get government funding. Ticket prices are often higher than regular films at for-profit theaters. Overwhelmingly they are non-profit and get special tax treatment.

Yet in spite of all these advantages, film festivals can’t seem to find a way to pay filmmakers for showing their films. Oh maybe there’s money to fly you in, maybe even a hotel to stay in, maybe even a token screening fee. But mostly “doing the festival circuit” is a big financial drain. If your film is a “success” on the festival circuit, hundreds, even thousands of people will see your film, and you won’t see a dime.

So why do filmmakers participate in a system that is gamed against them? It’s all in the hopes of getting a coveted a “distribution deal,” with all the fame and fortune that goes with it.

Fame? Maybe a little (anyone remember Daniel Myric and Eduardo Sánchez?) Fortune? Most certainly not. Here’s how it works:

By the time you get to the end of the “festival circuit” you are dead broke. Maybe you shot your film on a cell phone in a favela in Brazil, but the airline tickets and hotel rooms and meals for the circuit take cash money. Plus if you’re “out on the circuit” you’re not working. Unless you’re a trust-fund baby, you arrive at negotiations with distributors in the weakest possible position.

So there you are. In spite of a well-received festival run, you’re in debt and a large portion of the cinephile audience has already seen your film. Of course your film isn’t available on DVD, because film festivals don’t play films that are already available on DVD, so people who read about your festival success, (the best press your film is ever going to get,) can’t give you their money. Things are bad. But they’re about to get worse. You’re about to get offered a $50K advance for your film.

Of course that’s if you took the grand jury prize at Sundance. If your film wasn’t quite so successful, you’ll get offered less. But just wait till you hear the terms.

“Advance” has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? It sounds like it’s the beginning of the money; something to tide you over until the royalties start rolling in. Maybe you’ll use it to take a long and well-deserved vacation to St. Barts and by the time you get home, your first statement will be waiting for you; and more importantly your first check. But that’s not the way it’s going to work.

Your film is about to become the bubbly brown liquid in a giant marketing and hype machine. As essential as it is, that magical combination of water, sugar, and carbonation is a financially trivial part of what makes Coke Coke. Your film is about to get the same treatment. Here’s why.

Big budget Hollywood movies run on about a 3:2 production to marketing ratio; the figure I’ve read is that the average Hollywood film has a production budget of about $60M and a marketing budget of about $40M. But for independent films, the marketing ratio puts makes the film a much smaller part of the financial equation. Harvey Weinstein once said that even if he got a film for free, he’d still have to spend $20M on marketing, and “break-out” indie films (films that might make $10m-$20 at the box office) routinely have marketing and promotion budgets that are 10 or 20 or even 50 times greater than their production budgets. So much for the ROI on a half-million dollar picture. And so much for those royalty checks.

Read the hype and you’d think that the film is a big hit. In fact all the “profit” has disappeared into advertising, press agents, photocopies, and a zillion other expenses (if you think $4 for an aspirin on a hospital bill is outrageous, just wait till you see a distributor’s expense report!) Once the distributor is finished tallying up the score, the theatrical run will turn out to be a loser; a bunch of hype in the hopes of broadcast and DVD sales. And guess what, before a single royalty check is cut, the TV and DVD sales have to fill in the financial crater left by the theatrical run. The filmmaker with the “breakout” hit is never going to see another dime.

And that “three picture deal”? That’s not a guarantee of financing for your next three films. That’s an option for the distributor to get first right of refusal, at a price they set, on your next three projects.

Next. Part 2: A Tale of Two Indie Films

Instant Karma

So this Google Instant thing has made the rounds now, and my impression is that outside of sexy people, and the networkie people, and the I hate Google because they’re big and successful people, the various oddities around what does and doesn’t produce Instant Returns aren’t going to be seen as any great inconvenience by most people.

Yes, once you see how the game is played, you can get some odd results that will absolutely point out 1) as a culture, we have some pretty conflicted feelings about sex; and 2) that machines don’t do a very good job of making marginal calls.

For example, [Kim Kardashian] will return results instantly, but [Pamela Anderson] will not. [Alfred Kinsey] will return results instantly, but [Kinsey] will not.

What that says about The Algorithm, I don’t know, except that if you work in the area of sexuality and put yourself at the mercy of machines you do so at your own peril. I spent a good few hours poking the damn thing with a stick, and even on our own movie titles, I can’t figure out why some of them return instant results, and some of them get nothing but a white screen.

But as I’ve seen in countless comments on any number of blog posts and articles about Google Instant, if the search is really that important to you, you can just hit the ‘return’ key button, and Google will deliver the results to you, however hoary and gory they are.

Does it bother me that people don’t have to hit return to see results for [storm front]? Yes it does. But I’m sure that Google’s answer to this would be similar to the entertainment industry’s answer to the frequent accusations that there is too much sex and violence in movies, music, videogames.

The entertainment industry’s stock standard answer to these criticisms is that movies, music and videogames don’t shape culture, they reflect it; and I’m have no doubt Google would say that the user experience Instant provides is the user experience most people want, and what results are or are not shown in that experience reflects the values of the culture in which it exists.

On the subject of results, what I have noticed is that at least anecdotally as of today Google’s search results on things you would expect would return at least some sexually explicit results look a whole lot less scrubbed than they did a couple of years ago when I wrote about returns for the search [real sex], and Seth Finkelstein, writing for The Guardian, wrote about me writing about it. But what Seth wrote then still applies:

It’s become almost a cliche to point out that algorithmic choices made by search engines represent social values. But different factions care about different values, as demonstrated in the case of complex topics such as sex. As more groups begin to see how Google’s determinations affect their own interests, we’ll likely see repeated outrage from people newly arrived to these debates.

With the debut of Instant, what Google doesn’t show in its user interface and search returns seems to have received more attention than all the previous coverage added up. Between December 2006 and now, the wider world has become a little more cautious about the pervasiveness of Google in our lives.

Here at the at end of 2010, what had been a niche concern about Google’s power has evolved into a minor industry devoted to debating how so much control in the hands of one dominant, opaque company stands to effect our culture and our economy. I quoted Kevin Marks in my last Google post, but it’s worth quoting him again:

[Our dependance on algorithms] has only got worse since then; in some ways the computers programmed to write and evaluate prose are analogous to the computers programmed to securitize and trade mortagages – they are growing large enough to outweigh and destabilize the human activities that provides their reason to exist in the first place.

Rereading Mark’s quote puts me in mind of two tid-bits I came across in the last week.

The first is (IIRC) Nick Carr’s claim that today the average photo is looked at less than once. (Sorry, no citation)

The second was a tweet from Bethany Noviskie that the descipline of Biology alone produces two academic papers per minute, and production has outpaced the capacity for peer review.

And all added up, this reminds me of something independent director Victor Nunez said at a Kodak symposium I went to in 2003.

The symposium was ostensibly a sales pitch by Kodak to up-and-coming filmmakers to consider Super16 instead of the (much ballyhooed at the time) DV video. In a nutshell, the argument was that if everyone is shooting DV, the market would soon be flooded with films shot on DV, and in such a market, a project shot on film would not only look better, but more importantly, would stand out from everything else. To further the argument, Victor was there, talking about his experience shooting the Oscar nominated Ulee’s Gold, as well as other of his films on Super16.

But the thing that stuck with me was when Victor kind of sighed, and then offered with what seemed to me like deep resignation, “It’s getting to be an I’ll watch your film if you watch mine world.”

And that’s more or less what’s come to pass.

Just as there simply aren’t enough biologists to review all the biology papers being produced, there aren’t enough film goers to see (let alone pay to see) all the films that are being made. Nor are there enough readers to read all the books that are being written, or listeners  to listen to all the music that’s being made.

And the scarcest resource is no longer time, or money, or even inspiration — it’s attention.

The last film I made that wasn’t about sex.

My first erotic documentary, MARIE AND JACK: A HARDCORE LOVE STORY, was shot in July of 2001, in the bedroom of our Hell’s Kitchen apartment.

It turned out to be a pretty good little movie, but the truth is at the time I thought the shoot was a near miss, and I didn’t think I had a movie. I thought their lovemaking was very nice, but I was disappointed with the interview. It had way too much material there was no way I could illustrate, and I just didn’t see how it would cut into a movie. I took the footage to the studio, cut the sex footage into a very crisp 5 minute vignette, figuring that after 5 years of experimenting with couples in private, at least I now had a model-released, shot to be seen by the public demonstration of my vision of how sex could be photographed and edited.

How I would use interview to create character and story and then wed that to the lovemaking would have to wait for another day.

Then nine years ago, on a morning very much like this one, the world turned upside down.

Two weeks earlier, my wife had flown to Oregon to take my mother up on the offer to give us her Mustang convertible (a crappy late 80s one, not a classic) and Peggy had only arrived home the night before. There was a beautiful swell running, and after two weeks of sitting on the beach with our baby, I was out the door early.

The waves were big and clean. The wind was lightly offshore. The sky was, as it is this morning, clear early Autumn bright. It was a perfect day.

Then strange and confusing rumors started coming out with fellows paddling into the line up. An airplane had hit one of the Trade Center towers.

How could that be? I knew that a plane once hit the Empire State Building, but that was years ago, at night, in a fog. How could a plane hit the Trade Center on a bright clear morning? Anyway, the waves were good, and I kept surfing.

Then more rumors that made less sense.

I kept surfing.

Then one of the regulars paddled out. There had been an attack and towers were on the ground. He was a recently retired Manhattan fireman, so I figured if he said it, it must be true. Immediately I thought of my uncle and my sister-in-law and figured they must be dead.

But it was a perfect day, so I kept surfing until I couldn’t take the anxiety anymore. I caught a wave, rode it to the beach, and drove home.

Contrary to her habit, my wife was up early that morning. When she checked her e-mail there were a bunch of “Are you alright?” notes from her online friends. She turned on the television just in time to see the second tower collapse, and when I got home she was collapsed in front of the TV, sobbing.

“They’re okay!” she burst out as I came through the door. Family members had called to let us know that my uncle hadn’t gone to work that day, and that my wife’s sister, although she had been thrown from her chair by the impact of the plane, had been able to escape without injury.

We spend the next three days watching the TV and crying.

—

Our business came to a complete standstill.

In October I finished MARIE AND JACK in one non-stop 4 week editing session, and although it was not the movie I had set out to make, it wasn’t as bad as I had first feared. In fact, some people were telling me it was the best integration of character, story, and explicit sexuality they had ever seen.

Unfortunately, those people were not festival curators or film distributors.

In January we sublet our apartment, in February we let the lease run out on our studio, and in March I sold my rapidly devaluing AVID editing system.

Then in early May the phone rang. I was asked if I would be interested in producing a film about pastoral counseling and 9/11. Of course I said yes, (please don’t misunderstand, I had produced many explicitly religious films, for this client and others.)

There was one condition: would I agree not to put my company’s name in the credits for the film. There was some concern that in this context “Crumbling Empire Productions” might upset people. Of course I said yes.

—

SUDDEN SHOCK: SPIRITUAL DOUBT AND RENEWAL IN THE WAKE OF 9/11 was produced in three days of principle interview photography and one day of second unit photography.

From the outset I made the decision not to show any footage from the day of the attack, feeling that it was a waste of resources to show people images that were already well-known, and the intensity of the images risked overwhelming the smaller, personal stories that would comprise my film. The film was edited against a September 1 deadline so that it would be ready for the 1st anniversary, a relatively short amount of time to turn 25+ hours of testimony from more than 20 subjects, and 2 hours of second unit photography into a 25 minute film. The film was well received by the client, by my friends and colleagues, and by its audience.

But for me, the aftermath of SUDDEN SHOCK was mixed.

Unbeknownst to me, SUDDEN SHOCK was tangled up in a larger power struggle within the organization that commissioned it. Outwardly the film was a tremendous success, and I was asked to begin work on a larger piece for the same organization. But when I found I myself sitting at the very first meeting of stakeholders with a woman screaming at me that SHOCK was a waste of money and that I was “taking food out of babies’ mouths, I knew that project wasn’t going to go well. That next film took more than a year to finish, contradictory agendas born of the above power struggle caused delays and waste, and while the resulting film was perfectly fine, it did not realize the investment that had been made in the project. It was the first time I had had a project spin so completely out of control, and I was bitterly disappointed; both by the fact that I hadn’t been able to make the film I knew was “in the can” and by the pettiness that had prevented me from doing so.

—

The disappointment faded, but the above project gave me a more lasting gift.

The project took me to Kenya for a month, and upon my return home I had a terrible stomach ache, and was generally lethargic. I underwent a series of tests to see what sort of nasty African bush bug had taken up residency in my guts, but all the tests came back negative. But my stomach ache got worse, and it was finally determined that it was a psychosomatic stress response, and I was in fact suffering from a bout of depression. (The unmowed lawn and disinterest in anything else should have been a clue.)

Later, when I was recounting my mental misadventures with Souha Nikowitz (the Lebanonese psychotheripist in SUDDEN SHOCK) she said, “Well think of what you do. You go to all these terrible places and hear people tell you all these terrible things. Then you come home and lock yourself in a dark room and listen to it over and over and over again. This is not behavior that is conducive to good mental health!”

—

The day before yesterday I noticed my stomach hurt. In fact it hurt enough that I went to bed early.

When I woke up yesterday it still hurt, and it hurt throughout the day, becoming particularly bad last night. Then I thought about what an exciting and productive week it had been, with essays about Lower Manhattan and Google Instant, and a lot of e-mails back and forth with friends and colleagues about “Big Ideas”. And then I looked at the calendar, and knew that in a few days my stomach ache would likely pass.

—

The blurb on the DLR Films website reads as follows:

Sudden Shock: Spiritual Struggle and Renewal in the Wake of 9/11 is a documentary focusing on the work clergy, chaplains, and other faith-based caregivers have been doing in and around New York City since 9/11. The work takes an emotional and spiritual toll on these men and women, but it has also given them renewed hope and reinvigorated their faith. It’s a small film about a big idea: that love is more powerful than fear.

I wanted to embed it here at the bottom of this post, but WordPress is being cranky. If you’re so inclined, you can watch SUDDEN SHOCK online at the DLR Films website. As I said before, there are no images from that day in the film. Just testimony and some footage of life “getting back to normal” a few months later, and a beautiful score.

What’s Happening with Google Instant Didn’t Happen Overnight

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” – George Orwell

So now everybody knows — there are some things that Google doesn’t want to show you.

This is not news.

In December of 2006 I broke the Great Google Sex Bug story, a story that was covered by outlets as varied as SearchEngineLand.com, Boing Boing, PBS.org, and the New York Post; and in the years that followed, I chronicled a systematic campaign by Google to control and suppress sexuality-related returns.

Specifically relating to Google’s autofill, in November 2008 I wrote about an internal Google database that prevents certain search strings from being include in Google’s “Suggest” feature, which autopopulates its search box.

In that same month, I discovered and wrote about gender bias in Google’s treatment of proper medical terms for sex organs.

My mistake is that I wrote about all of this on The Art & Business of Making Erotic Films, thereby relegating my observations to the back alleys of the internet. I was idealistic to the point of foolishness.

But in May of this year, James Fallows was kind enough to post these and other of my observations about how Google’s search algorithms affect our company, with an eye to the broader implications.

But it wasn’t until yesterday, when Google rolled out its new Instant search product that the world took notice of the fact that Google has some pretty strong opinions about what you do and don’t want to see. What can I say, except welcome to the party, folks.

—

Over at Kevin Marks’ blog, in a post about Orwell and Google Scribe, Kevin wrote:

[Our dependance on algorithms] has only got worse since then; in some ways the computers programmed to write and evaluate prose are analogous to the computers programmed to securitize and trade mortagages – they are growing large enough to outweigh and destabilize the human activities that provides their reason to exist in the first place.

Considering how the computerized securitization and trading of mortgages turned out, that’s a pretty unsettling thought, isn’t it?

The only thing I’m ever going to say about the “Ground Zero Mosque”.

Skin in the game:

My wife’s sister was in one of the towers that morning, but made it out alive. My uncle would have been, but didn’t go into work that day. For a few hours that morning I thought they were both dead.

Thought:

If you have employees who are smokers and you don’t provide them with the time to smoke, a place to smoke and a place to put their cigarette butts, they’re going to smoke at times and in places that are inconvenient or even dangerous to themselves and/or their co-workers, and there are going to be cigarette butts all over the place.

My Daughter Swears an Oath

Tomorrow is the first day of school, and our eldest daughter is going into the sixth grade.

Right before our very eyes, our daughter is changing from a child to a young woman, and the process is simultaneously gladdening, startling, and makes me a little wistful. Everyday she is a little less dependent, a little more autonomous, a little more responsible for herself, and a little more exposed to the indifference of the universe.

Her first great leap in this process is that this summer we began to allow her to go to the beach with a friend, but without parents along, and she reveled in her new-found freedom, returning from her first day at the beach declaring it “the best day of her life!”

Another step in her walk toward responsibility is her declaration that, although some of her friends have begun to use profanity, she is determined to abstain until high school. Furthermore, she has decided that she is not going to use exclamations that are merely thinly disguised versions of stronger words: no “shoot” or  “crap” or “dagnabit”. I am proud of her, for her choice, her sense of appropriateness; but even more so for the fact that she’s thought it through and made a choice.

I don’t know if the work Peggy and I do makes us more sensitive to issues of sexuality, profanity, and age-appropriateness, but you certainly don’t have to make sexually explicit documentaries to find yourself neck-deep in these questions; and not always at the place of your choosing. From a couple years back on Peggy’s blog:

So while Google is busy doing its part to (presumably) keep our nation’s impressionable youngsters “safe” from sexual terminology and content (check out Tony’s blog for more,) I get called upon to explain erectile dysfunction to my nine year old daughter while innocently trying to watch a PG-rated show at 9:00pm on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Hilariously, I’m almost afraid to type the brand name of the product being advertised for fear the Google-bot will find the offending name on this blog and penalize the Comstock Films site as a drug-spamming, malware breeding, den of iniquity. We’ve got enough problems with the Google-bot already, thanks. So let’s just say the commercial was for a drug, name beginning with the letter ‘C,’ famous for featuring attractive and affluent looking middle-aged couples lounging in side by side bathtubs with smarmy faux-cool jazz playing in the background. (Because nothing says intimacy like individual high-walled ceramic pods-for-one, but that’s a head-scratcher for another day.)

So, back to the sofa in the Comstock family den, daughter #1 and I curled up for our weekly dose of implausible science-fictional fun, and whammo: commercial break after commercial break, here comes that smarmy faux-cool jazz and alarming quick-spoken fine print babble about “erections lasting more than four hours.” Wonderful family viewing, piped right into our home, no searching required! Fabulous!

“Mom,” daughter #1 asks finally after being bombarded by these ads, wrinkling her little brow in consternation. “What is E.D.?”

I’m a good little arugula-munching liberal: I’ve talked about sex with her before, she’s got a copy of Where Did I Come From, she’s seen me go through a pregnancy, etc. — she knows the basics. I assure you, none of that made it any less awkward to have this “teachable moment” thrust upon me unawares by the good folks at Eli Lilly and the SciFi Channel while I was just trying to enjoy a little escapist TV.

But hey, this is life as a parent, isn’t it? You don’t always get to pick and choose where your teachable moments come from. Even the best filters don’t always work. Life comes at you and your kids, and you are responsible for seeing them through it. You stay involved with your kids’ lives, you watch what they’re watching on TV, you stay aware of where they’re going online, and you talk with them about their experiences and understandings. Sometimes, you have to explain things that make you uncomfortable. Sometimes, you have to (try to) explain society’s strange hypocrisies and priorities.

For my kids, for my family, this responsibility — no matter the subject — is not Google’s job, it’s not the Sci-Fi Channel’s, it’s not some arbitrary filter’s. It’s mine.

Meanwhile, as outlined in the previous post, we have embarked on an exploration of age-appropriateness, censorship, community,  disintermediation, gatekeepers, status, and all the other hoary gory stuff this new networked world has opened up, and made a part of people’s lives in ways many of us never expected. Last week I had a great chat with Tony Hey, Senior Rater at the MPAA, and over the weekend I submitted a project proposal to Kickstarter, had a cordial tete-a-tete with high-level members of the YouTube community, and send a query letter to Vimeo about helping us create a content-appropriate version of  our upcoming film to serialize on their service.

Lastly, when I started this work,  I was just trying to find a way to make images of sex that didn’t make me feel ashamed. But in the 15 years of experimenting with technique, making and marketing our films, and trying to keep up with the huge changes in how (and how much!) information swirls around us, the work has taken on a larger meaning for me. Through this work I’ve tapped into “big ideas” and time and time again pursuing this work has forced me to re-examine and reevaluate what I think, what I feel, and what I believe.

For those of you who are long time readers of my blog, and supporters of our films, I hope you feel the same way. And I hope you’ll stick around for whatever’s next!