And Cannes Rolls On...

Thanks to all of you who have written in from the Cannes Film
Festival and Market. It's nice to have our Film Specific
members out there in the big bad Distribution world and
reporting live back to us at home...

Speaking of Cannes, over the weekend I posted my Top Ten
Cannes Buyers List up on Film Specific. Check it out on the
home page: http://www.FilmSpecific.com. It's free for
members.

And I also spoke with Scott Bedno, our foreign sales agent
in residence (also head of sales at Showcase Entertainment),
direct from his booth at the Cannes market - and he's looking
forward to giving us all a download when he returns. We'll
be having a teleconference call with him on May 30th and
we'll get to ask him all sorts of questions -- my favorite
being, when are sales companies going to stop charging filmmakers
such high marketing expenses?

In this day and age, I don't think sales companies should be
charging the $30K-$50K in expenses they are accustomed to doing.
In my opinion, if they continue this practice, they will all
soon go out of business. It's a dying business model if you
ask me....

Figure this - you can get your own professional looking DVD's
made for less than a buck a unit, you can print up your own
artwork and even provide your own FEDEX account number -- and
come out way ahead of the what the sales companies usually
charge back to filmmakers for all this under the heading of
'marketing expenses'.

Oh, and the biggest marketing expense of all is when sales
companies take your film to all the markets like Cannes....they
spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to be there, and
conveniently charge a portion of that back to all the films
they represent.

I never agreed with this particular practice because in my
mind, it's just a cost of doing business and sales companies
should build that into their own marketing budgets - just like
every other normal company does in the world.

Anyway, I'm off my soap box now but it's a topic of GREAT
discussion among filmmakers these days and is one big reason
why so many people decide to go it on their own without working
with a sales agency.

To that end, I even created a consulting package called
Distribution Plans whereby I evaluate your film and then
recommend specific distributors for you to contact directly,
referred by me of course. It's been an extremely popular
service because filmmakers are no longer beholden to the
sales agencies at this point - they can submit their films
directly to distributors and not worry about paying even a
single commission, let alone any big marketing expenses.

You can read more about our Distribution Plans here:

http://www.filmspecific.com/products/item10.cfm

Last but not least, my Film Distribution Labs are back and
are scheduled for August in Los Angeles, September in NYC,
and October in London. Distribution Labs are all day
intensive workshops, where I do very little 'teaching' -
rather we workshop your film as a group, pull apart each and
every distribution strategy in the room, and put them all
back together again, the right way.

Registration is open and you can read more about it here:

http://www.filmspecific.com/products/item13.cfm

Please write in and let us know if you've any good, bad,or
ugly experiences with sales agencies and what you would do
differently --- and if you'll be joining us on the call with
Scott Bedno on May 30, do send in your questions for him.
Let's grill him while he's still jet lagged! LOL!

Alright, off to work.....more later....

Regards,
Stacey*