ELEMENTS OF SURVIVAL
By William C. Martell
Greetings from the American Film Market at Loew’s Hotel in Santa Monica, California. Three years ago when I reported on AFM, they were in the midst of a fight to the death with the MIFED market in Milan.... which they won. MIFED is dead, and AFM and Cannes are the two surviving film markets.
When AFM began, independent producers like Vestron, Orion, Hemdale, and Cannon were making inexpensive genre films for theatrical release. You could still get a small film like CineTel’s *Armed Response* in cinemas. Vestron Video, which had a policy of never spending over $4 million on a film, had a huge hit with *Dirty Dancing* and decided to spend more money and hire bigger stars. They cast Nick Nolte (hot off *48 Hours*) to star in an epic adventure film called *Farewell To The King*.... which flopped, sending them and other companies that followed their lead into bankruptcy. Companies that continued to make low budget films survived, capitalizing on the new world of direct-to-VHS movies.
When the cable revolution hit, the focus was on films for HBO, USA Network and Showtime. When *The Sopranos* killed the cable film (hour long series became the new staple of cable), independent companies began making edgy non-genre films for art houses. But too many movies, not enough audience, combined with studios buying up indie labels like Miramax and Shooting Gallery forced them to alter their strategy and use their expertise in the foreign market to produce studio-sized films with big name stars. This gave us such winners as *Driven* and *The Whole 9 Yards* and *Battlefield Earth*. They discovered that adding a $20 million star to a bad film doesn’t make it any better. In a replay of the 80s excesses, many companies went under. Leaving us with a fractured indie business - part art house, part low budget genre and part *successful* studio sized films like *The Departed* and *Hostage*. After twenty-seven markets, and massive changes to the film industry, AFM has managed to survive... as has CineTel.
This year there were over 9,000 motion picture professionals from 70 different countries attending AFM, where they screened 384 new films and made around $800 million in deals. Some of these deals are for completed films, but a few are for films that have yet to be made. Presales (like buying film futures) and co-productions. Film is a global business with as much as 70% of a US film’s box office coming from overseas. Producers used to wonder if this film will “play in Peoria”, but now they’re more concerned if it will play in Paris and Pakistan and Pnom Pen and Peru. Any script you write needs to appeal to a worldwide audience to survive.
By now a few of you are wondering just what American Film Market is. It’s not a film festival, it’s a *market*, a place where films are bought and sold. Major studios like Warner Brothers, Paramount, and Universal, have long standing deals in place with foreign distributors. But independent producers usually make their foreign distribution deals on a film-by-film basis. Selling each film to each individual country or territory. Every year they take over Loew’s hotel in Santa Monica, pull out all of the beds and turn the rooms into offices. Security guards are posted at the elevators and stairwells, to keep the uninvited off the sales floors. Only those with badges are allowed. American indie producers selling films to foreign countries, or foreign producers selling films to independent American distributors.
TWO TYPES OF INDIE
An independent film is one that is made outside the system. Usually the writer doesn’t sell their screenplay, instead they find the money from private sources and make the film themselves. Those private financial sources can be anything from selling your body to medical experiments (Robert Rodriguez) or selling your comic book collection (Kevin Smith) to getting a second mortgage or putting together a group of doctors and dentists. Check out the credits on your favorite Indie films - is the writer also the director and producer? The film is then sold or licensed to a distributor, or a deal is made with a foreign sales agent to represent the film to buyers at the market. The movie is sold to domestic and foreign distrbs, and hopefully you make your money back plus a profit.
When I was at the Video Software Dealers Association convention in July, I attended an indie distributor panel where they estimated that there are 27,000 independent films made every year... and less than 600 get any form of distribution, *including* DVD. Most indie films are never seen by anyone other than the maker’s family and friends. The ones that are picked up by a distrib have some “exploitable” element(s) which make it possible to sell the film to an audience. Movies are made to be seen, and if your film has no audience appeal it will not survive.
The other type of indie film are those made by producers who are outside the system. They don’t have a studio deal, but they have some sort of financing connection. Since the studios began buying up all the indie companies to operate as art house branches, most of the indie companies remaining specialize in genre films. Though you may find a company that makes *star driven* indie films at AFM, most of the films made by *companies* (as opposed to *individuals*) fall into a specific genre. Companies like UFO make science fiction films, because they have a deal with the Sci-Fi Channel. Imagination Worldwide specializes in female lead thrillers, because they have a deal with Lifetime. Companies like Imageworks that don’t have cable output deals focus on popular genres like action or horror. If you want to survive as a producer, you need to make the types of films the audience wants to see... or you’ll end up with one of those unreleased indie films.
You will also find the survivors of the big budget indies, like Initial Entertainment Group which produced *The Departed* and sold domestic rights to Warner Bros. Some companies, like Nu Image, make both low budget genre films and star driven films like *Rambo 4* and *King Of California* with Michael Douglas. Every kind of indie film is on sale at American Film Market, along with foreign films from every corner of the world.
BUSINESS IS PICKING UP
The film business can be broken up into three stages: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition. As writers we are part of production - making the film. Exhibition is actually showing the movie - the cinemas. Distribution is the middle man - companies that find movies and deliver them to the cinemas. Movie studios are usually distributors who have deals with producers on their lots and often act as a bank - funding or co-funding movies. Independent distributors usually buy completed films that they find at festivals or through submissions. The Head Of Acquisitions at a distribution company might watch a stack of DVD submissions every day, looking for that one in 27,000. They will attend screenings set up by producers, and attend film festivals like Toronto and Sundance.
Distributors are an audience surrogate. They are looking for films with the elements that will appeal to the people who buy tickets and DVDs. Some companies have a special niche audience they cater to, others are looking for films that will interest a mass audience. Because a niche audience means a limited audience and limited earnings, most distribs are looking for a movie with cross-over like *Little Miss Sunshine* which can play in art houses *and* mall cinemas. At the Toronto Festival last year many of the films in competition didn’t get picked up by distributors... but The Weinstein Company paid top dollars for *All The Boys Love Mandy Lane* - a horror movie playing a midnight show. They also picked up Jonathan King’s *Black Sheep*, a comedy-horror film also playing at midnight.
(Update: The first big sales at Sundance were a trio of horror flicks playing out of competition, *Teeth* and *Signal* and *Joshua*, with the silly comedy *Son Of Rainbow* (about two kids making their own backyard sequel to *Rambo*) selling for the most money of any film screened at the festival for $7 million. The Grand Jury Prize Winner, *Padre Nuestro*, was *not* picked up for distribution at the festival).
Distributors at a film festival pick up films they believe there is an audience for, and those tend to be genre films. Though they may be wrong once in a while, they’ve been in the business long enough to know what audiences want to see. It’s no coincidence that all the distributors loved *Mandy Lane* - the reason why there are bidding wars at festivals like Sundance is that most distributors are looking for the same thing: a movie with the elements that attract an audience. These are the type of movies they can pass on to exhibitors or DVD retailers so that we can see them.
THE ELEMENTS
What are the elements that distributors look for? In the middle of the lobby at Loew’s is a bank of video monitors showing trailers for the films on sale at AFM. Watch a half hour of trailers and you’ll learn everything you need to know about independent film distribution. There are cars exploding, shoot outs, maniacs with power tools chasing damsels in distress, monsters attacking, and movie stars. When you have three minutes to sell film to a busy buyer walking through a noisy hotel lobby, you don’t have time to show the fascinating characters or witty dialogue or amazing dramatic moments... so you show the exploitable elements. The film is reduced to things that are exciting. Every once in a while there’s a trailer for an epic from the orient which focuses on cast-of-thousands battle scenes in exotic locations.
No matter what the genre, the film is broken down into exploitable elements. When I do my big 2 day class in Los Angeles on May 26th & 27th, we’re going to begin with character and find the story that best explores that character... but no matter where you start your story will end up as a trailer (coming attraction), either shown in the lobby at AFM or the screen of your local cinema. That’s how they will sell your story to the foreign buyers and the audience. What are these exploitable elements?
Exciting genre moments. If your script is an action film, explosions and car chases and shoot outs and fight scenes. A horror script will have blood and guts and jump moments and creepy suspense scenes. A comedy is going to have those comedy set pieces. Drama is the “default setting” for any screenplay, so in addition to the explosions or maniacs with machetes, you will find big meaty dramatic moments in these trailers. Even in the comedies. Your script needs enough of these genre and drama moments that a producer can cut a 3 minute trailer jam-packed with moments... and there are still a bunch of surprises when the audience sees the movie. One of the main reasons why a trailer gives everything away is that there isn’t much to give. You want to make sure your script is inundated with big moments.
Another thing you quickly learn from watching the trailers in the lobby is how many movies look just like other movies when they are broken down into their elements. You want to avoid that! So we want to create *unique* moments that no one has seen before. My friend, comic book writer Iain Gibson, has a theory about *high concept action scenes*: everyone has seen a shoot out, but you had never seen that “bullet time” shoot out until *The Matrix*. Those are the kind of genre moments that will stand out in that endless stream of AFM trailers. Something we’ve never seen before.
WHAT’S HOT?
"Horror", says Kurtis Estes of Imageworks. "That’s still the big genre. Our film PLANE DEAD is the big seller because it’s exactly what a movie should be. Entertaining all the way through. It doesn’t waste time getting started. Once it takes off, it keeps going until it crashes at the end." When you walk the halls at AFM, almost every poster is for a horror movie. "The hardest genre to sell is drama, unless it has a big name in the cast," Kurtis told me. "Dramas are emotional, and that takes time to set up. You need a star to keep us interested while the story is building."
I asked Kurtis what he thought the next big genre might be. "Maybe war movies, because it’s been a while since that genre was popular and *Flags Of Our Fathers* and some of the Iraq War documentaries are creating some interest in the genre. Also psychological thrillers and suspense movies might pop - we’ve seen some interest in that genre."
Almost everyone I spoke with said that horror is still going strong, but the volume of horror films on the market requires that you really come up with something unique in the genre. *Plane Dead* is a zombie attack flick... at 30,000 feet! The market has been crowded with a million low budget standard stalk & slash and vampire and zombie movies. For a movie to sell at AFM it needs to be something we have never seen before or a major twist on a traditional horror element that reinvents the genre. Because anyone can make a low budget horror movie these days, the market is focusing on creativity and production value. Since AFM is an international market, it’s interesting to see horror legends from other cultures on film - from Japanese ghost stories to creatures from other countries.
Action movies are still popular at AFM, with films from America, Hong Kong, Thailand, Italy, Japan, Spain and Germany... not to mention France and England. Most of the action movies seem to focus on cops or crooks with very few sci-fi hybrids this year. Lots of major stunts and big explosions on the lobby monitors - many from the trailers of Germany’s Action Concept Films, a stunt crew that are now making their own big films using screenplays from top American screenwriters like Stephen E. DeSouza. Different cultures may have different senses of humor, but they all share shoot outs and car chases and fight scenes.
When a sales agent or AFM company is looking at a movie made from your screenplay, they will be interested in whether they can sell the film or not. That comes down to the elements - exploitable elements that they can put in the movie’s trailer. After that, cast and production value are important... and then comes the quality of the film itself. That may seem backwards to you, but if nobody buys the movie, nobody sees the movie. Those genre moments in the trailer that sell the movie are critical. Does your script have the elements to survive in the film market? Enough elements so that you aren’t giving everything away in the trailer?
FADE OUT.
MY BLOG!
SCRIPT SECRETS STORE - time to monkey around!
Was MICHAEL CLAYTON a great character study but a ho-hum thriller?
Is THE GAME PLAN a sign that the world is about to end? Can's wait to see KINGDOM 2: ELECTRIC BUGALOO? Be heard:
Movie Discussion!
CLASSES ON CD! Five Classes are ready to ship on audio CD: GUERRILLA MARKETING YOUR SCRIPT: NO AGENT? NO PROBLEM!, WRITING HORROR, WRITING THRILLERS (2 CD set), WRITING INDIES and IDEAS & CREATIVITY. Classes on CD - Click Here!
WRITING THRILLERS - a TWO CD Class - The first CD covers the essentials of a thriller screenplay, using examples from MINORITY REPORT, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, BOURNE IDENTITY, BREAKDOWN, THE LADY VANISHES, THE GAME and THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR as primary examples - what do all of those films have in common? This CD will tell you! Part Two covers the 20 iconic scenes in Thriller films, and explains how suspense works using MINORITY REPORT as an example and how plot twists work using BOURNE SUPREMACY and other films. Writing Thrillers: Two CD Class - $24.95 (plus $5 S&H)
WRITING INDIES - Writing an Indie film? This class covers everything you need to know - from Central Locations to Confined Cameos. Using examples from SWINGERS, THE COOLER, STATION AGENT and others, this 80 minute CD is packed with information. How Indoe films challenge the audience (while mainstream films reassure the audience). Structures, using BOYS DON'T CRY, RUN LOLA RUN, HILARY & JACKIE, and others as example. Writing for a budget, writing for non-actors, getting the most production value out of your budget. Writing Indies is $14.95 (plus $5 S&H)
GUERRILLA MARKETING YOUR SCRIPT: NO AGENT? NO PROBLEM! Is a full length CD of my popular class on selling your script without an agent. Dozens of methods (at least thirty) to get your script to market on your own. These are all of the things that *I* have done to sell my scripts - so I know they work. The book store / Amazon price for this CD is $24.95, but you can buy it on the website for $14.95 (plus $5 S&H).
Click here for more information on CLASS CDs!
|
