[Reported on April 2, 1998 by Jim Bihari]

 

In the past we've included articles and messages by other film professionals. One of our biggest concerns is after we make our film, how do we make a profit? This article, by independent filmmaker Jim Bihari, details his experiences trying to get distribution for his two completed films. "I Didn't Think You Didn't Know I Wasn't Dead" and "My New Advisor." His experiences tell a rather chilling tale. But in true indie spirit, it hasn't deterred us from proceeding with our project at all.

A final note: The experiences and opinions in this story are strictly Mr. Bihari's. I did not fact check these claims and don't know how accurate they are. I only know Mr. Bihari from sporadic email correspondence.

 

The story all began back in August 1997, when, after a couple dozen film festival rejections for my two films, I decided to see if there would be any distributors interested in them anyway. I sent out letters and flyers to nearly 500 distributors in the U.S., England and some other places. About 35 companies requested tapes of one or both films. Of those, five responded with contracts. The first to respond was Tapeworm Video Distributors who I eventually signed with. More about them later. The other four were international or overseas distributors, which generally means they sell television and cable broadcasting rights to various countries. (Often poorer countries can't afford to pay 10 or 15 grand for rights to broadcast a Hollywood film. They can afford to pay $500 to $2,000 for a film like ours. At least that's my understanding.)

The second company to respond was an international distributor, Grant Enterprises, which turned out to be two cousins who were trying to start a company in their garage. Nothing wrong with that, except they had no connections or money. They wanted me to put up a lot of money to make promotional materials, change the title of "My New Advisor," and have me do all the work while they would email buyers from their computer and take 40% off the top of any sales they thought they'd make. Their contracts were packed with really, really obvious spelling errors and made no sense whatsoever. I told them no deal.

By this time I got a call from Peacock Films who sounded encouraging. They already handled some small films with known actors, and I thought they sounded honest (and they were very willing to alter the contract to please me). They told me they would distribute Advisor overseas but I should expect to make very little money from it. It's a long story, but I later found out this company had a reputation for robbing filmmakers of any profits (basically by always altering the books to say that expenses always exceeding any income from sales) and not holding to their contracts. Once they have your originals, they don't have to be honest in telling you how many sales they made. They know there is no good way to check on this and they know it will cost more money to take them to court than I can afford, given what I'd stand to gain. So essentially, signing with them is basically giving them all rights to the film for free. They'd been taken to court a number of times and had been shut down twice.

Eventually, I talked to a filmmaker who made a $100,000 budget film and lost everything by dealing with Peacock. He sued and found out they'd made $80,000 in sales from his film but never paid him a penny (Ultimately he was not was successful in getting any money.) He said they had a high employee turnover. The Peacock people that talked to me had only worked there 4 weeks. They believed they were working with a company that was trying to change for the better and treat filmmakers right. (Although the one Peacock guy who called me was a young filmmaker himself who had just finished his first feature and said he didn't want to have it distributed by the company.) They say that ALL film distributors are dishonest but when you have little films like ours you end up dealing with the slimiest of the slimy!

By then (October) I got a call from Spectrum Entertainment who had been producers of horror films etc. and home video distributors of their own films. The woman at Spectrum previewed Advisor and said she really liked it. She said they were branching out into overseas distribution because they were tired of getting ripped off by other distributors. She told me a story of a distributor telling her they sold 10 of Spectrum's films to Russia? For 30 grand or something, but they were only going to pay Spectrum 3 grand, and they knew it would cost them more than it was worth to take them to court so they should just take their 3 grand and live with it. The Spectrum lady sounded honest, agreed to take a 35% commission which covered all their expenses so that I could be guaranteed 65% of gross from the first sale on (which is rare). And just to prove they were honest, they said I could keep the master videotapes and send out sub masters to buyers directly so that I could keep track of actual sales.

This sounded great, but she was always too busy to get a contract written up. By mid November, she was unavailable to answers my calls. The new guy at Spectrum was less enthusiastic about taking our film. He sent a contract in which I got 50% of the gross after their expenses and said they needed the masters. So this was now starting to sound like a deal in which I'd end up getting ripped off since they could make sales without my knowledge and claim expenses ate up any profits.

Then I got an email from Buttle Broadcasting, a British company who handled non-fiction films, but was expanding to handle fiction. Clara, from Buttle, said they loved Advisor and wanted to represent it. (They later agreed to handle both our films.) She said they act as more of a sales agent, rather than a distributor, so all sales would be directly with the buyers and I could hang on to my original video master and have copies of all contracts signed wit buyers. They'd match the original "offer" I thought I'd gotten from Spectrum. Buttle would take 35% commission and would cover all their own travel and promotional expenses. Given that the other three international distributors ended up being so slimy, I signed with Buttle. They included a $30,000 performance clause in the contract, so maybe they think they can make $30,000 in sales from the two films combined over the next three years. 65% of 30 grand is only about 20 grand, which would still not be anywhere close to making a profit on the two films combined.

Back to Tapeworm, the home video distributor, they were the only home video distributors (in a list I had) that would even take my phone call without cutting me off after 10 seconds -- literally. Connie the Tapeworm lady was really nice. She said she watched "some of each film" and said "the acting is actually pretty good" or something like that.

Tapeworm sells to Blockbuster, Book of the Month Club, Tower etc. etc. They'll sell videos of both films. The only catch was that I needed to get new professional video jackets (boxes) for them to handle the films (and no printer will make less than 2500 video boxes). The Tapeworm lady said they'd also sell New Advisor soundtrack CDs. The deal is, I can get videotapes made for about $2.50 each, I sell them to Tapeworm for $11.98 and Tapeworm tries to sell them for a list price of $29.95 (which was the cheapest list price they have for selling videos. Tapeworm requires a 60% markup. I guess other videos sold to stores like Blockbuster list for up to $100 each new. It's only later when the movies are old do you see them for $5.99 in discount stores.) With CDs, I sell them to Tapeworm for about $4.80 and Tapeworm lists them for $11.99. All this means is that our stuff will be in Tapeworm's catalog but it doesn't mean any company like Blockbuster will ever buy one copy.

I have no idea who would ever buy our films, but they say many buyers (buyers at companies like Blockbuster, etc.) make sales on the basis of the video boxes only, and never even request or watch preview tapes. If that's the case, then I say they deserve what they get. I think Gail Hervey (Lee's wife) did a great job of designing the video boxes to make our films look appealing. Who knows, maybe people will buy our films? Wouldn't that be funny! Ah, I'm dreaming, because the first thing buyers (and video rental customers) look for is "Who's in it?" Without known actors it's unlikely that either film will sell much. Keep in mind that every year, something like 1000 feature films are made in the U.S., and the majority never get theatrical distribution so they're competing with us for home video sales (and most places like Blockbuster only want films that were big hits in the theaters.)

There really is a glut of independent films out there and most have more action and sex and guns and marketable things in them than ours do. Of course, they probably have more plot than our films do as well, but that's another matter.

During this time last fall I was also sending out packages to a few dozen potential film reviewers. Boy is that a waste of time and money! You send a nice package and a follow-up letter and the few places that do respond say they must have lost the package but don't review unsolicited films anyway. Actually I did get one really nice letter from the editor of Delta Airline's Sky Magazine saying how much he and his daughter liked Advisor. And we got one usable quote from the Midwest Book Review, which I ended up putting on the box. The other reviews on the box are from local papers and I hope they don't complain that I took their good words out of context!

So after 5 months of phone calls and letters and faxes and emails, all we can do now is wait and see what happens. I can finally get on with my life. What a drag it is to be trying to promote these films I'm sick of. (I never ever want to do this kind of crap again!) But it's even more of a drag being in debt so much.

While I've officially called the budget for each film to be about $20,000, I'm sure I will have racked up nearly $70,000 in expenses for both films combined when I start to add in everything I spent money on to make and promote these films. I haven't yet had to go through and add up the receipts, but expenses for both films combined are something like this: Initially I had to buy about $12,000 worth of equipment to shoot and edit the film. (That's not an expendable expense, though some of the equipment depreciated to nearly zero due to obsolescence and just plain wearing out.) Something on the order of $33,000 was spent on buying film and film lab processing fees. Easily another 2 grand spent on getting rejected by 50 film festivals (printing press material and shipping packages and entry fees).

Another two grand spent on making 1000 Advisor CDs, with maybe 700 to 900 of these having been given away for free. Another 3 grand was spent at three different labs on having 500 Advisor VHS tapes, and about 320 "I Didn't Think..." tapes made since 1994. 90 percent of these were given away and I only have 2 or 3 dozen tapes left of each. It's hard to imagine where all those tapes and CDs went. Easily 150 tapes and CDs went to festivals, distributors, reviewers, and others in the film biz, and I guess cast and crew went through a couple hundred more, but I digress.

Anyway, sending out 500 letters and fliers and SASE to potential distributors and over 60 packages to distributors and potential reviewers and other film people probably cost another grand. Probably a couple grand on maintenance of equipment and miscellaneous expenses (recollimating the camera lens, having DAT and motor replaced and heads aligned 3 or 4 times, something like 70 DAT tapes purchased, dozens of $20 to $30 printer cartridges, etc. etc.) I just spent $2,200 on the new video jackets and having a new video sub master made for videotapes to be sold by Tapeworm. I'll have to spend about another grand on making a new video masters with separate dialogue and effects tracks if the films do sell overseas and have to be dubbed.

I'm sure I've racked up about ten grand worth of interest on my credit card debt since 1993, even though I've been able to keep my interest rate averaging about 10% APR. I'm not sure if the interest on debt is something you'd count as an expense, though. Oh, and I still need to pay my attorney, Bob Goldstein, for his fees for helping me with the contracts. (He was nice enough to defer his fees until I get some money coming in.) Someday, if I ever see any income, I'll sit down a tax accountant (another expense) and my pile of receipts and see what the IRS would count as legitimate expenses and then declare that to be the actual expense. It sure doesn't sound likely that I'll ever break even so that cast and crew people can get a percentage of profits, does it? I'd just be happy if my debt were decreased enough so that my minimum monthly payments were less than my monthly income!

What's next? Produce a 35mm dramatic feature by the year 2000. I better get busy. Anybody got a million dollars to spare?

Jim Bihari 423 W. 7th Ave. #1 Columbus, Ohio 43201-2607 phone: 614-421-7211 fax: 614-451-7007 email: bihari@fetching.com or bihari@mps.ohio-state.edu movie web sites: www.fetching.com/bihari/ and www.buttle.com/tv