I posted a bit article about the self-distribution efforts of John Sayles and Maggie Renzi with their newest film Honeydripper. The New York Times has followed up and given an in-depth picture of the plan. From where I sit, the plan looks like they put a lot of thought into how to find an audience for this particular film. I’m going to try to talk with them afterwards and see what worked and what didn’t. I’m not sure yet if creating a kind of map of their work will help other filmmakers down the road? Are such plans so unique to the film? The Netflix algorithm that tells me if you liked that, you’ll like this, doesn’t work well for me, but as Sayles points out, “Sundance gets 5,000 feature films every year, and there are 5,000 filmmakers from the last year who are still trying to make films. Every distributor in America could show a different movie every day for a year, and there are only so many screens that show non-Hollywood stuff, and only 52 weeks a year, so the mathematical equation is — there’s a huge amount of competition.”

Read Down South, Singing the Blues

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Tags: Big Picture, Distribution, honeydripper, john-sayles, Real Deals