Case Study: Stephanie and Alec’s journey with The Red Machine

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The Red Machine (2009).

If you’re reading this case study and trying to learn how to take your movie out into the world and find its audience, you’ve already given yourself a better start than we had when we began on the marketing and distribution of The Red Machine (2009). Our original plan—if we’d actually had one—would probably have looked something like this: debut film at Sundance, win every award (including some new ones invented just for us), incite the biggest bidding war ever before seen in Utah, collect millions of dollars, start shooting another feature the following month. Or something like that; we were a little vague on the details.

This did not turn out to be our experience. What did happen turned out to be even better.

We weren’t newcomers to having a movie out on the festival circuit. We’d traveled a lot with Gandhi at the Bat, the short film we’d made immediately before The Red Machine, and we’d taken away two important lessons from that journey:

  1. Swag is the key to the universe. With Gandhi at the Bat, we gave out copies of Gandhi’s rookie card and tiny harmonicas (a tiny harmonica figures prominently in the story), and we coaxed queries out of our audiences at Q&As by offering chocolate to anyone who would ask a question. Also, anyone who asked how to buy a copy of the film was given one for free, as long as that person first promised to show it to all of his or her friends and to see all of our subsequent work. The amount of goodwill this generated is almost incalculable.
  2. Screenings need to be more than just screenings. For example, when Gandhi at the Bat played at the Baseball Hall of Fame, we were accompanied by a party of 10 people from all phases of our lives. The only thing they all had in common was our movie, but that was enough—it made them like family. We knew this was pointing us toward . . . something. It would take The Red Machine to teach us what that something was.

As we rolled out with The Red Machine, we found that things are different with a feature than they are with a short. For the first time, we felt as though we were sitting at the grown-ups’ table, and there were greater expectations.

Here’s an overview of what happened with The Red Machine, the main steps along our journey:

  1. Submitted the movie to many festivals as a work in progress; got rejected from all of them. (Submitting as a work in progress was a VERY bad idea. Please don’t do this, regardless of what anyone tells you about how you’re the exception to this rule.)
  2. Finished the movie.
  3. Submitted it to more festivals. Got more rejections before we got into the Mill Valley Film Festival for our world premiere. (We can’t say enough good things about this festival: how well run it is, how pristine the exhibition is, how well attuned it is to its community—perhaps the single most important aspect of any festival—and what a great launch it gave us into the world.)
  4. The cachet of Mill Valley helped us get into many more festivals, where we started winning awards. This gave us a new credibility—and bolstered our faith in the movie.
  5. But in the eyes of Hollywood, the awards meant nothing. We were offered a distribution deal with an advance of $3,000; we were offered the “opportunity” to pay $12,000 (plus expenses) to have a notorious “sales agent” rep the movie; everywhere we turned in the conventional movie world, deals seemed to be based on our spending more money (which we didn’t have anyway) and giving up the rights to our film for up to 20 years. At this point, we realized that we had to do something different; playing by the rules was going to get us nowhere.
  6. We decided to experiment with some limited theatrical exhibition. On the website workbookproject.com, we came across a listing of independent theaters across the United States. We contacted Facets Cinémathèque in Chicago and spent months wooing program director Charles Coleman, who finally agreed to play The Red Machine for one week.
  7. Charles sent the movie to Roger Ebert, who was on vacation—but Charles talked him into watching it just the same. Roger Ebert gave us a thumbs-up and a three-and-a-half-star review in the Chicago Sun-Times.
  8. On the strength of that one review, more theaters, film societies, and university film programs began contacting us, making it possible for us to expand our non-festival screenings—even as we kept playing festivals. We tried to make personal appearances at as many of our screenings as we possibly could, and we made it to almost all of them. (Some travel was paid for, most was not; we suggest that you set aside a lot of money for flights and lodging—or have a relative in the airline or hotel business.) With every screening, we were able to very slowly transform ourselves from poorly spoken mumblers into engaging filmmakers who were quite good at representing our film with charm and humor. (We highly recommend you learn to do this as well.)
  9. As our festival run drew to a close, we looked into cable and other avenues of distribution but found that without having “names” in the movie or having played one of the “big three” festivals (Sundance, Toronto, and Cannes), we didn’t have enough cachet to get any interesting deals. We decided that to give the movie more heft, we would reach out to theaters in a more organized way and see if we could be screened in a lot of them at once, then use that to attract some splashy national press. We sent out a very elaborate mailing (a replica of a prop dossier from the movie but filled with quotes, photos, the Ebert review, and an article on the movie from Wired) to independent theaters and film societies.
  10. One of the theaters we contacted (the Bryn Mawr Film Institute in Pennsylvania) introduced us to SpectiCast; on our own, we also found Indie Film Net. These companies gave us the means to be exhibited in theaters without having to pay for an expensive service deal. The deals are non-exclusive, and most importantly, we maintain all the ownership of and control over our movie—something very important for us, because it is in keeping with the independence with which we made the movie in the first place.

All along the journey, our promotion has been a process of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what would stick. Here is some of the spaghetti we’ve thrown:

  1. Swag (trading cards, buttons, prop replicas, canvas bags to hold DVDs). At our world premiere in Mill Valley, we gave every person in the audience a DVD of Gandhi at the Bat because it had also had its world premiere at Mill Valley, was also set in the 1930s, and featured eight of the same actors as The Red Machine.
  2. Crosswords and cryptogram puzzles. The Red Machine is a movie about a code machine, so these were ways to let audience members experience something similar to code breaking themselves.
  3. Raffle giveaways during our Q&As. Because The Red Machine is set during the 1930s, we decided to emulate the Depression-era practice of movie-theater giveaways. Our biggest prize was a $200 gift certificate for clothing made by the dress designer who created our ladies’ costumes, but most were small trinkets.
  4. Radio appearances with ourselves and our actors. These were very good for drawing audiences!
  5. Television shows with ourselves and our actors. These were much better once the two of us decided to stay off television and just put the actors on.
  6. An alternate-reality game (done to coincide with our theatrical release).

We could go on and on, but the point isn’t that you should do exactly what we did and hand out cryptograms or raffle off prizes; it’s that you should find a way to let your own story shape your marketing, your promotion, your distribution. It’s a creative process, and it’s as thrilling as writing the script or standing on set.

You’ll follow your own path, and we hope you’ll carry what you do far beyond anything that we’ve dreamed of. Be brave. Be experimental. Enjoy it. The more fun you have, the more everyone else will, too.