“Success will return to Hollywood once again when the gutted creative process and talent is re-established at a bearable cost. And it will be on the shoulders of the creatives, not the accountants, that a return to greatness is achieved”.
Beautifully stated in Drake Pruitt’s blog post on Peter Bart’s article in Vanity Fair. I strongly urge you to read both and in response I share the following.
A top exec at Fox Searchlight said recently, “It’s companies like IndieFlix that are f*cking with us!” It was a compliment I think? He then went on to say that he was paid a lot of money and liked his job very much; regardless of how archaic and broken the Hollywood system, he was going to ride that pony as long as he could.
IndieFlix is a small revolution or perhaps an evolution. We’re not trying to buck the system or take on Hollywood we’re just doing our own thing. We don’t want nor can we afford to play by Hollywood’s rules so, we’re doing what makes sense for us.
Armed with a library of 1500+ film festival titles with worldwide rights we now have the ability to curate and program our content on to all major platforms such as iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, Joost, Tivo, Babelgum, Xbox, Youtube, Snag and Mobile. Filmmakers keep their rights, it’s non-exclusive and they get 70% of all revenue streams. It’s free to the filmmaker all we ask is that they work with us to promote and market their films.
Just like the early days of Hollywood when, Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith began to talk of forming their own company to better control their own work as well as their futures. The four stars formed United Artists, the first independent studio in America.
People thought we were nuts back in 2005 when we launched IndieFlix with 36 titles. We wanted to control our own distribution. We learned quickly that we can only do that with effective marketing and owning the rights to our films.
Removing the Hollywood naysayers from the process has allowed us to find success. It’s all grassroots, lot’s of hard work and very time consuming but oh the freedom fuels our creativity!
Now we have bigger budget films working with us because they want to keep their rights and the lion share of the money too.
In April, IndieFlix is day and dating two feature films and completely bypassing the studios delivering two “new releases” theatrically, on DVD and directly into the consumers’ homes via iTunes. Everything keeps evolving at an alarming rate. It takes a lot of work to convince exhibitors and platforms to share distribution windows and experiment with us but we’re doing it.
The virtual studio is in the works.
