A year ago, my feature directorial debut hit Amazon Prime Video on demand.

Today I want to give you the story of how we got to this moment, before we go over what happened after next week.

If you don’t already know, Wild Boys is my first feature. It’s an adventure comedy, shot on location near the Sequoia National Forest in California. With a modest budget of $25K we felt we were able to create something special with our little film.

The festival circuit isn’t right for every film

The path we’re told is the way for an independent film goes something like this:

• submit film to festivals
• get in
• people love your film
• a distributor or sales agent wants the film and you’re off to the races.

This didn’t happen for us.

I’ve talked about my experience with festivals before, and my experience with Wild Boys only reinforced those feelings. The festival circuit is expensive, uncertain and takes a long time.

It’s amazing for a small number of films, and a waste of time and money for a lot more.

I agreed to do the festival route to try to find an audience for our film, and use it as a springboard for the eventual broad release.

Between the pandemic forcing a lot of festivals to shut down or embrace alternative screening formats, and our film not finding an audience where we submitted, we only played at 3 festivals.

There were no offers on the table, no distributors waiting to help us get the film out into the world. Our strategy failed. Which made me think how this path indie films are supposed to take is not viable for most small movies.

Would I have loved to have a great festival experience? Absolutely. But the fact that we didn’t has made me interested in pursuing different routes in the future.

One lesson sticks with me from this journey. Submitting to festival via Film Freeway is not nearly enough. No matter the size of your film, but especially for features, you need to show them you can provide value to their festival.

Here are 3 things I would have done differently if I could go back:

• Be hyper specific with which festivals we submit to, and have a clear reason why our film is a perfect fit for their festival
• Form relationships with the people behind the festivals, seek to become part of their community and provide value that way.
• Be creative in the ways we try to stand out, make sure our film is an unforgettable experience, not just another 90 minute past time.

There are waaaay more films getting made each year than can be programmed at festivals. At every step of the journey the chances of success become smaller and smaller.

Not even all the features that get into Sundance end up getting a favorable distribution deal, and those are the 1% of the 1%.

Looking back, waiting 1+ year in the hope the festival journey would pay off was wrong for us. But if we’d implemented my learnings, I believe we could have had a different outcome.

Finding a home for our film

Once it became clear we weren’t going to have distributors or sales agents knocking on our door we had to start figuring that bit out ourselves.

To be completely honest, I felt the film had kinda failed. We hadn’t been able to do the thing you’re supposed to do, and I was pretty disappointed.

Diving into the world of marketing and distribution was pretty overwhelming. For someone who’s spent over two decades making movies, it was shocking to learn how little I knew about how films get out into the world, find an audience and make money.

The horror stories from this part of the industry are so many, and so devastating for indie filmmakers that we went at it with a lot skepticism. We knew we didn’t want a deal where we signed away large parts of the revenue and put ourselves at the mercy of creative Hollywood accounting. The truth is most small movies don’t get good deals this way anyway. You might get $10K up front, but that’s probably the only money you’re going to see.

So we went in a slightly different direction. Some director friends recommended we reach out to a company called Indierights. They’re different in that they help you get on all the different streaming platforms, and help you roll out the movie, but they leave the marketing to the filmmakers.

I loved a few things about them:

• The team is great and experienced with handling small indie films
• They share profits 80/20 in favor of the filmmakers
• They have a community of indie filmmakers who share ideas and experiences.

After considering a lot of different models and approaches we decided to go with Indierights, and uploaded our film to their system.

The next step was getting it out into the world.

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