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Mid last year Tommy Pallotto (producer of Scanner Darkly) released his documentary “American Prince” online for free. He choose to distribute his film this way so that his documentary would be available to anyone anywhere in the world, rather than face the prospect of having his film die largely unseen, as so many cult films do.
American Prince is a follow up to Martin Scorsese’s American Boy, a cult documentary made in 1978 that never received release. Bootlegged copies of American Boy nonetheless influenced many popular filmmakers, including Quentin Tarantino who replicated a scene in Pulp Fiction. Tommy hopes that his documentary will create pressure to release Scorsese’s film properly to a wider audience.
Living in the Netherlands, Tommy finds that his only option to see many films and TV shows is by downloading them through file sharing sites. To him, digital distribution is about releasing a film to the largest possible audience. Cult films have a hard time gaining exhibition space and distribution through traditional channels even in large international cities, much less smaller outposts, and even a diligent fan may find it impossible to track down.
In addition to new material American Prince uses clips from other films downloaded from torrents and Youtube. None of the clips are formally licensed, but rather used with a Fair Use argument. With this in mind, it is pretty obvious why Tommy is in turn has released his film for free online.
American Prince screened at the SXSW festival as a double bill with American Boy, which garnered it some press, before releasing it online. It is an ultra low budget film, with new material shot over the course of a weekend. A larger budget film would have a hard time justifying this lack of monetisation.
What could be done better:
Because this film project included a large proportion of unlicensed third party film clips, I can understand why they haven’t pushed monetisation (that would be a good incentive to sue!).
However, if this wasn’t a concern, I would suggest that more should be done to gain returns.
- Sell an official DVD, perhaps through Amazon’s print on demand service
- Sell t-shirts & other merchandise through a print on demand service such as CafePress
- A donation button, or ChipIn type tip jar, for those who enjoy the film enough to give something back voluntarily
- Social media campaign: funny that a film being distributed online hasn’t made use of twitter, facebook, blogging, or got involved in relevant online forum discussions. It seems that marketing has been done the traditional way – press releases and interviews with media (some of which are online) – but nothing as intimate or 2-way as social networking. As a result, it doesn’t seem to have ‘spread’ as much as it could have.
You can download the movie in entirety here http://www.mininova.org/tor/2660738
American Prince is a follow up to Martin Scorsese’s American Boy, a cult documentary made in 1978 that never received release. Bootlegged copies of American Boy nonetheless influenced many popular filmmakers, including Quentin Tarantino who replicated a scene in Pulp Fiction. Tommy hopes that his documentary will create pressure to release Scorsese’s film properly to a wider audience.
Living in the Netherlands, Tommy finds that his only option to see many films and TV shows is by downloading them through file sharing sites. To him, digital distribution is about releasing a film to the largest possible audience. Cult films have a hard time gaining exhibition space and distribution through traditional channels even in large international cities, much less smaller outposts, and even a diligent fan may find it impossible to track down.
In addition to new material American Prince uses clips from other films downloaded from torrents and Youtube. None of the clips are formally licensed, but rather used with a Fair Use argument. With this in mind, it is pretty obvious why Tommy is in turn has released his film for free online.
American Prince screened at the SXSW festival as a double bill with American Boy, which garnered it some press, before releasing it online. It is an ultra low budget film, with new material shot over the course of a weekend. A larger budget film would have a hard time justifying this lack of monetisation.
What could be done better:
Because this film project included a large proportion of unlicensed third party film clips, I can understand why they haven’t pushed monetisation (that would be a good incentive to sue!).
However, if this wasn’t a concern, I would suggest that more should be done to gain returns.
- Sell an official DVD, perhaps through Amazon’s print on demand service
- Sell t-shirts & other merchandise through a print on demand service such as CafePress
- A donation button, or ChipIn type tip jar, for those who enjoy the film enough to give something back voluntarily
- Social media campaign: funny that a film being distributed online hasn’t made use of twitter, facebook, blogging, or got involved in relevant online forum discussions. It seems that marketing has been done the traditional way – press releases and interviews with media (some of which are online) – but nothing as intimate or 2-way as social networking. As a result, it doesn’t seem to have ‘spread’ as much as it could have.
You can download the movie in entirety here http://www.mininova.org/tor/2660738
'SXSW' is 'South by Southwest Film Festival' in Austin Texas. Not familiar with SWSX.
ReplyDeleteThanks Anonymous, that would be a typo on my part! Fixing it now.
ReplyDeleteOut of curiosity--any chance there were any numbers published re: actual viewings of the film?
ReplyDeleteThanks Danny, I'm trying to track down some figures for you. So far, best I've been able to work out is almost 20,000 downloads on the above link, but I know they also streamed it Submarine Channel. Hopefully I'll be able to report back soon with more information.
ReplyDeleteHi Luci,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the coverage of American Prince. You raise some valid points. I would be happy to respond to them. I will email you and we can figure out how to best go about that.
Best
Tommy Pallotta