Last Updated on July 27, 2021
AFM 2006 REPORT
“To Live and Die in LA”
ARROW INTRO: I have
personally been attending the AFM with writer/director/editor/booze buddy and
often collaborator CHRISTIAN VIEL for 3 years now. We started off as guys with screeners in our back-packs and this year we graduated to having our
own booth to peddle our crap.
This year I mostly stuck to legwork duty (attending
meetings outside the booth) but Viel got the full booth experience, so I asked
him to write this up for us. Trust me its VERY insightful as we learned a lot on
this trip, moreso than we did at the 2005 AFM
(read our slick report here).
Without further bla-bla, here’s the
Viel man with the 411 on the 2006 AFM experience. You got the floor bud! Mop it
the f*ck up!
CHRISTIAN VIEL:
I have been a regular attendee at the American Film Market in the lovely city of
Santa Monica for four solid years now. This year however marked a notable
change for me: I jumped over the fence and became an EXHIBITOR. That means that
I was there paying ridiculous prices for the smallest things and services in the
feeble hope of selling my films to international buyers. I will try to share my
observations about the transition, which I found a sobering experience.
AFM FOREPLAY AND INTERCOURSE
Viel owning the booth… or does the booth own him?
First thing, the AFM needs to be prepared almost as much as an actual movie. You
need to contact buyers ahead of time and try to secure meetings – this is made
fairly easy thanks to the AFM committee who very kindly makes the buyers who
confirmed their attendance contact info available to us, the Exhibitors. You
need to prepare posters, screeners, trailers and one-sheets (a sheet that
presents poster, tagline, contact info, credit block and synopsis all into one),
get all that stuff packed and ready to go for sunny California and above all,
toughen your skin…
If you think critics are though, you haven’t lived until you
have seen your film rebuffed by a disgusted buyer. Let’s make one thing clear
here: the AFM is a market. Films are products there, not art. Nobody cares
about how much blood, sweat and tears you put into the project. They want to
know how much it will cost them for the rights for their particular territory.
That’s it. That’s all. That is, if they want the film at all… Which brings
us to my second point:
Liars, phonies, swindlers, poseurs, twats with Yankee
caps…welcome to hell!
Each country has its own market realities shaped by cultural, religious and
social pressures. Hence, the Middle East countries generally want nothing to do
with films with nudity and intense violence. The Chinese market views our
versions of zombies and vampires as distasteful and disrespectful of the dead.
If your film does not meet particular requirements of that particular territory
at that particular time in its history, you are shit out of luck. At AFM, the
poster is everything. It’s the poster that gets people in the door. But for the
same cultural reasons that your film may not work at all for some territories,
same happens with the posters…
The artwork for an upcoming project, Death Row, which was qualified as eye
catching and striking by an American buyer was equally qualified as bland and
pretty poor by a Japanese one. Then again, the Japanese make amazingly striking
posters. Thirdly, you need stuff to sell. You need more than one film to sell
or you will lose your shirt.
We were there with almost three films (two
completed, one in post) and two in development/preproduction. I would venture
to say that it wasn’t nearly enough. Mercifully, as fate would have it, we
teamed up with my RECON distributor (Critical Mass Releasing) for this one and
their library of cult classics helped us look bigger, and also contributed to
have us being taken more seriously. The classics often brought people in out of
curiosity for the title and it helped us pitch them our « newer » titles.
AFM 2006 TRENDS
Low budget urban action/dramas with white people
in em…yes they exist buyers! TRUST ME!
Every year at the American Film Market, you hear about trends. Everybody is
trying to have their pulse on what the buyers want. Well, this year many buyers
did not mince their words to tell us what they wanted. Here’s a general
overview NO MORE HORROR!
International buyers are sick of it. So many of them
have told us to either stop making horror or, if you absolutely must make one,
put it in a science-fiction setting because slashers in the woods, vampires,
zombies and evil clowns, they are having an overdose of it. As one Asian
country representatives told us, we can buy horror films for a dime a dozen
right now.
It appears that the US box office successes of all those remakes and sequels of
horror films has created a flood of cheap indie horror films, which is easily
understandable: traditionally, horror films never required names to be a success
and they have usually cheap, easy to find locations and depending on what or who
is your villain, that can be cheaply done too.
Problem is that with the new,
cheaper technologies, everybody and their sisters are churning out badly acted,
badly edited, badly shot, badly directed horror films, some of them rehash and
rip-offs of classic horror as well which are already sequelized or remade to
death. So the market is glutted with horror, cheap or otherwise. While it may
still work in the US, foreign buyers seem to have reached a THAT’S ENOUGH!
point.
The Viels, taking
in their super-potion to survive the rest of the AFM!
Almost every buyer is saying that their market is slow, weak, mined by piracy.
Hence, to try and improve their diminishing profit margins, they almost
exclusively only want films with recognizable name talents. Why? More people
will buy/rent those films than the films with no names, leaving them with a
better chance at a profit.
Also, if the film with no names gets pirated, while
it won’t be as popular as a big studio picture, the loss in sales for the no
name film might just be enough to kill the slim profit margin that film had.
Hence it is no longer financially viable for a buyer to get no names movies.
So
it appears that while piracy hurts the studio marginally because of their huge
distribution network, it is slowly killing the indies. Ironically, piracy seems
to be giving more power to the studios to ultimately control all of the movie
entertainment eventually.
The parallel to this is that in direct consequence of
piracy, buyers are PAYING LESS for films that they were years ago, which makes
it impossible for an indie producer to afford the crazy salaries requested by
the name talents and their agents. It’s a catch-22.
Look who I ran into at the AFM!
Bad Moon Director (and site alumni) Eric Red with Bad Moon star Michael Pare!
ACTION/SCI-FI: What was requested/looked for the most? Action. Followed
closely by traditional war movies (ie without Hitlerian
zombies/vampires/werewolf). Buyers all claimed they were ready to pay more for
those (albeit nowhere near enough to justify the costs involved in shooting an
action or war picture).
In third place came Sci-Fi. But not any sci-fi. Out
of this Earth sci-fi. Something, as one buyer put it: « Not shot in some corner
of desert in Arizona » but something more space opera. Again, something not
cheap.
But again, the money offered barely makes sense. Which explains why
most indie producers stick to horror and thrillers – cheap and easy to produce.
So it’s all a consumer affair in the end. Everybody wants the moon; no one is
willing to pay for the rocket fuel. But it does seem that piracy is driving
business down – or it is used at least to justify a staggering lowering of the
amounts paid. Which is bad news for the whole industry and for film lovers in
general.
AFM DISCONNECTED/CONCLUSION
Do these people really have deals going? Do they
really?
Disconnection. That is the word that kept creeping in my mind throughout the
eight days of this market. Disconnection between the buyers and the sellers.
Between the filmmakers and their audience. Between filmmakers and
distributors. Disconnection.
When I originally came to the market, I thought that I would finally get the
answers to the ever elusive holy grail of the independent filmmaker:
Distribution. Sadly, it wasn’t going to be. I am leaving the market with more
questions than when I first arrived. I thought I had a fairly good grasp of
what distribution for indies entailed.
I am forced to admit that I did not have
a fucking clue. Even more sadly, I am also forced to admit that I STILL don’t
have a fucking clue. Because the issue is complex, with many variables, I think
that the recipe for what makes a successful film distribution will never be
found.
The AFM experience having its effect
on the Viels! Will booze save the day?
DEADEN co-star Carmen Echeverria
and I hoping for the best as to the film’s distribution…hoping….hoping…
At least now I understand why the studios have taken over distribution
of their products worldwide: it is the only way to ensure some kind of control
over them. Otherwise, the end result is very random. It feels a bit like a
gigantic mutant amoeba that is constantly mutating every second. You can’t
quite grasp it or make out its shape before it changes again.
For those who read me so far, you might be wondering how badly we fared over
there. Well, frankly, we did okay. We did not break the bank but we did not
lose money either – at least on paper. It always remains to be seen if all
these deals will really come through or not – in this business, you can never be
sure of anything until the check clears. And sometimes, even that isn’t enough.
Well f*cking earned! Am ready for
my next meeting!
Our RECON series got a LOT of interest from mostly Asian territories who where
out in force this year at the AFM. Japan in particular was especially
aggressive towards the RECON « franchise ». Over 15 companies made offers on
the film – an issue that is still not resolved at press time.
DEADEN did
not perform as well despite having been selected at a major film festival and
glowing reviews, the offers where either ridiculous bordering on insulting, or
buyers where just plain uninterested in it altogether. Which brings me again to
disconnection.
Interstate
(read review here) producer Eddie Granillo with
writer/director Marc-Andre Samson feeling optimistic!
From the amount of emails we get about this film, you would have
thought that distributors would have wanted it badly but it wasn’t the case at
all. Interestingly, it is the same for the RECON series in certain territories.
I get tons of emails from Australians who want to see RECON down under but we
can’t get arrested in Australia with those films. Australian distributors do
not seem to want to commit to buy it. They talk about it – for years now in the
case of number one – but nothing ever comes out of it.
It also appears that we may have found equity financing for our next project,
Death Row. I say appear because until the check clears… You know the drill…
Funnily enough, I mentioned to the gentlemen who are willing to finance it in
part that of all the horror franchises elements, the one that was universally
decried as over the hill was zombies. Their reaction? Meh. This business goes
in cycles anyways. By the time the movie is finished, for all we know, zombies
will sell like hot cakes. And that, somehow, is as fitting a conclusion as any…
This year’s AFM experience summed
up with one pic…
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