The ultimate in Custom DIY Distribution

Remember the Flaming Lips-soundtracked documentary trailer a while back in February? About the mushroom hunters Gary Lincoff and Larry Evans? Well, the Canadian doc is about to get some unique love.

To promote his new documentary Know Your Mushrooms, the CBC reports that Ron Mann is releasing the film on a customized USB stick -- one shaped like a cute, tooth-filled shroom (seen to the right). I'd love to see DVD storage folks come up with a shelving unit for this.

Following a British company that released Ghostbusters on a 2GB flash drive with digital rights management, the Toronto-based filmmaker is taking a more share-friendly approach. Basically, people buy these USB keys for $59.99 -- which, I might add, are said to be almost sold out -- and are then encouraged to upload and share the film. Mann says: "We did this as a fun project. It wasn't a commercial venture." Nevertheless, it's a smart idea -- warm people to the film, and then how can they resist the charm of shroomy movie keys?

But best of all, he doesn't plan to stop there. Remember the 1999 cult film Grass? He's gearing up to re-distribute that flick on a USB key shaped like a joint. The possibilities are endless!

is Hollywood afraid of Twitter?

While word of mouth could always make or break a movie, it usually took days to affect the box office. But the rise of social networking tools like Twitter may be narrowing that time frame to mere hours. And that has Hollywood on edge.

This summer, movies such as "Bruno" and " G.I. Joe" have had unexpected tumbles at the box office - just within their opening weekends - while "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" survived blistering critical reaction to become a blockbuster.

Box-office watchers say the dramatic swings may be caused by Twitter and other social networking sites that can blast instant raves - or pans - to hundreds of people just minutes after the credits roll.

"Almost every time after I go out [to a movie], I'll tweet about it," says Lindsay Wailes, a cook and barista from Westminster. "I tweeted about 'G.I. Joe' as soon as I left the theater." Her take on the movie: "If you like science or plot, this isn't a movie for you; if you like explosions for no reason, you'll love it."

She also listens to what others have to say: She turned her back on the shock comedy "Bruno" because of downbeat Twitter reviews. "A lot of my friends are crazy young people - I'd expect them to like 'Bruno' more than an actual critic, and even they said, 'It's crass, don't see it.' So I didn't bother."

Studios are trying to gauge the impact of an avalanche of tweets, and how it affects the staying power of a movie. Was the 39 percent box office drop of "Bruno" from Friday to Saturday a case of disappointed moviegoers tweeting from theater lobbies? Or did a limited fan base for "Bruno" exhaust itself on that first day?

"I think Twitter can't be stopped," says Stephen Bruno, the Weinstein Co.'s senior director of marketing. He's trying to stay ahead of an audience's appetite for instant information.

"Now you have to see it as an addition to the campaign of any movie," he says. "People want real-time news and suddenly a studio can give it to them in a first-person way. The blogs have to go to our feeds for the latest trailers and reports."

Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures, says studios are worrying about a time when "people will be twittering during the opening credits - and leaving when they don't like them." But he also warns, "the next step [for the Twitter Effect] is for studio marketing to manipulate it."

The Weinstein Co. has already done that big-time for the Friday release of the Quentin Tarantino- Brad Pitt World War II epic "Inglourious Basterds."

The company packed a screening at San Diego's Comicon with people who won access via Twitter. It also staged "the first ever Red Carpet Twitter meet-up" during the movie's premiere at Mann's Chinese in Hollywood, generating celebrity tweets including Sarah Silverman's "just made me smile forever" and Tony Hawk's "another Tarantino classic."

Twitter has broadened the reach of bloggers and other aspiring opinion-makers.

"Just two years ago, if I saw a movie I loved or I hated, I'd be able to tell a dozen friends, tops," says John Singh, who works for the movie and social networking Web site Flixster. "Now, I can be walking out of a theater as the credits are rolling and immediately tell 500 people what I thought. ... It's never been this easy to be this influential."

Bruno says that the savvy use of Twitter can build up a force that's sometimes just as powerful as "word of mouth": "want to see." Take "The Proposal," a film that had little advance buzz, yet has become one of the summer's most profitable productions. (It cost $40 million and is grossing upward of $159 million.) Flixster, which runs the Movies application for iPhones, worked with Disney/Touchstone to promote the Sandra Bullock- Ryan Reynolds romantic farce. Flixster's Singh credits the campaign with increasing the film's opening-weekend haul by 30 percent.

"Nothing else can get you the same mass of people all immediately saying how they felt about a movie 30 seconds after it ends," says James Lombardi of Baltimore, who sometimes uses Twitter to get a fix on a movie.

Positive reviews from her Twitter friends can persuade Wailes to attend a film if she's "undecided." If it "gets raves from people I network with, since I know I have something in common with these people, I figure there must be something in the movie that I might want to see." Since even the four-star professional reviews for "Up" sent mixed signals to her - was it a kids' film with a lot of adult scenes? a comedy with a lot of heartbreak? - she was on the fence about seeing it.

"But when I saw so many great reviews on Twitter, about both the silly elements and the heartfelt montage, they encouraged me to go."

Others see the Twitter Effect as more urban legend than viable trend. Gregg Kilday, film editor of the trade paper The Hollywood Reporter, notes that it's impossible to separate the factors that would explain a film's drop or rise in box office.

"Even if you don't have Twitter, a lot of people, especially kids, have long had the ability to text each other, sometimes from within the theater," he says. "And for a lot of the mass-market movies, the potential audience will go whether friends tell them they're good or not. Universal did a great job of marketing 'Bruno' and getting awareness of a character who was not well-known, but they may have been trying to mass-market a figure that had no mass appeal."

Brandon Gray, president and founder of boxofficemojo.com, notes that, just a few months ago, the hit teen-romance vampire film "Twilight" dropped 41 percent from Friday to Saturday, without any discussion of the Twitter Effect.

"There have been many indications through the years that films targeting teens and young adults will have a huge Friday, and a more front-loaded weekend," Gray says. "That's just kind of how it goes."

Ira Miller, owner of the Rotunda Cinemas, says: "Even 'The Ugly Truth' opened bigger on Friday and then dropped."

Movietickets.com recently ran a home-page poll in which 88 percent of the voting sample said Twitter had no effect on them. Joel Cohen, the company's executive vice president and general manager, thinks "we may be putting too much weight onto the Twitter Effect. But you can see Twitter's benefits as a communications tool that spreads the word about a film, and the negatives have yet to be proven."

Cohen theorizes that Twitter may have a larger influence on the success of smaller films such as the hit documentary "Food, Inc." than it does on major studio releases. (Gray cautions that, compared with the money generated by studio features, the $3.6 million gross of "Food, Inc." is "just a drop in the bucket.")

Bowles, who distributed "Food, Inc.," acknowledges that "we did some Twitter-specific things, including a Twitter-cast with the movie's director, Robby Kenner." But he's cautious when it comes to describing Twitter as a "revolutionary" force.

"Revolutionize moviegoing? No. But all the tiny little bits together [Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and others] can add up to something meaningful."

The Austin Film Society funds local Filmmakers

The Austin Film Society cashes out $112,000 to 2009 Texas Filmmakers Production Fund. The Film Society unveiled 25 projects which received support from the organization’s 2009 Texas Filmmakers’ Production Fund. In addition to $90,000 in cash grants, the group gave away $6,000 worth of Kodak film stock, $5,000 in in-kind services from Seattle-based Alpha Cine Labs and $1,000 in-kind services grant from local effects house TexFX. Recipients this year include David and Nathan Zellner’s latest project, “Pardon My Downfall,” Kyle Henry’s narrative, “Fourplay,” Erik Mauck and Chelsea Hernandez’s “The Road to Livingston” and James Marsh’s “Potlatch.” For more information and a full list of recipients, visit the AFS website.

Competing formats, bonus material under consideration by music industry

From Movie Marketing Madness: Various reports have come out about moves being made by the music industry – including Apple – as they seek to shore up sales not just of single songs but of full albums.

As Epicenter rounds-up, Apple and the major labels seem to each be working on their own formats for full albums that would be loaded with bonus content, creating an incentive to purchase that complete album instead of just a single at a time as has become the norm among buyers. The two formats don’t seem to be, as Van Buskirk at Epicenter says, at war since the parties are working together to some extent and the different formats are likely going to be used in different stores.

This story dovetails nicely with a question Scott Kirsner posed the other day when he asked what the future of “DVD extra” material is in the age of digital distribution. The two options he offers are that they will be folded into the movie’s online marketing campaign or that some will be offered for free but others (particularly those with high production costs) will be available as a la carte offerings for a buck or two on top of the film itself.

In the comments on Scott’s post I came down on the side of these features being made available during the marketing campaign, but on a staggered schedule that supports not only the movie’s theatrical (or other initial) release but then as a way to continue the conversation about the movie into its home video or secondary release life.

For the music industry I think the best thing that could be done is to go back to the traditional 45 LP, cassette single model: When someone buys the most popular song of the moment they get a B-side from the album as well, giving them a “free” taste of the rest of the album and thereby giving them a stronger reason to complete the album.

But I think it’s interesting that both the music and movie industry seem to be re-thinking the value proposition of additional content. What needs to be stated, though, is that in order to truly become a factor in the consumer decision making process additional content needs to have as much value as the core content itself. That can be value in the form of replay-ability or in the form of social capital, something that gets peers talking to each other on the same level that core content does.

That’s why I think free bonus material is a better model.

Imagine if, when you bought a song on iTunes you were given the option to subscribe to a video podcast by the artist. (Or you can use movies or books or whatever in this idea as well.) So you listen to the song and then a week later you get the latest episode of the podcast delivered to you and think “The song they played in that episode was pretty good.” and you go buy that. After a song or two you’re probably going to go ahead and just buy the rest of the album.

Regardless of the model there’s obviously a place for bonus material that supports and enhances the core content being sold. It’s just a matter of figuring out how that best works out.

Even more restrictions added to the home video rental market

from movie marketing madness:

So Warner Bros. not only wants to join Universal and 20th Century Fox in withholding its new releases from Redbox rental kiosks for a month (28 days, to be exact) after the hit home video, but it also is seeking to renegotiate its contract with Netflix along similar lines.

Great, good idea. Let me know how that works out for you, when people go to Netflix, realize they can’t get the latest Harry Potter movie there. I’m sure that won’t at all be “What do you mean I have to wait a month?” followed by a sour feeling toward both WB and the movie specifically.

This whole discussion seems to be predicated on the idea that the decision between buying and renting puts those two options on equal footing. As if consumers see both as equally viable options and it’s kind of a toss-up based on availability.

Only it’s not. Renting and purchasing are very different. Very few people are going to see a movie is unavailable at their rental outlet of choice and think “Oh, well then I’ll just go buy it.” That’s not where their head is at. They want to see the movie (for the first or repeated times) and then be done with it. If someone’s in the mood to buy, they will. If they’re in the mood to rent and can’t, they’ll become what are commonly called “dissatisfied customers.”

Not only that, but all this has me wondering what percentage of DVD sales are actually the result of a previous rental. As in, someone rented the movie (once or multiple times) and then decided it was worth buying. So by making a movie unavailable where and when people want to get it at the moment its hype is at its second greatest peak (theatrical release being the first greatest) is there the potential that sales are actually being hurt?

I’m all for a lot of experimentation in this new media age as companies seek to find the model that works for them and for consumers. But generally those experiments err toward making something over-available and then pulling back based on results, not by creating artificial scarcity.

Roger Ebert fears the gathering Dark Age

Apparently unconnected items appeared within two days of each other in the Los Angeles Times, and together confirmed my fear that American movie-going is entering into a Dark Age. The first was in a blog by Patrick Goldstein, who said: "Film critics are in the same boat as evening news anchors -- their core audience is people 50 and over, and getting older by the day. You could hire Jessica Alba to read the evening news -- or review 'G.I. Joe' for that matter -- and younger audiences still wouldn't care." The other was in a report by John Horn that despite "The Hurt Locker's" impressive box office success, "younger moviegoers are not flocking to the film, which could limit its ticket sales."

The obvious implication is, younger moviegoers don't care about reviews and have missed the news that "The Hurt Locker" is the best American film of the summer. There is a more disturbing implication: word of mouth is not helping the film in that younger demographic. It has been Hollywood gospel for decades that advertising and marketing can help a film to open strongly, but moviegoers talking with each other are crucial to its continuing success. That has been Summit Entertainment's game plan for "The Hurt Locker," which opened in a few theaters and has steadily increased its cities, becoming a real success without ever "winning" a weekend or benefiting from an overkill marketing campaign.

Certainly most of those who see "The Hurt Locker" become enthusiastic advocates of the film; but apparently those younger viewers who have seen it haven't had much of an influence on their peers. While the success of the film continues to grow as it steadily increases its number of theaters, the majority of younger filmgoers are missing this boat. Why is that? They don't care about reviews, perhaps. They also resist a choice that is not in step with their peer group. Having joined the crowd at "Transformers," they're making their plans to see "G. I. Joe." Some may have heard about "The Hurt Locker," but simply lack the nerve to suggest a movie choice that involves a departure from groupthink.

Of course there are countless teenagers who seek and value good films. I hear from them all the time in the comment threads on this blog. They're frank about their contemporaries. If they express a nonconformist taste, they're looked at as outsiders, weirdoes, nerds. Their dates have no interest in making unconventional movie choices. They're looked at strangely if they express no desire to see that weekend's box office blockbuster. Even some of their teachers, they write, are unfriendly to them "always bringing up movies nobody has ever heard of." If you hang around on these threads, you know the readers I'm referring to, including "A Kid," who writes so well that if she hadn't revealed her age (just turned 13) we would have taken her for a literate, articulate adult.

If I mention the cliché "the dumbing-down of America," it's only because there's no way around it. And this dumbing-down seems more pronounced among younger Americans. It has nothing to do with higher educational or income levels. It proceeds from a lack of curiosity and, in many cases, a criminally useless system of primary and secondary education. Until a few decades ago, almost all high school graduates could read a daily newspaper. The issue today is not whether they read a daily paper, but whether they can.

This trend coincides with the growing effectiveness of advertising and marketing campaigns to impose box office success on heavily-promoted GCI blockbusters, which are themselves often promotions for video games. No checks and balances prevail. The mass media is the bitch of marketing. Almost every single second of television coverage of the movies is devoted to thinly-veiled promotion. Movie stars who appear as guests on talk shows and cable news are almost always there because they have a new movie coming out. Smart-ass satirical commentary, in long-traditional in places like Mad magazine and SNL, is drowned out by celebrity hype. It was Mad that first got me thinking like a critic and analyzing popular culture.

No critical opinion--indeed, no opinion at all--is usually expressed by the hosts of these programs. The formula is rigid: (1) "Thanks for coming to see us," as if it's a social call; (2) "I hear you play (fill in description of role);" (3) "What was it like working with (name)?"; (4) "Do you think (this film, even if a comedy, sends a positive message?); (5) "What are you doing next?" This formula is interrupted for one (1) film clip and some funny remarks by the guest, which have been prepared and discussed in advance and are cued by the host's straight lines.

Just once I'd like to see a TV host of cable anchor say, "I'll make you a deal. I will play an ad for your new movies for free, right now, and then I will ask you questions that have not been vetted by your publicist, and you will answer on your own." This might result in some good television, as it once often did. But even smart people like Jon Stewart and Paul Giamatti can be seen enacting the guest-appearance charade. Giamatti's new movie is about a man who has his soul extracted, and finds it looks like a garbanzo bean. Why couldn't Stewart ask him, "Do you believe you have a soul?" And Giamatti might have replied, "Do you believe garbanzo beans go to heaven?"

Having succeeded in taming and orchestrating the media, studio marketing executives are understandably reluctant to take chances like that with their publicity. Some movie star might go on the air and say--why, anything! I started interviewing stars at a time when they still talked with an interviewer without a publicist hovering. Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, Shirley MacLaine, Charles Bronson, Jeanne Moreau, Sidney Poitier, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Sarah Miles, Oliver Reed, Michael Caine...would say anything. Heedlessly. Now even the smartest stars are kept on a short leash.

The movies themselves aren't left on their own, either. Paramount's decision to refuse advance critics' screenings of "G. I. Joe" was explained with refreshing honesty by Rob Moore, vice chairman of Paramount Pictures, to Christy Lemire of the Associated Press: "After the chasm we experienced with 'Transformers 2' between the response of audiences and critics, we chose to forgo opening-day print and broadcast reviews as a strategy to promote 'G.I. Joe.' We want audiences to define this film."

That hasn't meant no advance screenings. Indeed, the movie was recently scoring 85% on the Tomatometer, although today (August 6) it is down to 65% and dropping. Why so strong at the beginning? The studio screened it (in the words of the invaluable Goldstein, for "certified fan-boy zealots"). While some of them do articulate their reasons (I'm convinced Harry Knowles, bless his heart, really believes what he says), many are simply delighted to deliver an "exclusive early look" to their websites, making good on their half of an implied deal.

What usually happens in the 24 hours before a North American opening day is that the Tomatometer reading starts to drop as the International Date Line creeps inexorably toward Newfoundland, and MSM critics from Australia and the UK begin to check in. Another corrective is that the score on Metacritic.com often skews lower than the Meter because it monitors (dare I say) reputable critics and not fanboy zealots.

In any case, as I often say, I love the movies enough that anytime someone spends the money for a ticket I hope they have a good time. Nevertheless, I lament the 105,000,000 hours of life that North Americans have lost to "Transformers." As Gene Siskel liked to say, "It's your life, and you can't ever get it back."

Some weeks ago I went so far as to suggest the gap between some critics and some moviegoers may be because the critics are more "evolved." Man, did the wrath hit the fan. I was clearly an elitist snob. But think about it. Wouldn't you expect a critic to be more highly evolved in taste than a fanboy zealot? And what about "A Kid?" Should she be shunned by her peers for having her own ideas? And what about another one of my readers, the 15-year-old who says he has viewed dozens of my "Great Movies?" If you're his friend, isn't it worth wondering what he's stumbled onto? And what about your date this Friday night? If he or she only wants to see the movie "everyone" is going to see, is that person going to be much good for conversation?

In any event, I have good news for Patrick Goldstein and others like us. If the core audience for film critics is getting older by the day, then so is the overall audience for mainstream media. That means we're all appealing to the only demographic we have. As a remedy to pull us out of this nosedive into a gathering Dark Age, I have a simple proposal: Double teacher salaries and cut class enrollments in half. - Roger Ebert

The Path

There is one rule in the game. And it needs to be broken.
There is one goal. And when you attain it, you die.

Six sisters live in an apartment in the city. One by one their mother sends them on an errand to their grandmother, who is sick and bedridden. The teenagers are instructed to go to grandmother's house deep in the forest and, by all means, to stay on the path! Wolves are hiding in the woods, just waiting for little girls to stray.

But young women are not exactly known for their obedience, are they? Will they be able to resist the temptations of the forest? Will they stay clear of danger? Can they prevent the ancient tale from being retold?

The Path is a game about growing, about changing, about making choices, about accepting the consequences of these choices. A game about playing, and failing, about embracing life, perhaps by accepting death.

This may be one of the best games ever made. There is nothing action packed about it. There is nothing quick. There's only choices. I LOVE THIS GAME. Worth the 10 Dollars, my friends. Well worth it.