My life up to now. Part 15: OK. So we reached the top of the proverbial mountain, now what?

OK. So we reached the top of the proverbial mountain (distribution), now what? When Robin and I got up there (the mountain), we took off our packs, found a nice shady spot to sit and rest. A nice breeze came over us flipping the leaves out of their stems and sprinkling them down onto our heads. We looked up towards the sky and low and behold, there was more mountain. After you get your first distribution deal, the next step in the life of being a filmmaker is to get a "better" distribution deal. There is an unwritten rule (until now) that the first deal you make should always be your worst. The rest of this blog post will be hugely constructive for you filmmaker types and probably mildly interesting to those who do not make movies. I'd like to talk about stuff we did wrong and will never get wrong again. See, constructive!

What the heck is a QC Report? What is a deliverable? E & O Insurance? At the time, we had no idea. Here is how we learned and here is how we eventually succeeded. Google. We would have a meeting with our distributor and be googling the entire time he was talking to us, pretending to be intelligent and business savvy. I felt like I was an international spy on a mission and I had my 'tech' guy on a laptop, sitting outside in the incognito van, rattling off secret codes in my ear piece. Robin and I knew how to make films. What we didn't realize is that we were expected to do all of this business stuff on top of it. Put me on set with a camera in my hand, I'm good. Put me in a room with a bunch of suits to talk about Errors and Omissions Insurance, Title Reports, Actor riders, Certified Statements with Contractual Obligations, Chain of Title Summary, Copyright Registrations? I can think of about 1209374365 things I would rather do. But guess what? That's part of the film business!

The QC Report. This stands for Quality Control. Basically, a lab hooks a bunch of scopes, software and monitors up to your movie and they go through it frame by frame with surgical instruments looking for imperfections in the picture and sound. It costs about $1500 per report and trust me, on your first time out, you'll need 2 of them. You'll fix the first wave of problems and then they will test it all again. So that's 3 grand right there you'll need to add to your budget to cover the cost. Oh, you didn't know about QC Reports and you spent your entire budget on Pre-Production, Production and Post Production (Naturally of course!)? Well, you'll just have to pay for that out of pocket. Next, there is Errors and Omissions Insurance. That will be $4500. Didn't budget for that? Well, go ahead and pay that out of your lunch money too. Creation of all the masters? $5000. Did you get two distributors, one for foreign and one for domestic? Double that 5 grand to 10 grand. Next, you'll need an attorney to broker the distribution contracts. Didn't budget for that? Oh, well you can just do it yourself. Be your own attorney! Attorneys are overrated anyway! A distributor has 3 different filing cabinets where they get your deal's paperwork:

1st Filing Cabinet is labeled: 1st Time Filmmaker With No Representation
2nd Filing Cabinet is labeled: Filmmaker With Representation
3rd Filing Cabinet is labeled: Filmmaker With Good Representation

We grossly under budgeted and quickly drummed up $20,000 in expenses and that didn't include all the normal expenses that the distributor takes out of your cut. Because we were out of money, we structured our deal so that the distribution company took care of all these expenses and they just took it all out of our profits. Smart right? Eh, not really. Not really because that change made it so that they would have no expense cap. And what happens when you give a kid mom's no limit credit card? A rain of destruction, mayhem and misfortune, Lou Pearlman style.

All of this said, I have no regrets. I feel wonderfully lucky that we got a distribution deal to begin with. I feel lucky because now that I have two movies in distribution (sorry, jumping into the future here), I realize that it's a stepping stone process. We made it through "distribution school" as it were, came out on the other side better for it… more prepared. In order to get a good distribution deal, you first have to most certainly get a bad one.