Shoestring Part 2: What went wrong

By Jason Goldstein — Nov. 8, 2009

Within a few days of Project Shoestring's launch, we'd sold over a dozen digital copies of Salad Daze, and started devising plans to recruit more filmmakers to use our platform.

We approached all the filmmakers we knew who had completed features, and pitched our proposal. Nearly all of them thought Shoestring was a great idea. They offered us feedback, encouragement, moral support... everything but their movies.

It's not that these people didn't want to try digital distribution. In fact, most of them thought it could really benefit them... just not now.

We'd gone out of our way to build the perfect platform. It was cheap, scalable, and risk free, with an operating agreement that allowed the filmmaker to pull out whenever he wanted. Yet, for some reason, nobody was ready to use it.

The problem is we launched the perfect platform into a very imperfect world.

The state of the independent film industry

There was a time when some guy named Kevin from New Jersey could shoot a movie in a convenience store, take it to festivals, sell it to a major distributor, and see it released in theaters nationwide.

Those days are over.

The studios have lost interest in marketing movies that don't star big names. The festival circuits have been flooded with 'indiewood' films, made outside of the studio system with well-known actors and million-dollar budgets.

We're more or less on our own. And increasingly, filmmakers all over the country have been finding ways to adapt to that.

We know people who burn and sell DVDs on their own. We know people who take movies on tour from city to city, the way independent bands do. We know people who have played the niche festival circuit, finding the venues that have yet to be taken over by indiewood films trying to drum up hype.

You'd think these renegade self-distributors would have everything to gain by making their films more accessible. The problem is, the rest of the industry still thinks its 1990, and nobody is sure how they'll react to filmmakers who put their movies online. Festival committees demand to be the first to show a movie in their city, and distributors expect to be the first person to bring your film to general market.

Most filmmakers don't want to risk throttling those options, no matter how unlikely they are.

In my less-than-humble opinion, that isn't acceptable.

Onward!

After a summer of playing Go Fish with every independent filmmaker we've ever met, Randy and I decided to change our approach. Shoestring wouldn't be a store anymore, just a method of self-distributing. We'd keep using it for our own work, and if anyone else wanted to license it, that's great.

Still, the world is going to change, with or without the big dogs. The more filmmakers decide to self-distribute and ignore the old guard, the more important platforms like Shoestring will become.

But first, a few obstacles

Of course, there are a few things that need to happen before we can have our self-distributing utopia of digital cinema.

First, audiences need a higher comfort level with digital film. We've gotten nothing but raving reviews from the Project Shoestring customers, but this is still a very foreign medium to a lot of people.

This will change, just as MP3's have outright replaced their plastic predecessors.

Second, there needs to be a better marketing framework out there.

This may be the journalist in me speaking, but I believe what we need is a set of high quality online magazines (or blogs) that write about independent movies. Right now, people who love movies read SlashFilm. SlashFilm doesn't write about people like us, but there's no reason it couldn't have a scruffier sibling-blog.

This can change over night.

As for the filmmakers, there's no reason we need to be passive agents in this. While Twittering, flyering, and engaging local press has done us a tremendous amount of good, perhaps its time for us to start asking how we can collaborate to bring a little more attention to next generation of rebels on the backlot.

What do you think?