This is the last post of the series I’ve been writing about the making of Resentment, my debut feature film as writer/director. If there are new developments, I’ll post about them, and I’ll post a note here when the film becomes available to rent, and then when it becomes available to stream for free on advertising-supported services. But this series of posts will be done, because distribution is the last phase in the “making” of a film: the point where it is made available to audiences generally. To make that happen, you need distribution.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you need a distributor. I know people who have pursued self-distribution. You have to be extremely good at marketing yourself, incredibly energetic and creative. Friends of mine who made a film called Bite Me, a vampire-themed romantic comedy, tried that route when they weren’t satisfied with the distribution deals they were offered. Their plan was extremely creative. They put their film out there for rent on the various platforms, and then they launched a 35-city cross-country tour with the film. They would rent a theater, screen for a weekend, put ads in local papers and on social media, throw a vampire-themed party at the theater post-screening and sell merchandise. They even hired a documentarian to travel the country with them, and posted the documentary segments on Youtube as they went. In conjunction with all this, they put ads on social media to drive traffic to the film where it could be rented. The tour sounded like it was a whole lot of fun, and they sold plenty of tickets—they basically covered the costs of the tour. But it was an enormous amount of work, and as a strategy for generating viral interest on line, it didn’t really work, and they eventually wound up signing with a distributor.
Resentment isn’t a genre film with the same potential niche interests as Bite Me, and I don’t have the necessary talent for self-promotion anyhow. We knew we wanted a distributor. But what did we want from the distributor?
I’d faced that question before for indie films that I’d been on the producing team of. If you’re in the rarified realm where you can hope for a significant minimum guarantee (the film equivalent of a book advance), money is one of the things you’ll want—but it might not be decisive. I’ve been party to decisions to go with a lower offer from a more prestigious distributor and party to decisions to go with a higher offer from a less prestigious one. The interests of the film and the interests of investors are generally aligned, but not perfectly; you need to think of both—but neither will necessarily be served by going either with the largest offer or the biggest name. What any filmmaker wants is for their film to be seen, and seen by people who will appreciate it.
The dream for any filmmaker is for their film to be released theatrically, at least in a limited way, so that people can see it the way films were meant to be seen. Under contemporary conditions though, that’s vanishingly unlikely to happen. Of course, a filmmaker can always rent a screen in a theater on their own dime and show their film there, but notwithstanding the Bite Me experience that’s generally a money-losing proposition, a way to have a premiere and give your friends an opportunity to come out and show their support (something the Manhattan Film Festival had effectively already provided us). Distributors won’t generally pay for something like that, and such screenings do much less to draw critical attention than they once might have. Realistically, what we wanted was a distributor that would be creative in getting our film noticed as it was distributed on streaming services, and that would ideally add some cachet by association. We wanted them to be invested in our film, not to just put it out there with dozens of other titles they had acquired and hope for the best.
Our sales agent, Blood Sweat Honey, pitched Resentment to dozens of distributors, and garnered a handful of offers. Some were from tiny, one-man outfits. Some were from subsidiaries of larger media companies. There was a wide range in terms of the number and kinds of titles they generally handled. The financial terms varied much less than their personalities—what we really wanted to make sure was that we had a good cultural fit, someone we thought understood our movie specifically and had some knowledge of how to help it find its audience. After interviewing all of the companies, we decided that Buffalo 8 was the clear best choice. Once we had agreed on terms, we moved into the next phase—making delivery.
What does “delivering” a movie mean in the digital age? It doesn’t just mean delivering the film itself in the format or formats needed for distribution. It means delivering a variety of other assets: the sound mix (in required formats), closed captions, subtitles (if you want distribution to non-English speaking countries), a poster (we had one that our distributor liked, but we had to modify it to gain their approval), a trailer (which we also had, and which didn’t require modification), key art based on the poster in a variety of sizes and formats, stills from the film, promotional photos—a long list of materials that would be used in the placement of the film on various platforms. Then there are legal materials that had to be delivered: contracts with cast and crew, licenses for music and any film clips, clearance reports, copyright reports, chain of title, proof that the film was not financially encumbered (by unpaid bills or unusual financing agreements) in ways that would prevent the distributor from receiving any share of revenue that they should be due, etc. Even starting from the point of having a lot of this in hand, which we were, it took weeks to get together everything that our distributor needed.
After delivery is complete, the film has to go through quality check, a process required by the streaming services to make sure that it meets their technical and content-based requirements. That’s another multi-week effort, during which all we had to do was wait for the results. When we passed quality check, our distributor set the date for our release—and laid out the strategy for getting it seen. They strongly recommended that we hire a publicist (and were prepared to recommend several whom they had worked with many times before) in order to help get us interviews on podcasts and reviews of the film. After doing several interviews we settled on one, again based largely on our perception of fit (it helped a lot that she had taken the time to watch the film and read up on my own history before doing our call). Our distributor also strongly recommended that we hire an intern to help with social media posting. For that task we had something much better up our sleeve: we’d be hiring my son’s marketing and brand management company, Millman Management. We began building up our social media presence in anticipation of the release, and provided our publicist with tons of background information on the film, my team and myself both to entice and to assist interviewers, critics and podcasters.
And, of course, I started writing this series, which has now come to a premature end—premature, because while our trailer dropped a week ago, both on Buffalo 8’s channel and on Film Threat, it won’t be possible for audiences to actually see the film for another week. Any critical attention we get won’t come until after that, and it’ll be weeks or months until we know whether the film has started to find its audience. It’s been an incredibly long journey: over a year since our festival premiere, almost two years since we finished post-production, over three years since the shoot, more than four years since we received our first investment, nearly seven years since I started writing the first draft. And yet, in a sense that whole journey was just to get to the starting gate.
The journey of the film itself has just begun. I can’t wait to see where it goes.
Previous entries in this series can be found here:
Resentment is now available for pre-order on Fandango at Home. Pre-ordering the film is incredibly helpful for placement on that site going forward, so if you are so inclined please pre-order today. The official trailer can be seen on our distributor’s channel and on Film Threat.
To keep up with the countdown to our release, please follow us on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok and on X. You can also add Resentment to your watch list on Letterboxd. If you’ve seen the film, please rate and review it there. Letterboxd is the home for fans of all varieties of film, and the more attention Resentment garners there, the better its chance of finding its audience.