The Living Wake: The Path To Self Distribution (Pt2 of 3)

This entry was originally published at Hope For Film

Today’s guest post is the second of three from filmmaker Sol Tryon, whose The Living Wake is currently in theaters.

Like many indie films, with The Living Wake we were continuing to raise money as we went and post-production was no different.  We used the dailies from the shoot to show new potential investors what we were creating.  Fortunately, Charlie Corwin and Clara Markowicz from Original Media saw our vision and believed in us enough to finance the completion budget and help escort us into the next phase of our journey with the project.  After an extended post-production due to schedules, we had a film that we felt surpassed all of our initial expectations for the project. We were sure this was going to be a darling of the film festivals and people all over the world would appreciate our bizarre little movie.

While we knew it was a very particular film and that it wasn’t really headed for big mainstream success, we felt that the film was well crafted, had an amazing combination of comedic wit and emotional sensibilities and that the cult classic potential was off the charts.  Unfortunately, we were hitting the festival circuit right at the time when the bottom was falling out of the industry. No one was taking any chances on buying films that needed a special sort of marketing to reach its audience.  We found ourselves in a predicament where many of the buyers were saying, “I love your film, but I don’t know how to sell it…”  We received amazing praise from the press and audiences alike, but it didn’t fit into the traditional mold of successfully distributed films.  We had several offers to basically give our movie away and hope for the best, but that wasn’t something any of us were interested in.  We had worked too hard and believed too strongly in the film we had created to just have someone put it out there with no real vision or marketing support and potentially find it sitting on a shelf somewhere leaving us with no control over the future of the film. So, we decided to pass on all of our offers and embark on the journey of discovering how we could release the film ourselves.  With the guidance of some filmmakers that had been having similar experiences, we devised a strategy to get the film out theatrically and retain control of all of the other rights.

Tomorrow the tale continues with: The How & The Why Of Our DIY

Don’t miss The Living Wake in Los Angeles May 21st-27th at Laemmle’s Sunset 5