Kludges, Adaptations, and Evolution, Part 2

David Ryan

David Ryan is a boat builder and USCG licensed master captain. He is the owner of Sailing Montauk and skipper of Montauk''s charter sailing catamaran MON TIKI You can follow him on Twitter @CaptDavidRyan

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5 Responses

  1. Pat Cahalan says:

    Make it part of a cruise package.

    I bet you can find some other filmmakers who have stuff sitting in the can somewhere who would be interested in the idea of making private screenings available for some sort of fee.  If you don’t ever make a copy of it, it doesn’t lose any value, and it might gain some if someone knows someone who books a cruise.Report

    • wardsmith in reply to Pat Cahalan says:

      Pat that is fishing brilliant! Maybe tie in with these guys? They’re going to get bored talking about money all day, they’d like to watch something interesting at night to give them ideas on what to spend all that money on. 🙂Report

    • David Ryan in reply to Pat Cahalan says:

      Touring, four-walling, special screenings are all ways to get around this current impass. But having thought long and hard about it, I decided it’s not for me. Again, quoting from “Why I don’t make movies…”

      For a while I thought about four-walling. That’s what my hero Bruce Brown did, traveling from town to town, putting up posters, renting out halls, and hoping enough people would come to the show to make it worthwhile. But I’m in my 40s, I have two young children I adore, and the thought of being on the road, touring touring touring, away from my kids, sleeping in hotels instead of sleeping in my own bed with my wife is not especially appealing.

      In short, you really, really have to love the lime-light to do the touring, director’s Q&A, SXSW, TED thing, because there’s not a lot of money in it (as in mostly none). If being on stage doesn’t nourish you, give you something you need to make up for the road-warrior life-style and low wages, it’s not really worth it. (Caveat: Corporate speaking gigs pay well, and all of the above can be a stepping stone to corporate speaking.)

      In other words, it doesn’t work.

      Also keep in mind, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of the most popular and expensive independent films there is, commanding the princely sum of $300/screening. If (if) your title could be as in demand as RHPS to net a $100,000 gross, you’d need to have it screening somewhere virtually every night of the year. Every. Night. Of. The. Year.

      Achieving that would be nothing short of a miracle and a full-time job.

      My long-standing calculus for a sole-proprietor is you take the number at the bottom of the non-overhead P&L and multiply by .4 to get a yearly salary  with benefits equivelent; ie, if your after non overhead expenses number is $100,000, that’s going to going to yield a life-style on par with a job that pays $40K/year with health insurance and the other bennies associated with a good middle-class job.

      This is simply not going to happen.

      Maybe (maybe) it would work with a roster of films. But it would still be a full-time job, and you’d be a film distributor, not a filmmaker. (Ah, now I get why distributors get a cut!)

      The magic of LPs, cassettes, DVDs (or iTunes DMR protected files) is that they allow creators to take advantage of pre-existing distributions networks. But what we’ve seen in digital distro (iTunes, Pandora, etc)  is that artists are getting a *smaller* cut of the final sale, not a larger cut.

      No wonder people are making t-shirts.Report

  2. James B Franks says:

    Any chance of some close ups of the akas and some building descriptions?  From this angle it looks like you have curved sections.Report

  3. Jeff says:

    1. Special features.  That adds value to the DVd

    2. Closed captioning.  In this brave new world of all-Internet all-the-time, the requirements to accommodate the deaf and hard-of-hearing are being left by the way-side.  (Why is it that a piece of film, broadcast over public media, must be CC’ed, but the same piece of film, over the Internet, need not be? [“Leverage” may be the greatest show in the history of the world, but it’s creator doesn’t give a crap about those who need CC, so I will forever revile him.])Report