I don't usually take a lunch break at my day job. I mean, I leave the office for an hour, but I usually run some errands as opposed to actually going out for a meal. It's not like I don't get plenty of eating done while I'm on the clock.

Today, though, I'm in the mood for Mexican food, so I'm driving out to Los Amigos (voted Birmingham's best Mexican restaurant by me) when my cell phone rings. I don't recognize the number. I answer the phone and find a dude from a direct-to-video distribution company on the line. It's a small company, but not so small I haven't heard of it.

The distributor guy and I proceed to have a pretty lengthy conversation, during which I find out that he really digs HIDE AND CREEP and is ready to release it on DVD as soon as possible. I'm pretty excited, so I try to call co-director Chuck Hartsell as soon as the distribution conversation ends. But Chuck's not answering.

When I finally get Chuck on the phone, I find out he couldn't answer earlier because he had another distributor on the phone. And this other distributor, California company the Asylum, is all about releasing HIDE AND CREEP, too. Could this be the beginnings of a bidding war over our little zombie opus?

How It Happened

You might remember that I put a lot of effort into making HIDE AND CREEP a festival-friendly film, from designing press kits and (hopefully) cool DVD covers all the way down to mixing the movie in mono for more predictable audio from film fest sound systems. Well, all that effort was wasted for the most part. Of all the festivals we entered (Sundance, Slamdance, SXSW...) we only got accepted into two -- Arlene's Grocery Picture Show and the B-Movie fest.

Chuck and I were a bit depressed about all this. We thought we'd made a pretty good movie -- HIDE AND CREEP had received generally positive reviews. So we started wondering if the home video distribution industry might like it better than the film fests. Heck, they couldn't like it much less.

At this point, I'd like to tell you that we had a brilliant plan that landed us a multi-million dollar distribution deal for HIDE AND CREEP, but that'd just be a lie. What we did was send out DVDs to every distributor we could find. We searched the Internet for distributors' contact info. We called the distributors. "Can we send you our movie?" They usually said, "yes." So we usually put the DVD in the mail.

When we couldn't find any more distributors on the Internet, we went to the video store. We looked at the back of DVD cases and found more distributors. We sent out more DVDs.

So, unlike the time Lion's Gate Films phoned us, these more recent distributor calls didn't just come out of the blue.

Deals

You can't talk to a distributor for very long without talking about the deal. After all, if they want your movie, they're going to have to give you something for it, even if it's not millions of dollars.

We were offered two deals for HIDE AND CREEP. The first was an outright buyout for $20,000. Meaning that we got $20,000 and the distributor got all rights to the movie forever and ever. HIDE AND CREEP would be ours no more.

I could live with selling all rights to HIDE AND CREEP. But for $20,000? We spent more than that just on out-of-pocket expenses, not even counting all the deferred payments for various cast and crew members. To me, selling the movie outright for less than... I don't know, say $100,000, would just feel like just giving up.

The other deal didn't guarantee any money up front, but we would get a percentage of the profits. The basic formula for this deal is selling cost of the DVD minus manufacturing and promotional costs, divided by two. If the distributor sells a disc for $7, and the distributor spent $2 on manufacturing and advertising costs, we'd get $2.50 for the disc. That might not sound like much, but keep in mind these distributors are dealing with large chains like Blockbuster, who buy thousands of discs at a time.

This "back-end" deal was also not forever and ever. It would expire in seven years, after which all HIDE AND CREEP rights would revert back to Chuck and me.

What We Did

I really wasn't crazy about either of these deals. I'd heard of shot-on-film horror flicks selling for more than $100,000. I'd seen some of these movies, and, quality-wise, I think HIDE AND CREEP really gave them a run for the money. I knew HIDE AND CREEP had gotten better reviews than some other movies that sold for big bucks.

But nobody wanted to pay big bucks for HIDE AND CREEP. At least not up-front. So we went with the "back-end" deal, which was offered to us by the Asylum. The other deal was less of a risk -- at least we'd get $20,000 and be able to cover most of our out-of-pocket expenses. But, since we'd pretty much been gambling with this project from the beginning, we decided to let it ride. If the movie didn't sell, we'd be out of luck (at least for seven years), but if it sold well, we might be able to make our money back. If it sold really well, we might be able to pay the cast and crew. Heck, if it sold exceptionally well, we might even turn a profit.

What We Should Have Done

Earl Hilliard, Jr., another Birmingham filmmaker, had told me about Integration Entertainment. He'd been researching producer reps -- companies that help independent filmmakers sell their movies to distributors -- and heard good things about Amy Steuer, who is the president of Integration.

I got in touch with Amy and she eventually tried to help us find other distributors interested in HIDE AND CREEP. Unfortunately, most of them had already seen the movie because Chuck and I had already sent out so many copies.

I can't know for sure, but I bet that distributors who turned down HIDE AND CREEP when we sent it to them would have paid a little more attention if it had been Amy who showed it to them first. Because they know Amy and trust her judgement.

If I've learned anything about the movie business, it's that relationships are key. If you are friends with a guy who owns a good camera, that's going to make it much easier to get a good camera to shoot your movie. At the other end of the process, people like Amy have relationships with distributors, and she has a much easier time setting up distribution deals.

That's another good thing about producer reps. They do deals all the time, unlike Chuck and I, who don't even make movies all the time, much less movie deals. If you can find a good producer rep to sell your movie, I really feel like you're going to end up with more money and less headaches in the long run. From now on, I'm going to try to concentrate on making good movies and, hopefully, finding someone else to make the deals.

Living with Distribution

All that being said, the Asylum deal has been pretty cool so far. There were a couple of minor incidents, though, mostly due to my general lack of movie business experience.

Up until we made the deal with the Asylum, I'd been slack about cleaning up the audio for HIDE AND CREEP. I knew it needed a lot of work, but the whole constant-rejection-by-film-fests thing had kind of gotten me down. I had developed a "nobody's ever gonna buy my piece of crap movie" attitude... which happily changed after we signed the Asylum deal.

However, the Asylum had a hole in their release schedule -- July 19, 2005. They wanted to fill that hole with HIDE AND CREEP. And they needed a DigiBeta tape of the final movie ASAP, so they could go ahead and start mastering it for DVD. Suddenly, I had great incentive to remix the HIDE AND CREEP soundtrack. I spent most every free minute working on HIDE AND CREEP audio for the next couple of weeks. I found some new effects sounds, had some actors dub lines and got Eric McGinty and Jimbo Roberson to remix several of the music selections in stereo.

A few days after we got the master tape sent off, Chuck and I received a crash course in the production of "key art." The guys at the Asylum called and asked us for high quality photos of characters from HIDE AND CREEP that they could use to create DVD cover art, promotional posters, etc.

The Asylum was in a hurry to create HIDE AND CREEP key art because they wanted to show the folks at Blockbuster Video what the eventual HIDE AND CREEP DVD cover would look like. Blockbuster buys tons o' DVDs, and, apparently, the DVD cover art is one of the things that influences exactly how many copies of a particular movie they purchase, especially when it's a smaller movie no one has really heard of.

Chuck and I called Kyle Holman and Melissa Bush, two of the lead actors from HIDE AND CREEP. They were nice enough to agree to a Saturday morning photo shoot. For the shoot, we stood Kyle and Melissa in front of a white wall and snapped film and digital pictures for a couple of hours. We developed and scanned the film pics and sent it all, electronically, to the Asylum's art guy, Lars Canty. Lars replaced the white background with tombstones, trees, zombies and a foreboding sky, among other things.

More Distribution Fun

We didn't have too much trouble getting anything else ready for the upcoming HIDE AND CREEP DVD release. Chuck and I recorded a commentary track one night, Chuck cut together a brief behind-the-scenes piece and I remastered the video on the two HIDE AND CREEP trailers.

The July 19 release is strictly domestic, which means the United States and Canada around here. We recently signed an international home video/worldwide TV (!) rights deal with the Asylum that will involve some more video work on HIDE AND CREEP. I'll have to crop the original widescreen image to create a "pan and scan" version of the movie, and I'll also need to create a PAL version of the movie for certain regions of the world.

Well, I guess Blockbuster liked the HIDE AND CREEP cover art okay, because they ordered 6,300 copies. Which, I assume, means that you should at least be able to find one copy in most any Blockbuster in North America. On or after July 19, that is.

If Blockbuster isn't convenient for you, Hollywood Video has placed a pretty large order as well. Or if you'd like to go all the way and purchase your very own copy of HIDE AND CREEP, you can order it from Amazon.com.

I'll be back again to finally (really) wrap up "This Movie Ain't Gonna Shoot Itself" once and for all with Part Twenty-Two: Lessons Learned. In the best Saturday morning cartoon tradition, I'll say "I've learned something today," then proceed to explain, in great detail, just what that "something" is. Until then...

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