Bankroll. Tom Malloy

the same. I’m not holding anything back. I’m revealing all the techniques and tricks I use so that you, too, can make your dream a reality. It’s not easy to raise money for your film. But it can be done. Here’s how.

       WELCOME TO INDIEWOOD

      1

       Welcome

      Welcome to Indiewood. Indiewood doesn’t have a geographical location, but it does have a place: It exists outside the Hollywood studio system. Sure, in the past, Hollywood has dabbled in Indiewood, but those mini-majors (Sony Pictures Classics, Focus Features, etc.) are just little versions of the big distributors. When I talk about Indiewood, I mean truly making a film from scratch and then trying to sell it to one of those big Hollywood distributors for a theatrical release.

      Indiewood is where I live. It’s how I support my wife and two kids, and how I pay for my house and cars. I have friends in the Hollywood system who make double or even triple the money I do per year, but, for what it’s worth, they respect the hell out of me and want to be doing what I do.

      What I do is risky, exciting at times, mostly difficult, and has so many ups and downs it can be compared to crack addiction. As Indiewood producers, we are all “chasing the crack high” — that great feeling you get when a film is financed and you are in production. There’s a little bit of a high in preproduction, and a little bit of a high in postproduction (sometimes), but the time where you are loving life 24/7 is when you are shooting.

      Granted, there are tough times during production and disasters happen (we almost blew up an entire block in Spencerport, New York, when we were filming The Alphabet Killer), but production generates a feeling that I cannot explain — you have to experience it for yourself. Everything is so fantastic until production ends.

      Then reality hits and you have to sell a movie and make money. If the film makes money, you can use your private equity investors to do another film. If the film doesn’t make money, you just burned your investors and you better start looking for new ones.

      This is a world where everyone talks a great game. All the players have various projects in different stages of development, but most (and I’m talking north of 90%) are just “chasing the high.” They’re not gonna get there.

      Technology, especially the recent advent of digital cameras that cost next to nothing and produce amazing results, has opened the floodgates. Any wannabe filmmaker with $25,000 can make a movie that has the potential to look good. The unfortunate side effect is that, 99% of the time, these movies are very bad, and they impose a negative stamp on the indie film world. They tell an investor, “Invest in independent films, and you’re gonna lose money.”

      In Indiewood, budgets range from $300,000 to $8 million. A viable movie can be made for $300,000. Going over $8 million would be foolish; at that point, you should just work with a studio. But these movies that fall within this range are not made by students and are not cheaply done. They have union crews (as many as can be afforded), always deal with the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) (never make a non-SAG movie), most of the time deal with the WGA, and almost always deal with the Directors Guild of America (DGA) (unless I’m breaking in a new director I think is a hidden talent).

      Some may disagree with my numerical definition of what constitutes an independent film, but that range I stated above is the one I’m addressing in this book. If you want to raise $10,000, I guess you could use some of the techniques in here, but most of them don’t apply. If you want to raise $15 million, again, some of the techniques may work, but a lot of them aren’t going to help you.

      However, if you have a movie that falls within that $300,000 to $8 million budget, you’re going to want to listen.

       My First Project as a Producer

      In 2001, I made an educational video called The Agony of Ecstasy. It was funded by a recovering alcoholic who wanted to give something back to the world. He advanced us $3000 and asked us to shoot a video geared for high schools.

      My producing partner at the time and I took the $3000 and used our Canon XL-1 (mini-DV) camera, which was one of the top prosumer cameras back then. We set out to make an indie-type street film instead of the moronic drug videos that are out there, so many of which we watched in preparation for producing our film. One video about crack featured interpretive dancers in ballet uniforms. We were crying as we watched it!

      We took to the streets of New York and did on-camera interviews, and we even got into an actual rave party, a feat that VH1 couldn’t even achieve for their ecstasy special. Our video came out quite well.

      Once we finished the video, we started selling it to schools through various distributors. I didn’t know it at the time, but educational videos sell for big numbers. The lowest price I saw the video go for was $99. Most of the time it was $129.99, and sometimes it was $200, if I included a CD containing a little PowerPoint presentation and test for the class that I made up from the knowledge I gained while shooting.

      Well, our video sold to over a thousand schools. All in all, it’s probably made over $150,000. Out of that, I’ve probably seen around $10,000. But, it was the first little film I ever produced, and it made money.

       My first produced project that made money! An educational video for high schools. This was the video box cover I designed.

      I remember talking to a distributor from Pyramid Media, one of the distributors of the video (I believe you can still buy it there). He told me that, back in the day, educational videos could make millions. Nowadays, the market was flooded.

      That was the first time I heard about how great it “used to be,” but it wouldn’t be my last.

      Unfortunately, “things used to be so much better” has become the battle cry of the independent film world. Each year, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter love to report how the American Film Market (AFM) was the “slowest yet,” and at Cannes, “No one is buying…” and at Toronto the “market is grim.”

      Is it true? Somewhat. I’ll go into more detail as I explain the three features I produced over the past two years.

       The Attic

      This was the first time I experienced the “crack high.” When we were shooting The Attic, we really thought it was going to be the next Halloween. I felt I knew enough about horror movies (being a horror movie junkie my whole life) to be able to craft the scariest movie of all time.

      The problem was, it’s not that easy. And, it wasn’t just me doing the crafting. Early on, I had been in talks with an editor/wannabe director (let’s call him “the WBD”) who wanted to direct The Attic. He was, funny enough, the same guy who had been attached to direct AnySwing Goes, and he was getting screwed over by that scum producer (“the SP”) as well.

      About two years into the AnySwing Goes fiasco, I felt a connection with this guy. I thought that, together, we were fighting this SP. I told him that I was getting a movie funded, and I wanted him to direct. He immediately read the script for The Attic and jumped in. He started doing his own rewrites, which I shouldn’t have let happen. I wasn’t yet WGA and didn’t know that this isn’t how it’s done.

      In the meantime, as I explained in the introduction, once I started to expose the con-man SP, he tried to push me out of the film. What I didn’t know was that this guy, the WBD, was supporting him. Looking back on it, I realize he was doing it out of fear for his own job. He thought that the SP was going to be successful and that I was just a kid. He was wrong. The SP has never done any film project to my knowledge (or IMDb’s knowledge), and I now live in a house that they both could only dream of owning.

      When I discovered this