Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Are You In Business or Not?

I recently came across an interview with Francis Ford Coppola in Moviemaker magazine and was not surprised at his remarks regarding the "business of movies" which you can see here.

I say I'm not surprised because that was the old way of distributing movies and entertainment. It's a very suspicious business to be in - with a lot of risk and rolls of the dice...

Unless you're smart about it - as he alludes to in his reference to Corman (his former boss).

But he's dead on when he says this - an old school adage that still applies:

"The movie business is not a good business to be in. You can have the money to finance your own movie, the actors can all love you, and if you don't control the distribution, you're dead."
Thankfully, that aspect of the business is changing.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

He makes a great point about the leverage that's involved in distribution. Unless you can hold out the next big release, the exhibitor doesn't have much incentive to honestly report his revenue. The current system forces the exhibitor to pay back a certain amount -- even if it means dipping into popcorn revenue to be sure that he gets Iron Man 2 on opening weekend. Filmmakers with a mind to self-distribute theatrically will be better served to rent out theaters and handle their own ticket sales. But as Coppola points out, that doesn't leave much time for being a filmmaker.