EP 89 | The Distributor Decision
This season of Truly Independent is supported by the Help Them See Foundation. Help Them See is a nonprofit dedicated to supporting feature films that inspire faith, hope, and connection. By partnering with filmmakers, the Help Them See Foundation brings meaningful stories to life and shares them with audiences worldwide, making a lasting cultural impact to the power of cinema. Learn more and discover how you can be part of the movement by visiting helpthemseefoundation.org. Welcome to Truly Independent.
Garrett:I'm Garrett Batty alongside my cohost, Darren Smith. Each week, we'll go in-depth with guests, industry experts, and we'll even share our own experiences, all with the goal of demystifying the independent thought process. This season, it's all about the script. From the first of an idea to a polished final draft, breaking it down for scheduling, budgeting, and ultimately shooting. We'll walk through every step it takes to get from page to production.
Garrett:Welcome to Truly Independent.
Daren:There he is. Hello, Garrett. How the heck are you?
Garrett:Hey, Darren. Good. I'm good. It's nice to see you.
Daren:It's nice to be seen. It's nice to see you as well. Okay, Garrett. So moving on with a podcast today. What are we talking about today?
Garrett:Okay, Darren. Well, first of all, a couple of things. I mean, I'll say the topic, but then before we get into it, gotta, I want to say a couple of things.
Daren:Okay.
Garrett:The topic we're going to talk about is distribution, self distribution versus distributor and how to make that ever important decision on how your film is going get seen by people.
Daren:The Distributor Decision. I like it.
Garrett:The Distributor Decision. That's a great title. Okay. Now, first of all, congratulations on getting your picture locked for Brotherhood.
Daren:As of yesterday.
Garrett:Is that right? Are we allowed to announce that?
Daren:Yeah. By the
Garrett:time they listen to this, they will have seen the movie.
Daren:Yeah. We are we asked a locked picture yesterday, so about six weeks after we wrapped production, we have a locked edit.
Garrett:That's stunning. And credit to your team and Andy and Aaron, I know how hard they work as editors and Ross certainly had a vision and was able to execute that. Yeah. Way to go. That's cool.
Garrett:It's your post team then, your sound mixer, your composer who's Ross, they all have now an extra week and a half that they didn't have because you guys are ahead of schedule.
Daren:Yeah. We're ahead of schedule. We're giving it to them early. It's this constant thing in indie film, like you never have enough money, so the next thing you can give people is time, and that is a massive gift. So the audio guys were like, oh, man.
Daren:If we have more time, that's great. We're not gonna charge more. It just means that we're not crunching all of this work into four days. So they're very excited.
Garrett:Okay, and the second thing before we get into our topic is we're recording this on June 30 and this Friday, Young Washington comes out. Our friends over at Angel Studios distributing an incredible film made by our friends over at the Wonder Project. John Erwin directing and Adam Abel is one of the producers and I saw a early screening last night at the local theater here and they've just done an incredible job. So this is a plug for Young Washington. This is an unsponsored invitation to go see Young Washington in theaters.
Garrett:It's independent film at its best, and they continue to just do amazing things.
Daren:That's awesome. It looks like it's tracking for a decent opening weekend, 5 to 35,000,000 with some models projecting a total lifetime gross between 85 and 145,000,000. So any of those numbers are good.
Garrett:Yeah, was talking to the Harmans over at Angel and certainly we're always hoping for success, but they've had some success with Sound of Freedom and with their Christmas movie, The Story of David. It should be well received and deservedly Do
Daren:you have any idea what the budget for this movie was?
Garrett:At a q and a last night, they didn't ask about the budget. Somebody asked about the production schedule and it was eighty plus shooting days over in Ireland. The scope is epic. I mean, scope is a war movie. You know, and I know that Adam Abel has done war movies before.
Garrett:He's done Saint Soldiers on a very extremely tight budget. This had scope and scale and spectacle and, yeah, it was it felt very not independent. Yeah. I was very impressed.
Daren:My guess is probably 20, but I asked the question because you said an indie film and I was like, yeah, that it doesn't feel the same as like a $2,000,000 indie film, but it still is indie. These are outside of the studio. I'm sure they lined up distribution beforehand. Angel's kind of a mini major at this point. It feels like a really solid mid budget movie with really good support and a lot of awareness right now.
Garrett:Yeah. So
Daren:but I for the sake of the truly independent audience, this is not a little $2,000,000 Indie that was shot in twenty days.
Garrett:I love for me, it's it's very it's the goal. It's the direction we wanna get to. It's the exit out of Indie. You know, these guys back in whatever 2009 made their first movie on a couple of Canon five d's and put in theaters and did the festival circuit. Right?
Garrett:And they've continued to just plug away in that indie space until, you know, they hit a home run with I Can Only Imagine. And then it goes on and on and on. So you're right. It's not indie film in that same spirit as Brotherhood the Musical, but it's, you know, it's I love seeing the indie filmmakers succeed and graduate, I guess, to the next level.
Daren:Yeah. I'll I wrote a post on my IndieWire column a few weeks ago about different tracks that you can take for indie film, and there's track one and track two and track three. I would squarely peg this as a track three film, Young Washington, whereas the stuff I'm doing right now is track two and I'm working to get to track three.
Garrett:Yeah. No. By saying that, all you're doing is making us wanting to go read your column.
Daren:Darn. I'm so sorry. That was not my intent at all.
Garrett:Okay. And next week, we need to talk about a conversation with John Carney whose movie Power Ballad. Okay. Let's get into this self distribution versus distributor. The dis what'd you call it?
Garrett:The distributor decision.
Daren:Distributor decision. I like it.
Garrett:Because you guys are right there. You're making a decision for brotherhood.
Daren:We have made the decision for brotherhood, and that's why we're talking about this today because it is a big decision, and then in the same week as I'm finalizing the decision for distribution for brotherhood, I had a consulting call with a friend that we both know who called up and said, can I ask you about a distribution deal that we got offered? And I was like, yeah. And by the end of that conversation, I had talked them out of two competing offers for distribution because they weren't in alignment with what they ultimately wanted. And so I think it's a really good time to talk about the distribution decision on the podcast. Yeah.
Garrett:And this is a warning. So if you're a distributor, keep listening. This is not an anti distributor podcast. We're not going to talk filmmakers out of distribution, but we're going to help identify what goes into the decision making process. Yeah.
Garrett:Because ultimately the decision making process is that of the filmmaker and we have to decide you can't just blindly sign an agreement.
Daren:Yeah. This is an anti bad deal podcast though.
Garrett:Hey, that should be interesting to everybody. So Darren, okay. So in making that decision, what's kind of your first step? What's your first metric as far as saying, hey, this is a distributor we wanna work with or this is not a distributor we wanna work with?
Daren:So where I always start with is the outcome. What is the outcome? How are you gonna define what success looks like? And so I asked this on the consulting call with my friend. I said, look.
Daren:What are you actually working towards? Do you want a big theatrical release? Do you want a name distributor? Do you want maximum profit, maximum revenue? Because those are two different things.
Daren:Do you want it to land on some certain streaming platform? Or what do you actually want? And they were very clearly, we want this and this. Then once you define the outcome, that informs the strategy. You can use that outcome as your North Star to say, great, our North Star is a profitable release of the film.
Daren:We wanna make money on the movie. Great. Then does this distribution deal lead to profit? No. Then say no to it.
Daren:Does this other deal lead to profit? Potentially, but, and that was the caveat there, the but, it was like, but we're doing but it includes this and includes this. Okay. Those are deal points we need to talk about. So really starting with a very clear definition of success, what I would call the outcome that you're working towards, and letting that outcome inform the strategy or the path that you're gonna take to get there.
Garrett:I see a lot of filmmakers and in some of my early films, the decision was not distribution, it was validation. And you go
Daren:Yeah.
Garrett:I have a distributor that wants this movie, you know, you get the emails from certain not to be named distributors and deeper research, realize this is just an aggregator that literally sends this email to every film submitted to a film festival. Right? And they get the film festival records and they say, such and such distribution company is interested in your movie and here's our agreement before they even seen the movie or anything. Here's our agreement. And you go, oh, that's very exciting.
Garrett:Yes. My movie is gonna get distribution. And that's don't confuse that for validation.
Daren:The other thing that happens a lot is we see it here locally where people go to a local festival and they get a distribution deal from one of these aggregators or a sales agent or a distributor, and they just say yes because they got a deal. They're like, oh my gosh. I didn't think I would get a deal, but I got a deal. I gotta say yes because that's what you do. That's the next step is you say yes to the distribution deal.
Daren:Realizing that might not align, that deal may not align with your outcome. And I've met a handful of filmmakers that are very disappointed, not because the distributor did a bad job, just because the job they did wasn't in alignment with the outcomes they wanted. Yeah. It's a matter of understanding deal points, understanding the different aspects of distribution. Are we talking about digital?
Daren:Are we talking about streaming? Are we talking about foreign? Are we talking about licensing versus selling versus theatrical versus all these things? And if you don't understand and you just say yes and so that you can, like you said, be validated in the sense that my movie got a distribution deal, you may that may be great for a week where you can tell everybody you got distribution, but then the next ten years you're regretting that decision.
Garrett:Yeah, because the follow-up question is, oh your movie got distributed, how did it do? Those are two totally different answers sometimes and you don't want to have to answer that if, yeah. Yeah. If it didn't do well.
Daren:So that kinda takes us to the next point, which is the mismatch between thinking that if you get distribution, the audience comes with it. And that's not the case. Right? We've lived this. I've done four movies, and I've seen it across whether it was IFC films or self distributed or Amazon Prime Latin America or wherever the movies go.
Daren:The distribution is actually not the hardest part. The physical act of getting your movie from a hard drive on your computer into a theater is not the hard part. The hard part is getting the people to show up there, which is why I've said that our jobs as producers not just make a good movie anymore. We have to bring the audience along with it. So this misunderstanding or this belief that, oh, I got a distribution deal, so the movie's gonna make a lot of money and a lot of people are gonna see it, those are mutually exclusive statements.
Daren:A distribution deal is one thing, and marketing and audience is a completely separate thing.
Garrett:That to me was a moment of realization. A distributor's job distributor's job is not to get an audience there. That's not what their cut is, that's not what they're getting for. And to sign a distribution agreement thinking that, oh, this distributor is going to get an audience for my movie, is a terrible misunderstanding. That is not their job and I think they will tell you that.
Garrett:Fact, they're looking for movies that already are going to get an audience there. Job is not to market the movie.
Daren:Yeah. Now there's it's a good moment to talk about different tiers or types of distributors. Right? So there are distributors that are really more like booking agents where they will call up theaters and circuits and get your movie booked. They will book showtimes for your movie, and that's great.
Daren:That's a very valid thing that a distributor does, but there are some distributors that only do that. They don't do any marketing, any promotion, anything beyond that. You go up a tier, and now you're talking about kind of these mini majors like the Angels when they started when the project when they started where they're releasing their own movies, but they're putting 2,000,000 or $5,000,000 worth of marketing spend into it. Angel did that famously by doing crowd funds for marketing. So they would raise $5,000,000 for the marketing, the P and A of Sound of Freedom, and all of their audience that backed that got their money back plus ten percent first.
Daren:They were last money in, first money out. Very cool model. Right? They were able to do that because they had a big audience. So as a distributor themselves, they were able to bring the audience along with it, bring some marketing dollars with it, And so that's like the next level, and then the top level I would say is your studios that are not only gonna bring a lot of marketing dollars and a lot of audience, but they also have a lot of leverage with the theaters.
Daren:So if you want Toy Story five came out on 4,500 screens. It's insanity. But you had 4,500 screens, and Toy Story five can do that, a, because it's a known entity and known IP, and a lot of people wanted to see it. But the the studios have leverage against the theaters to say, oh, you're gonna play our movie or else I won't give you the next one. You're gonna put it on this many screens on these showtimes, and you're gonna run it for this many weeks whether or not it's selling tickets anymore.
Daren:That's the kind of leverage. Oh, and they'll say, and we get 70% of opening weekend, and you get 30, and then it'll progressively get closer to fifty fifty over six weeks or whatever. Yes. So that's the distributor tiers.
Garrett:Yeah. The distributor has the ability to do that. The the theaters go, what are you gonna do to make sure that those 4,500 screens are filled? Exactly. And the distributor can point to the marketing department and say, we're spending a $150,000,000 to market the movie.
Garrett:Yeah. And so, yeah. Sometimes those are one and the same, know, Pixar or whatever. Pixar makes a movie. Walt Disney distributes it, markets it.
Garrett:But but they are two different two different, like, projects and businesses, and they work together, but they are different.
Daren:Yep. Exactly. So one of the big things you gotta talk think about when you're making the distribution decision is who's doing the marketing? If it's you, do you have a marketing budget? If it's not you, do they have a marketing budget?
Daren:Who's approving and in charge of the marketing materials, the strategy, how you're gonna reach people? Are they just gonna spend a $100 on Facebook ads and hope it works out, or do they have more of a hyper targeted approach? Are they gonna be using influencers? Are they doing screenings? Are they who's booking the theaters?
Daren:Are expenses capped? The distributor in this scenario will put the money up for marketing distribution costs, but they're gonna recoup those first before you see anything. They're in the least risky position. So you have to realize if they're gonna go and spend a million dollars, they're gonna have to recoup that million dollars, which means you had to make 2 or 2 and a half million for them to recoup a million dollars before you see anything. And so if your movie only makes $600,000, they made some money and you made zero.
Daren:So it's really important to go through those deals and look at all the deal terms and the points to go, who's responsible for what? Who's committing what to this agreement so that you have clear eyes and so that aligns with our outcome or it does not.
Garrett:In looking at those agreements, look at the order of payback, like look at the waterfall because again if you're saying you're gonna spend marketing, if it's run by the distributor, is going to spend a million dollars, The distributor will say, okay, well we're the distributor therefore we get our 20% or 24% or whatever box office first, and then we're gonna start to recoup the million dollars plus interest versus, okay, we're gonna recoup the million dollars first and then our 20% comes out. Those are two significantly different numbers that you're going to have to earn at the box office to pay back that million dollars, and that order of waterfall is crucial.
Daren:Yeah. Also keep in mind with some of the, let's call them smaller distributors or the service provider distributors, where you're paying them to put your movie in a theater and book the screens, they're typically paid on a per screen fee. So if you go in, they might charge 2 or 300 or $500 per screen that you book, so you have to be really thoughtful about how many screens you're gonna release on. Because if you release on 500 screens at $500, that's $250,000. That's a big cost to you.
Daren:And you have to pay that to them upfront because they're not putting that money up and risking it. So if you're looking at a fee based distribution strategy, you're thinking about, okay, do we release on 50 screens and then expand based on demand? Do we release on 10 or one screen? Or do we start at 200 or 500 or 400, whatever, and hope that it works out? But if you do that, you just added $250 that you need to make back you didn't have as an expense or a line item beforehand.
Daren:Mhmm. So it's being really really smart and really thoughtful about, okay, there's a way we can do it this way, there's a way we can do it this way, I'm using my two different hands and pointing on two different sides of the screen. Yeah. And you gotta weigh a and b against each other, and you probably always have c as an option, which is self distribution, doing it all yourself.
Garrett:And maybe that's a good time for just a quick time out or water break or whatever it is just to say that our goal with this episode is not to scare anybody away from a distributor. We've had wonderful experiences with distributors and marketers and things like that, and I think that there are great distributors out there who have interest of the filmmakers in mind and more importantly the ability that for the filmmaker to recoup so that they can continue to make movies. These are just kind of certain pitfalls that sometimes we fall into as filmmakers signing a deal or signing an agreement with somebody who doesn't. But there are great distributors out there. I won't name who on this podcast, but if you want information, reach out.
Daren:I do think one of the big takeaways is if none of this is making sense, like, that's good. That then you've got some homework to do and you gotta learn about this stuff because the last thing you wanna do is go into a festival not understanding anything about distribution and deals and rights and talking points and deal memos and all these things, and just sign your movie away to someone when you don't really know what you're getting into. So that brings us to talking point number three, Garrett, and you get to answer this one because you've had this experience. Talk to us about rights and how rights might matter more than anything else in the deal memo or in the deal terms.
Garrett:I think that this is a great space and I love kind of living here now with the movie. You've made the movie, you've put a lot of work into it, and I don't think there's any reason to sign away all the rights to one distributor unless the deal is the deal is very unless the compensation is worth it. So yes, rights are a huge issue. When you're looking for a distributor, don't distribute the film, distribute the rights and say okay, what is the audience that this distributor can reach or has reached and that's who they're allowed to distribute to. So if it's a faith based film, you've got a faith based distributor, I say great, you can distribute this to your streaming site or whatever it is, to your catalog, but it's a non exclusive agreement that allows me to continue to sell the rights to other distributors.
Garrett:I think that the audience right now is so segmented. Whether that's good or not, we can benefit from that because it allows us to make multiple deals with multiple distributors to reach multiple audiences. Yeah. Other things to consider in that are how many years, know, the length of the deal that you're making. I think we sold Faith of Angels to Germany for like twenty five years, and it's not a good deal.
Garrett:And others have been a two year deal and I love that because two years they're gonna work hard to get everything they can out of it in those two years and if it does well we can re up and if it doesn't do well it gives us both an opportunity to move on and for me to find another solution for it. Other rights would be territories, and say, oh, okay, well, we sold to North America for two years on this platform, and that there's a certain amount for that that we would expect, but we don't just do a worldwide deal where we can sign it away and forget about it, because the minute you sign that then the distributor I think forgets about it as well.
Daren:One other thing is the if you give away rights as you're selling the rights, you're you're auctioning off or how did you phrase it? You're not distributing the movie, you're distributing rights.
Garrett:Yeah.
Daren:If you gotta be careful because if you give away rights to streaming, for example, but then the movie's really good and it gets in front of some bigger distributor that wants an all rights deal, but you've already given away streaming or you've already given away international or you've already given away North America, they'll say no because they require all rights deals. Sure. So really thinking through and being strategic around what rights are you keeping and when are you giving those out. So you may wanna if you have a conversation with someone who wants to do digital for you or wants to do international for you, say, great. Just hold on.
Daren:Give me two more months or three more months to talk to these other distributors before I give away the rights that might preclude me from being able to take a bigger or a better deal.
Garrett:Another way around that or in support of that is a distributor knows who they are. They know that they are not the big distributor or if they are, they know that as well. And so it's okay. Think I've had conversations with them a little bit more bold and just, you know, saying if a better deal comes along, we just need a clause to be able to buy this out or to terminate these rights. And if you're interested in this film succeeding, that that will be important to them as well.
Garrett:Yeah. Nobody has to lose the distributor, the smaller distributors says, oh, okay, great. The deal is here's an amount to terminate the deal. Okay, great.
Daren:And the last thing on there, did you already talk about carve outs? I didn't. I was like, I know you said words. Didn't talk
Garrett:a lot, but yeah, you should talk about that because that ties in the brotherhood.
Daren:Carve outs are also really important because if you do a rights deal with a distributor and it doesn't give you the ability to go show it at a church or do a private screening or sell the soundtrack or do live events or any of those things. Like, you just missed out on, a, a bunch of other revenue streams, and b, your ability to promote and market the movie on your own. So that's one of the big things as I was talking to distributors about Brotherhood. Ultimately, we decided to self distribute on the movie.
Garrett:Oh, spoiler alert.
Daren:I know. Know. Craftsman Films
Garrett:Like is and subscribe. Thanks, man.
Daren:Craftsman Films is the production company and the distributor, so we're like in new little studio now. But one of the reasons was because we're doing this 20 city promotional tour in September, and a lot of the rights wouldn't have allowed us to do that. We would have had to license our own movie. We have a really big plan for once it hits theaters, how it goes strategically to P VOD and T VOD, and how we're gonna do group screenings and church screenings and stuff afterwards through different platforms. It's like, we wouldn't be able to do any of that stuff because the distributor would have all the say.
Daren:So we wanna retain a nice like eight week, I think we have an eight week window for theatrical because we support theatrical. We can be strategic because we have all of those rights. But if you're thinking about being strategic with your marketing and with the distribution strategy, you wanna think about the carve outs you might need so that you can retain the rights to be able to self distribute in certain ways or have these promotional events or all these other opportunities.
Garrett:It's an interesting kind of a conundrum that that presents, Darren, because you're doing the tour, you're doing the marketing, and for a distributor to say, No, you're not allowed to do that, it sort of exposes perhaps maybe those distributors that wouldn't see the value in that. Yeah. But you're doing what they should be doing, and so for them to say no, that's okay. It either means, hey, their job yeah. They don't want your involvement in helping the film succeed.
Garrett:That's an man, that's an interesting dilemma you're in.
Daren:It's a fun dilemma because when you have a defined outcome, all these decisions become a lot easier.
Garrett:Yeah.
Daren:My experience, I've I was weighing four really big distributor options. Full disclosure, no deals had been offered yet. So no offers are on the table. So we were just conversation. But the more I was in conversation, the less excited I was.
Daren:And so I Yeah. I cut all the conversations early. I said, you know what? I know what I'm doing. We're self distributing this.
Daren:Not just haven't heard from him since then. So it's like, okay. But they're gonna see the success of this film and then they'll come afterwards and say, hey, we want the next one. I say, great. That's the conversation I'm happy to have, but here's what we did strategically and systematically to make this a success, and I want the ability to do that again.
Daren:And if they say no, I'll say, I'll just go do it again because I just proved I can. There's very little downside. A phrase that I heard of, in this part of the industry, distribution, theater, booking, etcetera, I had a distributor tell me that people are lazy and not like in a bad way, but like just their human nature of the business is they don't wanna work hard because when there's so much to do on every movie and they have so many movies, and the nature of the beast is movies turn over every week, so they never get a break. So they're taking the path of least resistance everywhere they can just so that they can survive situation. And so when you come in with a new idea or you come in with a different way that you want to do things, they're going, no, man.
Daren:I don't want to work hard. I've really been thinking about, okay, how can I come the work already done to say, look, here's what we're done, and here's what we have, and here's what I'm committing to? And we go, would you like this outcome? It's very easy. There's no extra work.
Daren:We just give it to you instead of your competitor. And they go, oh, that'd be nice. Thanks for thinking of us. Yeah. We'd love to do that.
Garrett:Yeah. That all makes sense. To be disruptive is to is exactly that. And I go, oh, well, I'm kind of that's kind of out of my comfort zone and it's probably easier for me to just pick up a different movie rather than have to be accountable for coming up with new ideas on how to get an audience there, which in their defense is not their job. It's your job.
Garrett:So Darren, now this brings us to point number five and we're getting to the end, but it's not free. Like you're saying, oh, we're gonna distribute ourselves
Daren:And to
Garrett:I've been on the filmmakers side when we're saying, oh, we spent every penny we have to get this movie across the finish line into picture lock and theater ready, distribution ready. We have our DCP, and now you want me to spend money to distribute it? So you have to pay attention. Self distribution is not for you. Of course, is distribution because you still have to get all the deliverables, but self distribution, you're looking at key art, trailer, website, PR, ads, theatrical booking, deliverables, everything like insurance and then screenings and support.
Daren:Yeah. Our marketing budget for the movie started in November of last year. The first four people we hired were marketing hires, and I put about $250,000 line item just for the people, like, just for the people and the things we're gonna be doing and another 100,000 for the tour. So, like, I committed 350,000 that should pay for itself with ticket sales because of the way that it's structured and what we're actually doing with those dollars. But so far, we're just spending.
Daren:There's not a there's no revenue to be had yet. So we're probably a good 100 or a $120,000 in on our costs, and we haven't even finished the movie. So like you said, there's DCP, there's QC, there's errors and emissions insurance, there's closed captioning and deliverables and fees to put the movie out there. From the start, we said, great. We're gonna need $250 for the marketing team to be able to start on 11/01/2025 for a movie that comes out 10/02/2026.
Daren:And if you raise the money and you have the budget, it's fine. If you don't have the budget, you finish the movie, and now you're going, oh, we gotta figure out how to do this and this and this and this, all those things you listed off, and that's gonna be another 30 or 50 or $70,000. That's what those things cost, but it wasn't a it's not hard because it cost those things. It's hard because you didn't prepare or plan for them.
Garrett:Well, and it's and and you have, and you've done a great thing, and you've I mean, you started back in November, a year before production, building your email list and building your following and that type of distribution first or marketing first mentality has helped inform the casting and the locations and the crew and the stories behind the scenes that are slowly getting out there.
Daren:Yeah. It's been really fun to see it come together. It's was an idea that I'd been noodling on for years, and now it's actually happening, which has been really fun to watch it play out. But I think it goes back to the idea of what's the producer's job. And this is the first time I've been really the lead producer on a movie.
Daren:I was a line producer at UPM. On the first movie. I was a producer, but tertiary producer on the second movie. You were the lead producer on the last two movies. We did those together, but I was really there for production, not for development and financing or marketing and distribution.
Daren:So it's the first time I've had an opportunity to how would it work if we did it my way? And what is my way? What does that even mean? But it comes back to the distribution decision. It's not about me.
Daren:It's not about pride. It goes back to this idea that the producer's job, at least on production, is to provide and protect the creative space for these artists to do their best work. That's stewardship. Right? And it's the same thing here as the movie's done and everybody's gone home and they're on other jobs.
Daren:It's like me and Ross and eight, ten people that are working on the marketing distribution, once the movie's out, it'll be me. Ross is gonna go make another movie, and you are the one person still working on Faith of Angels. So it's about stewardship, and what is the best thing that you can do for the movie, the story, the audience, the investors when it comes to distribution? And again, all those things should just inform the outcome, and that informs the strategy and the way that you get there.
Garrett:Truer words are rarely spoken.
Daren:Yeah.
Garrett:You just said it. It on a t shirt. Okay. So those are our talking points. Were there any more that we wanna cover?
Garrett:I mean, we've talked a little bit about the waterfall. We talked about transparency and and you summed it up with that stewardship statement. It was just like, nobody cares more about your movie than you do. You you will do everything you can to get it seen and get it out there and get it. And so make sure that the people that you partner with are willing to support that.
Daren:Yeah. I think we're expanding people's definition of what a producer is and does. Right? The question I often get is, okay. You're the director on the movie?
Daren:No. I'm I have no aspirations to be director. I'm the producer. Oh, what does that mean? That's 90% of the questions I get about my job is what is it?
Daren:What do you actually do? And it's all the things we talked about today. I know a lot about distribution deals. I know a lot about how to get movies to theaters. I'm learning and figuring out how to do marketing.
Daren:They're all producer responsibilities that falls under this stewardship that most people don't think about. Sometimes you find the money if you're a development producer or a financing producer or a lead producer. You're gonna go find the money, then you're gonna hire the crew and put the budget together and make the movie, and then you're gonna find a distribution deal. And they that last sentence is all the stuff we talked about in this episode and in the whole season we did on distribution. Yeah.
Daren:No. It's a way bigger job. There's way more responsibility than just find a distribution deal.
Garrett:My wife and I laughed. We we do this screening recently and there's a Q and A afterwards and we're always amazed at who the studio brings to the Q and A because usually it's, the front facing actor or somebody connected with the movie that have no idea what has gone into the movie to get it made. And so you get a question like, what was the pre production process like? And the actor who's on set for three days goes, I don't know, they cast me. Yeah, I'm gonna
Daren:get Instagram.
Garrett:Yeah, so to connect to your comment, yes, the producer is really one of the only people that should be in a Q and A as far as behind the scenes. What does it take to get this movie seen? And few people know that. And hopefully this podcast will help those producers and filmmakers go, oh, okay, there's a lot of work to be done.
Daren:Yeah. There we go. Okay. Another one in the books. All right, Garrett, anything on your plate exciting this week?
Daren:Any updates on your projects?
Garrett:We received another significant donor to the Help them See Foundation, which is very exciting. It's just so neat to see people that are mission driven, are saying, yes, these types of stories that Help them See Foundation is trying to tell, we want to support those. And so we're grateful that there are significant donors that are saying, yeah, we'll take a tax deduction and we'll help leave a legacy.
Daren:Yeah. And we'll just claim credit now that they came because of the podcast.
Garrett:Yeah.
Daren:Podcast is working as intended.
Garrett:Perfect.
Daren:No. I'm sure you're doing tons of work every day to go and find donors. It's a lot of work, guys.
Garrett:It's a lot of not movie making to make a movie. Yep. Darren, thanks, man. Great episode. And let's definitely connect this week.
Garrett:This season of Truly Independent is supported by the Help Them See Foundation. Help Them See is a nonprofit dedicated to supporting feature films that inspire faith, hope, and connection. By partnering with filmmakers, the Help Them See Foundation brings meaningful stories to life and shares them with audiences worldwide, making a lasting cultural impact to the power of cinema. Learn more and discover how you can be part of the movement by visiting helpthemseefoundation.org. Thanks for joining
Daren:us.
Garrett:If you are enjoying Truly Independent, please share and subscribe so you don't miss the rest of the journey. Today's episode was edited by Michael Bradford and produced by Three Coin Productions.
