The Struggle

I have worked in Video Production for a little while now and I've been really successful. I thought getting distribution for a documentary would be challenging, but I was certainly not prepared for the amount of struggle it has taken.

The good news is, that the air date is finally set, the licensing and distribution deal is all set into stone and squared away. The show has already made the distributor money before it is even seen. All great things right?

The bad news. Man was it a fight, the product seemed secondary to the deal. It almost seemed that the distributor wasn't all that interested in the quality of the content, but rather my track record (which is non-existent in this field) and whether or not it would be profitable.

To be fair, I am certainly an unknown here, but I figured that they would see the quality of the work and that would be all that mattered. Secondly, I can stand there and claim that people will pay money to see it all I want, but as the saying goes. Don't tell me, show me.

I was hoping the distributor would join in my passion or at least be excited about the project, but instead everything is a fight, even at the late stages, even after they are well into profit. In fact, if I wouldn't have pushed so hard to get this thing to actually get a start date and work out the particulars on my own, it would have stalled out 3/4's of the way through and stayed there forever.

Is this a typical experience or am I just being a whiny bitch?

TL;DR

My project is finally going to be seen, but it was a struggle working with the Distributor every step of the way.

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Sorry to hear you had a hard time.
Maybe they think they already made the bulk of the money, & it wasn't worth more of their work & time investment.
Does your documentary have a big social media following, or a great selling point for advertising/marketing?

Does your documentary have a big social media following, or a great selling point for advertising/marketing?

Click to expand...

Well yeah. This got picked up by broadcast TV and the advertisements sold out in the first week. Candidly, their promotion of the Doc has been really great. I realize that it makes my complaining about all of this seem odd. I get it, on paper it's all good. I created something, worked on a distribution deal, and the distributor held up their end and did a good job on what they were supposed to do.

My complaints are really with all of the inner workings of that. After the initial deal was struck, it seemed like an uphill climb the rest of the way. Its all kind of little things, but those things add up, but mostly, I was disappointed with their general lack of enthusiasm. It seemed like the only person who cared about the project actually getting on TV was me.

What percentage is broadcast TV in the overall earnings?
Where & when will it be shown?