Hard to find?

chipper

chipper

I'm fairly sure the real answer to this question is LONG and drawn out......but:

If you spend some time browsing around at IMDB you'll find ZILLIONS of indie films listed (I'm talking about, say, 2001 up to current day).........
Now, places like CD Baby are great for small-time musicians and sure, there are A FEW sites devoted to short, indie films.....and if you hunt and dig and grind, you can find some compilation DVD's with 8 short films on them selling for $9 here and there.......and there's Amazon Prime (which I personally find lacking on low-budget indie stuff)....and blah-blah-blah..........but......

Why is it SO HARD to find many of the movies you see referenced at IMDB? Sure, many of them are garbage......BUT they were MADE and they were SCREENED (MOST OF THE TIME) by someone, somewhere........so why can't it be easier to buy/download/rent/stream many of those movies? I can't be the only person who's wondered about this!
 
A lot of the times the indie films are self-distributing and they don't get the success the filmmaker hoped they would be so they kind of just forget about them and move on with the next project. I did that to a degree with my last film. We had a theater premiere which got me an IMDB for it, then made a run of DVDs. Once they were gone, I chose to put the film on YouTube instead for people to at least see it (it has ~400,000 views currently). I'm making a sequel right now and will re-release the DVD again as part of the set, but most likely will still keep it a limited run and do YouTube for a primary release.
 
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IMDB

If an indie film is shown in a film festival that is serviced by "withoutabox.com" , it will automatically
get an IMDB page whether the film is ever distributed or not. Both IMDB and withoutabox.com
are owned by Amazon (createspace). We personally have over thirty films listed on IMDB and only
a few of them are available for distribution.
 
chipper said:
so why can't it be easier to buy/download/rent/stream many of those movies? I can't be the only person who's wondered about this!
Click to expand...

You are not the only person who has wondered about this. Rayandmigdalia
is correct. Not every film listed on IMDb has been distributed; meaning
the movies are not available to buy/download/rent/stream.
 
I can't speak for any other films. But here's my story:

My tiny-budget debut feature met with a little bit of success, not nearly as much as I had hoped.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1832897/

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/antihero/

We won some awards at some festivals, blah blah blah, doesn't fucking matter. We secured a week-long run at a tiny boutique movie theater in Brooklyn, and then a week-long run at a "real" movie theater in our home-town of Richmond, VA.

All of this was done by me making phone calls and sending emails. I was not able to secure distribution by a company that specializes in that. I got one offer. An actual distributor offered to use their resources to distribute my film.

I had to turn them down, because they were offering no money up-front. That's fine, I don't need money up-front, but they wanted me to PERMANENTLY sign away the rights to my blood, sweat and tears, without any guarantee that they'd actually devote their resources to it.

They literally just wanted me to give them my film. Sorry, that's a no-go. I've considered releasing it on youtube, or maybe vimeo, but I invested too much to just give it way, not so much my money, but my life. I'm holding out for the day when it might be sought after. That day will probably never come, but I still consider it an asset that I will keep tightly-guarded.

That being said, it is on vimeo, and if anyone wants to watch it, I don't mind sending you the link on the low-low.
 
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