SOUND IT OUT (75 mins) is a documentary portrait of the very last surviving vinyl record shop in Teesside, North East England. A cultural haven in one of the most deprived areas in the UK, SOUND IT OUT documents a place that is thriving against the odds and the local community that keeps it alive.

The film is directed by Jeanie Finlay who grew up three miles from the shop, and represents a distinctive, funny and intimate film about men, the North and the irreplaceable role music plays in our lives.  Sally Hodgson is the PMD on the project who I have written about before.

What is also distinctive about SOUND IT OUT is the innovative merchandise that they are offering. Check out their store.   One of the key things you want to try to do with merchandise – if offer scarce goods – limited editions that will be valued by fans.  In addition to selling a classic DVD, they have produced an ultra limited edition 7″ gate-fold version of the DVD (only 350 copies are available for sale). The DVD, which was printed with grooves like a vinyl record, is mounted on sleeve notes with credits for supporters of the film on IndieGoGo and thank yous by the director. The limited edition DVD also includes artwork by Amy Blackwell as well a hand numbered, 4 track baby blue vinyl soundtrack EP. The EP features Saint Saviour “When you smile,” The Chapman Family “Sound of the Radio,” Detective Instinct “Witches Birdies,” and Das Wanderlust “Pyrmintro.”

SOUND IT OUT also offers some more traditional fare including stickers, pin badges, and posters to go with more unique items like a pair of vinyl earrings custom designed by the wonderful people at Tatty Devine.

I am a firm believer that in providing customers a way to engage your film at various price points – so that they can choose a level that feels right for them.  This is common for crowdfund campaigns, but is only starting to be adopted by independents in their stores.  Sound It Out are selling various combinations of their merchandise. You can buy the ltd edition boutique vinyl DVD together with the classic DVD. There is also the “whole shebang” combo deal, which bundles together the Boutique DVD, A2 poster (paper), stickers and badges.

Through their clever merchandising SOUND IT OUT shows that a little ingenuity goes a long way. By offering limited edition items in addition and combination with more traditional fare, SOUND IT OUT widens their net, creating unique value for unique consumers to ensure that no dollar is left on the table.

On Friday, January 20th from 11 am to 12:30 pm I will be at the New York Lounge at 545 Main Street with Matt Dendler of Cinetic Rights Management for an Empowerment Town Hall moderated by attorney Steven Beer.

On Saturday, January 21st, I will be participating in the Black House Panel on Alternative Distribution from 3:30 to 5 pm. We will be discussing the latest developments in the distribution landscape and where success is being found.

On Sunday, January 22nd, I will be at Dolly’s Book Store for the Sundance Film Festival book signing for Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul, the new book with co-writers Orly Ravid and Jeffrey Winter. Unfortunately Sheri Candler won’t be able to come.

Right after the book signing party I am hoping to hustle over to Slamdance’s Hot Tub Summit at Treasure Mountain Inn

On Monday, January 23rd, I will be giving the introductory talk to the Sundance #ArtistServices Workshop at 8:30 am.  This workshop lasts all days with presentations by Erick Opeka from New Video, Bob Moczydlowsky from Topspin, Josh Grau on Twitter for Filmmakers, Caitlin Boyle from Film Sprout, Yancey Strickler of Kickstarter, Emily Gray from Fractured Atlas, Reid Carolin for Constellation and Kathleen Grace, Margaret Healy and Paul Snow on “Your Filmmaking Career on YouTube.  RSVP artistservices@sundance.org

If you are coming up to Park City – please come by one of these events to meet up.  Or if you want to meet about your film – let me know in advance and we can arrange a time while I’m up there.

For the past four months, my company Hybrid Cinema has been working on the release of the new film Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance directed by Bob Hercules about the history of the Joffrey ballet. I will be writing a number of posts outlining the unique path that I and my partner on this release, Sheri Candler have taken to release this documentary about the history of the groundbreaking dance company The Joffrey Ballet.

In my book Think Outside the Box Office and in subsequent posts, I have written about the advantages and challenges of launching a film after its world– premiere festival. Many filmmakers have complained that they can never recapture the exposure they gain with their first festival. As a result there have been a number of attempts to launch a film in some fashion out of a premiere festival. Orly Ravid writes in Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul, about BassAckwards which launched via YouTube Rentals during Sundance 2009.

IFC has been running its Festival Direct program to provide a promotional lift to its VOD releases for several years. For instance IFC will premieres films at SXSW and follows it up with screenings in a few cities while it premieres day and date on VOD with the festival. Tribeca has started using their festival as a launch for a number of films that they distribute on VOD.

The chief advantage of using a world premiere to launch a film’s release is to condense all of the publicity into one window – thereby conserving precious resources and taking full advantage of press garnered via the premiere. It also utilizes the promotional muscle that many festivals can muster to promote the release. The principal challenge is being prepared – having all of the necessary tools and distribution and marketing channels lined up to take advantage of the promotion. In general this has been beyond the abilities of most independent filmmakers who are just scrambling to get their films finished in time for their first festival. Another challenge is the short window of time that films have to get everything lined up after they receive acceptance to a film festival.

One of the first things we did for Joffrey was to target the Dance On Camera (DOC) film festival as a perfect launch for the film. It is not only one of the premiere dance film festivals in the United States (if not the world), it is also based in NYC – where the Joffrey Ballet got its start. It is based at Lincoln Center through the Film Society of Lincoln Center, one of the epicenters for culture in the US and the world.

Simultaneously I started speaking to Ira Deutchman of Emerging Pictures because I felt that Joffrey would be a perfect match for his network of theaters across the United States. For the past number of years Emerging Pictures has been simulcasting culturally oriented films, many of which feature live Q&As.

The Emerging deal is very filmmaker friendly with 30% of the box office going to the filmmaker if you pay $1000 for encoding, or 25% of the box office going to the filmmaker without any money upfront. Emerging takes care of all deliveries and collections from the theaters. Because of their ongoing relationship with theaters, Emerging is able to collect from theaters and in turn is able to pay the filmmakers.

I proposed to Deirdre Towers and Joanna Ney of Dance on Camera that through Emerging, we could be the first film to launch its release out of its world premiere, simulcasting to cities across the US. The partnership is also beneficial for Dance on Camera as it gets their name out in these theaters where ballet and dance fans will watch the simulcast and interact with the festival. It’s a winning situation for all which is what a partnership should be.

Emerging does not actually “simulcast” the screening of the film, the theaters download it in advance (hence no print costs), but the theaters carry the Q&A event after the screening via netcast. As important, people at the theaters around the country can tweet questions to the post screening panel in NY – so that they are actually participating in the Q&A – making it a national event. Once the film is on Emerging’s server they can book screenings of the film at a later date at no additional cost.

Currently we are screening in 42 cities throughout the US to launch the release of the film. We will start selling 6 panel Digipak DVDs of the film at the premiere and off the website February 1st – in addition to posters, 50th Anniversary photo books of the Joffrey Ballet and an eBook reprint of Sasha Anawalt’s book The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company (out of print for over a decade until this January 27th – she is launching her eBook to coincide with the launch of the film). We will roll out other merchandise over the course of the release. We will follow this up very quickly with digital DIY via Distrify in order to capitalize on the international attention we will receive from the publicity via the worldwide web. The biggest challenge has been to get the project ready to release in the short window since we found out we were selected for Dance on Camera.

We have also been planning events throughout the United States that will run through the spring and potentially throughout the summer. Most of these events have similar Q&As with former notable Joffrey dancers – many of whom head established dance organizations in cities throughout the US and are actually also coordinating the screenings in their cities. To start the process of the Los Angeles screening, I met with former Joffrey dancer Carole Valleskey who runs the nonprofit California Dance Institute. We then sought the involvement of Leslie Carothers-Aromaa another Joffrey dancer who teaches at the Colburn School and helped secure the 430 seat Zipper Hall. We’re selling tickets for $20 a piece and are 1/3 sold out as this goes to press. These screenings will lead up to a day and date DVD and digital release by New Video (more on the timing of this in a later post) in June. To book and coordinate the rest of the events in the US, we brought on Liz Ogilvie and Paola Freccero of Crowdstarter.

The other type of event that we have wanted to set up from the beginning is to have a live ballet component to the screenings. This has turned out to be very difficult to set up due to either expense or theatres not being equipped with an appropriate, safe stage for the dancers. However the screening being set up by former Joffrey dancer Trinette Singleton in Allentown, Pennsylvania will have this feature and we are pushing for more.

A final note – one aspect of what attracted me to Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance was the fact that Bob Joffrey and his partner Gerald Arpino were early artist entrepreneurs. They came to NY with no connections to the established dance world, set up a dance studio to train young dancers and then toured the US in a borrowed station wagon like so many indie bands and filmmakers.

Sheri and I will be writing a number of other posts about the various aspects of the release and marketing in the coming months – we look forward to your feedback.

Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance premieres January 27th at the Dance on Camera Film Festival at Lincoln Center, NYC. Check the website for the cities where the January 28 live simulcast is taking place. The film was directed by Bob Hercules (A Good Man, Forgiving Dr. Mengele), produced by Una Jackman and Erica Mann Ramis and executive produced by Harold Ramis and Jay Alix.

Jon Reiss is a filmmaker, author and strategist who wrote the book Think Outside the Box Office and co-authored Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul with The Film Collaborative and Sheri Candler. He will be appearing at a number of panels at Park City this week and is a year round lab leader for the IFP Filmmaker Labs. Follow Like

For the past several months I have been working on the release of a new film Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance under my new entity Hybrid Cinema releasing entity – partnering with Sheri Candler Marketing and Publicity.   Over the next few months I will be writing about how we have approached the release of this film on a variety of subjects – including what I believe is the first national simulcast straight from a film’s festival premiere (January 28, 2012), Facebook splash pages via Fanbridge, Email for Media campaigns, targeted email campaigns, Facebook advertising, affiliate marketing, merchandise packaging, creative windowing and more.

I am excited that these blogs will be hosted on this newly relaunched website courtesy of the folks at CHIPS – which has been too long in coming.  I wanted a site that would integrate all of my activities, filmmaking, writing, speaking and strategy/consulting.  A few more changes to the blog are in the works.   I welcome your feedback on the layout on the design.

Stay tuned for two more content streams: I have been filming my workshops for the last couple of years and we plan to be releasing those this year.

Finally – this year I will be conducting interviews for my new book on Artistic Entrepreneurship where I’m going to be taking the concepts of Think Outside the Box Office and applying them to all the art forms.  I’ll be posting blogs and video clips from interviews as the project progresses.

Here’s to a wonderful 2012 to all.

Sincerely,

Jon Reiss

Hybrid Cinema

The Bertha BRITDOC Documentary Journalism Fund – for filmmakers from around the world working at the intersection of film and investigative journalism — films that break the important stories of our time, exposing injustice, bringing attention to unreported issues and cameras into regions previously unseen. £250,000 a year for 3 years is available to filmmakers as a mixture of grants and investments. Soniya Kirpalani’s We The People, about a miscarriage of justice against migrant workers in Dubai, is announced as the first production grant. Jess Search said, “This fund is urgently needed. Documentary is becoming an increasingly important medium for breaking stories which require long term investigation and the commitment to gather evidence and amplify voices. ‘We The People’ is just such a film and we are proud to be supporting it.”

The Bertha BRITDOC Connect Fund – the first outreach and engagement fund in Europe, is open to filmmakers from around the world with smart, strategic outreach campaigns that have the ability to achieve real change on a local, regional or global level. £250,0000 a year for 3 years is available in grants. Steve James’s The Interrupters is the first grantee. Rebecca Lichtenfeld said, “‘The Interrupters’ represents the best of contemporary social justice filmmaking. We believe that this film can inform and improve the lives of individuals and communities and we want to help that happen.”

25 to Life, a documentary film by Mike Brown, is celebrating its campaign launch on World AIDS Day on December 1st from 7:00 – 9:30 pm at BOFFO NY, located at 57 Walker Street between Church and Broadway in New York City. The launch will feature a screening of the extended trailer, music by live footage and drinks. RSVP at RSVP@25TOLIFEFILMSITE.COM.

Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance, the first film to chronicle how the legendary Joffrey Ballet revolutionized American ballet by daringly combining modern dance with traditional ballet, will also simultaneously premiere in theaters around the country via simulcast through Emerging Pictures on Saturday, January 28th. An accompanying art exhibit, featuring bold photos and posters by Herbert Migdoll (painter and official photographer for The Joffrey Ballet) will also be displayed during the month of January at the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery at Walter Reade Theater.

Dance On Camera’s opening night celebration will launch with the world premiere of Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance and include attendance by the director, Bob Hercules, and several members of the cast. The film, and associated Q&A session for the Saturday, January 28th matinee screening at 1:30pm, will simultaneously premiere for dance enthusiasts in participating theaters across the country via the Emerging Pictures network of theaters. A pioneering project, this marks the first time a film has simulcast its world premiere out of a major festival. Audiences at premiere screenings across the country will be able to participate in the New York City Q&A session on Saturday through a live Twitter feed. Walter Reade Theater and the Freida and Roy Furman Gallery are located at 165 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center, New York, NY 10023. Tickets for the screenings go on sale Thursday, January 5, 2012 at the Walter Reade Theater’s box office and online at FilmLinc.com.

This insightful documentary, executive produced by Harold Ramis and Jay Alix and produced by Una Jackman and Erica Mann Ramis, examines the dynamic trajectory of the groundbreaking American ballet company – The Joffrey Ballet – which daringly combined traditional ballet and modern dance at a time when it was not routinely accepted. Weaving a wealth of archival footage, behind-the-scene photos and interviews with former and current Joffrey star dancers, director Bob Hercules (Bill T. Jones: A Good Man) documents the struggles and achievements of the Joffrey from its newfound beginnings in 1956 to the Company’s present international success. The film features rare excerpts from many seminal Joffrey works including Astarte, Trinity and Billboards, as well as breakthrough collaborations with choreographers such as Twyla Tharp, Leonid Massine, Laura Dean, and Kurt Jooss. Founders Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino and a host of ballet notables, including Gary Chryst, Trinette Singleton, Helgi Tomasson, Kevin McKenzie and more, are featured in the film. Narrated by Tony® and Emmy® Award winner Mandy Patinkin, the film is a rich chronicle of a ballet company that continues to reinvent itself, raise the bar and invigorate audiences worldwide. See list of full credits here.

Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance screenings at Dance On Camera are accompanied by special appearances at panel discussions related to the film:

• Friday, January 27 [8:30pm] at Walter Reade Theatre:

Moderator Anna Kisselgoff, former Chief Dance Critic of The New York Times; Ashley C. Wheater, Artistic Director of The Joffrey Ballet; Bob Hercules, Director of the film; Kevin McKenzie, Artistic Director of American Ballet Theater and former Joffrey principal; and former Joffrey Ballet principals Brunilda Ruiz and Adam Sklute.

• Saturday, January 28 [1:30pm] at Walter Reade Theatre:

Moderator Sasha Anawalt, author of The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company (published by Scribner 1996); Trinette Singleton, principal dancer of The Joffrey Ballet who appeared on Time Magazine’s cover in 1968 for rock ballet Astarte; current Artistic Director Ashley C. Wheater; and former Joffrey principal Christian Holder.

The simulcast premieres across the country mark the launch of the film’s distribution by Hybrid Cinema, which brought Dance Films Association and Emerging Pictures together for this series of events. The simulcast of the Saturday screening, which includes introductions as well as the Q&A session featuring top former Joffrey stars, will also be streamed live into participating cinemas. Audience members throughout the US will be able to ask the stars questions live via a live Twitter feed. Visit www.emergingcinemas.com for updates on exact theater locations.

The screenings are accompanied by a colorful photo exhibit in the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery by Herbert Migdoll, painter and official photographer for The Joffrey Ballet. The exhibit highlights Joffrey’s Carousel: Celebrating 50 Years of Dance, a photographic parade of Joffrey’s dancers in costume, representing the Company’s classical and contemporary repertoire. The multiple images on panels were shot in 1996 at the famed outdoor carousel on Chicago’s Navy Pier. The Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery is located in the Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, Plaza Level at Lincoln Center, New York, NY 10023. Gallery admittance to the exhibition is free to the public during normal Walter Reade Theatre hours – seven days a week, 1:00pm to 10:00pm, throughout the month of January.

Following the film’s premiere in late January, Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance will embark on a U.S. tour through Spring 2012 with stops in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit, Aspen, St. Louis, and many other cities. Special one-off events with Joffrey alumni and limited theatrical engagements are planned. The documentary will then have a VOD/DVD/digital release in June of 2012 through New Video.

Hybrid Cinema is also releasing multimedia companion projects with exclusive content for fans wishing to further explore the Joffrey legend beyond the film. The first of these initiatives is a series of digital photobooks called Joffrey Maverick Moments. Each new edition will be available for free from the film’s website and Facebook page. The digital photobooks are based on themes and time frames found in the film with photos accompanied by quotes from Robert Joffrey, his friends and associates, as well as alumni interviews that provide further insight and background into the Company. Future Joffrey Maverick Moments may explore such themes as Joffrey’s Nutcracker through the years, Joffrey’s psychedelic rock ballet Astarte, Arpino’s most well-regarded ballets (The Clowns, Trinity, Olympics, Round of Angels, Light Rain), and more. Starting December 1st, Hybrid Cinema will start releasing a series of audio podcasts with exclusive new interviews of Joffrey legends. These podcasts will utilize the SoundCloud platform and will be available through the film’s Facebook page for fans only. The multimedia companion projects will be released over the next few months, through the premieres and leading up to the DVD release. Regular weekly content, including film clips and bonus outtakes, is also available on the film’s website blog and YouTube channel.

Firstrun screenings have become events by Gregg Goldstein

Can kung-fu fighting monks, cave screenings and feral, caged Santa Clauses save the movie biz?

Exhibitors sure hope so. Around the globe, theaters and distribs are fighting competition from new media by turning firstrun screenings into the kind of events one expects at a theme park or state fair.

London’s Future Cinema, set to hit New York and Paris next year, draws up to 17,000 people for its surprise Secret Cinema screenings, with a troupe of actors mingling with the audience in environments staged to match the film. Alamo Drafthouse flew a real-life “Iron Man” with a custom jet pack above one of its theaters on the film’s opening weekend. Microdistrib Variance Films enlisted local comedians for 10-minute warmup sets and post-screening Q&As for its comic doc “American: The Bill Hicks Story.”

Though indie films can often make their biggest profits via one-night or weekend event screenings, one stumbling block to this approach, notes filmmaker and “Think Outside the Box Office” author Jon Reiss, is that news outlets usually won’t give crucial reviews for films booking less than a weeklong run. Another is that box office for these runs usually isn’t tallied by Rentrak or other tracking services, which can handicap filmmakers looking for ancillary deals.

Read the rest of the article at variety.com.

Five Question Q+A with Jon Reiss by Rachel Allen

Meet Jon Reiss. Jon is a filmmaker (Bomb It, Better Living Through Circuitry), author (Think Outside the Box Office) and consultant whose most recent book is Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul which he co-wrote with The Film Collaborative and Sheri Candler. He works with numerous film organizations, film schools and festivals to bring a variety of distribution labs and workshops around the world. His upcoming books concern new models of artistic entrepreneurship and the concept Producer of Marketing and Distribution.

RA: What drew you to your work?

JR: I made a film called Bomb It, which is about graffiti all over the world. We frankly thought that we were going to sell the film in a traditional fashion and we didn’t. There’s a long story behind that. Basically, I ended up distributing the film mainly myself, but I had other distribution partners. I started writing about it and people liked the writing that I did. I realized that I enjoyed talking to filmmakers about this process and I decided to write a book about it. I enjoyed talking to people about new ideas and how filmmaking has changed in terms of engaging with audiences.

In addition to being a filmmaker now, I also do this other work to try to help filmmakers prepare for distribution. I don’t like to call it distribution marketing anymore. I like to call it connecting with audiences. For 95% of filmmakers these days, it’s their responsibility now to connect to the audience. They need to learn how to do that. Even if they don’t do it themselves, they need to know what is the path that they could have for themselves and for their film. And I also believe that they need to think of their film work as unique and what the unique path for their films are.

RA: What would be your advice for a filmmaker trying to balance the social media stuff with filmmaking?

JR: I understand how hard it can be, especially for people who didn’t grow up with social media, or who are kind of digital immigrants, instead of digital natives. The thing I would say, is that it’s not just social media. The process of connecting with audience is for me as important as making the film.

It does depend where you’re at in your career. If it’s your first film and you’re not expecting a ton out of it, that’s one level of work. If it’s your magnum opus and it’s the best film you’ve ever made and you’ve been making films for 15 years, you’re probably going to want to get that out and seen as widely as possible and you’re going to want it to have as long of a life as possible.

The biggest advice I can give is to start the process as early as possible. Almost start the process at inception for two reasons: one is because connecting with audiences takes time and it takes time to become facile with the usage of social media and other techniques of connecting with audience. The more time you give yourself to do that, the better. That doesn’t mean that you’re pushing, pushing, pushing, the film. What you’re doing is you’re expressing your voice in a different medium. By doing so, you’re attracting people who are attracted to your voice, thereby creating an audience for yourself.

The last thing I’ll say about that is that if you don’t feel that you can balance it, then you should find someone else who can help with the process. I call that person a Producer of Marketing and Distribution, which I think is as important as any other producer. A typical producer is busy making the film and helping the film go along and creating the film. A lot of those skills with audience engagement are skills that often directors or producers of films don’t have—some do, some don’t. I would partner with someone like that, especially if you’re starting out early in your career and you can’t afford to pay someone. Do it however you pay any other crew person and make that person a partner so they share in whatever you share, just like any other member of your crew.

RA: If a filmmaker is looking to hire this Producer of Marketing and Distribution (PMD), what kinds of skills should that person have?

JR: That person should definitely be a people-person, outgoing. Even if they’re not doing a lot of that stuff in person, it’s the same kind of personality that can translate online. They should be facile with social media. They should also have some sort of marketing and business sense and be able to see the film from a different angle.

In the best of all possible worlds, they would have an understanding of crossmedia/transmedia. I know bigger films will have a transmedia producer, but on small film crews, people wear many hats. The PMD is the one that can help out doing the transmedia work , especially if the film crew is traditional. If the film crew is not traditional, then transmedia skills should be in collaboration. A lot of those producing elements of the transmedia element might fall to the PMD. I get in trouble with that a lot with transmedia people, but I understand how small independent film crews are and you’ve got to share the work somehow.

Someone who has a skill with words. Someone who is a self-starter. Similar to any independent producer, someone who is tenacious, die-hard, and is passionate about the project. The other thing that’s also helpful, especially if you’re just starting out, is to find someone who has an affinity for the subject matter and has a voice in that world. What I find is that there aren’t a lot of people who are trained in this.

On one film , Sheri Candler and I have started this process where we train PMD’s, so that people hire qualified assistant people who are included in networking and reaching out and working with organizations and partnerships, have a bit of writing, have a use of the English language, all of which I feel are important to this task. Then we train them in how to be a PMD. Little by little in that, we’re trying to train people who will then be able to lead this in the future as well.

RA: So you talk a lot about the importance of holding screenings that encourage live audience participation. Can you think of any examples of innovative live participatory events?

JR: Actually, I think participatory is great. That’s the harder stuff to do. I talk a lot about having a live component to events, for example what Peter Greenaway did where he remixed the film in front of the audience, so you create a sense of an event. So then as far as participation, that being the next level of this, there aren’t that many people who do that. There aren’t that many filmmakers who do that. There is this amazing theater piece that I have yet to write about that I saw in New York called Sleep No More. That kind of blew me away. The audience is there, not really affecting the story or part of the story, but living in the story.

Participatory live events are more like alternative reality games from the transmedia world. Lance Weiler has been able to do more of those on an indie budget. A lot of those involve a level of complexity, technology and logistics that generally it’s the studios that really spend the money on it. I’m excited to see how that will grow in the future. I think we’ll see more. That flash mob stuff has become fodder for TV commercials now, and there are still things that can be done in that regard, like flash mob cinema. I’m sure there’s much more interesting things that upcoming filmmakers can think of and when they do, let me know. I’ll be excited to see them and I’ll write about them and talk about them.

RA: Tell me a little bit about your new book.

JR: New book is called, Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul, and I wrote it with Sheri Candler and The Film Collaborative. The book is different case studies of films and filmmakers who have explored new techniques of distribution available to them over the last several years and really going into depth, into the, what works, what didn’t work, what their strategies were. In most cases we gave really hard numbers and data as to how successful films were or not successful in different areas. I encourage your readers to let us know what they think of it.

Find out more about Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul, the book that Jon Reiss cowrote with The Film Collaborative and Sheri Candler.

Filmed over twenty years, My Reincarnation is a wonderful film that chronicles the epic story of the high Tibetan Buddhist Master, Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, and his western-born son, Yeshi. The film follows Namkhai Norbu’s rise to greatness as a Buddhist teacher in the West, while his son, Yeshi, recognized at birth as the reincarnation of a famous spiritual master, breaks away from his father’s tradition to embrace the modern world. Never before has a high Tibetan Master allowed such complete access to his private life. With her signature intimate entry to both families, Fox expertly distills a decades-long drama into a universal story about love, transformation, and destiny.

Read the rest of my blog on Jennifer Fox’s Reincarnation as an Artist Entrepreneur at the Huffington Post.