Orly Ravid, Founder of The Film Collaborative

Introduction: Orly Ravid, founder of nonprofit educational and services site The Film Collaborative, has given us an exclusive sneak at TFC’s digital book Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul: Case Studies in Hybrid, DIY and P2P Independent Distribution. This “deep dive into the real numbers and real details of independent film distribution,” as Ravid calls it, will be available in September. It’s a mostly free digital book (the enhanced iBook is $4.99), thanks to sponsorship. Ravid co-authored the digi-tome along with business partner Jeffrey Winter, filmmaker/consultant Jon Reiss and social-network marketing strategist Sheri Candler. They’ve shared the entire chapter on Bass Ackwards (Sundance Film Festival 2010), which was written by Winter, with #ArtistServices.

About Bass Ackwards, taken from the Sundance Film Festival 2010 Catalog:  “Yes, in Bass Ackwards a man drives a ’76 Volkswagen van across America. No, the film isn’t mired with the tired mechanics of a typical ‘road movie.’ This utterly original, lyrical, and visually exciting adventure has such a light touch that it quietly sneaks up and tugs you into an overpowering appreciation of being human.

When humble Linas, kicked off of his friend’s couch and spurned by his lover, finds a forgotten van on a llama farm outside Seattle, he begins lurching east with nothing to lose. Slowly, the road eases him out of his relentless longing and into the moment. As his encounters with enigmatic characters take on subtly transcendent qualities, his shame and discomfort at being alone gradually give way to self-acceptance and connection. The dented, off-kilter vehicle, which valiantly, amazingly endures the journey, becomes a colorful metaphor for the human condition—our tenacity and hopefulness always tinged with imperfection.” -Caroline Libresco, Sundance Institute

It was March 2009, and producer Thomas Woodrow had done everything right. He had produced his first feature, called True Adolescents, starring Mark Duplass and Melissa Leo, by first-time director Craig Johnson. He had gotten into the SXSW Film Festival and, given the film’s “indie grunge” feel, it was arguably the perfect festival at which to premiere the film. He had brought on a very well known, well-respected, and accomplished sales agent in the form of Josh and Dan Braun of Submarine Entertainment .The premiere was packed, all the right distributors were in the room, and the film was good.

But then nothing happened.

Nothing – as in no offers from distributors, no sales of any kind. The film just kind of fell into that gaping maw of indie purgatory known to many — destined to travel from small film festival to small film festival without much rhyme or reason while the producers try to figure out what to do with it. I know, because I saw the film nearly a year and a half later as a juror for the Bend Film Festival, where we judged it the best film of the festival. Of course, awards from festivals like Bend don’t really help a film find distribution. Fortunately for True Adolescents, the story ends better than most; now more than two years after the premiere True Adolescents is getting at a small platform theatrical release along with DVD and Video through New Video Group in the summer of 2011.

“We knew that the only one thing Sundance guaranteed us was a tremendous amount of publicity, a chance for people to hear about the film and to be curious about it.”

Objective

But this story is not about True Adolescents, it is about what producer Thomas Woodrow decided to do the next time he had a good indie movie poised to make a major festival premiere; because Woodrow had learned a lesson, or at least so he thought…

Flash forward a few months to the fall of 2009; Woodrow had completed a $35,000 micro-budget indie “road movie” called Bass Ackwards, by actor/director Linas Phillips (and executive produced by True Adolescents star Mark Duplass). Phillips had made a couple of docs before, but Bass Ackwards was his first narrative feature (although its verité style and semi-autobiographical storyline incorporated aspects of his documentary background). Character-driven, leisurely paced, without any obvious marketing hooks and without any stars, the film is exactly the kind of contemporary indie that typically faces tremendous hurdles to distribution…unless it catches a “lucky” break. Bass Ackwards did catch that proverbial break. It was around Thanksgiving when Woodrow found out that the film had been selected for the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

Approach

With Bass Ackwards’ acceptance into Sundance, Woodrow had once again done everything right, and the “logical” thing to do was to follow the same model he’d tried with True Adolescents by bringing aboard a respected sales agent and hoping for the best. Sundance is considered the “golden ticket” for U.S. indies–the best of all possible launches in North America for low-budget, character-driven films. But look carefully at its line-up every year–through the best years as well as the worst–and you’ll find that many films get no distribution offers at Sundance. In fact, the vast majority of films don’t leave Sundance with good distribution opportunities. Even those that do get distribution offers very often don’t get the kind of offers that make a picture “whole.”.

Of course there are spectacular exceptions every year, but Sundance is hardly a guarantee of distribution for films like Bass Ackwards. In fact, the film had been accepted into the newly created NEXT section of the Festival, for low and no-budget films. Unlike the higher profile Premiere and Competition sections, the more “outré” sections like New Frontier, NEXT etc., are likely to be overlooked by traditional distributors who are pre-occupied with the flashier fare.

Given Woodrow’s disappointing experience only months earlier with True Adolescents, an idea began to take shape. Rather than trying to get traditional distributors to attend the Sundance screenings only to have them pass once again, Woodrow made the decision to take matters into his own hands and, as he puts it “flip everything on its ear this time.”

Said Woodrow, “We knew that the only one thing Sundance guaranteed us was a tremendous amount of publicity, a chance for people to hear about the film and to be curious about it. We also knew that we had an anti-commercial film, difficult to market, without an obvious target audience outside of the people that go to film festivals. We knew we had virtually no chance for traditional pick-up, and imagined that if we did things the regular way and waited for other companies to come to us, we’d probably see ourselves on IFC’s digital platform six months later, and nothing else.

We also knew that we had spent so little on the film that we could afford to take risks,” he continues. “So we decided to just go for the jugular and to use the publicity generated by Sundance to release the film directly to the audience. We knew we couldn’t wait until people forgot about the Sundance press, so we decided the launch the film as wide as possible immediately after the Festival, meaning February 1st…one day after the Festival concluded.”

Beginning around Thanksgiving, a unique and frenzied odyssey began. Woodrow teamed up with marketer/publicist/distribution strategist Marian Koltai-Levine, formerly head of marketing at Fine Line Features and head of her own company, Zipline Entertainment, on a unique DIY strategy for the film (Note: Zipline Entertainment has since merged with famed Hollywood publicists PMK*BNC, where they have formed a marketing and distribution arm for the high-profile publicity firm). The idea was relatively simple, but also relatively unheard of – to use Sundance as a publicity platform for releasing the picture directly into the marketplace; to subvert the system of selling one’s film at a major festival and instead to use Sundance as a vehicle to go directly to the audience.

Woodrow started a Kickstarter campaign to help raise the funds needed to actually get the film to Sundance. Micro-budget indie aside, it still takes money to get the exhibition materials finished, book the travel and housing for the relevant cast and crew, get the necessary additional staffing in place and make sure all the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed. The Kickstarter campaign lobbied for $2,500, and the campaign actually raised more than twice that at $5,250. Apparently a lot of good will had already been generated by the film…always a very positive sign for a film launching into an extremely competitive marketplace.

However according to Woodrow, the actual cost for getting the film and the team ready and geared up for Sundance was closer to $15,000. This is a figure other filmmakers should consider carefully. $15,000 may be more than most filmmakers need to spend, but it should be remembered that the budget for delivery to film festivals (which is generally not included in the average production budget) is likely to raise its ugly head just when most filmmakers are the least able to deal with it, i.e. right after the film is finished, the budget is exhausted, and the credit cards are maxed out. That is usually the moment, when the chips are at their lowest, that the simplest financial decisions can make or break a film’s chance at distribution.

I usually like to say that a film should put 10% – 15% of its production budget aside for expenses linked to procuring distribution after the film is finished, recognizing that this is usually a luxury most films can’t afford. Nevertheless, note here that Bass Ackwards incurred expenses for launching the film at Sundance that were far greater than my usual recommendation for percentage of budget….in fact, it was closer to 50%!

With Koltai-Levine working to book theatrical engagements to immediately follow Sundance, Woodrow took the extra step of ensuring the film was available as widely as possible and started working with one of the industry’s top DVD and digital distributors, New Video. What they decided to do was unheard of at the time – to make the film available on major digital platforms (especially iTunes and Amazon VOD) during the Festival so that people could see it immediately upon hearing about it, and experience a Sundance film without actually having to be at Sundance.

Even more remarkably, New Video’s DVD release was also scheduled to follow immediately after the Festival, with DVD pre-orders on Amazon.com set to go soon after the Sundance line-up was announced so that they could be shipped on February 1.

In addition, New Video pushed hard to make the film available via Cable VOD on Comcast, Time Warner, Cablevision, and Insight Communications to go day-and-date with the February 1 release. However, given the enormous bureaucracy of the large cable carriers, the timeline ultimately proved too short to synchronize this window, and the VOD actually happened a month later (still extremely soon by most film release standards!). At its peak point, the Bass Ackwards Cable VOD release achieved penetration in 40 million homes.

In other words, the entire strategy was conceived to make the film available to any consumer whose interest in the Sundance Film Festival would translate to watching a Sundance film, and to have Bass Ackwards be the film that was most readily available for them to see.

Here’s how Woodrow described the release strategy in the Kickstarter campaign:

“This release is intended not only as a strategy to help Bass Ackwards gain attention and find its audience, but also as an open experiment in alternative distribution. In approaching Sundance as a platform rather than a marketplace, we are trying to pave the way, insofar as we are able, for a new era of filmmaker empowerment. We are not waiting around for someone else to tell us they want to distribute our movie. We know the movie’s good. We’re being proactive”

Here’s how New Video framed the release in a January 2010 press release.

“The title, Bass Ackwards, not only describes an offbeat and entertaining film, but also the spirit of the filmmakers who are joining us on this innovative ride,” said Steve Savage, co-president of New Video. “Together we’ll be taking a film from its festival buzz immediately to an audience that is ‘on the pulse’ and wants to see it now. The digital age is an exciting time in the evolution of indie film distribution with post-festival releases among the new paradigms.”

You can also watch Woodrow’s description of the strategy used as part of the Kickstarter campaign on a video made at the end of 2009

Now, anyone who has actually delivered a film to a distributor can well imagine how crazy the end of 2009 got for Woodrow and the Bass Ackwards team.

“We had only found out that we got into Sundance around Thanksgiving, so suddenly we were faced with the fastest delivery schedule ever imagined,” explains Woodrow. “The idea was to have everything available at the same time as Sundance…so in addition to Sundance we had deliveries to iTunes, Amazon VOD, Playstation, etc., for during or immediately after the Festival. We wanted iTunes and Amazon to be available during Sundance, and VOD and Playstation immediately after. I can’t be sure, but I think it was probably the fastest iTunes encode turnaround in history. We wanted people to be able to pre-order the DVD at Sundance and have it ship right after, so DVD delivery was also necessary. It was total madness.”

To complicate things further, the Sundance Film Festival chose 2010 as the year to launch a limited, non-exclusive five-film distribution initiative with YouTube, which was the Festival sponsor of the NEXT section. A few weeks before the Festival, Sundance and YouTube announced that they were getting into the digital distribution rental business together–a major first for the Google-owned giant known previously for making content available for free. Sundance itself had dipped its toes into digital distribution back in the early 2000s, (making a selection of short films available for rental online during the Festival via its website), but had backed away from this initiative after a couple of years. The idea that viewers all over the world could pay $3.99 to watch five feature films during the Festival (three from 2010, two from 2009), seemed to be a potentially game-changing event, merging two of the best brands in the entertainment industry into a new way to monetize the delivery of independent films to audiences worldwide.

Results

Bass Ackwards was one of the five films chosen – with the other four being 2009 award winner The Cove, Children of Invention, and 2010 NEXT section titles Homewrecker and One Too Many Mornings. The industry buzzed with interest in the new partnership, both positive and negative, seeing it as a precursor to a new distribution model that could bypass the traditional distributor completely, albeit as a limited experiment in its initial stages.

For Bass Ackwards, the circle of publicity and buzz was now complete. With the indie industry mired deep in the recession, the message of what Bass Ackwards was doing was loud and clear. It was another harbinger of the DIY era, but with major industry veterans like Zipline and New Video along to help. With announcements of its novel distribution strategy, Bass Ackwards had already done what many small Sundance film aren’t able to do…namely, rise above the “second-class” status of films in the smaller sections and make people talk about it. That was, of course, exactly the point of the strategy.

Of the buzz created by their tactics, perhaps noted journalist Eugene Hernandez in Indiewire said it best in a December 2009 article: “If you make, market, or simply care about the future of indie movies, keep an eye on Woodrow’s approach. This is a first for a Sundance Film Festival movie. Will it be a defining moment for a new decade of film distribution and give emerging and established filmmakers new models to explore outside the system?”

For both Bass Ackwards and the Sundance Film Festival, the first evidence of how well the idea that Sundance “buzz” would translate into worldwide interest came back almost immediately from YouTube. On February 2, 2010, The New York Times reported that in the 10 days that the five films were available, there were a total of 2,684 views for total of $10,709.16.

Although several different media outlets reported slightly different numbers, (some suggesting the total number of views was actually lower), the closest thing to an actual breakdown of the titles by film was posted on slashfilm.com during the Festival under a blog post heading entitled, “Analyst Declares Sundance’s Youtube Streaming Initiative a Flop.” Again, these numbers were posted during the Festival, so the final numbers would be somewhat higher. Nonetheless, this provided a good idea of the way the eyeballs on YouTube were being distributed.

The Cove – 303 rentals Children of Invention – 301 rentals Bass Ackwards– 299 rentals Homewrecker – 279 rentals One Too Many Mornings – 241 rentals

Keep in mind that The Cove had won the Sundance Audience Award a year earlier, played numerous festivals around the world to tremendous accolades, had been released theatrically to very good per-screen averages in the summer of 2009 (and would win an Oscar just a few weeks later), and yet the number of downloads was just barely above the others. Clearly none of the individual films were generating much attention, and the overall experiment of putting the films on YouTube that year just kind of…fizzled.

There was wide-spread industry head-scratching and hand-wringing about why the YouTube experiment didn’t perform and what it might mean for the future. In fact, most industry people seemed to react to the numbers with glee, perhaps because very good results might have felt as if they were no longer needed, i.e. they’d be out of a job. (Obviously, successful direct festival-to-consumer distribution via digital platforms might spell the end of the industry machinery as we know it).

The most popular opinion was that Sundance and YouTube just didn’t market the experiment outside industry circles. (YouTube apparently didn’t even have a rental page that listed the films, according to published articles at the time.) It was also noted by most analysts that the community that regularly watched content on YouTube was not accustomed to paying for anything. There was such immediate and significant negative reaction to the move into the rental business from viewers that YouTube had to disable the ability to comment on the films’ pages.

In addition, it was reported that it was exceedingly difficult to find the Sundance films on YouTube, a fact made humorously public when industry veterans Lance Weiler, Scilla Andreen, and Brian Newman blogged on SpringBoardMedia that during Sundance, the three had spent more than an hour at their Sundance condo trying to find the films to rent, with no success. (However, as I write this, I am happy to report it is now very easy to go to YouTube, type in Bass Ackwards and rent the film for $3.99.Thankfully, we’ve already come a long way since that (not so long ago) time.

Of course, what makes this Bass Ackwards/YouTube story compelling is that, as the first experiment of its kind, it set into motion the kind of inevitable, inexorable way that many film festivals are slowly moving into the distribution space – trying to capitalize on their brands as a way to help filmmakers as well as become distributors in their own right. Most notable has been the aggressive moves of the for-profit Tribeca Film Festival into both traditional and digital distribution spaces, particularly through its VOD channel its relationships with Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon FIOS and others, as well as via the Tribeca (ONLINE) Film Festival – an interactive, web-based film festival that occurs concurrently with the Film Festival. Nowadays, it is commonplace to be watching films via password-secured digital platforms like Vimeo, while its technology provider OpenFilm is working on new ways to leverage its film festival relationships into monetizeable film content online… but such was not the case in at the start of the 2010.

Given Woodrow’s stated goal to go “as wide as possible” immediately after the Festival, a theatrical release strategy had to be in place. Keep in mind that because this was a micro-budget indie and he had made this decision just a couple of months before the release and wasn’t interested in a traditional distributor, there was no P&A money in place – nor any time to raise it.

This is where Marian Koltai-Levine of Zipline Entertainment stepped up in a big way. Zipline was known as a fee-based, service-oriented distribution/marketing company – which traditionally means a company that puts out films for a monthly fee plus the P&A money – which is entirely the responsibility of the producers to raise and put toward the release. Instead, Koltai-Levine opted for an equity position in the film’s release (exact % of equity undisclosed). They agreed to pitch theaters into going along with the novelty of what Bass Ackwards was doing, and to book the film on an opportunistic basis with theaters that could be sold on the idea – despite the lack of any P&A money to support the release.

It is important to consider the fact that most indie films today aren’t actually looking to make money on their theatrical release, just to break even and generate reviews, publicity and buzz, but Bass Ackwards wasn’t even counting on the theatrical for publicity. This was to be accomplished at Sundance. Just about every film gets some Industry trade reviews at Sundance, and Bass Ackwards was no exception. Reviews in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety were mixed, which is a risk every film takes when seeking to generate press coverage. They were, however, much better at Huffington Post and Entertainment Weekly (link: http://insidemovies.ew.com/2010/01/28/is-vod-the-future-of-indie-film/)

Given the unconventional nature of the pitch to theaters (no traditional distributor, no P&A money, mixed reviews, no major awards etc.), Bass Ackwards was able to score what we generally call a “hybrid theatrical release,” meaning bookings of a somewhat unconventional nature in independent theaters outside the biggest markets. Here’s what it looked like….(of course, all these dates were in 2010).

2/20: Lake Worth FL – Lake Worth Playhouse 2/20: Wilmington, DE – Theatre N at Nemours 2/27: Three Rivers, MI – The Riviera Theatre 3/11: Chester, CT – EO Art Lab 4/2 – 4/8: New Haven, CT – Criterion Theatre 4/2: Madison, WI – University of Wisconsin 4/9 – 4/15: Saco, MN – Cinemagic & IMAX 4/16: Portland, OR – Northwest Film Forum 4/16 – 4/22: Greely, CO – Kress Cinema Lounge 5/9: Ann Arbor, MI – Michigan Theatre 5/28: Portland, OR – Hollywood Theatre 5/29: Olympia, WA – The Capital Theater 6/10 – 6/16: Seattle, WA – Northwest Film Forum

While some might call this an “11 city release” in an effort to hype the theatrical presence, a quick look at these bookings makes at least one thing abundantly clear — none of the big independent theater chains in the major cities would show the film given the release strategy and lack of P&A (note: the major theater chains at the time were very publicly against day-and-date digital release strategies: happily, that has changed somewhat since that time). As a result, the film was not able to secure the kind of mainstream consumer publication reviews, (through such outlets as The New York Times), that most indie releases covet. In fact, The New York Times has a pretty strict policy that a film must open theatrically in New York plus at least a couple more major markets before it will review a film…which Bass Ackwards did not. Of course, New York is a famously expensive market in which to open theatrically, and this was not an option for the film.

The financial upshot of the theatrical bookings was, as producer Woodrow puts it, “negligible.” (Exact theatrical figures are undisclosed and unreported.) According to my dictionary, the term “negligible” refers to “the quantities so small that they can be ignored when studying the larger effect.” One could argue that theatrical releases for independent films are never “negligible,” considering how the Industry instantly views films that have any kind of theatrical presence as different from films that are straight to DVD and digital. It was generally understood that Bass Ackwards was getting theatrical treatment, and that automatically increased the Industry buzz around the film. In addition, there was the extra marketing and word-of-mouth that any public presentations inherently generate. The film also played a few additional key film festivals, including the Seattle International Film Festival…although these festival bookings were limited, given the fact that the film was already available digitally at the time). From a filmmaker’s point of view…these 11 “hybrid distribution” theatrical bookings would need to be considered a net positive, even if they didn’t generate any real revenue.

For better or worse, very few independent films these days are looking to generate real revenue theatrically. It is the word-of-mouth, the reviews and the industry presence that theatrical bookings generally supply that is wanted. Keep in mind that many indies every year pour significant money into theatrical releases, and often lose significant money by doing so. (I know, I’ve worked on a few of them.) In fact, “negligible” theatrical revenue is not something to overlook; for most films in the contemporary climate it is simply a reality to be grappled with — especially if the film spends absolutely no money on P&A or marketing materials!

Of course, as it was travelling through its hybrid theatrical, the film was also available on DVD (available to order on February 1, although the full retail push did not occur until June), as well as Cable VOD and key digital platforms like Netflix Watch Now, iTunes, and Hulu. The ultimate point of the strategy was to gamble on how the hype around the Festival and the unconventional release would drive these ancillary windows.

And so finally, we arrive at the all-important ancillaries.

As of 2nd quarter accounting statements from New Video in 2011, the gross receipts for DVD and digital platforms was $37,343.40. Breaking it down a little further, DVD units sold were a little under under 2,000, and the rest of the gross came from digital platforms. Note: Woodrow also carved out the rights to sell DVDs from the film’s own website, but these sales were once again what Woodrow calls “negligible.”

Of course, what is amazing about that number $37,343.40…is that its just about exactly what the film cost to make. And making back your budget is the basic gold standard of filmmaking.

With regards to how much of that actually got passed on to the filmmaker — Woodrow is not at liberty free to disclose the exact terms of his deal with New Video. However, the company is well known throughout the industry as being one of the most filmmaker-friendly distributors in the U.S. with respect to their splits with filmmakers. In general, filmmaker-friendly distribution splits range from 25% – 50% for DVD, and 15% – 50% for Digital…and New Video is acknowledged to be amongst the fairest/most favorable with its deals. According to Woodrow, “New Video was totally amazing throughout the process.”

After factoring in distributor fees, one would also have to realize that there would have been replication fees, digital platform delivery expenses, etc. to be recouped. Therefore, if you do the fuzzy math based on the available figures above, it becomes pretty clear that the filmmaker would have made some five¬figure money, but not enough to make back the initial budget of $35,000. (Also, Zipline’s equity position comes into play here.)

Most importantly, this is a fact that Woodrow readily acknowledges in a positive way. “I have had the privilege of writing checks to investors within a year of the film’s festival premiere,” says Woodrow. “That is nothing to be sneezed at in this climate. In the end, I will not make my investors whole for the total amount of the production, finishing and distribution, but the film is truly out there and available. And people talk to me about it all the time, so it has had an impact and allowed all of us to continue building our careers which, against a relatively small spend, is a very real thing. And something is always better than nothing.”

The Future

Examined even more closely, Bass Ackwards emerges as a particularly interesting study of the difference between industry success and the general consumer market. As discussed at great length already, the film generated considerable recognition among so-called “industry insiders” – which is extremely rare for a no-stars, no-niche, genre-blurring, character-driven indie. However, Bass Ackwards didn’t necessarily take that step and convert that industry buzz into general consumer awareness, a fact which Woodrow again readily acknowledges.

“This really was an industry play as opposed to anything that got noticed by a more mainstream audience,” explains Woodrow. “The intention was to create publicity buzz through the unconventional nature of the release and to have that alone drive audience interest in the film. It was definitely successful on that level. We did far, far better revenue-wise and exposure-wise than if we had tried to go a more conventional sales route, but in truth, Aunt Beatrice didn’t download the film on iTunes in HD. It was an experiment, and within its own terms, I would call it a successful one,” continues Woodrow. “All involved learned an enormous amount about the machinery of marketing and distributing films, and the investors did get money back.”

Again, as Woodrow puts it, ”nothing to be sneezed at in this climate.”

“Of course, in hindsight it was also the nadir of the economy and the distribution picture, and things have gotten a little better since then,” Woodrow concludes. “But really, how much better have they really gotten? So certainly I have no doubt we did the right thing for the times. What we probably really needed was more P&A money for distribution. If we could have raised $50K – $100K in P&A then I think it would have made a huge difference. In addition to the Sundance publicity, we probably needed the money to do some more traditional marketing and booking in NY, LA, and Chicago, and maybe some additional markets. That would have helped everything and probably made the difference making this into an unqualified success. So we built a car, but we didn’t have enough gas for the car. It worked for the industry–it was in fact, a ‘stunt’ that the industry talked a lot about and it really got the film out there and helped our careers.”

In retrospect and from our outsider perspective, would the additional $50,000 – $100,000 invoked by Woodrow have helped the bottom line? Maybe, but obviously we will never know. But where would that money have come from, and how would it have been possible given the overall strategy of going as wide as possible upon the Festival premiere? Would throwing $50,000 – $100,000 toward a film that didn’t cost that much to begin with and lacked marketing hooks even make sense?

To that I’d say that it is clear that if the filmmakers had decided they needed that money to release it into the market, then the timing would have been completely different, and that would have changed everything on the table (publicity, buzz, release schedule, etc.). To what effect, again, we will never know.

Was Woodrow’s “experiment” with Bass Ackwards a success, or not? I leave that with you, the reader, to decide.

Feel free to let us know. Or better yet, let pioneering producer Thomas Woodrow know what you think about his films and his efforts, as I am sure that in today’s digital reality you can find his online handles without much difficulty. It is almost as easy to find Bass Ackwards online and rent it –if only to help show Woodrow, Sundance, New Video, Zipline, YouTube, etc. that they were not completely off-base by trying to usher in the age when independent films are both available and monetizeable online.

Personally speaking, I congratulate the bravery and foolhardiness of all of them.