Terrortory Makes An Impact

First off, check that out. Today Terrortory showed up on IMDB's movie meter at 4,705. That's insanely high for an indie film. Hell, I think that's higher than any other of my movies have gone other than Fear of Clowns(which peaked at 192 back when it was released).

So that's cool. People are watching the flick, or hearing about it, and heading to imdb. A good sign.

As for Amazon, the first time it showed up on the list it was 115. It moved up quickly from there, and as of Sunday was at #31 out of almost 1100.

That's a pretty fast move. Much faster than any other film I've put on Amazon.

The big question is going to be can it go higher than Garden of Hedon went(#8) and stay there for a while? The competition is fiercer than it was when GOH debuted, for starters, and we need some real staying power to have a shot at 2 million minutes in one month.

That's sort of the arbitrary number I think we need to hit to have a shot at the Amazon bonus. I could be wrong. Could be 3 million. I just don't know, and Amazon doesn't give you any hint.

They did release this notice about August's stars, which released 50 of the 100 movies that got the bonus.
http://variety.com/2016/digital/news/amazon-video-direct-top-studio-digital-partners-1201878900/

Honestly, as tired as I am of the whole grind of making no-budget movies, I'd be lying if I didn't say that now that the weather's turning cool I'm feeling the pull to shoot something.

Rough Couple Weeks Part 2

It's the epic conclusion to the two-part series!

Minus the epic part of it. But first--pictures!

 The rare-to-see Australian Brett. This animal is rarely sighted during the day, and for good reasons--it's very tempermental.

 My buddy Dom, who I've known for years and years.

 Fellow filmmakers Jason Delgado and Jeremy Todd Morehead, whose Easter Sunday comes out soon! Check it out when it does--I'm looking forward to it.

 It's Fredpool. Get it? Freddy Krueger and Deadpool? I thought it was kind of clever, but what do I know?

My brother from another mother. No, seriously, we both came out of different vaginas on literally the same day, same year. (Well, the different vaginas is still hearsay, for all I know)

ANYWAY

I headed up to the convention after noon. Wasn't taking that much stuff, so didn't have to get there too early. The load in, as always, was a pain in the ass. The loading ramp is this 45 degree down ramp, and in this case it was still wet from the rain...

I won't bore you the way the attendance bored me on Friday night. It was slow. Handed out flyers and talked to people, but not that many to talk to.

And we(the dealers and whatnot), as always, were confused by why they close off the room between the celebrities and dealers. The room looks so big and spacious without the wall, but once they close that wall you have two very small rooms that aren't particularly inviting.

Couple dealers I know went to complain, but to be honest the convention runner isn't too interested in hearing from us. Don't get me wrong--he's a fairly nice guy in general who really knows how to run the NJ Monstermania, but he's never really been able to get a grip on the MD one, and doesn't seem interested in figuring out how to fix it.

Whatever. I still go because it's so close and it's a chance to hang out with friends I don't see that often.

Friday night I came home instead of hanging out--had to make sure the Amazon launch worked out, and sure enough at midnight the link suddenly appeared to add to the watchlist. It was on!

That took quite a load off of me. If it didn't show up, I was gonna be in some trouble explaining, you know?

SATURDAY
We went up early--me and my buddy Zig--got there around 9am. The place got pretty crowded, we handed out tons of flyers. Met a lot of people, wandered around and saw the sights.

The days really go by fast. Never enough time to talk to everybody.

My lead actor from "Garden of Hedon", Richard Cutting, actually came down from Connecticut and hung out for a while. I showed him his segment from Terrortory, plus a segment he was on set for. Told some stories.

Then we went downstairs to the bar. Vodka drinks in hand. Hung out the rest of the night there, talking to people like filmmaker Brad Twigg and some actor friends of his, as well as actress Judy Furlow from Fear of Clowns and her husband.

I sort of wish I'd gone to a couple of the panels, but when the choice is chat & drink or sit and listen to people talk...it's easy.

My buddy Dom and Brett--who are usually the last guys standing with me at 3am when all the wussies have gone to sleep--went to bed EARLY. Couldn't believe it! Now I know we're all getting old...

SUNDAY
It was back to dead again on Sunday. Gave away fewer fliers, but took actual pictures of people, which I always forget to do. And Dom introduced me to the Greatest American Hero, so all is forgiven.

We packed up early and got out of there. Ate a 5 Guys dinner, and that was it.

I was honestly too tired to celebrate the relief of having it all over. The news of the premiere was spreading to a lot of web sites, and I wanted to start taking a look at the numbers...

But Amazon's metrics were collapsing--frozen--so I didn't get to see much at first. When Terrortory debuted on the chart it was 113. The next day it's here--we broke into the top 100 much faster than any other movie I've put up.






Fingers crossed we can break into the top 50, then the top 20, and even--dare I hope? The top 10...

Terrortory Music

I promise I'll get back to the rough week story, but I have to take a moment to talk about the music of Terrortory.

I've been kind of quiet about it because I wanted it to be a little bit of surprise of the style in the movie. I was originally going to go for what I normally love--orchestral. For me it's always been the mark of a serious movie, and I've loved it as far back as I can remember.

But things came up, and the film took longer to finish than I thought, and my usual composer Chad Seiter was working on the ReCore game for Microsoft that had him flying to London to conduct sessions with the Philharmonic Orchestra...

We scrambled for a replacement. A buddy of mine said he knew of a guy in the UK named Terence Jones, so I contacted him. He did a test scene for us and he was very good.

Here's where you can hear the score for Terrortory and buy the soundtrack:
https://terencejonesmusic.bandcamp.com/album/terrortory-ost

The only thing was, he didn't think he'd have time to score the whole thing in the time we had. That led me to go with the backup plan I'd had in my head for a while...

I've been a synth fan forever...I mean, I'm an actual child of the 80's. I grew up on that stuff. So I'd been a member of a synth FB group for a while and I put out a call to a few of those guys and said "Hey, anybody interested in doing music for segments of my movie?"

I figured if each segment was done in the old-school synth style--which has been making a comeback since Drive/The Guest/It Follows, and more recently Stranger Things--then it could be cool.

First guy to come back was a dude named Daniel Deluxe. He didn't have a lot of time, because he was getting ready to go on tour. He's pretty well known. You can hear some of his stuff, including his very cool Corruptor album here:

https://soundcloud.com/daniel-deluxe

I gave him Smiling Jack, which is probably my favorite segment of the bunch, and he went to work. Hit it out of the park, man. It was great. A few tweaks, and we were good to go.

Got a couple of other people who tried segments but either weren't experienced enough yet to do it up to what I was looking for, or like in one case, quit after a day because they didn't realize just how much work it was.

Another guy got back to me. His name was Ben Moseley, and his musician moniker was "Bishop of Battle". I mean...it was kismet, right? (for those who don't know, that's the name of the villain in one of the segments of the 80's horror anthology Nightmares, which I watched the crap out of as a kid)

I gave him Siren. We went back and forth to get it where I was happy, but man was he talented. The Siren piece is haunting, and reminiscent of things like the Vangelis Blade Runner score.

You can hear some of his other stuff(including a cool Oingo Boingo cover) here:

https://soundcloud.com/bishop-of-battle

But it didn't end there...

I had nobody for Prowler, so I asked Ben if he'd be up for doing that one also. He watched it and said "Sure". He wanted to do it a little differently since it has a lot of humor in it. He referenced the funny "Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill"segment from Creepshow as the sort of thing he'd be trying to do.

The person doing Drone quit--too much work. So I'm scrambling, and I ask Ben..."I know you're not done with Prowler, and we're like 3 weeks out from the premiere...any chance you'll be able to do Drone also?"

And like a boss, he said "Send it to me and let me see." I did, he took it on, and he hit all of them out of the park. Saved my ass, I can tell you that.

Somewhere in there I also got all of Terence's orchestral score to the wrap-around, and it was excellent. I barely asked for any changes. It builds slowly and by the end really brings on the horror.

The final piece was the end credit music. I wanted it to be a fun, 80's pop style music. My temp music I laid in was "Ain't Nothing Gonna Break My Stride". That sort of thing.

I spent days listening to songs on soundcloud from synth groups. I made a list of my top 8 and sent it to Zig. We decided which four were the best, and I emailed each of the groups to see if they were interested.

Well, happily for me, one named Foret De Vin got back and said they'd consider it. They read the contract and said, "Let's do it." Here's the song over the end credits--so 80's it's awesome! They're from Sweden, and Europe seems to be having a major 80's revival...makes me want to move there.
https://soundcloud.com/foretdevin/hold-the-night-feat-robert-beachgrove

Get on their Facebook here:
https://www.facebook.com/foretdevin

If you like these guy's music, buy some of it--help support these talented guys, because they're amazing and willing to help out us indie filmmakers.
(and if you're not familiar with soundcloud and bandcamp, there are usually links to the musicians FB/Twitter/etc on the right side of their soundcloud page, so give them a Like!)

Blumhouse Features An Exclusive Clip of Terrortory...and why that's so cool for me

First off, the link to the article is here, so go check it out!


http://www.blumhouse.com/2016/10/03/exclusive-check-out-a-clip-from-the-new-horror-anthology-terrortory/

Story time! I'll try not to get too purple with my prose.

Years ago I finished Fear of Clowns 1. I had no inkling to do a second, especially with how disappointed I was with the finished movie. With the exception of the last half hour, it really wasn't the movie I'd set out to make.

But I made a cool teaser, and had a talented graphic designer I'd met online named Erik Ashley do a cool poster. I was looking for a distributor, but hadn't sent out any copies yet.

I woke up one day to find I had a message on my phone from someone who said they were with Lionsgate, and wanted to speak to me about acquiring FOC. I thought--One of my friends is a real asshole, messing with me like that.

But the number was in California, so I called it. I was shocked to find out it was actually Lionsgate. The person I spoke to tells me, "We've seen the poster and the trailer, and we love them. We can't believe nobody's used that title for a movie yet, either."

They tell me--send us a screener, but it probably won't matter--we want the movie. The only rub was, they didn't want to buy it directly from me. They wanted a producer's rep.

(that may sound weird to you, but the bottom line is that many young filmmakers don't understand deliverables and dealing with contracts, so the movie company doesn't want to have to hold your hand through it--if you get a producer's rep, THEY will hold your hand and save the movie company time)

Lionsgate told me, get any rep you want. But here's a list of some of the ones we deal with a lot.

I did my research, talked to some other filmmakers who had used some of the reps, and found one that seemed good. We talked, and they were very cool. But they wanted to stress--there was no deal on the table yet. They would talk first with Lionsgate, but there was no guarantee it would land there.

I told them--and put it in writing in THEIR contract--there are only two companies I am signing this movie to:  Lionsgate or Anchor Bay. At this time, those were the places for horror. They were the ones putting out all the best horror. (you gotta remember, this was like 2002 or so)

Anyway, Lionsgate came through right away and the rest is history.

The reason I tell you this story is because Blumhouse is now IT. They are, far and away, creating the best horror movies. Insidious, The Purge flicks, Sinister. Under-appreciate flicks like Creep, Oculus, The Visit and more. These guys appreciate horror, and they take risks. They bankroll a lot of small horror movies to see what works and doesn't work.
http://deadline.com/2015/05/blumhouse-panel-produced-by-conference-1201435034/

Then last year they started the Blumhouse web site, which is the biggest time-suck in history, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. There's a TON of great articles, day after day, that will ensure you don't get all your actual work done.

They've hired some great writers and talent, from my buddy Rob Galluzzo to another guy I've known online for years, Ryan Turek, to others I haven't met but have read many times like Rebekah McKendry, William Bibbiani, John Squires and more.

So to be featured on their web site is a huge honor for me. I think Blumhouse is the present and future of horror, and the good news is that they're not just in it for the money--they all have a sincere love of horror, and that's why they're succeeding.

There you have it! Maybe next time I'll tell you how I met Rob G--it involves a hotel room, an early screener of Feast, and Adam Green. (not joking)

Whew! Rough Couple Weeks! PART 1

Just got back from the Monstermania Weekend promoting Terrortory's release. That's me and the Greatest American Hero, William Katt.

But let's REWIND...

It's September 23rd. I've submitted to be published the actual Terrortory movie...I've set it so that it won't be live until October 1st, but I want it to be published so it will show up in Amazon's database for people to add to their watchlist.

Amazon REJECTS the title late on the 24th. They say "Misleading Synopsis". They don't give any other help, which is just another exhibit for how mediocre-to-bad their Video Direct Support is.

So I send them this email:

I just got an error on Terrortory that reads as this: 

"Synopsis - Misleading Content:
We are unable to publish your title as the synopsis provided contains content which
is misleading and/or an inaccurate representation of the video content. Please
update the synopsis and resubmit your title. For more information, see our Content
Policy Guidelines. "

Nothing in my synopsis is misleading. This is the synopsis:
EXCLUSIVELY PREMIERING on AMAZON PRIME until October 31st! In the vein of Creepshow
and Tales From The Crypt comes this anthology horror featuring six tales set in the
nightmare land called the TERRORTORY! 

The movie is exclusively premiering on Amazon Prime until October 31st, at which
point we will make it a pay-only title. The movie is in the vein of Creepshow and
Tales From The Crypt, and it has 6 stories in it.

So what's the misleading part of this?

But I don't have time to wait for their reply. I have to get this approved. So I modify the synopsis slightly and resubmit. Another day and another rejection. I'm starting to sweat, because if this isn't approved by the 28th, it may not show up in time to be live on October 1st...

The new rejection clarifies that my synopsis implies that Amazon endorses my movie. I disagree--it simply states the fact that it's exclusively available on Amazon. It's true. We're not playing it anywhere else. The fact that Amazon's being anal about it is just stupid.

Whatever. I delete that sentence and resubmit.

It gets approved after a couple of days, but it doesn't go live until midnight strikes the first minute of October 1st.

But before that we have the premiere. REWIND AGAIN

The weather was terrible. Pouring rain, which led to massive traffic. I knew this would mean no cool pictures of the crowds of people under the marquee--they'd all be huddled inside to avoide the crappy weather.

 I needed to get to the theater early so I could test the blu ray and make sure it was cool. We had the limo show up, and headed out.

I started getting a lot of texts and emails from people who were gonna come, but said the weather was too shitty or the traffic was bad, etc. I don't blame them--it was disappointing, but I can't say I wouldn't have done the same thing in their place.

I get to the theater and nobody's arrived yet. I rush in and get the blu ray to the projectionist guy. He puts it in and the disc is fast forwarding with some weird shit. I just assume he's doing that. But he opens the window and he's like "Is that how it's supposed to look?"

I'm like, "No." He messes with it and gets it working. Sounds good too--the Dolby mix plays nicely.

Fast foward--we get a decent crowd. Not as many as would have come if the weather had been nice, but definitely a healthy bunch--I'm guessing around 250. They laugh in most of the places I'd hoped. There was a couple of places where I thought there'd be a laugh but there wasn't one.

Most people seemed pretty happy with the movie. We got differing opinions on which ones were best, but the leaders seemed to be Siren and DC, with Smiling Jack coming next.

Funny aside--my kid was only supposed to watch the part he's in, but he bullied his mother into letting him watch all of it, much to my parents disapproval. They were all up in the private balcony overlooking the theater.

Afterparty was fun, had some drinks, shot the shit with people I don't see that often.

But in the back of my mind I was heading to the next challenge--the very next morning I was heading to Monstermania to spread the news of Terrortory on Amazon...

TO BE CONTINUED

Terrortory Amazon Prime Premiere Approaching, Plus Updates

Almost ready to submit the whole thing to Amazon, so it gets listed. You can set the day it premieres on Amazon, though it's not guaranteed. I guess there's an off-chance your movie will show up early, and they don't want to be held liable if that happens.

So I'm a LITTLE afraid that what if I submit it and Amazon accidentally puts it up before the local premiere? That would be awkward.

Yet, to guarantee it shows up by October 1st, I have to submit it earlier than the Premiere.

----

On the stats front, some weird stuff going on. Can't really explain it.

GOH and Bounty are going WAY down now, even though they're still both top 100 titles. GOH is down to like 1000 minutes a day, while Bounty is around 4000-6000. I guess it's to be expected since they both went over a million minutes--the viewership has to be finite, I suppose.

But I put both Hunting Humans and Fear of Clowns 2 up, and neither is doing big business like the other titles. Hunting Humans has only done about 33,000 minutes in four weeks, which is pretty small.

Maybe it's just not that recognizable a movie.

However, Fear of Clowns 2, I put up at the beginning of September. Did the same advertising as the others. It's the sequel to a Lionsgate film, and it has a huge interest base(scary clowns!)...but it's really been slow going.

It's changing a bit now, making me wish I'd submitted at the end of August. This week it broke the top 200 horror flicks on Amazon, and this past weekend started doing over 7000 minutes per day.

Not gonna be a million-minute-in-one-month title, unless it does it in October.

As far as the Amazon Star program, we still heard nothing on GOH. I'll admit I'm pretty disappointed. We did amazing numbers, and somehow missed it? Or are we penalized because of that "Terms of Service" violation that they wouldn't give us specifics on?

Waiting to hear on Bounty...because if we get it on Bounty, then it's definitely us being penalized, since it had slightly less views in the month than GOH did the previous month.

Kinonation Update Plus Why Amazon Prime Makes Me Happy

So I think I'm about to let the whole kinonation thing go away.

See, now that's it's on Amazon Prime, what do I care? If they could get us on Hulu or Netflix then okay, it would be good. But so far, after nearly 9 months they've gotten us here:

Vimeo On Demand. Could have gotten us there myself, so no big deal.
M-GO. Not even sure what this is. So I looked it up. It's Fandango Now, some sort of streaming thing from them. Only problem is, I search for Bounty and there are no results for my flick. Here, see for yourself.
MagicInternet2. Ditto. No idea. It's not in the list of outlets I checked, and I can't find anything via a search engine.

And for me the bigger problem is this: There doesn't seem to be any accounting or stats page to show me if I'm getting any sales. I guess--since I haven't heard--that we haven't had any.

Leads me to just think I should pull the plug on the whole thing. I've sent them an inquiry about stats, so we'll see what they say.

----------------

I'll tell you why Amazon Prime makes me happy.

I see these other filmmakers, and you know what they're doing when their movie is done? They're making press kits. They're sending out screeners(plus checks for submission fees) to film festivals, and maybe sending out screeners(more cost!) to distributors in the hope that a distributor will say, "Sure, we'll distribute you."

And it's SO MUCH work and SO MUCH money to do all that shit. I know, I did it for my first two films.

But I can get my film out to hundreds of thousands of people right away AND get paid for it...within 3 months of them first airing...

It's almost too good to be true.

Anyway, THIS is why I'm premiering Terrortory on Amazon. Hell, the movie's not even completely done yet, and we're 31 days away from premiering it to the world. (well, 29 days if you count the actual local premiere)

Excited.