Yesterday Chris and I were lucky enough to be at the “American Independents Day” talk by Ted Hope and Christine Vachon, two of the greats independent american producers of our time. They’ve both been working for 20 years and have both made 68 films; sometimes together, sometimes with astonishing success, always with a sense of integrity, passion and restless curiosity that marked out this event as a mustnotmiss. These are the producer/innovators who have been constantly reinventing their wheels to…

If you haven’t picked up a copy of Jon Reiss’ Think Outside the Box Office do yourself a favor and grab one now. Whatever kind of distribution and marketing strategy you are pursuing for your film (and if you haven’t got a strategy yet this book will help you develop one!), there are loads of good tips and ideas in here for you. This is a time when we all need to be sharing as many resources as possible to…

Below is the video from a talk that producer Ted Hope gave at the New York Foundation for the Arts about how the film infrastructure is changing as creators and audiences take on new roles. “We must accept that being a filmmaker means taking responsibility for our films all the way through the process. Building the new infrastructure is the first step towards real media independence” Producer Ted Hope Discusses the Future of Finding Film Audiences from Reel 13 on…

Ted Hope Art House Convergence Closing Remarks from joe zina on Vimeo. You can also read the full text of Hope’s keynote address, delivered at the Arthouse Convergence in Salt Lake City just before Sundance, on indieWIRE.

Ted Hope’s new blog Truly Free Film is definitely one to add to your reader (if you haven’t started subscribing to blog feeds in a reader I highly recommend it – it saves time and allows you to keep track of loads of blogs and websites in one place. I use Google Reader but there are other options out there). I previously wrote about Hope’s Phoenix Rising speech here and his Truly Free Film blog follows on from this with…

Super producer and super nice guy Ted Hope gave a keynote address at Film Independent’s Filmmaker Forum in Los Angeles over the weekend. If you need to gird your loins for the challenges and opportunities ahead you should read it because you, dear readers, are the TRULY FREE FILMMAKERS he is talking about, or at least you can be. A THOUSAND PHOENIX RISING How The New Truly Free Filmmaking Community Will Rise From Indie’s Ashes I can’t talk about the…

Mark Gill’s talk at the Los Angeles Film Festival’s Financing Conference has been causing a right old kefuffle in the independent film community. It was read nearly 100,000 times on indieWIRE in 4 days. Here’s an upbeat nugget to wet your whistle: Here’s how bad the odds are: of the 5000 films submitted to Sundance each year– generally with budgets under $10 million–maybe 100 of them got a US theatrical release three years ago. And it used to be that…