By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Four Eyed Monsters: DIY eyes wide open
At indieWIRE, Eugene Hernandez collates email and blog entries from Four Eyed Monsters co-everythings Arin Crumley and Susan Buice as they describe what it’s like to be left out in the open with a gentle, imaginative, inventive (and sometimes winsome and often adorable) independent, DIY Amelie-of-digital-video after more than a year of filmmaking and festival appearances at Slamdance, SxSW, Gen Arts and the Chicago Underground Film Festival with no distribution deal in sight and a pretty pile of credit card bills. “In the meetings we’ve presented our marketing plans and had a quick discussion about our bigger picture ideas of promoting our movie in innovative ways,”
Hernandez quotes Crumley. The pair prepared “materials to present to the rest of the company like a trailer, an edited preview of our free online content that will be used to promote the movie, a pitch video that explains our ideas on how the release could be successful, and a traditional press kit.” Bryan Wendorf of Chicago Underground Film Festival [Disclosure: I directed CUFF’s 2005 trailers] told me he was amazed at how the pair, whose alter egos meet via the fictitious “meetster.net” had used MySpace in order to find copacetic crowds for the Chicago showings. “Most of Susan’s MySpacers are guys and Arin’s are girls,” Wendorf added. Hernandez reports that “Buice and Crumley recently met in Los Angeles with the CEO and the marketing director at MySpace.com… Apparently the meeting went quite well, but as of Friday they weren’t quite ready to announce how they might work with the website on a release of their film… An obvious option for the pair is self-distribution. As Buice explained… “Even though we’d rather be making movies we are willing to establish our own mini-distribution company, it would just be kind of pathetic though because then the only distribution offer we would have ever received would be the offer we gave ourselves.”