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By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, September 22nd, 2011 - Comments Off on SnagFilms To Get More Aggressive
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SnagFilms To Get More Aggressive

God, I feel almost arrogant and self-involved enough to work for Deadline! I say something and BOOM!, it happens. Must be my doing!

Wait a minute… the sun is up in the sky… I knew that as going to happen… man, I am on a roll!!!

But I digress even before I say anything…

In the Netflix conversation the other day, I noted that the door was open for a company like SnagFilms to come in and create a truly dominant business as The Streaming Company Of The Indie. Today (obviously a long-developing plan), a press release, that leads with the latest additions of distribution channels and the announcement of a slate on fiction films to go along with the company’s catalog of 2300 non-fiction titles.

What is a little disconcerting about this expansion and the entire realm of the smaller companies streaming all kinds of content these days is that it’s still like everyone wants to be your guide and no one wants to step up and pay real dollars to control any content. Looking at the SnagFilms site, i am very impressed by the range of documentary content. But even as I skip around that content, I don’t know whether anything is really proprietary to SnagFilms. I’m not saying that some of this content is not exclusive to SnagFilms… but if it is, I have no idea.

Point is, great site… great content… but what is driving traffic or, eventually, subscribers/paying customers?

It’s a strange thing. Over the years, the discussion of the delivelution on this blog has had a lot of responses about the notion that people wouldn’t pay for individual studios content on a subscription basis. I disagree. But the advantage the studios have in this eventual pursuit is that they have massive library and a ton of well-defined brands. They own the brands and will spend a lot of money marketing what they have.

As Netflix de-emphasizes the content they don’t have or had and will not longer have, they have done an even better job making mountains out of content molehills as they make deals. People seem to have heard about the deals for shows that Netflix has made. And it seems to be, for many, content that impresses them.

But when I click through to SnagFilm’s blog entry on new fiction releases, I see…

Additionally, SnagFilms will offer digital release (also initially for paid viewing) of fictional films such as:
· Too Young To Die, starring Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis in a thriller based on a true story and reflecting the continuing debate over the death penalty;
· Women Talking Dirty, a Scottish comedy starring Helena Bonham Carter;
· P.U.N.K.S.,a comedy featuring Jessica Alba;
· Teknolust, a Tilda Swinton art-house title

… and i think they have this great, glorious machine being used to sell crap off of a rack at AFM.

Rick Allen does a great job staying on top of the future of streaming, positioning a business… but SnagFilms, like most of the other players on the level below Netflix and Hulu, simply don’t have a voice that is clear enough to market. People want to know what they are buying. It’s pretty basic. You can have your content available a million different ways and if you’re not selling your content, you’re still just spinning your wheels.

So… this morning’s press release is, in the end, not reflective of the kind of step up I was writing about Tuesday. It’s more of the same. It’s something I don’t know how to do… don’t handle well. It’s infrastructure and promoting the infrastructure.

But the great indie hub… or the singular doc hub? Still waiting…

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon