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Monday, November 23, 2009

Boston - The Greatest Night of Our Lives


It is difficult to put into words exactly how awesome our Boston premiere was. First, the Brattle Theater could not possibly kick more ass. It is a classic one-screen cinema house. The screen is on a stage in front of a 235 seat theater with a balcony. The crowd was better than our wildest dreams. 200+ people came out of the woodwork to support Self Helpless! The theater ran out of beer within ten minutes, resulting in various trips to the liquor store. My rough count was 5 thirty racks, 4 bottles of wine, and 2 bottles of whiskey that were smuggled in to the theater. The crowd was unbelievably live, everyone laughed pretty much the entire time. That NEVER happens at movies. Apparently Self Helpless is really funny when you are completely gunned, who knew?


After the screening we did a solid Q&A (best question: "Are any of you currently carrying firearms?", so disappointed that I had to answer no), and headed over to Tommy Doyle's for the after party. I have to admit, after 15 months of busting our asses and living like broke hermits, it was pretty great to kick back and celebrate. We got to play rock stars for the evening. Everyone was so pumped on the movie that we couldn't walk across the bar without getting pounced on by roving groups of wide-eyed beautiful women. For someone who has been living in the woods shoveling shit and editing video for a year, this was an overwhelming experience. We proceeded to do exactly what our characters from Self Helpless would have done in that situation.

It was a once in a lifetime night. Celebrating with our friends and having them be proud of us and proud of Self Helpless was more than we could have ever asked for. The hot babes showing up were a nice plus too. Thank you to everyone for coming out and showing love. You made us remember how much fun it is to make people laugh.


Thursday, November 19, 2009

Hartford Courant Article


Yet another GREAT article published in Hartford. This time it is the Courant showing love. Our screening on Friday at 9pm should be packed after all this good press! Much love to Art Cinema. That place rules. Porn and indie films, the perfect Self Helpless venue.


The link: http://tinyurl.com/yjlaqbk

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Boston After Party



Good news, we just scheduled our after party for the Brattle Theater screening. We will be taking years off our lives at Tommy Doyle's on Harvard Square. This dope Irish pub is just a stone's throw from the theater. They have offered us their entire second floor zone to hurt our livers in. NO COVER with a Self Helpless ticket stub. Should be a great time that we will all regret on Friday morning.

Check out Tommy Doyle's here:
http://tinyurl.com/dhe2bd

Hartford Article

Great article on Self Helpless in the Hartford Advocate. Good to see Patrick Simone's home town showing love. Feel free to leave comments on the article at the bottom.

The link:
http://tinyurl.com/ygj4pud

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Queens Film Fest recap



Whew! Just got home after the Queens International Film Festival. What a weekend. The festival was held at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, an incredible venue in Long Island City.

On Friday we scoped out some short films, then we met PK in Manhattan for the Bad Rabbit/Slick Rick/Goodie mob show at BB King's. Damn, Bad Rabbit (Boston) is the new band to watch. Anthony Hamilton meets Spank Rock. So fresh. Slick Rick was in classic form, backed up by Bad Rabbit, and Goodie Mob crushed, nuff said.

We woke up later than planned on Saturday morning and jetted over to the festival to watch some flicks and put up posters in inappropriate places (the ones in the urinals were a big hit). We saw a few really cool shorts. "You Will See Life" was made by two young babes from England; great actressing in that one. We also loved "Jenniffer and the Fish" and "Ice Breakers". Very unpretentionsly funny stuff. We stuck around for the world premiere of Buffalo Bushido. Wow. This is a feature length drama shot in Buffalo, NY. Very indie, very strong. Flawless acting, and highly engaging characters were the strong point of this film. Add in some dominant animation and this was easily the best film we saw at QIFF. I highly recommend it to everyone.

Our screening time was Sunday at 10am, so we had pretty much written it off as a private screening for ourselves and whatever crackheads we could pull in off the sidewalk. Much to our surprise, about 20 of our good friends from all over the city showed up to check us out. We were blown away, big thanks to everyone who fought through soul-crushing hangovers to show love. One guy that we had met at the opening night party even rode his bike out from Manhattan just to see the movie. Badass. Everyone really enjoyed the movie. Afterwords we all kicked it at the irish pub on the corner and caught up with friends and movie fans.

We met a bunch of cool people, and even got nominated for the Best Young Filmmaker award: http://queensfilmfestival.com/films/winners/2009/
We lost to a film that actually had some sort of socially redeeming value. What, milk-farts aren't award worthy? QIFF was a very cool festival, well organized and packed with cool movies. We hope to be back next year.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

So What Are You Guys Doing?


We have published a few blog posts about our distribution strategy. Since things have changed a bit recently, I thought it would be good to fill everyone in on where we are at right now.

We are currently in the middle of our theatrical release. During the month of November we will be screening Self Helpless in NYC, Boston, Hartford CT, and Burlington VT. This is a completely independent theatrical run. We book the theaters, we do the promotion, sometimes we even set up the projector. The goal of this short period of theatrical-only release is to drum up some popular support and some good press for the movie before our DVD and digital release.

Around Christmas time we plan to release Self Helpless on DVD and digital download. The movie will be for sale from our website, and possibly from iTunes or Amazon (we haven’t decided if these outlets will bring in enough sales to be worth the money and hassle required to deal with them). We are also planning to stream the movie FOR FREE on our website. I know this sounds counterproductive. Why give something away for free when we are trying to sell it? Our goal with Self Helpless is get the movie seen. Like seen in a big way; we are shooting for cult status. We want to be the movie that people pirate and pass around and tell their friends about. As far as sales, we are basically just hoping to earn enough money to subsidize our tour.

We are planning to spend December and January setting up a screening tour. Our ability to do this will depend on how much buzz we manage to generate during our mini theatrical run. If all goes according to plan, at the beginning of February we will pile into a car and hit the road. The hope is to travel around the East Coast screening Self Helpless at colleges and art house theaters. Depending on how many stops we can set up, we hope to be on the road showing the movie for a month or so. After that, we will come home and take a nap!

We are aware that this plan may change by next week. That is the great thing about self-distribution, we can adjust to take advantage of different opportunities. This model is by no means going to get us rich. But if we work our asses off we might just be able to get Self Helpless seen by a lot of people, and who knows what that could bring.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Queens Film Festival Screening


The announcement finally came down today. We will be screening on Sunday, November 15th, at 10 am in the Frank Sinatra Center for the Arts. I know what you are thinking: a movie at 10 am on a Sunday? Are you trying to keep people from coming? Obviously it wouldn't have been our first choice to schedule our NYC premiere right in the middle of everyone's hangover. That is just what happens when you are the new guy on the block. Until someone has deigned to review your movie, or you have been mentioned on a really cool movie blog, or you have made so much fucking money on your own that people have to pay attention to you, no one gives a shit.

That said, we are actually really excited for QIFF. We are screening on a weekend (way better than 10 am on a Friday) in the Frank Sinatra Center (a badass venue, especially for big fans of old blue eyes). QIFF is a festival that focuses on fringe movies like ours. They love young filmmakers, specifically first timers. And, of course, it is in NYC. This automatically drapes the whole thing in cool.

Since this may very well be our one and only film festival appearance (unless someone at Sundance takes acid and drops our DVD in the "make them instant superstars" box) we are going to live it up. We will be at every party, screening, and free breakfast. We will wear suits as often as possible. We will wallpaper the place with posters, and assault people with business cards. I hope some of our faithful NY fans will struggle out to show some support on Sunday morning, although I know what Simon, Felix, John Candy and The Drake would do.