Revenge of the Nerds

By: Adam L. PenenbergWed Dec 19, 2007 at 8:11 AM

Arin Crumley and Susan Buice were just art squids with a handful of credit cards, a digital camera, and very patient parents. Now they have a (long) shot at the big time. How the digital wave gives power to the little people and reshapes the way movies reach the world.

Crumley and Buice in their Brooklyn flat.

In fact, their whirlwind tour yielded nothing. After 18 festivals, they were still without a distribution deal to get Four Eyed Monsters into theaters. Their work seemed to resonate, but they had no money and no access to the pipeline. All they had was a mounting sense that people liked the thing. "We had a film that nobody knew about and nobody wanted to distribute," Crumley says. "Companies told us that the 'target' audience for our film was 'hard to pin down.' What they meant was that they had no tried-and-true formula for how to release a film to the type of audience our film appealed to, so they didn't want to take a risk."

Which got them thinking. At the time, social-networking site MySpace had about half the 75 million members it has today. But, children of the Web that they are, Buice and Crumley understood that social- networking sites could generate interest and create buzz--a free, self-fulfilling wave of publicity. A veritable army of users, the vast majority under 30, would market the film for them virally by blogging about it, or posting video clips. As any ad person will tell you, that kind of lightning-fast word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing, and the Internet makes it possible on a scale never before seen. So Buice and Crumley embraced what Crumley calls "collective curation"--the idea that a loyal, intimate, motivated fan base is better able to judge quality than any individual and that a thumbs-up from the "Netgeist" can be life-changing.

Tonight's dinner consists of almond-butter sandwiches. Still, asked if they would accept a $2 million offer for the rights to their film, Crumley says, "No." Buice isn't so sure. "Only if we maintain control," Crumley insists. And what if that wasn't part of the deal? "No."

It was here that Buice and Crumley began butting up against the film establishment. And it is here that the Web potentially becomes a transformative vehicle for independent filmmakers looking to crash the gates of the old system.

The pair's strategy began taking shape when they attended South by Southwest, where they posted a daily online video diary of their experiences. The diary proved to be popular and helped draw an audience to their screenings. For Buice and Crumley, it also drove home the point that the battle to get their film recognized (not to mention the peripheral tales of their own interpersonal combat and financial woe) was something their peers could relate to--that the story about their story might help them get over the hump.

So they sketched out a series of 10 three- to five-minute video podcasts that they intended to post once a month, a kind of Project Greenlight reality show about the making of their movie. One episode tells how they got started. Another relates their experience at Slamdance, detailing fights that broke out when an acting teacher and some of his students who appeared in the film clamored for more credit. A third looked at the impact the film was having on their relationship, which often seemed on the brink of disintegration. The first podcast was posted in November and immediately became a hit. It didn't take long for each new installment to attract 65,000 downloads via iTunes, YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, and other sites. As of late May, the first seven episodes had been downloaded about half a million times, unleashing a platoon of citizen marketers for the movie as the clips get posted on individual profiles, emailed down the line to friends, or played on iPods.

In fact, the marketing has been so effective that a recent Four Eyed Monsters screening at the Brooklyn Museum sold out completely: 470 tickets, in five minutes. In September, after Buice and Crumley post their 10th and final podcast, they plan to throw a series of screening parties across the country, organized by volunteers. They are trying out a new service from Withouta- box, which lets filmmakers distribute their work to art-house theaters nationwide; the more advance tickets sold, the more theaters sign on. Simultaneously, they'll release Four Eyed Monsters through their Web site, www.foureyedmonsters.com, either on DVD (complete with the podcasts, for around $15) or as a low-end digital download.

Crumley sees their strategy as a showdown between Hollywood and the New Economy: "If we are successful with releasing our film by building our own audience, getting the film directly to that audience, and using what they say about it to get to a bigger audience--that would prove that the distributors' existence is completely unnecessary. It's better than a couple of guys in an office making a multimillion-dollar decision based on their own personal taste."