Hey all, got a few general questions.
I know a friend who runs a pretty solid film series in New York City for serious indie films, and he always has the filmmaker come and speak on behalf of either their films or a few short films they may have created. The events are kinda small-ish, but the names he pulls are pretty solid, and they are entertaining events. He's asked me to put together a side-program to the whole thing focusing on horror films, hopefully new and under-the-radar thingies, but also older films where we could somehow nab the director to come. The fee upfront for the filmmaker would be nonexistent, so we're not going to get anyone on our wish list most likely (Werner Herzog is in NYC in April, and him screening Nosferatu for us would be beyond incredible).
Anyway, we're working on a proposal and looking up some mid-to-low level people we could get to show their films at the event. My questions are, for anyone who's ever done anything like this:
-How can we present this to distributors and filmmakers to make the idea palatable?
-Do we go to distributors first, or filmmakers first? I have a few tenuous connections, but I don't feel comfortable exploiting them.
-How do we go about this if the film is undistributed? Who is the best person to talk to? I'm guessing the producer.
-How can we put together a proposal for the money people? I don't know exactly who they are, working on skimpy info there.
Right now, ideally this would be twice a month, and we'd love to get filmmakers on Skype or something if they can't be there.
So, any suggestions or tips? And any help on working on a wishlist of filmmakers would be great. Aside from Herzog, the biggest name on this "wish list" is someone like Larry Fessenden.
