How To Market Your Movie? Gauging Your Success? Making Your Script Most Attractive For A Producer?

Today on #Pitch Chris, we’re going to be talking about how to market your movie. What is the best way to gauge your success? And how do you make your script most attractive for a producer?

Hey, welcome to Episode 2 of #Pitch Chris, where I’m going to take questions from you guys and I’m going to answer them. This first question comes from Billy. Let’s hear what Billy has to say.

“How do I get people to want to see my movie?”

That’s good that you’re at least thinking about people wanting to see your movie, Billy, because that’s the most important thing: getting eyeballs to your project. It’s unbelievably shocking to me how many producers, how many filmmakers forget to market their film. You’ve built this budget, you’re shooting, but you forgot the whole marketing piece.

There’s so many different things that you can do to help market your film, one of them being start with the characters in the film. If you have A-list celebrities, great, because you already have a backing behind it.

But if you have a smaller budget film, which a lot of you guys out there are just starting out, use the influencers. In their contracts, in their agreements, have them write that they’re going to help promote your film. That’s a way obviously to keep your promotional costs down, but also getting exposure.

If they’re an influencer and they have a lot of followers and they’re inside your project and they’re talking about your project to all of their friends, it’s going to give you a lot of exposure that you wouldn’t have before. So it’s a way of keeping the costs low or at no cost and getting the word out.

Plus, you also want to focus on your own social media efforts. You want to do interviews and reach out to newspapers and get the word out there. Friends, family. If you’re doing self-distribution, you’re going to want to let everybody know that your project is about to launch, and then keep sending them email blasts and keep posting about the launch of your film. And then immediately, as soon as it drops, you get everybody going in there to buy it.

So that’s going to increase your visibility and get you more sales. Great question. Let’s take the next one.

“How can I gauge the success of my movie? It’s a passion of mine and I want it to do good.”

That’s a great question. I may actually break a couple hearts out there, but I want to tell you guys first and foremost, this is show business. Don’t get hung up on the passion end of it so much, because it’s going to come down to numbers when you’re actually producing a film.

Obviously my first thing is, how well did it do in the box office? Did it make money? How much viewership? That’s the success end of it.

But at the same token, I also take the Clint Eastwood approach. Clint Eastwood says that he doesn’t care; he just makes projects because he loves filmmaking. That’s all well and good, but if you’re trying to make a living doing this, you’re going to gauge your success on the box office tickets and how many views you’re getting.

I guess it comes down to what you’re looking for out of it. Like I said, if it’s just to do a passion project and you’re just filmmaking, that is great and that keeps you going and you’re making great art. But if you’re looking to make a living in this business, the numbers are really what’s going to tell. Great question.

“How do I make my script most attractive so producers want to read it?”

That’s really good, Jill. I’m going to tell you, me personally, I’m going to say the first 10. The first 10 pages. When I get a script across my desk and I’m reading through it and I’m going through it, if you don’t have me within the first 10 pages, it’s pretty much downhill from there.

What you want to do is you want to make sure that within the first 10 pages of your script, you’re getting to something. You’re getting to the climax. Think about it: every page equals about 1 minute. If you can imagine people sitting in the audience, in the theater, watching your film, 10 minutes have gone by and nothing has happened – you’re going to start losing your audience.

That’s what I look for in a script. So I would say focus on that first 10. In that first 10, you’d better have a hook. If you don’t have a hook, it’s not going to be as effective.

Great question. That’s all for today. I want to answer your questions. The way that you do that, you find me on social media @ChrisDeBlasio and #PitchChris. I look forward to hearing from you guys.

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