The film Four Eyed Monsters just might be the most widely-known self-distributed film around. Co-directors Arin Crumley and Susan Buice threw themselves whole-heartedly into a DIY distribution process–much of which they pieced together as they went–and it’s worked. Recently, they won a $100,000 audience award at the indieWIRE Undiscovered Gem Festival, and the general buzz about the movie and their hugely popular podcast series on iTunes is everywhere you look in the broader indie film industry.

At Spout, we’ve been following Crumley, Buice, and their film, too. Most recently, Paul wrote a post, “Four Eyed Monsters Won a Long Time Ago.” And as all of the hype has been gradually building, one of our designers, Marie-Claire, (known as “Patches” on spout.com) has been quietly conducting an ongoing email interview with Crumley. She became interested in the project after following Crumley and Buice for about four months through their video podcasts on their website foureyedmonsters.com

“After watching just four video podcasts, I was hypnotized,” Marie-Claire said. “I requested that the film come to Grand Rapids, I bought one of their t-shirts, subscribed to the podcast, their email list and told all of my friends and co-workers to do the same. I even made my own flyers to post around town asking others to request the film too. I was hooked.”

In the interviews, Arin Crumley and Marie-Claire talk about the dream of a democratic distribution process for all small films. After watching (or reading or listening to) something, Crumley says, people would have the option to rate it, creating a recommendation network and what he calls “computerized word-of-mouth.” (Sounds like Spout has a role to play here.) Crumley has already experimented with this concept, harnessing existing tools from social networking sites like MySpace, and giving people a chance to request or “vote” that the film be shown in their town.

Read more in the interview, which follows. (Thanks, Marie-Claire and Arin, for letting us in on your conversation!)

Marie-Claire Camp: First off, I’ve seen all your video podcasts, not yet seen your film. There have been a few bumps in the road during the making of this film, in your minds, how did you see this experience–making the film, promoting it–working out in the end? What would have been the perfect experience for the life of this film? Your dream experience… And how has it differed from that?

Arin Crumley: The ideal life for the film would have been as people started to want to see our film because they had watched the video podcast the theatrical world could be completely dynamic and as demand in each city is reached for 1 screening that screening is immediately booked. If every city had a digitally equipped theater that was tied into a digital download system in the theater and that system was aware of things that individuals flagged as interesting and something they wanted to watch, then that could have been the case.

Instead what we did is let people “request” our film and then as those numbers pilled up we manually convinced one by one theaters in 6 cities to show our film. Hopefully it won”t be that much work in the future and you won”t have to limit yourself to only the 6 largest markets but could show the film in every single market there was interest.

MC: So basically your dream cinematic experience would be a purely democratic process. Voting on artist’s work… people see what they want, not what companies and studios want them to see. Beautiful.

What do you want people to do after they see your particular film?

AC: In a very basic sense, yes, get rid of the office guys trying to select what everyone sees in theaters and let people decide. It’s a pretty obvious progression and a great solution for the struggling theatrical world. An example of how this can be done with basic technology accessible to anyone is on our site:
http://foureyedmonsters.com/request_film

But moving forward I think it could become much more advanced then that. I really think having media come to people in a collectively curated way is basically the next step in evolution of humans. That sounds crazy I know, but think about it, that drastically changes the purpose of other human beings in relation to you. Everyone else becomes valuable to you because they are playing a small roll in making small decisions that collectively make up what happens in the world.

So to answer your other question, ideally after watching a screening of a film or after watching or reading or seeing anything, an audience member could always have the option to rate it. That could help a film for example be recommended to other people who also liked similar things you like.

And now with this whole “friends” idea made popular by myspace, what your friends like could dictate streams of media that come to you whether it be trailers of your friends favorite films, or a string of all of your friends favorite short films, all kinds of things can happen based on a “computerized word of mouth” that is based on your computer knowing what you like and using that information to better help you find what you want.

All of this would further automate the curating process, which is a good thing for indie film and obscure projects because content can really start to speak for itself.

Also I think video comments people create about films or bands they like will become more and more a way for others to discover that work. And even phone messages left about a film leaving the theater.

An example of the phone comments can be seen on our site. We post a voice mail phone number we got free with netzero.net and let people call in and leave up to a 2 minute reaction, comment or question to our video podcast or to our feature film. Scroll down on this page and you’ll see among our written out comments a few of the phone comments and even some video comments as well:

http://www.foureyedmonsters.com/category/comments

MC: Are there any other filmmakers that you’re modeling this self-distributed process after? Do you personally know of any other independents that have succeeded in distributing their own films?

AC: We were on a panel with 2 great DIY filmmakers you can watch the video here.

Nobody is really our role model, but we do look up to certain people like Chris Anderson, Steve Jobs, Mark Cuban, Adam Curry, Cori Doctro, Laurence Lessig, Peter Broderick. They all speak about a lot of the ideas and concepts that have inspired our approach to distributing our film.

MC: So I just watched the video from your link, each filmmaker giving his or her own case study, and watched as each of you reacted to each other’s experiences.

As the quote from http://www.indiewire.com/ots/2006/09/dispatch_from_i_1.html says
“The monolithic gate keeping model will break down.” Beginning this process has no doubt been rough for independent filmmakers.

You guys didn’t get much of a chance to learn from other filmmakers’ mistakes until it was late in the game. You cold-called theaters and did a lot with your own money, time and brain-power. You didn’t have a plan to distribute your film, you made it first, then thought about what to do with it.

You two, along with withoutabox.com, are young pioneers of the social networking-style film exposure. There’s no doubt that others will base their efforts on the work that you and Susan have done with this film.

Did I pick up correctly that you were working with withoutabox.com on creating tools for filmmakers? Did you help to create “Distribution Lab” or were you just initial users of the technology?

And do you personally have any plans to help other filmmakers get their films distributed? You mentioned that you have a file of willing theaters with digital capabilities on your site.

AC: We plan to publish more and more to our tutorial which is where we’ve posted instructions on how to create a video podcast, notes about myspace, google maps, pretty much any of the main things we’ve experimented with. You’ll find the database of theaters in the tutorial on our site.

We also have been trying to put our tutorial into an open source project Lance from Head Trauma is working on. He was on that panel and now after talking with him at IFP and digimart, we want to work with him to take his knowledge and ours and put it out there in a wiki that other filmmakers can use and add to as an ongoing DIY resource.

The Distribution Lab is something withoutabox.com created and we were selected to be a part of. It’s not an actually technology, more an attitude, the idea that the world will one day have a better infrastructure to distribute independent film but what would happen if we started acting like that world existed today. It’s in the collaboration with David and Joe at withoutabox.com that we got the confidence to try out some of these unproven ideas. The technology itself doesn’t exist yet and that’s been the problem, so we made it ourselves and they are making a version of it that will work to plug any film into. But they are in the early beta process of that because it’s paradigm-breaking technology and that requires a few drafts to solidify.

The largest asset will be the collective effort to innovate distribution. What we’ve tried to do with our film, and what others have done with theirs and then sharing that knowledge openly with others to further experiment with marketing and distribution to see where this all can go. That’s what it’s all about.

Another video you should watch if you liked that panel.

Talk to you later,
Arin