Hi everyone,

My inbox has been inundated this morning from readers of this article from the Wall St. Journal: http://tinyurl.com/c86dou

It's amazing that it took the WSJ this long to report that "Indie Films Suffer Drop-Off In Rights Sales". This has been going on since at least AFM!

Funny enough this topic came up over the weekend at a panel I spoke on at the Nashville Film Festival. I was explaining to the audience the need to think GLOBALLY with the distribution of their film....and I don't necessarily mean that in the literal GLOBAL sense.

Let me explain....

Independent Film Distribution is no longer optimized by selling all your rights to one company (really was it ever?). In today's environment you will benefit much more by capitalizing on each and every DISTRIBUTION COMPONENT independently and piecing together your recoupment plan as creatively as you can. This 'hybrid' approach to distribution was pioneered by Peter Broderick, and is what I refer to as your GLOBAL strategy.

Mind you, because of my passion for the international marketplace, I also place a lot of emphasis on foreign distribution of indies. What the WSJ article is referring to specifically is funding films via FOREIGN PRE-SALES, which is different from selling a completed film to international distributors. However, the same message also applies - the worldwide tightening of the credit market has given foreign distributors less money to play with (and buy with), so on a worldwide basis acquisition prices of indies are also down.

I'll be reporting to you from the Cannes Film Market next month, and look forward to giving you the blow-by-blow updates from there. Hopefully I can report that acquisition prices are creeping back up and that demand is intense for independently produced content.

And let me know your thoughts on the WSJ article!

To your success,
Stacey