In this blog, ICO Projects and Business Manager Duncan Carson takes a trip to the deepest depths exhibitors may need to visit when searching for and procuring film rights. Sharing insights from personal and peer experience, he offers advice, alternative places to look, and guidance on staying positive when a hunt for a film screening license gets complicated.
In the last few years, I’ve had the pleasure of doing some mentoring and training with young people. As I prepare to cross over from ‘pretending I’m in late youth’ to ‘young for middle age’ (I turn 40 this year), it’s heartening to see young people revved up by the idea of showing films to people. However, the absolutely heartbreaking moment of this work is bringing them face to face with a tragedy familiar to every seasoned film programmer.
‘I really want to show Near Dark for my vampire season.’
‘Oh, that’s really hard to screen at the moment.’
‘But why? I can stream it easily.’
And they’re right, why does it have to be like this? Even if we’re not fans of capitalism, the film industry is a mutant version of its essential transaction. People pay to make films, people pay to show the films, and everyone shares in that. Would that it were so simple!
Once you’ve gone beyond the safe borders of a title listed by Filmbankmedia or Park Circus, you’re in a different world, a world without rules and where anything is possible. Time dilates mysteriously, with months in between responses; your voice echoes into cavernous, empty halls of dead rights; and pint-sized monarchs, representing empires that most of the world has never heard of, demand wild sums for you to pass through their territory.
It’s a jungle out there. Here are some thoughts to help you hack through the thickets, or at the very least some consoling words to bear in mind when you’re lost in a thick bramble (of copyright).
Understand how it works
A good starting point is having a working knowledge of how films make it into the market and who ‘owns’ them. Broadly speaking, there’s four major options for who you’re going to when you try to find the rights on a title.
If a film has been produced directly by a studio, this can be a relatively easy path to walk. They either can directly license the film to you, or via the likes of Park Circus who represent their rights on their behalf.
What’s more complex is the scenario that a film has been distributed by a studio, but produced by an independent producer. After a period of time the work will revert to the original producer. Producers are in some senses very invested in the film’s success: they’re the ones out of pocket and needing to pay back investors. But the reality is often very different. They’re working on new projects, or have left the industry entirely.
This is where things become sticky for your average programmer. Producers often take an age to reply to you, if at all. The reply can often be worse than none at all. With scant screenings, no connection to market realities and often a lot of bills to pay, producers often seem to be plucking a number from thin air. We’ll come to what can be done from there.
Sales agents – contracted by producers to represent a film’s rights, whether to garner distribution deals or deal with individual screenings in territories where none is forthcoming – are often more reasonable. They have more skin in the game, represent more titles, and are leveraging more deals, so know what is likely to be a reasonable proposition.
Rarest of all is a filmmaker directly owning their own work. In some senses this is the easiest scenario: if they’re available, amenable and have screening materials, you can drop them a line to book it. But if they’re at a difficult life juncture, or deceased, this can be a hard road to walk.
…But understand it doesn’t work
All this makes the process sound reasonable. It’s not. There are all kinds of reasons why films are not available. You can hit a brick wall for no reason, where everyone has told you that this person is who you should contact. But absolutely nothing will induce them to get in touch, through any means.
One classic scenario is finding yourself contacting one party who seems to hold rights, for them to redirect you to another party, who then swears backwards and forwards the other party one is the one in charge, like an endless Spider-man meme.
I’ve also been told that certain Japanese rights holders will deliberately quote an absurdly high per screening fee purely to avoid the paperwork involved in a groaning bureaucracy.
Build a network
Against these tricky scenarios, you can find yourself alone at your desk, sure there’s no way around the impasse. But we’re exhibitors: our goals are always about bringing people together and rights detective work is no different!
At ICO, we get dozens of enquiries about rights. Many of them we can directly help with, because we’ve recently booked the film into one of our cinemas. Where we don’t know and our research doesn’t yield an answer from one of the obvious sources, we go to one of the experts we are in contact with to give us a hand.
It pays to be friendly and ask for generosity from fellow programmers, while recognising that the single email address they give you can often be the fruition of countless hours of following dead ends. And when you’re on the receiving end of a query, give generously, with the knowledge that we are not competing with each other, but are handmaidens to filmmakers and audiences.
I’d also like to point out that cinemas can do their bit – as festivals already do – in listing who they licensed their screening from in the event listing. Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds were the ones who first put this idea to me and are paragons of this by adding a ‘Distributor’ section in their filmographic information: https://hpph.co.uk/films/burning-an-illusion
Try every trick in the book
The reality is that once you’ve exhausted the top level tactics, you’re into a world of random methods that might unlock the result you want (or lead you up the garden path!). I canvassed film programmers on methods that they have used to get to results for rights research, and produced this meme to run down the dark paths you could reach.
The image below contains a large amount of text. For a full visual description, please scroll to the end of this blog or view the plain text version.
Be patient (but not too patient)
One universal salve for this kind of work is the application of generous helpings of time. Of course this may not be in supply. But the truth is, for most rights holders, dealing with enquiries on old films is always the bottom of their list. New, shiny films may be beckoning them. Or they may find these films hard to revisit, for personal reasons or simply because dealing with them is a major hassle. Try to think about that one task you really don’t want to deal with in any given week. As much as ‘finding film rights’ is at the top of your list and you can see it’ll lead somewhere fun, for rights holders responding to your email is probably close to ‘file tax return’ and ‘cleaning grouting’ in the fun spectrum. So, at first, try to be patient. Then you may find that stressing urgency and being politely insistent may be the route. At a certain tipping point, it’s more annoying to not respond than to respond! Remember: be polite and don’t assume you’re barking up the right tree. But they may be able to unlock your next lead, even if they’re not the right person.
Communicate clearly and negotiate hard
One thing that can really slow communication to the ‘one email a month’ pace is if you don’t include all the key information in your initial email to a rights holder. Don’t give too much away, but also don’t hide what the event will be. I always include:
- Where you’re writing from (e.g. independent curator, institution etc)
- What film you’re enquiring about (including director, year and title in its original language if that is not English)
- When you plan to put on the screening (I find that having a prospective date, even if, ahem, ‘confected’, can force some urgency)
- What format you want to screen on
- What scale of screen you’re going to show in and any context about the screening you think might be useful
Sometimes you may want to add something personal about why you’re doing the screening, but don’t give them your life story. It’s a business transaction ultimately!
As ever, check your Anglo-centric hegemonic privilege and consider commissioning someone who is a native speaker to do the outreach for you if you get no response from foreign rights holder.
If all of the above paints a rather bleak picture of what it’s like to try and find film rights, there’s also the equivalent feeling of delight when things do work out. Ultimately, curators and programmers are the custodians of film and keep the flame burning for others. As independent venues, we are the ones who shape the picture of ‘what is film’. If we are not reshaping that picture, if we take the path of least resistance, we give people fewer reasons to get off their sofa.
If you want to do exciting, unforgettable things in programming, you have to go above and beyond. There’s no use employing profit and loss thinking. The ‘amount of time spent’ vs ‘amount of money generated’ is often out of balance. A programmer’s job is split into professional and hobbyist time. 90% of the time, your programme will probably be composed of films within the pathways walked by others. It’s valid to give people a chance to see (or rewatch) canonical work as it was intended to be seen: on the big screen. This work has a clear return on investment, if done well. Another, much smaller part of the work is that of a hobbyist: impractical, arguably more self-indulgent and not worth the bother, on an hours spent vs results basis. Only rarely is it a better commercial bet to show something hard to see, off the map. But on that fork of the path lie all the things that make it worth getting out of bed, and also the things that make your cinema distinctive and keep feeding the engine room of passion for cinema. Some of my favourite films of the last few years – Chameleon Street, Losing Ground, Ticket of No Return – were hard to see until the heroic work of Arbelos, Milestone and others brought them to me. As for me? I’m off to try and find the rights on the fourth film in a four-film retrospective I’ve been working on for eighteen months. Is that reasonable? No. Will it be excellent if it happens? Absolutely. See you towards the bottom of the iceberg!
If you would like to know more about the various types of film rights and where to start when looking for them, the ICO has a free, downloadable guide on “What licenses do I need?”
Image description
The meme image shows a complete side view of an iceberg, both above the water and beneath the surface, where it is much larger. The image is divided into levels with ever more desperate tactics at each level as follows:
Level 1 (Above the surface of the ocean): Park Circus, Filmbankmedia
Level 2 (under the surface of the ocean): Approaching UK distributor, BBFC registration
Level 3: IMDBPro research, contacting sales agent, ICO enquiry, VOD rights holder listing, contacting UK cinemas who have previously screened it
Level 4: Emailing cinemas abroad who screened it, emailing filmmaker directly, emailing producers, looking up old festival catalogues, using the Wayback Machine to find contact details from defunct websites
Level 5: Emailing an international distributor you know doesn’t have UK rights, contacting the filmmakers’ family, making an actual phone call! Contacting the filmmaker via social media, contacting a streaming service who have licensed the film
Level 6: Going to the last known location of the filmmaker to sleuth in person, asking filmmaker to step in on ridiculous producer/sales agent fee, contacting the lawyer on the filmmaker’s death notice, Google Translating defunct foreign language websites
Level 7 (Below the bottom of the iceberg): If all else fails, screening without rights and putting an amount aside in case rights holder comes forward
Level 8: Screening without rights (not advised)