Crispin Glover Using Scarce Resources To Sell His Film... But May Be Limiting His Opportunities

from the think-bigger dept

richw alerts us to an excellent writeup he did about an interview Rich conducted with actor/filmmaker Crispin Glover. Glover's known as a bit of an oddball, but he is doing some interesting things. He's been making a "trilogy" of films, and focusing on selling "scarcities" around the films, focused mainly on his time. Not all that different from one element of Kevin Smith's plan, Glover is touring with the movie and doing Q&A sessions afterwards, along with some other theatrics and a book signing (for which you can buy his various books).

However, Rich notes that he appears to be limiting his overall strategy. While he's focused on selling the scarce, he hasn't also realized the additional value of setting infinite goods free. Instead, according to Rich, he claimed repeatedly that much of what he was doing was due to his fear of piracy. So, he's more or less trying to keep everything exclusive to where he can control it -- so he's not offering any other way to see the movie other than through this tour. This is, certainly, one strategy out there for dealing with the digital marketplace, but it's unlikely to be all that effective long term. Using the infinite as a promotional effort can help increase the value of the scarce good, increasing the audience while also potentially increasing how much they're willing to pay for things. However, in keeping the work locked up, it potentially limits those who know or care about the film, and makes the audience smaller, which is generally not a great business strategy. So there are definitely some interesting lessons to be learned, but it's not clear that this strategy really makes that much sense.

Filed Under: crispin glover, movies, scarcity