Indie Filmmaker Hits It Big With Free Film Online

from the nicely-done dept

Tom sends over the story of an independent filmmaker, Stevie Long, who wrote and acted in the low-budget indie film Strictly Sexual that has found tremendous success by being online where people can watch it for free. Apparently, Long had a deal with some sort of online distributor, who got the film on Hulu, and word of mouth made it the most watched film on Hulu, ever:

"I woke up one morning and found a dozen or so messages in my Facebook inbox, saying, 'Hey, I just saw this film, and it really touched me, and I love the way it talks about breakups and relationships,' " Long says. "And I just scratched my head, saying, 'Where'd you see my movie?' I had no idea what Hulu was. God bless the people who had the foresight to put it up there.... We were fortunate in that the timing of the Internet and the ability to watch movies came about at the same time. I didn't have any ego about it as an artist, I just wanted my movie to be seen."

But, of course, it's not hurting him financially either:

"I'll give it to you in these rough terms," he says. "The $100,000 film has made 10 times its money."

But... but... but... we keep having Hollywood insiders tell us in our comments that indie filmmakers who distribute online can't possibly make back enough money to cover their costs. Everything's impossible until someone does it.

Filed Under: filmmaker, hulu, online, stevie long, strictly sexual
Companies: hulu

Filmmaker Sues Websites After Commenters Cost Him A Job

from the misdirected dept

Over the years, we've been threatened with lawsuits a few too many times -- almost always due to something that someone said in our comments. The pace of those threats has certainly increased over the years, but most are nothing more than angry bluster. In the few cases where it appears to be someone serious, we have our lawyers explain to them Section 230 in rather plain language, noting that suing us for something said by others in our forums will (1) get thrown out of court incredibly quickly and (2) probably only serve to bring a lot more attention to the comments they're so pissed off about. To date, this has always worked quite well.

Of course, other countries don't have Section 230 safe harbors, and so you get a lot more ridiculous lawsuits with someone blaming a forum owner for what people say in that forum. Hopefully, common sense prevails in those cases too... but you never know. A bunch of folks have sent in the story of a lawsuit in Australia where a filmmaker is suing some online forums for comments in those forums that the filmmaker believes cost him a job. Apparently, some folks agreed to a deal with him to produce a certain movie, but after finding those comments, they pulled out of the deal.

First of all, the filmmaker, Greg Smith, appears to be suing the wrong parties. Rather than those who actually made the comments, he's suing the owners of the web forums where the comments occurred. And, on top of that, he never contacted those forum owners about the comments in the first place (at least one says that the first he knew about the complaints was when the lawsuit was filed -- at which point he immediately removed the comments anyway). And, of course, all this has really served to do is call a lot more attention to the comments about Smith (and the way he handles such things).

Filed Under: australia, comments, filmmaker, greg smith, liability, reputation, section 230