‘Piracy’ and promotion – how a low-budget movie came to success through filesharing – Interview with Richard Schenkman

The Man from Earth is a 2007 independent film written by Jerome Bixby and directed by Richard Schenkman. In what may be an unprecedented move, the producer of this film, Eric D. Wilkinson, has publicly thanked users of BitTorrent who have distributed the movie without express permission, saying that it has lifted the profile of this product far beyond the financier’s expectations.

The director Richard Schenkman, who “always wanted to make films” since he was a small boy wrote me, that he wants “people to see the film any way they can”. The movie was mainly financed out of the filmmakers pockets and the pockets of their friends and families, which shows the importance and risk someone is willing to take to realise his vision. (creative drive)
The business plan for Man from Earth was on the idea that the movie would go straight to DVD and hopefully sell to television as well.      –                        Richard Schenkman

“We never thought much about piracy, or illegal downloads, except to assume
that some of it would happen. We never thought it would get this big, with
well over 10,000 people having downloaded the film” says Schenkman and adds

“My feeling all along has been, “There’s really not much you can do about this, so there’s no point in stressing out about it.” Naturally, since I have so much of my own money invested in the film, I’m anxious about recouping the entire budget, and people taking the movie without paying for it certainly
doesn’t help that process.”

—

Scene from “Man from earth”

It looks like the theory that attention is the key for revenues proves itself right in this case, just imagine how many people would have heard about the movie if it would not be available in P2Ps. People loved the movie and told others, blogged about it, rated it on the internet movie data base on no.1 for indipendent and for sci-fi movies (its still on no 24 of best sci-fi movies ever today check here)

But still like everytime when artists/creative content creators set up a paypal account and ask for donations, the numbers of people, who downloaded the movie and people who donated break up. People not donating doesn t necessarily mean they don t value it.

“We garnered an enormous amount of publicity which
we probably would not have otherwise. Will that publicity translate into
greater sales, or a faster break-even, or an easier time making our next film? I
have absolutely no idea.”

Links to the movie -
official website
wikipedia
discussion on rlslog
BUY DVD at
Amazon