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Mark Gill at the LA Film Fest was pretty mopey about the future of Theatrical Indie Film:

“Do you think maybe Chicken Little was right—I mean, about independent film.” Leave it to a director to hope Chicken Little might be a cinephile. And again, my answer was simple: “Yes, the sky really is falling.” The last thing I heard him say was “I have to go throw up now.”

The speech runs down the standard litany of complaints (in very poorly formatted HTML) that indie filmmakers have about the current state of affairs in the feature film world.

Basically, he’s right.  But the answer is to embrace the chaos and write the new rules of show business online.

What are the new rules:

• Hold on to your rights for as long as possible.
  This is key, you are the entrepreneur of your ideas, you were there creating this.  Don’t sell them cheap.  It’s much better to release for free on YouTube, than to sign a crappy deal that takes away your rights.
• Bundle in marketing/PR into your film’s financing package.
  You can’t expect someone else to sell your work anymore.  Now you’re going to need to figure out how to get attention to your work, get a fanbase and sell DVDs and merch to them.
• Use online as your theatrical window.
  The typical indie theatrical deal is crap money, and even wildly successful indie theatrical runs like Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ had to sue it’s distributors for under payment.  Wherever your initial run is (theatrical, tv, web) use it as your loss leader for DVD/merch sales.  This is where you drive awareness with your PR and marketing budget so people know and like your project and will want to buy it and support you as a creator and artist.

This isn’t the early 90′s anymore.  The rules for Indie Film have been written and rewritten several times.  It’s time to move on.

By retaining as many rights as you can, and by bundling PR and Marketing into film’s budget, you’ll still retain the ability to license and remake and sublicense your original material onto any and all platforms.

And you immediately have a large pool of audience available to you.  People want to watch cool things and they can easily share your work with MP4s and Flash video.  You just need to make something worth watching.

Your ability to hold their attention is what’s valuable.  Pioneers like Four Eyed Monsters were able to find a much larger audience online than they were on the festival circuit.

And that’s what Ask A Ninja is doing as well.