New Yorker Closes Doors. Let's Keep Ours Open!

The indie world is in a tizzy right now over the closing of longstanding indie distributor New Yorker. It's a sad day when a company like New Yorker shuts its doors. To think that they made it through decades (43 years to be exact) of perilous times only to meet its demise in a time when society needs access to auteur filmmaking more than ever. IndieWire has a great article here on the whole gut-wrenching story. 

Talk about rubbing salt in all our wounds after we dig ourselves in this hole by foolishly overextending on home loans and allowing Wall Street to play Monopoly with our money. A side effect of all of this play time is the loss of the treasures like New Yorker. I can only hope we all have learned from our mistakes. I'm certainly learning as I struggle to stay alive myself! 

The days of knowingly overextending ourselves in the hopes that we will figure it out in the future are gone. This is true for us in the indie film world. We can't greenlight films in the hopes that we will make our money back. We need to "know" as much as we possibly can that we can make the money back or we will all end up with our doors closed. 

How do we do that? Research and work. We can't "guess" that our audience will like the film and want to see it. We need to find out before we even make the film who our audience is and will they want to see this film. We need to cast the film with our audience's interests in mind. We need to create a budget and cut it in half. We need to market our stories as soon as we have them. Basically, we need to do everything we can at the earliest stage possible to ensure our doors stay open!