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Indie Film Producing explains the simple, basic, clear cut role of the independent film producer. Raising funds to do your dream project, producing award-winning films with a low budget, putting name actors on your indie film-it's all doable, and this book guides you through the entire process of being a successful producer with bonus tips on how to effortlessly maneuver through the sphere of social media marketing and fundraising tactics. Indie film producer Suzanne Lyons pilots you through the actual making of low budget films to show you how easy and fun it can be. Laid out in a step-by-step, A to Z, matter-of-fact style that shows how the producer's role can be easy, how to treat the film as a business, and especially how to avoid the painful pitfalls faced by so many producers, this book gives you the essential tools you need to make your film a success from the ground up. . Begins with the earliest stages of concept development, continues through production & post, and ultimately concludes with distribution . Shows you how to create a buzz for your film through marketing and promotions . Interviews with global producers who produced films using social media, festivals, apps, and more, give you real-world insight that can be applied to your own films . Website points you to a fantastic collection of resources that you'll need to produce your own films (http://booksite.focalpress.com/indiefilmproducing)

The authors investigate how critics affect the box office performance of films and how the effects may be moderated by stars and budgets. The authors examine the process through which critics affect box office revenue, that is, whether they influence the decision of the film going public (their role as influencers), merely predict the decision (their role as predictors), or do both. They find that both positive and negative reviews are correlated with weekly box office revenue over an eight-week period, suggesting that critics play a dual role: They can influence and predict box office revenue. However, the authors find the impact of negative reviews (but not positive reviews) to diminish over time, a pattern that is more consistent with critics' role as influencers. The authors then compare the positive impact of good reviews with the negative impact of bad reviews to find that film reviews evidence a negativity bias; that is, negative reviews hurt performance more than positive reviews help performance, but only during the first week of a film's run. Finally, the authors examine two key moderators of critical reviews, stars and budgets, and find that popular stars and big budgets enhance box office revenue for films that receive more negative critical reviews than positive critical reviews but do little for films that receive more positive reviews than negative reviews. Taken together, the findings not only replicate and extend prior research on critical reviews and box office performance but also offer insight into how film studios can strategically manage the review process to enhance box office revenue.

Digital distribution channels raise many new challenges for managers in the media industry. This is particularly true for movie studios where high-value content can be stolen and released through illegitimate digital channels, even prior to the release of the movie in legal channels. In response to this potential threat, movie studios have spent millions of dollars to protect their content from unauthorized distribution throughout the lifecycle of films. They have focused their efforts on the pre-release period under the assumption that pre-release piracy could be particularly harmful for a movie’s success. However, surprisingly, there has been little rigorous research to analyze whether, and how much, pre-release movie piracy diminishes legitimate sales. In this paper, we analyze this question using data collected from a unique Internet file-sharing site. We find that, on average, pre-release piracy causes a 19.1% decrease in revenue compared to piracy that occurs post-release. Our study contributes to the growing literature on piracy and digital media consumption by presenting evidence of the impact of Internet-based movie piracy on sales and by analyzing pre-release piracy, a setting that is distinct from much of the existing literature.

This article examines the economic effects of prizes with implications for the diversity of market positions, especially in cultural fields. Many prizes have three notable features that together yield an emergent reward structure: (1) consumers treat prizes as judgment devices when making purchase decisions, (2) prizes introduce sharp discontinuities between winners and also-rans, and (3) appealing to prize juries requires costly sacrifices of mass audience appeal. When all three conditions obtain, winning a prize is valuable, but seeking it is costly, so trying and failing yields the worst outcome—a logic we characterize as a Tullock lottery. We test the model with analyses of Oscar nominations and Hollywood films from 1985 through 2009. We create an innovative measure of prize-seeking, or \"Oscar appeal,\" on the basis of similarity to recent nominees in terms of such things as genre, plot keywords, and release date. We then show that Oscar appeal has no effect on profitability. However, this zero-order relationship conceals that returns to strong Oscar appeals are bimodal, with super-normal returns for nominees and large losses for snubs. We then argue that the effect of judgment devices on fields depends on how they structure and refract information.

Product innovation is the key revenue driver in the motion picture industry. Because major studios typically launch fewer than 20 movies per year, the financial performance of a single release can have a major effect on the studio's profitability. In this paper we study how single movie releases impact the investor valuation of the studio. We analyze the change in postlaunch stock price and predict the direction and magnitude of excess returns based on the revenue expectation built up for a movie release. That expectation is set, in part, by media support; i.e., highly advertised movies are expected to draw larger audiences than others. By using an event-study methodology, we isolate the impact of a movie launch on studio stock price and track the determinants of that change. We examine a comprehensive data set comprising over 300 movies released by the largest studios. Our results indicate a clear interaction between the marketing support received by a movie and the direction and magnitude of its excess stock return post launch. Movies with above average prelaunch advertising have lower postlaunch stock returns than films with below average advertising. Our findings also suggest that movies that are hits at the box office may result in a lowering of stock price if they had high media support because of high performance expectations built up prior to launch. Thus prelaunch advertising plays a dual role of informing consumers about a movie's arrival as well as helping investors form expectations about the studio's profit performance.

Organizations employ various risk-mitigation strategies to cope with the uncertainty in marketing new products. In the motion picture industry, an important strategy is to cast star actors and actresses in movies. The ultimate box-office success, however, depends on multiple stakeholders involved with financing, making, distributing, and watching the movie. In pursuing different goals and interests, the stakeholders may look for different aspects of star power to mitigate their own risk. This paper examines how the influence of stars varies across key stakeholders in the movie market. The results show that, in general, stars have a greater impact on the stakeholders involved in the earlier stages of movie development and exhibition (where the risks are greater) than on those in later stages. Movie project financiers and exhibitors are strongly and directly influenced by star power, but news media and movie audiences are influenced less and only indirectly. Situated at the early stage of the movie \"value chain,\" the financiers are most concerned with stars' past box-office performance. Exhibitors, however, are influenced by the \"match\" between a star's genre participation history and the genre of a specific movie. By contrast, news media and movie audiences are influenced indirectly through the stars' impact on earlier stakeholders and their decisions. The findings shed light on the value of employing star elements in new products, the marketing of stars, and movie promotion strategies.

Film studios occasionally withhold movies from critics before their release. These cold openings provide a natural setting to apply laboratory-developed models of limited strategic thinking to the field. In a set of 1,303 widely released movies, cold opening is correlated with a 10—30 percent increase in domestic box-office revenue, and a pattern of fan disappointment, consistent with the hypothesis that some moviegoers do not infer low quality from cold opening. While selection and endogeneity may play a role in these regressions, the full pattern of results is consistent with level-k and cognitive hierarchy behavioral-game-theoretic models.

This paper examines the relationship between star power and box office revenues using box office data from nine countries and a continuous measure of star power based on the number of visits to a star's web page on IMDB, the most popular web site for movie-related information. The degree of star power is computed for the top star, top three stars, and the director for the films in our sample. The results indicate that replacing an average star with a top star would increase revenues by an average of $16,618,570, while replacing three average stars with three top stars would increase revenues by an average of $64,410,381.

In this study, we investigate the economic viability and environmental impact of three different soil management systems used for strawberry ( Fragaria × ananassa) production in the southeastern United States: 1) a conventional production system that is based on the current production practices implemented by growers, 2) a nonfumigated compost system with summer cover crop rotations and beneficial soil inoculants, and 3) an organic production system that includes practices approved for use under the National Organic Program (NOP). Under our assumptions, all three systems resulted in positive net returns estimated at$14,979, $ 11,100, and $19,394 per acre, respectively. The nonfumigated compost system and organic system also both resulted in considerable reductions in negative environmental and human health impacts measured by a set of selected indicators. For example, the total number of lethal doses (LD 50 ) applied per acre from all chemicals used in each system and measuring acute human risk associated with each system declined from 118,000 doses/acre in the conventional system to 6649 doses/acre in the compost system and to 0 doses/acre in the organic system. Chronic human health risk, groundwater pollution risk, and fertilizer use declined as well in the compost and organic systems as compared with the conventional system.

The production of grapes in the Midwest U.S.A. is not free of challenges. Growers are presented with a long list of strategic and operational decisions when planning a vineyard. This article uses survey data and secondary data to prepare sample budgets and examine costs, expected returns, and economic feasibility of grape vineyards under different production systems. Departing from two sample budgets that resemble the reality of American-hybrid and vinifera grape growers in the Midwest, we examine the economic feasibility of 24 plausible production scenarios by simulating changes in operational and technical parameters of production. Our results show that economies of scale, level of automation, and adequate balance between capital and labor use are determining factors for economic feasibility. Small-scale hybrid vineyards (10 acres or less) are seldom feasible as a stand-alone project. Vinifera vineyards tend to reach superior performance due to scale, decisions regarding automation, and efficiency of field operations. Following the feasibility analyses and results, our discussion helps explain why grape vineyards are frequently integrated with wineries and other business units across the Midwest.