Withoutabox prepares for the big time.

BY LAURA DAVIES

“An amazing website. As a first time filmmaker, you’ve helped me in countless ways.”

“Your service rules! Thank You! Thank You!”

These are just a few of the recent comments posted by filmmakers on the Withoutabox website. These accolades aren’t surprising, given that Withoutabox has simplified the festival-submission process in just a few years of operation, saving filmmakers hundreds of hours of laborious envelope-stuffing and form-filing. But now that the company has won over the hearts of indie producers and directors, can it successfully compete with MySpace and the Apple Movie Store as an online community and digital distributor? It certainly intends to try.

Withoutabox was launched in 2000 by UCLA film school graduates David Straus and Joe Neulight. Their initial goal was to simply streamline the festival entry process. The result was The International Film Festival Submission Service, a successful service that has been embraced by filmmakers and allowed Withoutabox to amass over 95,000 members in 207 countries.

As it enters its sixth year, however, Withoutabox is making a play to bust out of the festival scene. It is releasing a variety of new features, including Audience, the company’s bid to enter the social-networking arena currently dominated by MySpace, as well as ticket sales and DVD fulfillment.

Arin Crumley and Susan Buice, directors of Four Eyed Monsters, are using the company to aid in the distribution of their indie feature, and their experience points to the company’s future. With guidance and partial funding from Withoutabox, they have created a screening-request system for fans, resulting in a database of 600 suggested theaters and a six-city network of screenings. A friend brings a DVD of the film to a theater, Withoutabox sells the tickets, and Crumley and Buice work on shorts and trailers to play before the film. “Withoutabox is focused on independent film,” explains Crumley. “They take small percentages of transactions, whether it’s selling a theater ticket for a festival screening or fulfilling a DVD order or accepting all of your film festival fees in one place. MySpace and YouTube don’t sell any services; they simply aim to get as much traffic as possible to profit from banner exposure.”

Filmmaker spoke with David Straus and Joe Neulight about their company and their vision for the future of the industry.

How did you become interested in the business side of film and decide to start Withoutabox? David Straus: I’ve been interested in film my whole life. In 1989 and 1990 I was in Budapest on a Fulbright scholarship doing research on the political changes there. I was documenting what I was doing with a video camera, and I really loved it. I saw that people in Hungary at that time couldn’t do what they wanted to do in life. It was still a closed society on a number of levels, and I realized coming from where I came from I had the privilege of being able to choose what I wanted to do. At that moment I decided I was going to go to film school. While at film school we [Straus and Neulight] made a number of films together, and through that process I saw that anything was possible in terms of making one’s art. But we knew there had to be a way to empower filmmakers so that they could attain their goals without ever having to “ask for permission,” and that’s where Withoutabox comes in. For me, Withoutabox is all about choosing to make something happen, because as an independent filmmaker you have the power to make it happen.

What is The International Film Festival Submission Service? Straus: It is a product that connects filmmakers from around the world with festivals from around the world. Filmmakers can put all the information about their film — their marketing materials, press kits, trailer and anything else they would need to submit — into the system. They can then search our database of festivals and look for the festival that best matches their needs and submit that information to the festival. What one festival gets is different from what another festival gets, because [its submission] requirements are different. And festivals manage their submission process through us as well. The filmmakers that use our product are [everyone from] Academy Award winners [to filmmakers] right out of high school. Our filmmakers make 30-second films and 2½ hour films. They use 35mm and they use digital. It’s on all extremes.

Have you abandoned the camera for the business suit? Straus: Just to put things in perspective, I’m sitting in my office with Birkenstocks on. If you ever tell me I can’t wear my Birkenstocks, I’ll get upset. The thrill that I get when I log in to our system at three in the morning and I see a filmmaker in India or New Zealand or the UK using our system, I’m incredibly fulfilled. I never saw myself as abandoning filmmaking; I just saw myself participating at a different level.

What is Audience? Straus: If you look at the submission system as the first piece of a puzzle that facilitates a relationship between a filmmaker and the business elements that they want to connect to, Audience facilitates a relationship between a filmmaker and a fan base. And it doesn’t have to work on Withoutabox — it can work on your own Web site. For example, go to a site called www.tribethefilm.com. This is a film by Tiffany Shlain. She’s the founder of The Webby Awards and a successful filmmaker based in San Francisco. If you go to “Share Thoughts,” this is Withoutabox technology, the Withoutabox audience platform, but it [appears] on Tiffany’s website. It brings social networking to Tiffany’s Web site so that she can start to aggregate her fan base. Let’s say Tiffany has a fan base of 10,000 people, her film is a Jewish-themed film, and she’s in San Francisco. We have another filmmaker in New York who has a fan base of 10,000 [with another] Jewish-themed film. Now through Withoutabox, the New York filmmaker can market to Tiffany’s database and Tiffany can market to the New York filmmaker’s fan base. But more than that, even if they don’t choose to market [to each other], the system knows what different [viewers] like. We can now help audiences find films they might not have otherwise know about.

How do you expect a site aimed at industry professionals to compete with other services that encompass much wider general audiences when it comes to the marketing of indie films? Joe Neulight: We are not trying to compete so much as to organize differently. Our goal is to empower our filmmakers to use whatever tools are at their disposal to get the word out on their films and to get their work out to audiences. Withoutabox is a professional bridge from more general sites like MySpace and YouTube for filmmakers who want to take the next step, monetize their work on the world marketplace and perhaps make a career of it. Filmmakers and festivals are already beginning to run Audience as a “private label” platform beneath their own Web sites, and we expect Audience will come to distinguish itself as “the source” of independent film, whether their work lives on our site or on those run by our partners and competitors.

Do you see Withoutabox competing with all the new online movie stores like iTunes and Amazon.com? Neulight: We see [Withoutabox] providing filmmakers with easy avenues to get to those places. It will allow them to sell their wares through Withoutabox instead of — or in addition to — other movie stores. As an example, we are launching an initiative with Amazon right now which allows filmmakers to “opt in” to a listing on Amazon.com when they sign up for the DVD duplication services we already provide through CustomFlix, an Amazon subsidiary. We have a deal with Google where filmmakers who upload content to Withoutabox can check a box to syndicate to Google without the administrative hassle of dealing directly with Google. Expect numerous deals to be announced along these lines, and many are already in the works. This is good for everybody, and that’s the position we like to occupy, as both an honest broker and a “back office” tool set to manage this explosion of choice and opportunity.

Once you’ve attracted your share of professionals, how are you going to make Audience a more consumer-based destination instead of a place attracting only industry filmmakers? Neulight: As festivals begin to use Audience to post their schedules and conduct their ticketing, and as filmmakers begin to build their bases there, supporters of independent film will naturally find a home there. It doesn’t need to be a place where people spend four hours a night being “social” but the place where they go when they want to plug in to films they might otherwise not find. At the right time — once more commerce becomes available on the site — we will make a proper push to consumers. Our mission is to allow filmmakers to monetize. For now, we don’t pretend [Audience is] more than it is, and yet it’s gaining traction every day organically. We have filmmakers who swear by it and have used it with success.