The following post by Edward Jay Epstein, author of the forthcoming The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies (available from Melville House on February 23rd), is the fourth in a series leading up to publication of the book. You can read more of Epstein’s writings about Hollywood’s hidden economy at his website, here.You can also see Epstein in Oliver Stone’s forthcoming Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps wherein Epstein plays the head of the Fed …. Click here to read all posts in the series.

The Achilles’ heel of the independent movie business is American distribution. No matter how brilliant an indie movie may be, and no matter how many awards its wins at film festivals, it needs to get into theaters to be seen. That feat is no longer easy for an indie movie.

The Big Six six studios–Disney, Paramount, Universal, Warner Brothers, Fox, and Sony–are also distribution juggernauts. They dominate both American and foreign distribution . Each of them employs a small army of salesmen, publicists, media buyers, theater-relations liaisons, merchandising specialists, and lawyers to get its movies and coming attractions on the best screens in theaters, its stars on the top TV shows, and its DVDs in the prime space at video stores. Because of their enormous clout with theater chains, the Big Six can open their movies on 4,000 screens in the US and thousands of additional screens overseas. They also have long-standing merchandising deals with fast-food chains, toy companies, and other mass retailers to assist these global openings. Since their distribution machines have enormous overhead, the Big Six studios need to confine their releases to potentially huge grossing movies. The size of the gross is crucial–even if there is no net profit–because studios, take a hefty cut of it off the top in the form of a distribution fee (typically, on movies that studios finance, it is 30 percent) which helps offset the overhead. The requisite, however, often leaves producers of smaller films out in the cold. Consider, for example, the sad story told to me by one of the most successful indie producer. In 2009, he brought to a major studio a project that had a budget of a mere $20 million with a well-regarded director and stars. After running the numbers, the studio estimated that its potential box-office was $100 million, which would yield it, just from the distribution fee and the output deal with HBO, a 100 percent profit on its investment. Yet, it flatly turned down the project because, as its executive told the producer, “We don’t do films that do not have a projected box-office of at least $150 million.” The reason is that each studio has only a limited number of slots for their releases, and they have to fill them with so-called “high value” films with a potential to generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue to pay their overhead. Indie films, even if they return a profitable on a relatively small investment, cannot be counted on to do that job.

So how does an indie producer get an American distributor? Unlike studio producers, indie producers rarely, if ever, have a US distribution deal in advance of shooting. To raise the money to shoot a film, they must either find an outside investor or borrow it. As for the latter course, since the 1970s indie financing has used pre-sales agreements in foreign territories as collateral to borrow from banks. After the film is shot and edited, they then seek distribution either through screenings or by taking it to film festivals—-a process that can take years. What made the gamble on finding distribution feasible was that, at least up until 2008, there were over a dozen so-called specialty distributors handling indie films, including both studio-owned “indie” companies, such as Miramax, Fox Searchlight, Fox Atomic Films, Paramount Vantage, Warner Independent Film, Picturehouse, New Line, Fine Line Features, Focus Features, and Sony Pictures Classics, and truly independent companies, such as Lionsgate Releasing, the Weinstein Company, and Summit Entertainment. Even those these specialty distributors have an order-of-magnitude less overhead than the majors, they still have to fund it. Since cash flows from indie films is erratic , they depended for a steady stream of revenue from “output deals” with the three pay TV channels. HBO, Showtime, and (later) Starz originally entered into these deals, offering to buy the entire output of a studio/distributor, to get new titles to attract subscribers to their pay channel. But as these payments were pure profit, since they entailed no expenses, they proved to vital for the smaller distributors. In 2008, for example, New Line Cinema, received slightly over $80 million for eight titles from HBO, which paid its annual overhead. Bob Weinstein, the co-chairman of the Weinstein Company, not only described them in 2008 as “the bedrock of the business,” but said “not one company in this business could survive and succeed without one.” His words proved prophetic. When the pay-channels found they needed fewer titles, and began cutting back on their output deals, the bedrock crumbled into clay within a matter of months. In May 2008, as top tier indie producers gathered at the Cannes festival to seek distribution for their movies, they witnessed to their horror, as one put it in an email, “the landscape change before our eyes.” In short order no fewer than six specialty distributors—-New Line Cinema, Fine Line Features, Picturehouse, Warner Independent Films, Fox Atomic, and Paramount Vantage-— closed while a seventh, the Weinstein Company, announced it was sharply cutting back on acquiring new titles because of cash-flow problems. A few months later another domino fell, when Miramax, which had been the lynch pin of indie distribution for two decades, announced it was closing its main office in New York. Even the few players who remained moved to change their acquisition strategy, with Lionsgate, investing more heavily in exploitation films, such as Saw I, II, and III, and Focus Features, seeking co-production deals with Asian studios.

As indie distribution shrunk, financing through pre-sales became vastly more difficult. In the past, foreign buyers had been willing to make advance commitments for indie films because they assumed that they would get the sort of distribution in America that would provide publicity and credibility for their own release. Without such a prospect, European buyers were loathe to commit themselves to a pre-sales. As the executive of a major French distributor wrote me “except for auteur directors, such as Woody Allen, Wong Kar Wai, and Pedro Almodovar, we no longer make any pre-sales deals.”

Even suffering such blows, the indie business is not dead, at least not yet. Indie producers have always demonstrated incredible resourcefulness in piecing together financing, even if it comes in the form of exotic tax credits, government subsidies, or indulgences from American egomaniacs, Arab oil sheiks, or Asian tycoons entranced with a movie fantasy. So even if the pre-sales game is moribund, they will likely find other ways of raising money to make movies. But unless they also devise a new model to distribute them in America, no one will see them.

Edward Jay Epstein studied government at Cornell and Harvard, and received his Ph.D from Harvard in 1973. His master’s thesis on the search for political truth (Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth) and his doctoral dissertation (News From Nowhere) were both published as books. He is also the author of The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood.