If there’s one thing Mark Duplass hates, it’s “mandates.” He heard that maddening word a lot when he was pitching his latest show “The Long Long Night.”
“The Long Long Night,” which Duplass co-created and stars in with his old friend Barret O’Brien, has been sitting without distribution or a streaming deal since it premiered at Tribeca last year. It’s a series about two dudes who want to help the world but realize they’re just two white males taking up space, so they decide the only way to make the world a better place is to take themselves out of it. Predictably, no streamers were biting.
But Duplass has had enough, and he’s finally going to release the series himself.
“I wish we could program this, but it’s just not in our mandate. That fucking word ‘mandates,’” Duplass told IndieWire. “They have mandates, and the whole thing is falling apart at the same time. To be perfectly candid, we had some people who made us some really not financially beneficial offers for us so they could ride our coat tails on what we already built.”
Duplass is set to independently distribute “The Long Long Night” through a series of crowdfunding and community theatrical screenings of the show before making it available to the public, IndieWire can exclusively reveal.
Via a partnership with Seed&Spark and Kinema, Duplass is today launching a crowdfunding campaign through Seed&Spark to fuel the series’ marketing, in which backers will be able to get early access to the series. Duplass will then through Kinema’s tools arrange a run of in-person community screenings. The first wave of backers will be able to access “The Long Long Night” beginning April 14, and it will be released publicly on April 28.
IndieWire first reported about the partnership between Seed&Spark and Kinema back in February. It’s called “The Independence Partnership,” and creators who crowdfund their movie through Seed&Spark gain access to Kinema’s distribution platform. Duplass is their first major guinea pig to test the viability of the model, and he explained why it isn’t just about this one project but about building something for the long haul.
“What I’m asking people is not, hey man, come fund my project. I’m asking you to invest in the future of an ecosystem that we’re all going to need that’s a hybrid self-distribution model,” Duplass said.
As Duplass sees it, the days of getting your movie into Sundance and getting a huge deal, “that’s over.” Now, everyone has the tools to make a movie but what no one can figure out is “where the fuck to put it.”
With “The Long Long Night,” Duplass is first using Seed&Spark to crowdfund supporters for the project. That money will go to traditional P&A, helping to make digital ads, trailers, and the costs necessary to make DCPs and the rest of the marketing campaign, all while building a network of people who want to see the project succeed.
Then with Kinema, he’ll have the infrastructure to plan screenings and get the series on VOD, and he can invite those who helped back the series via crowdfunding. The 6-part series of 30-minute episodes each wouldn’t normally be shown publicly, but he can arrange it such that he can schedule community screenings that will play the whole show.
With his recent show “Penelope,” which Duplass sold out of Sundance to Netflix, he found he was already doing all those things necessary to get the word out about the show. Netflix only licensed the U.S. rights, so “Penelope” didn’t have the marketing support another Netflix original would have, and Duplass had to do it himself. With this new model, he’ll be able to own the rights to his show, access data about how it’s performing, and bring it directly to an audience that he’s built.
“I want to be able to step into the marketplace and say, this is probably what we can expect if we do a hybrid or self-distribution strategy through like Kinema and Seed&Spark, and we know we have that as a definitive road,” he said. “It takes away some of that fear that you have in the beginning of a process, oh my God, we’re gonna make this and it’s not gonna have anywhere to go. It also provides a proper amount of leverage if you decide you want to sell it to a traditional streamer, because you know what you have to offer there,”
Duplass has enough star power and influence to get “The Long Long Night” out to an audience in a way most indie filmmakers would never be able to. What he hasn’t had is the knowledge that he could do it himself. With “The Long Long Night,” he’s willing to eat the cost he’s already sunk into it, but he wants the “negotiating tactic” of being able to confidently look a traditional buyer in the face and know what his project is actually worth and what he can do on his own. And if “The Long Long Night” is successful, it gives anyone else that same power.
“Brick by brick, you start to build something that is indestructible so that, if you’re 25 years old and figuring out where to go, by the time you’re 45 or 50, you’ve made 20 of these things. You own all of these movies, and maybe they didn’t blow up and make a million dollars in box office, but you have put together a living and you have this huge library of stuff. And now you have 50,000 emails from people who want to see your things, and you get to go right to them, and there’s nobody keeping you out of the gates anymore,” Duplass said. “You don’t need Sundance anymore. You don’t need Netflix. You don’t need anybody. And that’s the point when they’ll start coming to you, and you can make the decision.”
