FROM THE PRODUCER (WHO HAS NOT VOTED!)

Hello Melly-27,

1. Business
When a film is completed, a sales agent acquires world-wide sales rights to the film. The sales agent sells the film to individual distributors, who represent different territories (typically countries or regions - such as Scandinavia). The distributors pay an advance against expected income. If the film makes more money in a territory than was advanced, the distributor will pay money back (overages) to the film.

2. The MoS deal
The UK generally represents some 10-15 % of an English-language film's total income potential (Hollywood films excepted - their business model are incomparable to a small indie movie like ours). Scandinavia, in comparison, 2 %. We still have remaining UK/Ireland rights incl. DVD rights (i/e from now on onwards) and are presently negotiating with distributors for rental and sell-through and Tv rights. So the MoS deal, selling DVD rights for a day, makes good sense.

3. Income split
Brendan doesn't get the income from the sale - the investors who paid for the production costs of the film do.

4. ImdB voting
I don't know that any cheating has been going on here. I know that a lot of the people who initiatially voted must have been attending the private charity screening of the film. It was a very emotional event, not least because of the charity involved, proving help to children with very serious and often deadly diseases.

If some of these people voted a 10, they did so after having paid £65 to attend the charity screening, which basically had nothing to do with the film but everything to do with the cause of the charity.

At the end of the day, I don't believe it makes any difference. The people who matter here are the distributors who put up the money as advances against future income. They don't care about IMdB.

And, in any case, it looks to me like quite a few of the many postings here have done exactly what they have accused us to do - voted because they want to further a cause. A negative cause, of course, having paid £1,40 for a film and a newspaper - not a charitable one...

Lars

It is probably way to early to tell whether this will be a viable business model - however now that one major national has done it, you can be sure other papers across the world will. I can guarantee that renting from BT will not be the breakout - unless you expect to rent The Lion King and then have Ben Hur delivered :)

The issues with voting are not unique to IMDB or even to the movie business. Short of doing test screenings across multiple demographics using a market research company with an accepted methodology - it is a difficult one to crack. If you have people who are enthusiastic and really like the film and vote high, are you saying do not give them a voice?

It is really easy to argue without clear factual data, that this is voter abuse. An example of that is in the US politics, where a candidate called Ron Paul seems to have a very enthusiastic Net following and is coming top in many of the polls - Fox News have branded this as "trickery" and used this as an excuse to ignore poll results they dont like. You also need to look carefully at just WHO is screaming, too. What if the many 10's the film received here indicate a lot of people love the film? Many of the people who hate the film seem to cannot abide the idea of people having a radically divergent opinion to theirs.

As viewers we have the right to give an honest opinion about what we see and think of it. This is so we can make a positive critisim which in turn we hope that the movie maker and actors concerned take on board and improve their future work for us the paying public.

We have invested our time and money to watch the movie, so therefore are entitled to comment, if we think its good then we say so. Comments on this board in the main have nothing to do with personal attacks Individuals or countrys, and if found to be insulting on a personal level then should be deleted. What annoyed me so much is that the movie promised so much and delivered so little.

Many top movies have been made for next to nothing, and made a fortune or not so but have become classics "The Blair Witch Project" and "Clerks" as an example.

Kindest Regards

[deleted]

by the way folks
i'm really doubtfull to 5mil budget of this movie
it looks & feels much closer to 1mil
the fake budget i assume is to garner higher capita when selling the material

"The Riddle script is
- a top ten prize winner in "The Big Australian" is one of the most highly regarded of all international screenwriting awards, sponsored by The Source.
- a top ten winner in 2001 in the Final Draft International award.
- awarded the silver medal in LA's prestigious Archer Prize 2001, run by literary agency Paris Belletric.
- a finalist in the 2001 Hollywood Symposium contest."

Well then that is proof positive that a good script does not = a good movie; just as much as good intentions do not necessarily = good outcomes.

I thought it was a confused mess of a movie. Okay here are some reasons -

1) I felt that it was made by people trying ever so hard to make an important movie, which wound up collapsing under the weight of its own badly executed cleverness. The best movies are simple stories well told - Luke wants to be a jedi, Froddo has to give up the ring, Shaun wants to survive a zombie apocalypse long enough to profess his love for his fiance etc. This movie was trying so hard to be clever it forget the simple truth that first and foremost a movie needs to entertain.

2) Flashbacks and anachronistic story lines in modern films are the poorest ways of avoiding the difficult job of revealing character and plot exposition in an entertaining way. Its a common device among hacks and lazy writers. If you must do that, It would have been far more interesting to have the dickens character speak directly to Vinnie Jones the whole time instead. That gives rise to comedy - other characters start to think he is losing his mind etc. At least that would have lightened things up. To have dickens address the camera directly just didnt fit and was so disjointed to the rest of the movie which had no p.o.v. shots. It was like when your flatmate switches channels on you while you are trying to focus on the one movie.

The structure from the ground up was just a confused mess - unfortunately since the characters/dialogue and settings were not that interesting, it didnt really make you want to delve into it and work out what the hell was going on.
I think I recall nodding off twice and wandering off to do house work - not a good sign.

There were good things - the production values and photography at times was okay and at other times downright dogdy (when the main character is out of focus in the first 5 shots we see of him .. well .. thats just pathetic filming). Jones as usual fills the scene with his usual energy and was fine but he had so little to work with, it was like watching beckham lose another england v germany game.

I am getting a little tired of low budget makers making excuses and not great films. I mean, the list of excellent low-no budget films is a mile long. Lars mentions that there were things they did that were free and had nothing to do with budget - well guess what ? So is writing a screenplay. It costs 20p for a pen and not much more for a notepad.

Making excuses for the lackluster performance of UK filmmakers is not the way to better the quality of our films in the long term. That can only be fine tuned in the cauldron of public approval (movies ARE made for the audience are they not ?).

[deleted]

:)
<Ali G>
So, is you sayin you didnt like da movie, man?
How do you know what da underpants of da dead tramp is smellin like? That's just so out of order!!