First off…
FOR ALL OUR FRIENDS IN THE NYPD!
The Harvey Boys are giving away free tickets for you to bring a date to RADIO CITY MUSIC HALL for the premiere of our new flick Red State!
The NYPD Red State Premiere Ticket Giveaway!
Contact the NYPD Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association at 212 – 233 – 5531 (If you’re not a PBA member, I wouldn’t recommend crank-calling that number, as it’s da’ fuzz).
So get your free tix to a night out at Radio City Music Hall, NYPD-ers! Bring a date! See a flick! Ask a question or just listen to the answers! It’s on us! If I seem a little suspect, Troy Alden plays hockey with us and can vouch for my character and smell.
Hug a Cop! Yeah, I said it!
Anyway, in the last blog, I wrote about why we’re doing the Red State USA Tour and the per-venue minimum seats we’d have to sell in order for the every theater rental to not cost us an out-of-pocket dime (and maybe just make some money in the process, too).
I’d surmised…
“Best case scenario: we sell out every show and walk with $1.5 million net that would go toward recouping our $4 million dollar budget. Worst case-scenario: half-empty-houses that cost us nothing but also earned the movie back nothing but potential word-of-mouth.”
As with all things, the truth lies somewhere in between.
The Radio City Music Hall Red State Premiere, as previously discussed, was the biggest concern. The ol’ girl’s a fucking barn at 6000 seats – the biggest house on the tour – and our minimum sales number was 1700 tickets. We’d have to sell 1700 seats to break-even on the Radio City Music Hall rental, or else it was going to cost us.
The day we launched the tour site at http://coopersdell.com/ it was pretty harrowing: were Jon Gordon and I gonna be slapping each other on the backs, all smiles… or were we gonna be scowling at one another as we opened our wallets to pay theaters back when we couldn’t make our house minimums? For the first three weeks of sales, I didn’t want sales updates. People would try to tell me how many tickets were sold, but I’d wave them off and ask simply “Folks happy or unhappy?” So long as folks were happy, that’s all I cared about.
At the end of the day, once we’d crossed the Rubicon of Sundance, there was little I could do to influence the end results of our tour experiment than what I was already planning to do: get in front of as many free-of-charge microphones or cameras I could between January 24th and March 5th to spread the gospel of Red State and the early-bird Q&A tour that would precede it. Essentially, “sell” the movie, but without spending the marketing dollars that’d usually be spent to support/promote sales.
Since then, I’ve spoken with anyone I could to talk up the flick. Every weekday morning, I’m awake by 4:20 a.m. (nootch!), calling morning radio shows back east, hyping the tour. I’ve done more TV than I imagined I ever would this early in the campaign, if at all for a movie this bleak and small – including big national spots like Chelsea Lately
Real Time with Bill Maher
Attack of the Show
And Piers Morgan Tonight, on CNN – long before our October 19th theatrical release… but it’s all helped.
And aside from the standard rate of cross-country phone calls, mileage-points-paid airline tickets, discount rated hotels, taxi-cabs instead of Town Cars, and an internet connection?
None of it has cost us a fucking dime to pull off.
Every ticket sale at every theater across the tour has been sold with heart, not marketing. Will, not skill. I ground it out like a fourth line crasher, filling my minute on the ice late in the third, giving the pros a rest, emptying the tank for the team. No TV or radio commercials. No magazine or newspaper ads. Certainly no billboards. All word of mouth: lots of words coming out of my big ol’ fuckin’ mouf – a mouth that can now say even more words, as I’ve eased up on stuffing food into it constantly.
We haven’t even done online ads – other than my incessant constant hawking of the tour across our many internet platforms. If you’re a SModcast Network fan, you’ve been subjected to three different Red State USA Tour spots. All I can say is at least I’m getting ‘em shorter: the first spot was five minutes, the second was four, and the latest is two (But, come to think of it? That shit’s free. So if you really wanna bitch about ads you can easily fast-forward through, I can open up the Complaints Window for you: it requires merely that I bend over and spread my cheeks. Bitch at that asshole all you want; this asshole has tickets to sell).
So with less than two weeks to go ’til the Radio City show kicks off, I figured it was time to spread my fingers a bit and peek at the ticket sales figures. How’d we do?
That smell assaulting your nostrils? That’s weeks worth of noxious gases built up behind my Fort Knox-tight sphincter which has – for the first time since tickets went on sale January 28th – finally unclenched and relaxed: we passed the Radio City 1700 weeks ago.
The Radio City show was our Big Green Monster, but neither Jon nor I would rank much wood in Williamsburg. I’d been able to sell out Carnegie Hall two years back and that seats 2600 – but in the two years that’ve followed, I’ve increased my touring schedule dramatically, adding live SModcast performances to that mix as well. Two years ago, you couldn’t hear me on almost daily basis on SModcast.com. Add an incurable case of Twitterrhea to that equation and there’s a good chance the same folks who came out for that Carnegie show have burned out on my antics. If that was the case, maybe we wouldn’t even reach that Carnegie 2600 number, let alone our hoped-for Radio City 3000 (which would be half capacity, pre-NYPD). Anybody who gives a fig about Fatty McNoFly can hear what’s on his one-track mind 24/7, free-for-nothing; why pay to see him or his dopey flick?
Kids? You gain so much when you give away the farm…
For four years of all the free SModcasts… for one year of all the aural we just give away at SModcast.com… for seventeen years of being there for them? The audience, as always, is now there for me.
We’ve reached the minimums on all but one of the houses on the tour (I’m looking at you, Minneapolis). We’ve already cleared (not grossed; cleared, post-all payments and expenses) six figures in profits thus far. The tour is making our investors money now, long before the October 19th theatrical release.
The idea was, rather than festival hop (which would have cost money), we’d go right to work, bringing the flick with me on one of my Q&A tours, and start earning some money back for our investors. There’s four million dollars to return, and Jon and I have this dream of being in the black before our theatrical run begins. It’s costing us nothing but time and sweat equity to earn (Well, that’s not the whole truth: the earnings from my spring touring would’ve been mine, personally – but I’m giving all the tour earnings to Red State).
Will we sell out across the country? Not likely. I’m not even sure a single house will sell out on the tour. But it doesn’t matter, so long as the tour itself ultimately profits; and right now, the tour is already in profit. Naturally, our investors would like to maximize that number; so I’ll be doing all I can to spread the word without spending a dime. But I’ll be honest: the moment we hit profitability, the pressure was off.
Only about 1600 people have ever seen Red State. Our plan was to release the film October 19th – a long ways away from the January 23rd Sundance debut. And The Harvey Boys didn’t have a studio backing us, so we didn’t have a marketing kitty – let alone a war chest. And word-of-mouth tours cost money.
So we took closed our eyes, held our noses, and hoped to fuck the audience on Twitter, the audiences I’d been standing in front of on stage for the last three years, and our gut instincts weren’t lying: there was an audience that wanted to see Red State as soon as they could. I started thinking “Bring the flick on tour with you…” I was already going to hit the road between flicks anyway; if I bring the flick and donate all the money back to the movie, voila: the tour is willed into existence by the very audience someone else would’ve spent to reach.
I don’t know how much we’ll ultimately clear by the time the tour wraps up on April 9th in Los Angeles, at The Wiltern, but I know this much: it’s taken a shit-ton of talking. If you’re not already sick of me yet and you’re curious about where I’ve been pimpin’ and whorin’ my wares, the boys over at News Askew always keep excellent track of my comings-and-goings in the media. Give ‘em a look.
Also, somewhat tied into Red State: on May 9th, post-tour, I’m starting an online radio station…
Expect lots of Red State commercials and plugs. I’m also toying with the notion of playing huge chunks of audio from the move: a free to hear, pay (in theaters) to see-kinda thing.
One bummer note about the tour: the Madison, WI show had to be cancelled. I’m happy to report it wasn’t because of weak sales; it was due to what some describe as a weak movie…
My kid, you see, has a pretty big demonstration at school that day – one she’s been working on all year. And the wife had told me, in no uncertain terms, that no matter where I was on the tour, I’d be home for that date. And it had been kept clear… until the Madison show got added a week into the tour going on sale. Mercifully, the error was caught before we’d been on sale that long.
So I apologize to the folks in Madison; we’ll look for a new date on the next tour. But if the guy that directed that fucking Sweeney Todd scene misses his own kid’s school event a mere seven years later… well, that might make the critics right about Jersey Girl being a pretty pointless exercise.
When the tour’s done, we’ll list the actual theater-by-theater breakdowns of the tickets sold, but for now? I thank everyone who’s bought a ticket so far: you were there when I needed you. Many thanks.
And to all those who wanna attend the safest premiere on the planet but haven’t scored a ticket yet? If you can afford it, come on out and join us for a once in a lifetime evening at the cinema. If the Tour is out of your price range at the moment, then please join us October 19th, when we roll out everywhere here in the U.S.
