By Dan Mirvish

(note: A version of this story first appeared on the website DirectorsWorld.com on May 22, 2002)

OK, the call won't exactly change my life, but it certainly changes the life of my film. It's a very unique deal with Total Movie and Entertainment magazine: Basically, they put out a DVD with each of their bi-monthly issues, and all 50,000 of their subscribers will get a copy. As for the other 300,000, they get stuffed inside every Pioneer DVD player that gets sold in North America over the next few months.

Just think of it: About one in eight Americans (and Canadians!) who buy a DVD player in the next couple of months will get a copy of Omaha (the movie) ­ whether they want it or not. That's almost a third of a million people will start their DVD collections with my little movie. It will be the DVD against which all other DVDs they watch will be measured! Countless thousands of 18-year-olds getting a new DVD player from Costco as high school graduation presents will love the DVD and say, "Dad! This guy's film is terrific! Will you invest in his next one instead of sending me to college in the fall?" My website will be swamped, my phone line will jam, my investors will get rich and I'll be able to bank enough cash to make my second film! Well, not quite.

Don't get me wrong. I don't have any complaints about the deal, but let me explain a little more of the details. You see, the DVD is basically a promotional tool for everyone concerned. It's actually a two-sided disc, with only one side devoted to Omaha (the movie). The other side has about 35 short-subject elements on it ranging from big-budget Hollywood trailers, to featurettes from upcoming mainstream DVD releases, to music videos, to a couple of short films. The idea here is that the magazine approaches the studios and asks them if they want to promote their upcoming theatrical releases and DVDs by getting the trailers stuffed in hundreds of thousands of DVD players. Then, they turn around and try to get one of the big DVD manufacturers to agree to stuff all of their players with a free disc. What's in it for the DVD manufacturer is they can then put a sticker on each box that says, "Includes One Free DVD - Right in the Box!" and hope that people will be more inclined to buy their DVD player, and not the one sitting next to it on the shelf at Circuit City. And the little cardboard sleeve that holds the DVD contains a very prominent promotional offer to get new subscribers for the magazine.

So where do I fit in? By being able to tell everyone that there's a genuine full-length feature film on the flip side of the disc, it suddenly makes the disc feel less like one of those free AOL CD-Roms you get in the mail that are instantly disposable, and more like something people will actually stick in their new DVD and use to try out all the fancy buttons. And while the surfeit of big Hollywood names in all the trailers (Russell Crowe, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Madonna, et al) might be enough to entice mainstream America when they buy their DVD player, remember, this same disc also goes out to the presumably more discriminating, DVD-geek magazine subscribers who might get bored if they didn't get a full-length feature to chew on. Unfortunately, in American business, when something is so cross-promotional and, at best, coming out of everyone's marketing budget, there isn't actually a lot of cash to go around.

All of which is to say that I don't get a cut out of every Pioneer player sold. Instead, I get a hell of a lot of exposure, a flat fee (somewhere in the very low four figure range), a couple hundred extra discs for me to use as I please, and a duplicate master of the fully-authored, fully-coded DLT of my side of the disc.

This brings me to the technical questions: What's on the DVD and how good a job did these guys do? For me, a lot of these questions relate to the specific timing involved with my deal. I got the call telling me the magazine was interested in Omaha (the movie) just a day before hopping a plane to Park City, Utah, for the Slamdance Film Festival (of which I'm one of the founders). Mind you, before I left, it was not absolutely certain they were going to pick Omaha. The guy who first called me was Scott Epstein - a friend who knew that Omaha was collecting dust on my shelf, and who's pretty much in charge of this whole DVD thing at Total Movie. I got him one of my last VHS tapes to view, and as of when I left LA, not everyone who needed to see it had had a chance to. But we all knew how tight their deadline was and that I'd be gone for two weeks. I also arranged to get them my video master (which was a one-light, unsupervised transfer from answer print that I had on BetaSP) and my electronic press kit (EPK). When I handed the latter to Scott, he said, "What's this?" I said it was my EPK. "No," he said, holding the bulky grey tape case, "What kind of tape is this?" I had to explain that it was 3/4" - the standard for EPKs eight years ago.

Once in Park City, I got the go ahead that they were going to go with "Omaha." So that night, I started working on my audio commentary. Now, realize that I was in Park City without any of the cast or crew from the original movie - to say nothing of not being anywhere near an established audio studio I could use. I'd brought an extra VHS tape of the movie with me, and fortunately the condo that I (and the entire Slamdance screening room staff) was staying in had a VCR. I popped in the tape, and propped up my Sony TRV-17 DV camcorder on a chair opposite the TV. I muted the TV and started playing the VHS. I aimed the camcorder at the TV, and for sound, plugged in my little $30 Radio Shack lavaliere mic (and set the camera to 16-bit sound). I hung the mic on a chair, and then along with my pals Gabe Wardell and Skizz (both Slamdance projectionists and overall festival gurus), we huddled around the mic, hit mute on the TV, started up the VCR and camcorder, and began the commentary. In theory, I was set up to pause both machines more or less simultaneously, but in practice it was too late at night to go back and redo anything. Also, we actually remembered to get in pretty much everything on the first take. Fortunately, I reviewed my old press notes before we started, and I gave Gabe and Skizz copies of my press kit to glance at during the commentary. I strongly recommend some sort of cheat sheet - especially if you're just doing one take (and you're drinking beer). It was only later, that Gabe admitted that he'd never actually seen the film before.

The next day, I ran around Park City shooting a little video introduction of the film - starting with me in front of Sundance's Egyptian Theatre marquee, and winding up in the Slamdance projection booth introducing Gabe and Skizz. I edited the piece on my iBook using iMovie (I have FinalCutPro, but haven't used it enough to really get fluent - and for what I was doing, iMovie was plenty fine). I was actually cutting the piece in the projection room as we were showing our opening night film. I FedExed the intro and the commentary to Total Movie's corporate headquarters in Montreal, which also does all the authoring.

One of the reasons Total Movie picked my film is that apart from the intrinsic qualities of the movie, it also has some "historical" context as the film that helped launch Slamdance. Robert Redford - who once referred to Slamdance as "parasitic" - is actually included on the flip-side of my DVD in a clip from an interview on the "Spy Games" DVD. But I figure, after all these years of him sharing Park City with me, I might as well share some disc space with him - it's the least I can do for the guy (who curiously is looking and sounding a lot like Robert Culp these days). We actually launched Slamdance while I was working at the Good Guys home electronics store in Westwood until they fired me for programming the festival on all their big-screen TVs. And now they'll be helping to distribute my film! Of course, if I was still there today, I'd definitely be pushing the Pioneers.

By the time I got back to LA, Total Movie already had the first DVD-R check disc for me to look at. Even though they were under no real obligation to get too fancy, the guys in Montreal did a bang-up job on the menu design - using full-motion video excerpts of the film for the main menu page, and for the chapter selection pages. The first pass at the audio commentary sounded good (got to love that Radio Shack mic!), but they'd forgotten to mix in the film's audio tracks in the background. We also added a reference to my website ("For more info, see http://www.slamdance.com/mirvish"). There were a couple days left to go before the master had to go to China for replicating, and it was just enough time for me to scan in about 20 still photos, upload them to a secure page on my site, and have the Montreal guys pull them down and add a nice photo gallery to the special features section of the DVD. Upon my suggestion, they were also able to do some nice coding that allowed the video introduction to be played immediately before the film, but also be listed as a separate element on the special features menu. And then off to China for the replicating (and if I'm lucky, bootlegging too - hey, that's a billion more people seeing my film)!

I've worked with labs before in doing some DVD authoring (Slamdance has done a series of short compilation DVDs), and I can tell you it can be a little frustrating not being in the same room with the guys who are doing the actual work. Unfortunately, the necessities of time and space meant that I had very little direct communication with the guys in Montreal. "Sacre fromage," as they might say in Quebec. So there's definitely a few things I would have done differently had the project not been in such a rush. For example, the finished DVD isn't letterboxed (though the master is). I probably would have spent the money for a decent telecine directly from my negative (though that likely would have cost more than what I was getting and it would have taken me a while to actually track down my negative from the lab - assuming they haven't thrown it away). I probably would have gotten some of my team back in Omaha to do a second audio track (my producing partner, lead actress, et al). Also, my producing partner back in Omaha apparently has some extra behind-the-scenes footage we could have stuck in there (as it turns out, our old 3/4" EPK only had about two minutes of behind-the-scenes footage that my DP had cut together). But, hey, we've got to save something for the "Special Edition!"

Since we'd cut the film on upright Moviolas (did I mention we made this last millennium?) there really weren't any deleted scenes or extra takes we could have put on, so it's not like anyone's missing anything there.

The key thing when you're putting together a DVD - especially when someone else is paying for it - is that you're limited in the amount of stuff you can put on by the amount of memory on the disc. Video takes up the most space (as well as digitizing time and money), but audio, still frames, and text frames are cheap. I don't know any of the technical specs or if each side of a double-sided disc holds less than one side of a single-sided disc, but if you're working with a lab, try to find out all that information early in the process so you can prioritize what extras you want to put on the disc. And if they tell you to spend a lot of money renting a professional studio to record your audio commentary, tell them you'd rather spend $30 bucks on a Radio Shack mic that you can return the next day.

I would recommend that everyone try to get their films onto Total Movie's DVDs, but unfortunately for those of you with feature films, you're probably out of luck. After my film and one other indie (the Slamdance '98 film "Scrapple" - who I hooked up with these guys), Total Movie is moving into a long-term output deal with one of the studios to release some of their older titles. That said, they are still looking for short films to put on the flip sides. But you never know when some other entity gets the bright idea to actually put DVDs into DVD players. (Note to Sony: Why don't you use some of that synergy to stuff Columbia/Tri-Star films into your Sony DVD players?)

At the end of the day, the thing that may turn out to be the most valuable in my deal is the fully-authored DLT (don't ask me what "DLT" stands for, but it's the tape stock that DVDs are authored onto). It's probably worth around $5-10,000. Keep in mind, even though the sheer unit-numbers of Omaha (the movie) DVDs are huge, they won't actually be available in video rental stores, or as sell-through purchases (unless you shell out $170 to buy a Pioneer player first). Even the discs stuffed inside the magazine are only available to subscribers; they won't be in the magazines for sale on newsstands. What all this means is that in theory a distributor will be interested in picking up the "traditional" DVD rights for the film and won't have to outlay any money on the mastering.

I say, "in theory," because already I've run across one distributor who's been put off from picking up Omaha because they mistakenly think that I've just given the film to everyone in America. In fact, when you consider all the people that will accidentally throw away the disc with the DVD player's packing styrofoam, or only want to look at Tom Cruise in the "Minority Report" trailer on the flip-side of my film, or not figure out that the DVD even has two sides, and the number of people who will actually WATCH Omaha (the movie) is probably pretty small. I actually did the math, and figured at best, only 7,500 people (out of the 300,000 Pioneer player buyers) are likely to watch the film, or about 0.000139% of the potential 54 million-strong DVD-player owning audience. Which is still great. If only one of those people wants to invest in my next film, this DVD has done its job!