AFM 2006 Liveblog

So I'm sitting in an anteroom of the Loews Hotel in Santa Monica working badgestation 2 for the opening day of the AFM, and those silly rabbits gave me a computer with internet access.

It's not glamorous work, but for me it's all glamorous since I'm a little Hinkley about this industry in general. There are a couple different types of people at the AFM. Buyers, Sellers, and Industry Folk. Some people have films they've completed and are looking for distributors to pick up. Others, like the Italian gentlemen I chatted up earlier, have projects that they've completely packaged and are looking for foreign pre-sales. He has a script, poster, and cast attached. It's of a certain genre and budget range. He then takes this to the hundreds of foreigh buyers who are responsible for programming their theatres and video chains for all next year. China has ten or twenty distributors here with pockets full of cash. But what the Italian gentlemen is going for is China's, or Germany's, Sweden's guarantee to distribute. Sweden says "yes, Bloodkillers: The Revenge is in the genre that Swedes love, and it stars Dolph Lungren, who's very big in Sweden, plus the poster looks cool because it has Dolph Lungren on it in crosshairs, and we've never seen that before, so we agree to pick the film up for $200,000 upon completion. Here let me write it down for you..." The Italian gentlemen then gathers these various pieces of paper, one from every country if possible and takes it to his financiers, who he asks to invest in the film, knowing already that they're going to make money because the money's already there (theoretically). Cool, huh? This is where the phrase "big in Europe" comes from, because if you're an American actor, you are. To let you know how deep this goes, Roddy Piper and Billy Blanks have done something like a dozen action films that sell every year at the AFM. Ever heard of them? But the producers are not complaining.

Only a handful of the films exhibited here will you ever hear of. Crash> exhibited two years ago. Most of them will go straight-to-video in Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, Uzbekistan, and with all that money cobbled together these films will make a very tidy profit. They're mostly action films or films with posters that look strikingly familiar to other films that were popular in the last year.



Shark Bait, from a new finance company called Velvet Octopus, coming soon to Helsinki, Prague, Ittenbieu, & Sakkar.

Cool huh? Be right back with a list of all the shitty films here at the AFM