Wild Bill is a mocumentary short that runs pretty close to a satire of the Oscar nominated doc, Searching For Sugar Man. I wrote original songs, cast all my musician friends for free and put together a fictious band led by my most extraverted friend, Bill Lawson. In real-life, Bill hosts a karaoke night on the weekends at a dive bar. We wrote the bar into the script and used the location and clientele in the movie for free. In the empowering words of Mark Duplass, we used what we had. In the climatic scene of the film, the fictional band plays a real concert of fake songs in front of a live audience. I begged a local promoter to let us play three songs in the middle of a real concert and we pulled it off, despite a disastrous sound check.

Wild Bill was a DIY production in every sense of the word. We begged, borrowed and stole wherever we could. There are many people in the film who think they are being interviewed for a real documentary on the late Motorhead singer Lemmy. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do!

Originally, we planned to make the film in a more traditional way, but all our funding options failed to produce. We launched a small Kickstarter campaign for $2,000 and I kicked in an additional $3,500 out of pocket for a total budget of $5,500.

After we finished post-production, we got turned down by regional film festivals due to the 22-minute runtime.

I spent most of my twenties as a touring musician and decided to take matters into my own hands and treat our little orphaned movie like an independent touring band.

We first convinced a local music festival to host the debut screening. The festival was expanding to include more comedy events and had an interest in eventually having a film component, so they were eager to roll the dice on us. We screened the film on a Saturday afternoon to an audience of music fans and friends.

From there we were able to leverage that screening to convince a music venue in a different city to let us screen the film on a night they didn’t have a concert booked. During a blizzard on a Thursday night, we somehow packed the venue. This time, we followed the screening with a live acoustic performance from actor Bill Lawson, who performed the fictitious songs from the film.

We made t-shirts with a specific graphic from the movie and sold them online for $40 a pop. We used the money to book more screenings.

The coolest music venue booked us for a Saturday afternoon screening followed by a live performance by the fictional band from the film. They paid us $500 and again, the place was packed.

We even screened the film in the small town where Bill hosts a weekend karaoke night. We did two screenings, one at 4 PM and one at 9 PM. The 4 PM screening was so busy that people had to sit on the floor. The town mayor even showed up.

We continued to take the film on the road and use t-shirt sales and good will to fund the grassroots campaign. Here’s a couple things I learned from the experience:

1)      While a 20–40-minute short is the worst length for a film festival, it is the best length for an independent screening. If you add a Q & A and a short musical performance, it rounds the night out to an hour or an hour and a half of entertainment. We never overstayed our welcome and always left people wanting more.

2)      Making a longer short film teaches you about pacing, which you will never learn from something with a runtime of under five minutes.

3)      Grassroot marketing campaigns build momentum as you go. Each screening just got better as we went, and some people would even travel from town-to-town and support us.

4)      I brought as many cast members as possible to screenings and quickly learned that our lead, Bill Lawson, was a captivating showman who people loved to have a beer with after the show.

5)      When you build an organic audience, they have a better chance of them sticking with you for your next project. Make sure you collect emails for a mailing list.

I’m already thinking about our next film.  I’m not planning to submit to a single film festival next time. I have plans to utilize the grassroots audience we built during Wild Bill and fund the next film through a larger crowd funding campaign. I am completely convinced that there are other ways to promote films that are more effective, cool and fun. At this point I’m looking to the 80’s Hardcore band Black Flag for inspiration, not the film festivals.

Watch Wild Bill here: https://youtu.be/vUVrgKLbxmc

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt35048666/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk