Business is Business
No philosophizing today. We’re at t-minus 48 hours from leaving the homestead, getting our dependents settled at a relative’s house and finding our way to LGA for our flight to Oakland. There are a few crucial details yet to be attended to, like making sure the seven crates of gear shipped out West are on track to arrive before we do, FedExing 14,000 feet of Kodak 7274 (big hassle to take film on airplanes since 9/11, I’m not doing hand inspection of 40 cans of film!), and of course making sure our clothes and toothbrushes are packed.
In the midst of this we did manage to get our e-commerce/shopping cart set up for Comstock Films, and we’re running a pre-order special on upcoming titles. Half off the regular price if you order before we go to press, and fully refundable if you find yourself short of rent money before we send the master out for replication. It’s got to be about the cheapest, lowest risk way to become an “investor” in a film project!
Aside from providing a little working capital to grease the production wheels, this pre-release offer will help us gauge interest in the titles so we can better judge how many DVDs to run. We underestimated with Marie and Jack and had to go through the added expense and hassle of re-upping. (Of course that did let us do a little redesign of the insert to include our Penthouse Magazine blurb, which should help with brick and motar sales, so maybe our underestimation will end up being a blessing.) For better or worse (mostly better I think) business is as much a part of filmcraft as knowing filmstocks or f-stops.
I’ve got a lot more to say about beer and Prohibition and porn, but I’m going to save it for a little later. In the meantime, Forbes.com has two articles that provide some good background information for my next rant.
-T.C.
February 15th, 2005 at 10:00 pm
The pre order offer is very generous TC, I hope you get many folks taking it up.
An aside — is there a way of knowing what kind of credit cards your e-commerce site takes before filling the form? There’s a good chance this may be obvious and I just haven’t found it yet.
Best wishes to MrsC and yourself on the big trip, here’s hoping everything goes wonderfully well — at least snow shouldn’t be an issue.
February 16th, 2005 at 8:20 am
Wow…..now that’s an pretty good offer there TC, just might take you up on it.
Hope you and the Mrs. have a wonderful and safe trip. More, more of those awesome shots, please!!!
February 16th, 2005 at 8:32 am
You might say generous, I say good business. After all, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, right? (Of course a hand in the bush beats two birds any day of the week!
-T.C.
January 6th, 2007 at 5:55 am
[...] Mr. Johnston pointed out that 1) the article’s headline was “slowdown”, and 2) the article mentioned that independently generated financial data about the “adult entertainment industry” is all but impossible to come by. Fair enough. I think the article might have made the second point more forcefully, and perhaps sited financial speculation about the size of “the industry” that doesn’t come from people with either an pro-porn or anti-porn agenda. (If he were a regular reader of this blog, he’d know where to look. [...]