Caffeinated Commerce

Documentary filmmaker Amy Ferraris MFA '02 discovered the classic barista-made cappuccino while living in Italy. She describes this eidetic beverage eloquently on the website CappuccinoMovie.com, devised as a self-promotion tool for her most recent film, a labor of love and good taste called "The Perfect Cappuccino." On the site she notes that every cup of true cappuccino "is unique in its particulars, based in large part on the hand of the person who made it."

This first-person documentary about a quest for the defining example of a hand-crafted artisan beverage seems an ideal candidate for the increasingly popular option of self-distribution via the Internet and DVD. Thoughtful "artisan" films like this one, in which "the hand of the person who made it" is visible in every frame, is exactly the sort of work that tends to fall through the cracks of the one-size-fits-all apparatus of mass market movie promotion.

"Early on in making the film," Ferraris says, "I recognized that this is not a mainstream idea, but I was so into it that I wanted to do it anyway. I wanted to do it for myself. It's really cool to me that I can do that and still have some possibility of connecting with an audience and making a little bit of return on my investment. I feel really fortunate in that way."

For Ferraris, the search for great coffee in North America inevitably leads to the specter of Starbucks, a chain so ubiquitous that in several cities there are dueling outlets facing each other across intersections. Now the chain is popularizing their homogenized version of the beverage around the world, raising the possibility that it could eventually supplant the original Italian version in global coffee consciousness.

Ferraris carved out a few minutes to discuss the process of self-destruction with us in May, working around the sleep schedule of her brand new week old baby daughter.

There seems to be a certain kind of personality that might be drawn to self-distribution. Some people just prefer to drive a stick shift. They want to have their own hands on the controls.

I am totally that way! I hate automatic transmissions. So, yeah, this is my preference, and I recognize that it is nor for everyone.

In order to self-distribute, you have to be comfortable being a business person as well as an artist, which I would guess some filmmakers are not.

Yes, and frankly one of the great attractions of D.I.Y distribution is that you get to keep a much larger percentage of the money. Your volume of sales may be lower but you're keeping so much more of the revenue that it's OK.

I would rather not be doing the work of sales. But I would rather be doing it myself than handing it over to someone who is inept or doesn't care. When I was researching this effort, talking to other filmmakers, participating in online filmmaking communities, I never met a small independent filmmaker who was happy with their distributor. Literally never.

What convinced you that this approach was a good match with for this film?

One of my friends said, "Your film is a little too intellectual." I don't agree that it's intellectual, in the sense of being difficult, but the argument I'm presenting is a little bit complex. It's an essay. It doesn't have a story arc built in, like some of the other recent documentaries that have done well. I've had warm responses from audiences, but it doesn't pack a rhetorical punch like "Bowling for Columbine."

So what do you use as a selling point? What becomes the focal point of the campaign?.

The subject matter. Why do people watch a documentary? Ninety-nine percent of the time it's because they're interested in the subject matter. So my major promotional niches in each city are on the one hand people who are interested in coffee, the foodies, and on the other hand people who are interested in Italian culture.

The coffee part of it was a no-brainer. I spent five years making the film. By the end I knew those folks and I knew how to reach them. I knew that I had to put a couple of ads on the coffee discussion web sites and reach out to the founder of CoffeeGeek.com and get him to write a review. People who are really serious about coffee feel so misunderstood. I've had them get so excited that somebody wants to make a movie about this little world that they care about. Those are the people who are e-mailing me though my website, the people I've slowly but surely built up into a mailing list.

The part I had to research was the manufacturing and order fulfillment end of things, the actual distribution of physical DVDs. I've had to research on my own the film and DVD review websites. Even just learning how to contact the mainstream press was a bit of a learning curve.

But there are a lot of filmmakers out there trying to do what I'm doing and many of them have put up resources on line that you can learn from. [Links to some of Ferraris's favorite online D.I.Y resources can be found in a sidebar on this page.]

What forms of distribution are you pursuing? I know you have a DVD coming in June. Are you also pursuing theatrical, online?

It would be an exaggeration to say I've been doing theatrical distribution. I have had some public screenings that I've arranged on my own, but I really only do them when somebody approaches me. Again, as I researched other people's experiences everyone said, "Theatrical is a lot of money for advertising and promotion and the revenue is just terrible.

Online is definitely a part of my strategy. There are so many new options right now for watching films on line, and most of the content carriers don't insist on exclusivity, so it's very easy to submit you work and make it available. A couple of them, Amazon Unbox and one called Caachi, are very filmmaker-friendly. "You set the price and we'll sell your film." There are others, such as Hulu and iTunes, that won't deal with you unless you come to them through an aggregator who will represent your work.

But even there, there are starting to be sites like IndieFlix that will make your film available for download and will also act as an aggregator to negotiate with iTunes and Netflix and other third party providers on your behalf.

How about broadcast or cable television? The tone of your film would seem to be very apt for PBS, for example. And of course there's the Food Network.

Broadcast is hard. Broadcasters are scared off by the heavy Starbucks presence in the film. They tend to be really touchy about things like corporate logos, even though I worked with an attorney and know that all of my uses of the Starbucks logo are completely legal.

Broadcasters worry about the likelihood of getting sued, which where Starbucks is concerned is highly likely. They will file a suit they know they can't win just to force compliance from people who can't afford to go to court. This is exactly what I document in my film, a case in which they went after a café owner in Tulsa whose place is called the DoubleShot Coffee Company. Starbucks is now claiming ownership of the term "DoubleShot."

PBS is still a remote possibility. I did submit the film to "Independent Lens" and I hope to submit it to "POV," although the deadline is right around now and with a new baby my life is little crazy.

The Food Network passed on it. I think they would rather do cooking shows.

Food seems to be a very strong niche subject for documentaries, though. Everybody loves food. There are a lot of other cool foodie sub-cultures out there.

I would love to keep on making movies about food, to be very honest. I continue to have ideas even for other films about coffee. A movie that was more about just coffee and less about the politics of corporate America would have more of a chance on the Food Network, I think. And I would love to make it.

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Keywords

"amy ferraris" "coffee" "cappuccino" 

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