Read on Twitter
Perhaps the most demoralising thing about making short films (and that's saying something) is the deluge of disingenuous mail-merge emails you get from people who've "stumbled on" your film, "loved it" and are "keen to feature" it on their site / platform / e-portal / whatever
I can’t be the only filmmaker who still feels a twinge of excitement when I receive one—naively thinking my work has proven meaningful to someone—only to realise the message has been sent to 5000 other filmmakers as well, our email addresses all cribbed from some grim database
Ultimately, the request is always the same: something for nothing. Usually they’re looking to license as much material as possible without spending a cent, promising either *exposure* or some nebulous future revenue stream.
This year alone I’ve received 9 emails from one such outfit, concerning various different films. Here are two of them—about two different films—using exactly the same wording!
Here’s another where they forgot to paste the [film title] in.
![Here’s another where they forgot to paste the [film title] in.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Enw6ebRXcAEmVJQ.jpg "Here’s another where they forgot to paste the [film title] in.")
For clarity, this isn’t some half-arsed phishing scam but an actual start-up with a fancy office in Central London! The mind boggles.
I went for a meeting with a similar company a few years ago, in a big swanky building in Shoreditch. They'd got a bunch of VC funding on the promise of being the UK Netflix or whatever. And they said all the right things in the meeting about carving out an identity and so on...
... but then you looked at the site and the programming strategy as far as I could tell was to offer ropey films featuring A-list stars before they were famous, presumably to lure in completist fans who'd pay over the odds for basically anything featuring their idol.
On that basis, they could claim to have 10 billion unique users or whatever, on the basis that 10 billion Benedict Cumberbatch stans had each used the site for 2 minutes.
(That seems to be a common feature of these start-ups: wildly OTT claims that can only be explained by some very creative accounting. They all seem to be the world's fastest-growing X, or the UK's biggest Y, boasting millions of fans but somehow no name recognition at all.)
And I guess that's the point: keep the money flowing by frantically gesturing at a self-evidently inflated user base, never bothering to work on building an actual audience, as the ultimate goal is just to quietly disappear after a few years and move on the next thing.
