Gigantic Releasing, which recently debuted the critically acclaimed documentary Must Read After My Death, may be an ironic name for the new arm of the Gigantic Group, since only indie vet Mark Lipsky and an assistant are behind the wheel. But the concept for this new independent distributor, if not gigantic, certainly encapsulates big intentions, a grand vision and, says Lipsky, “an industry-changing paradigm.”

In fact, Gigantic boasted the first ever national theatre/online day-and-date release, with its GiganticDigital.com website offering viewers high-quality streaming of the film—actually the highest resolution that a viewer’s broadband connection can handle—at a manageable $2.99 for a three-day viewing window while sparing them disruptive, annoying ads.

The film opened at New York’s Quad on Feb. 20 and L.A.’s Laemmle Sunset 5 on Feb. 27. To support the theatres, Must Read… could not be streamed in those markets where it was playing theatrically.

For the targeted blackouts, Gigantic used “a technology that looks at the IP [Internet protocol] address of a user and can be about 85% accurate where that user lives,” Lipsky explains. “It’s not an e-mail address but the IP address. And we found out that the technology works.”

Lipsky eschews service deals, asking advances from the theatres he deals with. “Theatres need to be motivated and they are when they give advances.”

Only time, evolving content platforms and viewer habits will tell whether the Gigantic approach can generate anything close to gigantic profits. In only three months after the cross-platform release, Lipsky is already tweaking his plan so that other distributors and filmmakers can come to Gigantic for their services.

Gigantic Releasing, which had previously done conventional releases of Year of the Fish and the often amusing mockumentary The Doorman, is one component of the Gigantic Group family of companies, with headquarters in New York’s Tribeca. Gigantic launched the releasing arm in early 2008 with a mission to rethink and upgrade the independent film distribution model.

In addition to Gigantic Releasing and its GiganticDigital.com website, the Gigantic group comprises production arm Gigantic Pictures (current art-house hit Goodbye Solo), Gigantic Music and Gigantic Studios, which offers post-production services. Gigantic Group founder Brian Devine is also the parent company CEO.

The new Gigantic Releasing and its website, suggesting an inspired way to expand into film distribution, casts one eye on theatres, another on the Web and, yes, a critical third eye on the media. On paper, the modus operandi sounds unique and kind of nifty: day-and-date release of a film in theatres and simultaneous availability on any computer in the U.S. with broadband capabilities. In other words, says Lipsky, there’s a potential for hundreds of millions of people to catch a film during its first weekend.

Lipsky’s pitch to viewers, suppliers and the media is that Gigantic on the Web is high-resolution, easy to use, completely ad-free and priced just right. Payments can easily be made by credit card or PayPal.

The paradigm sounds pretty cool, but also savvy was Devine’s decision to put Mark Lipsky, Gigantic Releasing president, at the head of this new effort. Like brother Jeff, Lipsky has had over several decades of experience in the independent world. He’s toiled in the areas of consumer marketing, distribution and technology and held important positions at companies like Bravo, IFC and Miramax, where he founded its Prestige boutique label.



Lipsky also worked with his brother as chief strategy officer at independent film company Lot 47 and, more recently based in Arizona, focused on technology at Internet applications company GabSight, which facilitates free video-related Internet applications. Lipsky co-founded the company and still serves as CEO.

With lone theatre bookings and the ubiquitous Web presence for Must Read…, it appears that Lipsky is using the theatrical window to gain the media attention that creates all-important awareness. But not so fast! Lipsky disavows this notion. “Not true. The fact is that opening the right film in the right theatre at the right time in New York can result in a big success. A New York opening is critical to any film because of media exposure and because of the prestige of just having the film play New York.”

So how well did Gigantic’s ambitious strategy for Must Read After My Death work? For starters, getting the right film was critical, says Lipsky, and the film, written, produced and directed by Morgan Dews, a scion of the film’s troubled family, got very good response.

The doc, a kind of Revolutionary Road meets a less toxic Capturing the Friedmans, affords an intimate, real-life look at a highly dysfunctional suburban Connecticut family in the late ’50s and ’60s. Largely a compilation of home movies and old audio tapes, the film didn’t exactly scream entitlement to big-screen exposure. Yet it had a respectable $6,500 opening weekend on the Quad screen, and, reminds Lipsky, it was the Oscar broadcast weekend.

Also crucial to the strategy was getting the media on board. Prior to the movie’s release, Lipsky had to wrestle with the fact that media coverage of indie films going to various platforms is in flux. For instance, some newspapers like The New York Times that have traditionally limited coverage just to theatrical openings are starting to recognize other platforms. So Lipsky and his team, reaching out to media in major markets across the country, pushed for such recognition.

This broader-minded approach to films reaching viewers whatever the platform also bodes change for popular online film review aggregators like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. Explaining the “volatility,” Lipsky observes, “Metacritic, for instance, wasn’t accepting some Gigantic [Must Read…] reviews when they didn’t originate on [a print publication’s] movie review pages. Now, however, Rotten Tomatoes follows any critics on the site’s approved list, which could include critics who are only online.”



Just days before the Must Read… release, Lipsky said that that Feb. 20 opening weekend would be “key” and “the most exciting and challenging moment in my career.”

The weekend did mark a first of sorts, affording all U.S. indie film fans with access to broadband (and $2.99) or living in New York the ability to see a first-run independent movie.

Looking back, Lipsky calls the experience “very, very good and we got a ton of broad acceptance from all media for our concept, which is what we were really aiming for. We now have a national exhibition system that is online where we can open any film. And the reception was so positive. We worked hard to educate the local media and they are beginning to accept films opening like ours as no different from an opening in a movie theatre.”

Equally important from a technical point of view, “we learned that I was right, that we could do it, that we can turn access on and off in any market in the country.” In fact, the launch had the Gigantic president putting on another hat, that of customer-service guy.

All went smoothly. Box office was decent and viewers were buying the film as well at the site. “And they are still buying today,” says Lipsky.

“For movies online, we made a nice, good start,” he opines, adding that activity was helped by giving away the first bunch of tickets online. “We didn’t charge for the first few hundred tickets. We were hoping for a viral response and I think we got that to some degree.”

There are no future theatrical bookings, but Lipsky predicts that Gigantic will get into profit on Must Read… with the upcoming DVD release. He expects to have all the extras for the DVD finalized by May.

Amidst the avalanche of content available, people were alerted to the film, he says, by the many print and online reviews including those that appeared on sites like RogerEbert.com and SeattleWeekly.com. The attention was nationwide in major markets because, as Lipsky and his marketing people promised in their pitches, the access to the film was going to be nationwide.

With indie film distribution paradigms emerging and changing at dizzying speeds, Lipsky says that Gigantic’s model should not be confused with what other new-media movie purveyors like IFC, HDNet, SnagFilm or Hulu do. IFC and HDNet, showing theatrically and via video-on-demand, use a different combination of platforms. SnagFilm, Hulu, etc. are more aggregators than distributors of content and interrupt their programming with ads. Sites like Amazon, Netflix, iTunes and soon YouTube don’t (yet) collapse the theatrical and Web windows.

Lipsky maintains that people like former Warner Independent head Mark Gill “get up on a soapbox and tell everyone how terrible things are, that nobody is doing anything about it. But we are by using the Net, the most powerful communications tool there is.”

Even content suppliers get a better deal, says Lipsky, because “they get a bigger piece of our take.” Initially, the deal done for Must Read… was “traditional”—so traditional, in fact, that digital wasn’t initially included. “Now with the digital component, filmmakers like Dews have a better chance [at revenues] beyond the small [distribution] advances.”

A deal done with aggregators running ads, he further explains, can mean that a thousand people have to watch the film online in order for filmmakers to get a check for $20 or $30, because revenues depend on the CPMs (costs per thousand that are predetermined by advertisers). With Gigantic, he says, film content providers will get a dollar for every person who watches the film.



Furthermore, Gigantic is flexible. “We can do the traditional acquisition deal or, for the right film, a deal lasting only two or three months for a digital window that allows the filmmaker to hold on to other rights.”

The upshot of the Must Read… release for Gigantic is that it led Lipsky to tweak Gigantic Releasing’s strategy a bit. The company doesn’t yet have future releases on its roster (the deal for a film the company had expected to release in late May fell through), but Lipsky is hoping to hear from a number of distributors and filmmakers who are sitting on product that Gigantic could release for them.

Other film distributors thinking theatrical will be able to leverage Gigantic’s online capabilities. “Even if a film opens on 1,000 screens,” notes Lipsky, “it still leaves out most of the country and we can serve those many, many smaller markets.”

Asked to comment on Wayne Wang’s The Princess of Nebraska, which did gangbusters on the Web—on YouTube—but was offered for free, Lipsky answers, “That’s the lesson. When you ask people to pay, the content has to be good. And you can’t just throw it out there. So we’ll do for other distributors the kind of promotion and marketing we did [for Must Read…] so their films will get the same degree of attention.”

But Lipsky isn’t just sitting back and waiting for the proverbial phones to ring. He assures that he’ll soon be scouting some upcoming festivals and markets for product. Must Read… suggests he knows a good thing when he sees it. And Gigantic Releasing’s game plan is proof he can fearlessly jump onto the new-media bandwagon and ride into new territory.

And, by the way, might not this outreach to other distributors—his concept of a non-exclusive distribution company that handles not just its own but other companies’ films—be some kind of fresh paradigm?

Like others, Lipsky has gone public about the state of independents today and wrestled with that whole blurry notion of what an independent film actually is in today’s world. In his disseminated broadsheet entitled “The Myth of the ‘Indie’ Film,” he makes his case for the “new” independent movement that has indies crossing platforms. In most cases, these are not the so-called “independent” films from the likes of deep-pocketed studio-run specialty arms like Miramax, Fox Searchlight, Focus or Sony Pictures Classics.

Not that Lipsky denigrates the theatre experience. On the contrary, he writes that “moviegoers will never abandon the movie house,” but—and here’s the bombshell—they won’t be going to theatres to see his notion of independent films.

Lipsky faults those exhibitors who “have unanimously bought into the instant gratification of opening-weekend grosses, so it’s now impossible to release a truly independent film to theatres. These independent films from the few companies left like Zeitgeist and others can’t compete with films from the Weinsteins, Fox Searchlight and companies like that.”

Since the definition of “independent film” has always been a bit slippery, how might Lipsky define it? His “indie” is “a film that has no recognizable stars, that is by a fresh directorial voice, and that’s it.”

“In today’s world,” he continues, “[Jim] Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise would not have been seen. Today, these smaller independent films are in and out because they aren’t given the time to build word of mouth.”

Lipsky calls the Giganticdigital.com website “industry-changing” and its first dual-platform release a noble experiment that worked. The future test is whether Gigantic Releasing can next deliver the must see—whether on the big or little screen. Stay tuned or, better yet, stay connected.