It was back in 2000 that David Straus and Joe Neulight, a couple of film school buddies who had struggled together as independent moviemakers, launched their online service Withoutabox.
That same year, the Independent Feature Project/West and its Executive Director Dawn Hudson were reformed as Film Independent, which runs the Los Angeles Film Festival.
Withoutabox allowed filmmakers to submit trailers, production notes, synopsis, bios, marketing materials and applications online hence the company’s name which was just what the growing L.A. fest needed.
The festival and others like it was just what Withoutabox needed. That first year, less than 9,000 filmmakers from around the world used the system. That number has mushroomed to 90,000 today, with 3,000 more coming onboard each month, according to Straus.
“The festival has seen an increase in submissions and we take some credit for that and we help them manage the entry process,” Straus said. “It’s mutually beneficial; we’ve seen them grow and we grow as well.”
It’s not the lack of cardboard packaging on the entries that’s important to the festival’s directors; it’s the number of filmmakers the company can reach that matters most.
“We want to pull from the biggest pool of submissions we can, and want to continue to increase that,” said Richard Raddon, director of the L.A. Film Festival. “Each year we’ve grown by about 20 percent, and we’re feeling like we’re getting close to the high, high end of film festival submissions near Sundance numbers. We want to build it into a world-class film festival here in L.A. That’s only appropriate. ”
The festival was awash in more than 3,500 submissions this year, more than a threefold increase from the 1,100 works turned in for consideration at the fest six years ago.
About 265 features and shorts this year will screen at its new home in Westwood Village, where the bulk of the films will be shown at the Landmark Regent, Mann’s Festival and Majestic Crest theaters.
“The Devil Wears Prada,” starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, will open the festival at the Mann Village at 7:30 p.m. on June 22. Organizers are expecting 80,000 attendees over the 10-day event, a significant increase over the 60,000 who attended last year.
“We were really hitting capacity with the audience in Hollywood,” Raddon said. “We needed bigger theaters that were in close proximity to one another.”
Withoutabox has more than 500 film festival partners and can connect filmmakers from Academy Award winners to high school students to the more than 2,600 festivals worldwide that use its service.
Withoutabox makes its money from festival partners, which pay a fee for promotion and marketing, submission deadline reminder mailings, inclusion in newsletters and the like. The basic online service is free for filmmakers; a $159 premium service upgrade adds more amenities.
This month, Withoutabox is launching DVD duplication and submission services for premium members, meaning that less filmmakers can pay less than $10 to avoid the chore of sending their feature-length or short films to each individual festival
“They’re well-positioned,” Raddon said. Their service has evolved and become very specific to film festivals and they’ll soon be at forefront of getting rid of the need to mail out DVDs.”
