At the DOBIE THEATER in AUSTIN, TX I met TODD SKLAR, President and Tour Director of RANGE LIFE ENTERTAINMENT.
Range Life Entertainment take movies on tour, just as any band takes their songs on tour. Todd and his team believe that human interaction and creativity are key to their model, and they aren’t afraid to break film distribution boundaries. We talked before one of their screenings in Austin about Range Life’s current and future directions and how Austin is one of the most supportive cities of this sort of creative endeavor. Read on to find out who would play Todd in a movie about his life and why his worst enemy is the densist.
Full Transcript (Audio):
Nichole Bennett: Alright I’m Nichole, and I am here with Todd of Range Life Entertainment.
Todd Sklar: Hello.
NB: Which is exciting. I guess just tell me how you would describe Range Life Entertainment because I’m sure your words are better than any description I could give it.
TS: They should be, but I’ll tell you we’ve never had a good time boxing this thing up very well. It means many different things to many different people. We would like to think we were a small film distribution outfit, but at the same time it’s a rolling roadshow. We’re a touring company. At the end of the day it’s about doing awesome stuff, getting people excited about movies, getting excited about doing something. We figured out maybe not on the first tour but maybe the second tour that we connect with a certain lifestyle. In reality it’s about getting excited about being young and doing stuff. It’s so easy to sit at home. You have access to all of these things. I’m the worst at it. I get on email all day long. We have access to all of these great things, and we can get together and do all this great stuff. It sounds cheesy, I know, but at the same time all it takes is a little effort.
NB: I was actually talking with the band that is with Range Life tonight, Capybara, earlier, and we were discussing how Austin in particular is good for that. People just seem to come out of the woodwork.
TS: It is the best.
NB: If you put a little spot of culture somewhere, people will go.
TS: And they support it.
NB: It’s amazing how supportive this city is.
TS: It is the best city in the country for that, without a question. A lot of people compare Athens as a mini version of it.
NB: I love Athens.
TS: And Columbia, Missouri
NB: I used to live near Athens.
TS: Yeah Athens is our other city like that and also Columbia, Missouri. Columbia used to be our home base for all of this. Austin is the best—I would argue one of the best cities in the country but definitely for what we are trying to do. Doing cool stuff. It’s a very supportive place for that.
NB: We are very glad to hear that. So you guys are just this traveling roadshow. Any highlights from this tour? Or is it all just a blur?
TS: Ooh, man it is all just a blur at this point. There are so many little things. Two weeks ago we were in Santa Fe, and we had a couple come. It was probably one of our weakest screenings number-wise, but this couple came up to us afterwards, and they told us that they drove from Colorado to see this movie we were doing. That’s so crazy. Who does that? But, at the same time they want to support this. So it’s little things like that. That somehow outweighs selling out a 300-person theater. It’s a microcosm for it all. It really is all of the personal interactions. That’s what it is all about, and that’s what keeps you going. I get to watch my favorite band play music every night. Whose dream isn’t that?
NB: This isn’t your normal movie distribution thing. What are people’s reactions to it? It seems like people are almost hesitant at first—like “Is this really true?”
TS: It’s funny. One of the movies we were touring with this fall is Mystery Team, it’s made by the Derrick Comedy guys, and it got picked up by Roadside Attractions, a real distribution company. The guys were cool enough to get us involved and do a three-person or three-unit team. They said that the craziest thing about being on the road with us was having all these people wondering why we were screening it in, like, Ames, Iowa. So, there’s that little shock thing. We’ve gotten more attention from the film industry than we have from the general consensus. The independent film industry has done a good job of coaching us along. There have been people along the way that have really helped us further develop the model. Even the ones that have led us down a wrong turn—we’ve gotten there faster and harder than if we would’ve gone the other way. I think at the end of the day that’s what it is all albout—just figuring it all out.
NB: It’s sort of an evolving process toward this vision you have. If you could break any world record what would it be?
TS: Any world record? Probably world record for most cavities. I love candy. I’m a really big fan of that. I eat a lot of candy.
NB: From your website, and your blog, and facebook, and your twitter, you are really good at using the internet. Have you found that the internet has had a role?
TS: It’s funny because everything on the film side of things is really pointing toward digital right now, as far as fixing distribution and finding audiences. I think that couldn’t be further from the truth. I think the internet is a tool, but I think the systems that have already been in place. Just because the model’s broken doesn’t mean the system’s broken. It just means you have to use it in a different way. I think the internet for us is the key to most of our marketing, all of our outreach, and big key to everything we do on tour. The tour itself, what makes it different from other forms of distribution, is that we are physically there doing it. It’s a very on-site, hands-on, way of releasing a movie. In a weird way, our on-site form of distribution is actually more reliant on the internet than what most studios or independent film companies are actually able to grasp.
NB: Have you had anybody else in the industry catch on to your model? Have you had anyone else adopt this sort of thinking?
TS: A little bit. And it’s not like we invented it. There’s lots of people who have done roadshows before on promotional tours. A lot of people, at least on the independent side of the film industry, nobody wants to put in the work to do this sort of thing. Unless you’re young and with your friends it doesn’t make a lot of sense to work this hard and to have this lifestyle. So a lot of people who point to it, and say that it needs a bit of elbow grease don’t actually want to put in the work to do this sort of thing. And rightfully so. I mean, this is insane. But, we’re insane so it works out.
NB: Speaking of all the work that goes into this, I’ve been walking around campus, and there are tons of posters up. You’ve been twittering and blogging about it. Coming from radio, I see bands have to do this sort of promotion. It’s amazing to me that film has to do the same thing. How is your street team? You guys are like a little army out there.
TS: You’ve got to have a little army. For us the street team is like a farm league. It’s how we find new young filmmakers or employees or people who want to be a part of the team. Or we find people who are doing other cool things that we can help out with. We call it an internship development program, but in reality it’s like this cool people’s club where we can find people we can work with.
NB: Man, I missed the boat on the cool people’s club!
TS: Oh no, you’re in now! We’ve got you now. Once we get your email, you’re in.
NB: So how are the movies actually chosen for this? I looked at them today and put them in my Netflix because I’m a nerd and I’m in school and I’m going to miss them. A lot of the films looked really interesting.
TS: 99% of the work is actually done for me. It’s the festival circuit and having a lot of friends in the industry and mostly having friends who work at prominent film festivals. Just to put on a good festival, like South By Southwest or Sundance or Cinevegas, you have to do so much work just to find these films. If we had to do that work, it would be impossible. We would fail miserably. But we have these great people with these programs built up already who have these great films that they have seen already. I can go to a festival and have ten people tell me to go check out this film, go check out that film. For me, I have this great circumstance where I get to watch awesome movies that are already picked for me and pick the thirty or forty best ones that I love and then have maybe ten or fifteen that fit this model. Of those, I see which ones I can talk into doing this crazy tour thing.
NB: So if you had to pick someone to play you in your crazy life who would you pick?
TS: I would say Corey Feldman. I get a lot of look-alike comments about him.
NB: His best friends just answered that he would be the deformed kid. What are some future directions that you see for Range Life?
TS: There’s a couple different things we’re trying to do. First and foremost the reason for this tour and the one in the spring is to set up on-site networks in each of these cities that we are doing so that we can have this apparatus built that we can shuttle movies to and find filmmakers and find content. We can find people who are doing cool stuff, and we can connect them all without us having to be there. So, we are trying to set that up over the course of the next year. We want to continue doing this in a fashion that it is the way it is—a bunch of dudes getting people together for some cool events and getting people excited. It won’t change too much.
NB: Still very accessible.
TS: Yeah. We’ve had really good luck working with other distributors this fall. So that might be a direction to go—working more as a marketing company. They’ll put the money up for the films, and we’ll just execute our plan. We’ll see. We’re keeping it very open right now, very loose.
