Ben Yennie is an American producer's representative, speaker, [1] [2] [3] [4] author, [5] and entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology and film. He's helped to package, finance, market, and distribute 15 films to date, [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] generally receiving the title of executive producer for his role as a producer's rep. He has written three books to date (most notably a guide to the American Film Market and a macroeconomic study of the film industry), [12] [13] [14] co-founded a film oriented project management company called ProductionNext, [15] and is also known as a blogger, [16] [17] and event organizer. [18]
In 2014 Ben founded Guerrilla Rep Media, a producer's representation firm. [19] Some of the films he's worked on have been released theatrically and shown on outlets such as Starz and Showtime. He is best known for Queen of the Capital, [20] Goodland, [21] Cicada Moon, [22] and The Devil's Restaurant. [23] Films he has represented have been accepted to the Slamdance Film Festival [24] and many other film festivals.
Ben has spoken at many conferences including the Seattle Film Summit, The Dona Ana Arts Council, and various in person events in and around San Francisco. He has also appeared on many podcasts, including The Lean Startup Podcast, [25] the Indie Film Hustle Podcast, [26] the Making Movies is Hard Podcast, [27] and the Nancy Fulton Podcast. [28]
Ben is the author of The Guerrilla Rep: American Film Market Distribution Success on No Budget. The book is currently in its second edition. Debbie Brubaker, [29] unit production manager of Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine , Tim Burton's Big Eyes , and Gus Van Sant's When We Rise wrote the preface. Oscar-nominated producer Marc Smolowitz [30] wrote the foreword. This book has been used as a supplemental text at multiple film schools. Ben also wrote the State of the Film Industry Report, [31] which was a first of its kind report on the macroeconomics of the film industry. Data was gathered with the help of IndieWire, Stage 32, and Fandor. [32] Ben also heads the blogs for Guerrilla Rep Media which focuses primarily on the business of the film industry [33] and serves as editor for the ProductionNext blog which focuses more on production and general critique of the film industry. [34]
In 2015, Ben co-founded a project management company called ProductionNext. [35] ProductionNext is a cloud-based project management system specifically designed for independent film. Ben has served periodically as an adviser and organizer for several angel investment groups targeted at the arts. [36] Previously, Ben served as executive director for Producer Foundry, a community organization and business school for independent film. [37]
John August is an American screenwriter, director, producer, and novelist. He is known for writing the films Go (1999), Charlie's Angels (2000), Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003), Big Fish (2003), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Corpse Bride (2005), Frankenweenie (2012), the Disney live-action adaptation of Aladdin (2019), the novels Arlo Finch in the Valley of Fire (2018), Arlo Finch in the Lake of the Moon (2019) and Arlo Finch in the Kingdom of Shadows (2020).
Geoffrey Kleinman is an American writer. He is the founder of Kleinman.com the company which started and ultimately sold DVD Talk and which runs DrinkSpirits.com.
The Departure Festival, formerly known as Canadian Music Week, is an industry conference and music festival held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Laurence T. Fessenden is an American actor, producer, writer, director, film editor, and cinematographer. He is the founder of the New York based independent production outfit Glass Eye Pix. His writer/director credits include No Telling, Habit (1997), Wendigo (2001), and The Last Winter, which is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. He has also directed the television feature Beneath (2013), an episode of the NBC TV series Fear Itself (2008) entitled "Skin and Bones", and a segment of the anthology horror-comedy film The ABCs of Death 2 (2014). He is the writer, with Graham Reznick, of the BAFTA Award-winning Sony PlayStation video game Until Dawn. He has acted in numerous films including Bringing Out the Dead (1999), Broken Flowers (2005), I Sell the Dead (2009), Jug Face (2012), We Are Still Here (2015), In a Valley of Violence (2016), Like Me (2017), and The Dead Don't Die (2019), Brooklyn 45 (2023), and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Alain Silver is an American film producer, director, and screenwriter; music producer; film critic, film historian, DVD commentator, author and editor of books and essays on film topics, especially film noir, the samurai film, and horror films. Filmmakers about whom he has written include David Lean, Robert Aldrich, Raymond Chandler, Roger Corman, and James Wong Howe.
Shih-Ching Tsou is a Taiwanese-American film producer, director, and actress. She co-directed the film Take Out (2004) with Sean Baker. She also produced Baker's other films Starlet (2012), Tangerine (2015), The Florida Project (2017) and Red Rocket (2021).
Withoutabox was a website founded in January 2000 by David Straus, Joe Neulight and Charles Neulight which allowed independent filmmakers to self-distribute their films. The first product launched was the International Film Festival Submission system. Withoutabox worked with film festivals and filmmakers all over the world. In January 2008, Withoutabox was acquired by IMDb, a subsidiary of Amazon.
Lean startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products that aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable; this is achieved by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning. Lean startup emphasizes customer feedback over intuition and flexibility over planning. This methodology enables recovery from failures more often than traditional ways of product development.
Karina Longworth is an American film critic, author, and journalist based in Los Angeles. Longworth writes, hosts and produces the podcast You Must Remember This, about the "secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century".
Jared Moshe is an American director, screenwriter and producer of independent films. He wrote and directed the films Dead Man's Burden (2012), The Ballad of Lefty Brown (2017) and Aporia (2023). He has also produced the features Destricted (2006), Kurt Cobain: About a Son (2006), Low and Behold (2007), Beautiful Losers (2008), Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (2011), and Silver Tongues (2011).
Chris Guillebeau is an American author, entrepreneur, blogger, and speaker. He initially received attention for his entrepreneurship and travel blog, The Art of Non-Conformity, which led to the publication of a book of the same name in 2010. Since then, he has published six additional books including The $100 Startup (2012), Side Hustle (2017), and most recently, The Money Tree (2020), his first novel. He also organizes the annual World Domination Summit in Portland, Oregon and hosts the daily podcast, Side Hustle School.
Pond5 is a New York–based online marketplace for royalty-free media. The company licenses stock footage, stock music, stock photography, sound effects, Adobe After Effects templates, and 3D models. Pond5 claims to have the world's largest collection of stock footage, and that they host more than 38 million clips as of September 2023.
Neil Drumming is an American journalist and filmmaker. Formerly a producer with the radio show This American Life, in 2020 Drumming became managing editor with Serial Productions, the company that created the podcasts Serial and S-Town. Drumming began his career writing for the Washington City Paper, and later wrote for Entertainment Weekly and Salon. He also wrote and directed the 2014 film Big Words.
On the Sly: In Search of the Family Stone is a documentary about Sly Stone, his absence from the music scene, and one man's quest to find out what happened to the artist. It is directed by Michael Rubenstone.
Brant Pinvidic is a Canadian film director and television producer, best known for Why I'm Not on Facebook, Why I'm Not on Pokemon GO, Bar Rescue and Extreme Weight Loss. He is the CEO of INvelop Entertainment, host of the podcast Why I'm Not... With Brant Pinvidic, based on the film series of the same name, and a contributing writer for Forbes.
Shrihari Sathe is an Indian filmmaker and producer. Sathe is a 2013 Sundance Institute Creative Producing Fellow. His feature directorial debut, EkHazarachiNote(1000 Rupee Note), won the Special Jury Award and Centenary Award for Best Film at the 2014 International Film Festival of India and has received over 35 awards. He was a member of the jury at the 2017 Miami International Film Festival. Shrihari Sathe received the Producers Award 2019 as part of 34th Independent Spirit Awards.
FilmFreeway is a website for filmmakers to submit their films to hundreds of film festivals globally. Started in Canada in 2014 as a four-person startup, it steadily grew in competition to the much larger Amazon-owned company, Withoutabox.
I'll Be Next Door for Christmas is a 2018 American comedy film directed by David Jay Willis and starring Nicole Sullivan, Atticus Shaffer, Jonathan Mangum, Beth Littleford, Regan Burns and Lil Bub in her final film role. The movie was released worldwide on Amazon Prime and iTunes.
QCode is a podcast network and audio production studio based in Los Angeles, California. The company was founded by Rob Herting in 2018 as a partnership between the production company Automatik and the management firm Grandview. The company focuses on producing scripted, narrative podcasts.
Cosmos is a 2019 science fiction film written, directed and produced by Elliot and Zander Weaver in their feature film debut. The film stars Tom England, Joshua Ford, Arjun Singh Panam and Ben Vardy. It was released in late 2019 in the United States.