Show Links:
Pop Motion Pictures
Pick It Up Documentary
WATCH: The Last Blockbuster
Here’s To Life
Key Points:
1:00 – His journey to become a filmmaker
2:16 – Flash animation
5:00 – Starting out with a DSLR & making music videos
9:14 – The idea of his first feature film
14:58 – Personal investment in documentaries
19:20 – What inspired The Last Blockbuster
29:30 – Nostalgia’s role in the success and involvement of films
Skip to: 37:54 Documentary budgets, financing and distribution approach44:00 – Marketing in a documentary
51:00 – Scripting in documentaries
54:05 – Talking to subjects before interviews
55:00 – Scheduling interviews with subjects
55:47 – Ending documentaries vs. following in real time
57:00 – Streaming On-Demand The Last Blockbuster
Full Transcript:
Taylor Morden: (00:00)
I drove by that thing for months until late 2016, early 2017 when I finally decided to just stop and check it out, thinking that I was going to look in the windows and see the empty racks, and it was going to be an abandoned Blockbuster because you see those on YouTube and Facebook, everybody’s like, “Oh, I found one and the Dropbox is still there and you can see inside. The cash register still says whatever.” So I thought I was going to do that. But what I found was it was like nothing had changed.
Tanya Musgrave: (00:31)
Welcome to There To Here, an educational podcast where industry professionals talk nuts and bolts and how they got from there to here. On today’s show, Taylor Morden talks about filming The Last Blockbuster and things to look out for as a documentarian. From CoLab Inc, I’m Tanya Musgrave. And today we have Taylor Morden, documentary filmmaker and director of the freshly released doc, The Last Blockbuster. Welcome to the show.
Taylor Morden: (00:52)
Hey, thanks for having me.
Tanya Musgrave: (00:53)
So documentary. We haven’t had a documentary filmmaker on the show. So how did you get from there to here?
Taylor Morden: (01:01)
Okay. Well, I really started probably 20 years ago picking up a video camera in high school, but that’s not super relevant because I quickly abandoned that to be a musician. I was a touring musician, a semi-professional musician for a long, long time and that is how I kind of transitioned into filmmaking. I was doing flash animation on the side. My degree is in, at the time it was called digital arts, which means I took a film class and a Photoshop class and like copywriting and all of these things that together are a useful skillset, but you can kind of tell how old I am by the fact that when I got out of college, flash animation was the thing, right? So websites used to have this, they’d have like an intro and it would say skip intro and no one would ever watch the intro. I would make those intros.
Taylor Morden: (01:58)
It was my job until Apple decided not to support flash anymore. And then at the same time, broadband was becoming ubiquitous in a way that most people could stream video. So flash was not necessary. It was sort of this format that was like very low data rate and the animation was clunky so that it could, people would dial up, could watch videos, “videos.” And so when Apple decided not to support it, flash died almost immediately because iPhones were coming out. It was the thing, iPads. Right around that time was also when DSLRs were becoming good enough at video to where you could make really great looking video content, nothing like I had done in high school, on my VHS camcorder up on the shoulder set up we had back then with premiere 1.0.
Tanya Musgrave: (02:56)
Yeah, the tape decks, log and capture.
Taylor Morden: (03:01)
Yeah. I never had that. So we just had two VCRs to edit with and you push pause on one and record on the other. So all of my linear editing background comes from a VHS tape to another VHS tape. And if you wanted to add music, you plugged your Walkman into the audio in. It was like [crosstalk 00:03:20].
Tanya Musgrave: (03:19)
Oh my gosh, that is fricking awesome.
Taylor Morden: (03:22)
1996 editing skills.
Tanya Musgrave: (03:25)
That’s amazing.
Taylor Morden: (03:25)
Yeah. That was all self-taught. My high school didn’t have a video class. I think in ’98 I asked because no one was using their camcorder for anything. And I said, “Can I just sort of have it checked out all the time and do video projects and I’ll do an independent study video class that I just taught myself?” And the internet wasn’t really around. So it was really just trial and error of like, well, I can do this. And if I do the two VCRs and plug in the Walkman and do all that, so that’s kind of my learning. But fast forward to 2010, 2011, DSLRs are starting to be great. Software, there was a program that Sony made called Vegas, which as a musician, we had been using to record music. It was a multi-track. You could do music recording. So we’d done a couple of albums with Sony Vegas, and then at some point they introduced video into it. So you could edit video. And then like I said, the DSLRs came on, I bought the cheapest one you could get, which was a Canon T2I.
Tanya Musgrave: (04:33)
Yeah, yeah. I remember that.
Taylor Morden: (04:36)
It was like $300, but it could shoot shallow depth of field, nice looking-
Tanya Musgrave: (04:41)
Yeah. You put good glass on it, you can shoot anything.
Taylor Morden: (04:44)
Yeah. Or with the $100 50 millimeter lens that everybody had, it still looked pretty good. The nifty 50. So as flash was dying, video was becoming attainable and YouTube was a thing and video streaming on the internet was everywhere. And so I all of a sudden didn’t have a job really because the flash thing went away. I was playing in a band and we had somebody come shoot a music video for us. And we paid, I don’t know, $1,000 for the music video. At the time, that was a lot. We were an indie band, but they showed up on set with these DSLRs. And I was like, “Oh, that’s … I know how to edit video.” And I ended up editing that video and looking at all their footage and I was like, “I wonder how much those cameras cost.”
Taylor Morden: (05:38)
And so then it was sort of like, well, we can pay for the next music video or I can just buy a camera and then we have unlimited music videos. And so that was my transition point is I bought a camera, I made like the DIY backyard slider and shoulder rig at a PVC and did all that indie film stuff, I had the home Depot clamp lights, everything. Everything that you see on like-
Tanya Musgrave: (06:04)
Bed sheet.
Taylor Morden: (06:05)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. All of that. And I made a couple of music videos and then other bands would ask, “Hey, can you make us a music video?””Sure.” And then I made a few dollars doing music videos for a little while. And I was living in Washington DC at the time. And there’s a lot of like organizations, like the national headquarters for things and I started somehow weaseled my way into doing like corporate CEO videos and like business to business, basically a lot of what I had been doing in flash, but in video. And so I’m interviewing CEOs and cutting this thing together that they’re going to show at a conference and I started to make a little bit of money doing that.
Taylor Morden: (06:52)
I was doing commercials like little web spots for businesses. It was like a groupon knockoff that was local to DC and I was their video guy. And I would shoot three or four restaurants and bars in a week and make a little bit of money that way. I also started doing weddings, which every filmmaker who has weddings in their back pocket never wants to go back. It is what it is, but it was good money. And I was finally-
Tanya Musgrave: (07:23)
[crosstalk 00:07:23] right now.
Taylor Morden: (07:24)
Once I added weddings and real estate to the corporate videos and the music videos, I was making a living and I could pay all the bills and I was a videographer. Right? Not a filmmaker, never made a film, but I was a videographer. And I did a couple of years of that and countless weddings and a lot of commercials and a lot of real estate, oh my God, if I have to tour another property with a drone, it’s like … but it’s where the money was.
Tanya Musgrave: (07:54)
Yeah, exactly. Whatever puts bread on the table.
Taylor Morden: (07:57)
Exactly. Exactly. And then my wife and I decided Washington DC was not for us. It was too much traffic, too much pressure, everybody’s in a hurry all the time and we grew up on the West coast so we wanted to move back. About six years ago now, we moved back to the West coast, specifically Bend Oregon, which coincidentally is where The Last Blockbuster video in the world is. That’s another story. But we moved back to bend six years ago. And I went from having all of this work with these corporate, I had gotten pretty well entrenched into these organizations. I was doing educational things and medical things, and those jobs don’t exist-
Tanya Musgrave: (08:40)
You had a client base.
Taylor Morden: (08:40)
Yeah. I had a client base. They only exist in DC. And so while I was able to keep sort of editing jobs going, stuff I could do remotely and then fly out maybe once a year to shoot some stuff, that work started to dry up. And I found myself here in a pretty small town in Oregon with not a lot of work to do and this sort of skill set that I had built up over all these years. And so I asked my wife if it would be okay if I tried to make a feature documentary, because I have the time and I have the equipment and I have the skills, I think I can do it. I had no idea if I could.
Taylor Morden: (09:21)
I had made like three minute mini corporate documentaries, and little music documentaries about bands that were five minutes, web-based stuff like that. And so I asked her permission and I said, “I think I can make a documentary.” And I picked what I thought was a very attainable subject. It was about a music documentary about a band that I was a fan of in the nineties. They were a one hit wonder band and then they had like-
Tanya Musgrave: (09:48)
Here’s To Life.
Taylor Morden: (09:49)
Yes, Here’s To Life is the movie and they had this career that was like interesting to me. And I thought, well, I know some other people who would find that interesting. I’ll see if I can make a feature film out of that. No idea if I could. I called up the band, their sort of manager who was really the wife of the lead singer, she’s like, “I think it would be okay, but we don’t know why anybody would want to make a movie about this.” They’re like a working band, they were touring and that’s how they make their money. They just didn’t think people would care about the story. And I say, “Well, I care. Let me try and we’ll see if it’s anything.”
Taylor Morden: (10:30)
And I went, they’re based in Arizona. I flew down with all my equipment, hired a local person I think probably off of Craigslist to help me out on the shoots because you can fly very easily with a camera and lenses and microphones, but C stands and tripods and the lights and the heavy things it’s like just hire somebody local who has that stuff. It’s more than worth it. And I learned that on day one of my first feature film.
Taylor Morden: (10:59)
So I had this guy from New York who was in Arizona for some reason, answered the Craigslist ad. And we went and did this like four day shoot where I ended up getting, I don’t know, a third of the interviews that were ended up in the movie in that first four day chunk. And then just enough B roll and I gathered just enough archival stuff from the bands of like, “Hey, can I borrow all these VHS tapes? I’ll digitize them and send them back to you,” just enough to put together a Kickstarter video, and this was in 2016. And I cut together a Kickstarter video and tried to raise money. And I had no idea how much money a documentary would cost to make. So put up this Kickstarter and I said, “I think I’ll need $5,000.” So I set the goal at $5,000. I don’t know. You’re laughing [crosstalk 00:11:57].
Tanya Musgrave: (11:57)
I’m so sorry. Well, because I have been involved with a couple of documentaries and so-
Taylor Morden: (12:02)
So you know that it costs more than $5,000 to make a documentary. Now mind you, I figured I could do so much of it myself. I’m not paying a DP. I’m not paying a DIT. I’m not paying a sound person. I’m shooting everything. I’m really paying travel costs, lawyers, licensing fees and that’s pretty much it on that one. The band owned the music. So that was part of my initial plan of like, I know what costs money, what’s the workaround? But it’s weird because they owned the publishing side, but not the masters because they weren’t a major label back in the nineties. So I had to use live versions and rerecord stuff. That’s a nuts and bolts work around for anybody who’s trying to put a hit song in their movie.
Tanya Musgrave: (12:52)
Just have your friends do a cover of it. And then-
Taylor Morden: (12:54)
Yeah. So I’m still so like budget conscious and DIY, and I’m a musician that in The Last Blockbuster, we have a couple of hit, like well known hits songs in the movie and we could barely afford the publishing side. So we have a song in the movie that I played the instruments and sang myself.
Tanya Musgrave: (13:16)
Dude, get out. That’s amazing.
Taylor Morden: (13:18)
Because we couldn’t afford the master.
Tanya Musgrave: (13:21)
That’s amazing. Well, I mean like when you-
Taylor Morden: (13:23)
That’s something everyone can do.
Tanya Musgrave: (13:24)
Yeah. But when you have the skillset, come on. I mean, if it saves you … I remember there was a, it was going to be a short, I mean, not even 30 seconds of the song and they were wanting a hundred grand for it. And you’re just like, “Are you kidding me?” Like, “No, I can’t. We’ll choose something else I guess.”
Taylor Morden: (13:42)
Yeah. I’ve had people ask for 30 grand I think was the highest quote we got. So your song must have been more popular than ours, but I’ve never, we can’t do it. And then-
Tanya Musgrave: (13:54)
No. But if you have a skill set though, and you know then you’re just like, “No, you know what? I know my level of quality. So let’s go ahead and do it.” That’s amazing. So all right. So actually you did Here’s To Life and that’s like that one hit wonder band in the nineties. You also did Pick It Up, a film about Ska in the nineties. And so I’m noticing a trend of like nostalgia.
Taylor Morden: (14:16)
I’ll be 40 years old next year, which means I was-
Tanya Musgrave: (14:20)
40 years young, come on.
Taylor Morden: (14:22)
Yeah. I was a kid in the eighties and I was a teenager in the nineties. And I firmly believe in the power of nostalgia. I’m that person, that demographic, which also means I understand that demographic, things that are nostalgia filled feel like they’re made for me. And so it’s easier for me to know how to market something. This was something I thought about early on. I went from doing really well financially in Washington DC, doing all these jobs to trying to make independent documentary films and then make a living from those films. And so before I even made the first movie, I did my research and I knew this band has X number of fans on Facebook, this many on Instagram, I can tap into their fan base.
Taylor Morden: (15:17)
Also I can probably get them to buy a certain number of DVDs from me to sell at their concerts. So I had like a, okay, if I make the movie for 5,000 bucks, I know I can make an additional however much money through these channels. And that has kept up with me for the other two movies as well. Because if you don’t know your audience, especially in the world of like pop culture stuff and nostalgia stuff, you won’t be able to market it and sell it and I think that is way more important.
Taylor Morden: (15:55)
At least me with my level of filmmaking ability, I think the marketing is more important because I’ve reached the limit of what I can do with a DSLR and a cheap microphone and Craigslist helpers. But I think if you can know your audience and B, with Pick It Up with the Ska documentary, I’ve played trumpet and Ska bands for 20 years off and on. So I made that movie for me. I would’ve wanted to watch it if nobody else made it. So that makes it really easy for me to go on a podcast or go on Facebook and tell people, “Hey, if you like this thing that I also like, you should check out this movie that I made about that thing, because I assume if I like it, you’ll like it.”
Tanya Musgrave: (16:43)
The thing is that documentary filmmakers, they always seem to have a little bit more personal investment in whatever subjects they choose. And I’m curious where that line is specifically for documentary, where that line is between, okay, I’m doing this because I’m passionate about it as opposed to this is bread money where like, okay, they want a documentary about Peregrine falcons and something completely out of their wheelhouse. Is that something that a documentary … Would you have the luxury of even doing that or where is that line?
Taylor Morden: (17:18)
So I feel lucky that I haven’t had to do that from my very first Here’s To Life, that music documentary made money, it was profitable. And then the Ska music one also profitable. And then this Blockbuster documentary that’s just out, we’ll see. But I think the odds are very high. It’s doing pretty well as far as like press coverage and it’s getting a wider release than the other two. So I feel like I’m not going to have to do that, but I also having made three feature docs now, I don’t think I could do it. I would rather go back to shooting weddings I think because at least then it’s a different subject every week because you have to live with these things for years. Here’s To Life took me two years, Last Blockbuster from when I started to now that it’s out was almost four years and Pick It Up was three years concurrent with The Last Blockbuster.
Taylor Morden: (18:22)
So I was making two movies at once, which is a terrible plan. Don’t do that. I don’t think I could do it if it wasn’t something that was exciting or interesting to me because I’ve worked on other people’s … I’ve DPd other documentaries, political stuff. But I’ll do, if it’s for a good cause, like I did one for a spay and neuter your pets program thing. And that I don’t love filming sad animals, that’s sad, but you can get behind it if there’s a good cause. And I think a lot of documentarians do that, it’s for the greater good and it’s for, we’re going to end homelessness or we’re going to get everybody to stop eating processed foods or animals. And that’s awesome, but I don’t think I have that in me.
Tanya Musgrave: (19:13)
You’re glad that there are other people who have that passion. So let’s dig in though. So The Last Blockbuster quite literally about the last Blockbuster store in Bend Oregon, what pulled you into this project? Like this nostalgic type of thing, how did you come across it? What pulled you into it?
Taylor Morden: (19:32)
So like I said, I moved back to Oregon almost six years ago now. And when I did, I moved into a neighborhood I didn’t know in a town I had never lived in near where I grew up. And there was a Blockbuster video right by the house we moved into. This was like the day we moved in driving around, it was by the grocery store that was by my house. So I went to the grocery store for whatever, there’s a Blockbuster video. It was going out of business that day. There was a sign that says we’re closing. Clearance everything’s 90% off, which I had seen many times. I was a big video store buff and I used to have this subscription where you could get unlimited Blockbuster movies. You just had to go into the store and swap them out. So I would spend way too much time at Blockbuster and loved it.
Taylor Morden: (20:26)
But I also am a physical media collector. I love DVDs. I love Blu-rays. I love video games, everything you can get at a clearance sale at a Blockbuster video. So I went in, we hadn’t unpacked the boxes at our house. We actually did like a pods thing and had our stuff shipped. We had no stuff. We had no stuff. But the first stuff we had, a stack of DVDs and some X-Box games or something, just because I could. We didn’t have a DVD player or a TV set up, it was just like, there’s a Blockbuster, holy cow, but it was closing. I was like, “Well, the first day I move here, there’s a Blockbuster and then next week there won’t be.” That was like the first notion that there were any still left. This was at that point 2015 and I was certain they had all closed by then.
Taylor Morden: (21:16)
It’s not like I was keeping up, but I remember the announcement that they went bankrupt and I remembered all the ones that I knew of closing. So then you got to fast forward about a year living here in Bend, that store was closed and I live on one side of town and then most of the things to do are on the other side of town. So I spent a lot of time on this main thoroughfare driving through town. And as you drive on that, you can’t miss it. There’s a big Blockbuster video sign. You know the blue ticket shaped thing that says Blockbuster video. But I knew from my experience that that usually is just a sign because it costs money to take the sign down. So the stores sit empty, but they leave those signs up. They’re all over the country. They still exist. You can see them on many road trips. So I drove past it for months thinking that’s too bad they can’t afford to take the sign down. What a weird town I live in. It’s across the street from the radio shack and there’s all these-
Tanya Musgrave: (22:15)
Circus city.
Taylor Morden: (22:15)
Yeah. It’s a weird kind of town. There’s a Kmart down the road. The radio shack and Kmart are both gone now, but that’s for somebody else’s documentary. But I drove by that thing for months until late 2016, early 2017 when I finally decided to just stop and check it out thinking that I was going to look in the windows and see the empty racks and it was going to be an abandoned Blockbuster because you see those on YouTube and Facebook, everybody’s like, “Oh, I found one and the Dropbox is still there and you can see inside. The cash register still says whatever.” So I thought I was going to do that. But what I found was it was like nothing had changed. You walk in, it was like going through a time warp to 2002 or 1998. It felt the same. It looked the same. It smelled the same.
Tanya Musgrave: (23:10)
Blockbuster has a smell, it does.
Taylor Morden: (23:14)
Yes, it totally has a smell and that was the first thing that struck me was you walk in and it’s like, I’m home. I had spent so many years spending every Friday, Thursday, Sunday night at Blockbuster that since memory is so strong, the smell really took you back before anything else. But then at the same time, it was surreal because it was Blockbuster, but this was 2017, they had all the new movies. So it was like, I was in a Blockbuster from the nineties, but they had the new Star Wars and they had the new Avengers movie and they had whatever the newest things were on the new release wall. It was like no one told them Blockbuster was gone. They didn’t get the memo.
Tanya Musgrave: (24:00)
It was like, did you guys know? You just keep on coming to work?
Taylor Morden: (24:03)
Have you guys heard of Netflix? There’s this whole thing where you can watch movies on your phone now, but no, it was like that. And that day, I didn’t know, and this was before I started on my second movie even, but I didn’t know if there was a movie there or not. But the nostalgia in me, the nineties kid was like, “Well, I’m just going to ask if they would mind if I start bringing cameras by and start shooting some stuff. I don’t know anything. I don’t know how many Blockbusters there are in the world, but this is one of them and that’s interesting to me and I’m a filmmaker, so I’m going to start filming.” So I started right away. I started filming and at the time there were still a dozen or so Blockbusters left in the world.
Taylor Morden: (24:48)
So I didn’t think I was making a documentary about The Last Blockbuster, just I had thoughts of maybe I’ll go to all 12 or maybe it will be about what kinds of towns these video stores are in or maybe it will be about video stores in general, because there’s still Hollywood video and there’s family video in the midwest and there’s at least 12 Blockbusters. But real life sort of happened. I started making my other movie while I was thinking of, should I go to these 12 stores, blah, blah, blah. And then I would get messages from the store owner saying, “Oh, another one closed. Now it’s down to 10 or nine or you should come by.” And so it became a much bigger story just as documentaries sometimes do because real life happened because the store I happened to film at almost four years ago, did end up becoming The Last Blockbuster. And so as a filmmaker, that’s like, I couldn’t have written that if I wanted to.
Tanya Musgrave: (25:50)
Yeah. That’s like, that’s gold that just dropped into your lap. Yeah. You had some pretty high profile guests too. Yeah. Like Kevin Smith and Sam Levine from Freaks And Geeks. For doc filmmakers just starting out, where do you even start? How did you go from just, we’re going to film from, we’ll just film around here to we’re going to get all these people involved too? And how you got those people involved with your project.
Taylor Morden: (26:18)
Yeah. So the first thing I did, I had done a couple of shoots at Blockbuster, but when I started to realize that it was going to be, if not the last one, one of the last ones, and it was gaining this sort of organic momentum, I was deeply entrenched in making another movie. So I immediately was like, “Well, I’m not going to have time to really give this the attention it deserves.” So there aren’t a ton of filmmakers in Bend Oregon, but I did reach out to somebody I had met through a film meetup group on like the meetup website. But he was the only person I knew who had done Hollywood work and he has an IMDB. So he invited me over just out of coincidence because he had some time off to watch some foreign movie that I had never seen that was one of his favorites because we’re movie people.
Taylor Morden: (27:14)
And he invited me over. We were supposed to watch this movie and instead I go, “Hey, I’ve got this idea. I have a little bit of footage. I think this is going to be a cool movie, but I don’t think I could do it by myself. Would you want to come on board?” And I pitched it to him right there and we never watched the movie. We just spent all night talking about how cool this could be. Wouldn’t it be great if it was the last one? Oh my God.
Taylor Morden: (27:43)
So I got him on board and he had been a writer in Hollywood a long time ago, late nineties and stuff, and moved up here to get away from Hollywood. And he had sort of a different skillset and certainly different connections. He had been a writer on the Weird Al show and Dexter’s Laboratory, Power Puff Girls. So my thought was this guy will have some connections. We can start there. I had a couple of connections. I had done some short films and one at some festivals. And I knew like a few people who knew people who knew people, that kind of thing. But what really set us off again, and this was right after I had done another Kickstarter campaign for the Ska documentary that had been wildly successful way beyond what I had expected.
Taylor Morden: (28:39)
And so I was of the mindset of like, well, this is just how you make movies now. If you put up a Kickstarter and that first one by the way that I asked for $5,000, raised $12,000, the movie ended up costing $15,000 which is cheap, but a lot more than five. And then the second one, that Kickstarter raised $118,000. We had asked for 40.
Tanya Musgrave: (29:02)
Oh my stars. Yeah.
Taylor Morden: (29:04)
So then I’m thinking, okay, well, step one, we’ve got this Blockbuster footage that I shot from before. Let’s put up a Kickstarter and sort of stake our claim to it, get it out in the media that we’re making this movie because as it becomes the last one, a lot of people are going to want to make this movie. It’s not a unique idea. Like you could tell just from our conversations of reaching out to people, “Hey, do you want to be involved? We’re making a movie about Blockbuster video.””What do you mean there’s still a Blockbuster video? That’s crazy. I got to get in on that.” And that I think to your question is the hook that really helped us. For example, Sam Levine from Freaks And Geeks, I looked him up. You can go on IMDB pro if you pay for the account, looked up his manager, emailed his manager. I had known he was a movie fan from Doug Benson’s podcast. Doug loves movies.
Taylor Morden: (29:56)
Sam Levine is on there all the time doing movie trivia and he loves movies. And so I thought this guy loves movies. I love movies. I’m making a movie about movies. Also, I know not to start at the top. You don’t reach out to Quentin Tarantino first. You reach out to Sam Levine who was in a Quentin Tarantino movie. You know what I mean? Like go attainable. Same thing I did with the music docs. My first doc, it was about this band that wasn’t that well known. The second one, I had no doubt in it and rancid and all these bigger name bands, but I started smaller. And so that’s kind of what happened is like my partner in the film, Zeke and I, we both reached out to people we knew, but we also made a list early on of people who had worked at video stores, people who had connections to video stores.
Taylor Morden: (30:51)
And then we made a second list of, well, who do we know? Who do we know who’s a friend of a friend, and we just, we reached out to everybody on both lists. And we ended up with a good mix because, I think because of the subject matter, because you can reach out to people and say, “We’re making a Blockbuster video documentary,” and everybody, even if they passed and didn’t want to be in the movie, they still were like, “Oh man, I remember Blockbuster. I spent so many nights at Blockbuster and I rented this and I did that. And I met my wife at a Blockbuster. And when we used to go on dates …” And that kind of thing. So it was easier than from pitching a documentary about the memory span of goldfish and I’m trying to get Chrissy Tiegen to be in that documentary. It’s like why?
Tanya Musgrave: (31:39)
It’s like all of those lists that you see on Facebook, you scroll past and there’s just like, oh, nineties babies will get these. And you’re just like, “Oh, hey, eighties babies will get these.” And without fail, I go through every single one of them because I’m so huge into nostalgia too. There was this one time I rode an elevator for like five minutes because I got in and I smelled something so familiar, like what is it? And I couldn’t figure it out. I was just like, “What in the world?” And I just rode it. I kept on riding it until it hit me, it was from kindergarten. Yeah. It was nuts. Like those scents smells, I mean, it’s true. It was Barbasol shaving cream that my kindergarten teacher she would squirt some in front of us and we would practice our letters. That’s how we would draw on it. And it was Barbasol. And so I was in this work, this corporate work building, where of course you have these old corporate men that are … you’re using your classic Barbasol. So-
Taylor Morden: (32:44)
That’s amazing.
Tanya Musgrave: (32:46)
I thought about it, you can’t even have some nostalgia when it comes to stuff like TikToks because you can’t find them again. I mean, you sort of can if you follow certain things, but if you’re scrolling past things, you’re just like, “Oh, I saw this thing and it’s near impossible to try to pull it up again.” So you’re just like … and I know that there is nostalgia obviously for people growing up in these days, but it’s almost as if their nostalgia, it’s like we’re the last age of actual nostalgia too. I don’t even know how to explain it.
Taylor Morden: (33:19)
No, I think about that too and I’ve read articles about it. And I think, I don’t know if you’re near my age, but people who grew up-
Tanya Musgrave: (33:28)
34. Yeah.
Taylor Morden: (33:28)
Yeah. Okay. So you were even more than me, you were the last generation to not have high speed internet as a kid or a cell phone as a teenager. I didn’t have a cell phone until I was 28. So I lived an adult life before cell phones and I’m the last age of people who can say that. And so I do think of course everyone’s going to have nostalgia for their childhood. People growing up now are going to remember the pandemic and things like that.
Tanya Musgrave: (33:59)
They’re going to remember Fortnite and-
Taylor Morden: (34:01)
Yeah, prior to that, it’s the giant things, the Fortnite, the pop culture, things that affect everybody, everybody will still remember. But the way people my age have nostalgia for the minutiae or for like movies that weren’t big hits. In the future, people will have nostalgia for the Avengers or Star Wars ones-
Tanya Musgrave: (34:29)
Game of Thrones.
Taylor Morden: (34:30)
And Game of Thrones and the huge things, but they’re not going to have, like I have nostalgia for like not just Saved By The Bell, but the spinoff show, California Dreams that nobody watched, because there weren’t other things to watch. Or I have nostalgia not just for the Ninja turtles, but for the weird spinoff characters that only existed as action figures. But because it’s all we had, we have more connection to those things I think because we didn’t have the whole universe of knowledge at our fingertips. There wasn’t Google, there wasn’t Alexa or anybody you could ask any-
Tanya Musgrave: (35:03)
Yeah. You were hyper focused on those things.
Taylor Morden: (35:05)
Yeah. And you had to work for the things. Like for me to watch a movie as a teenager, I had to return bottles and cans for the five cent deposit. And then I had to walk, it was like a quarter mile to this gas station near my house that also rented movies and walk and I’d turn in the cans and I’d have like the $2 it costs to rent a movie. I’d walk it home, maybe it wasn’t rewound. I’d have to rewind the tape and then I’d finally get to watch the movie and it was The Net starring Sandra Bullock. Even though that’s a good movie, but I have this emotional bond to it.
Tanya Musgrave: (35:39)
Yes. I remember that one.
Taylor Morden: (35:40)
I’m connected to that movie because it took me hours just to get to watch it. And so I have nostalgia and like you, you just reacted to The Net, which is you shouldn’t, right? No one in 20 years is going to look back and go, “Man, Bird Box, that was the thing.” That I think is the difference is because there wasn’t as much content and it was harder to get, so we have a stronger connection to it. We had to physically go and get the thing and put it in the machine that does the thing. Same with music. Like we had to get cassette tapes and CDs and then-
Tanya Musgrave: (36:16)
Wait in line.
Taylor Morden: (36:18)
Yeah. You have to wait in line and go to a place.
Tanya Musgrave: (36:20)
Or wait on the radio. So you can like-
Taylor Morden: (36:23)
Yeah. For years, my only copy, I loved the song Loser by Beck. [crosstalk 00:36:30] great song. The only copy I had was taped off the radio and the DJ talked through the first bit of it. So to me, that song just has talking at the beginning.
Tanya Musgrave: (36:41)
Yeah. Yeah. There’s one I remember I actually got a chance to, I requested a song. I think it was by like Enrique Iglesias and I requested it and you know how they play back part of the request, I got that on my tape.
Taylor Morden: (37:02)
Oh, that’s awesome.
Tanya Musgrave: (37:02)
So I got the DJ saying my name and he’s like, “Yeah, Tanya.”
Taylor Morden: (37:08)
Yeah. I had a couple of those because my friends and I it would be like all requests Friday night on the radio, we would always call in. We would try to tape those and then it wouldn’t matter what the song was. We just wanted to hear our name on the radio.
Tanya Musgrave: (37:16)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got you. So all right. We got to get back on documentary.
Taylor Morden: (37:22)
Nostalgia. Nostalgia. Nostalgia.
Tanya Musgrave: (37:23)
Nostalgia. See this is how powerful it is. All right. So you’ve gotten it made. I’ve been involved with a couple of documentaries and in that world, it always seems to be hit and miss. I mean, I guess like with all indie films, but it always seems to be really hit and miss with distribution. And because documentaries by nature have had a hard time making money back, unless they make it bigger or they have like a very, very tight budget, it’s always a little bit more difficult. And so, I mean, it’s awesome that it doesn’t have as many upfront costs, but compared to narrative, but it can still be a considerable amount that needs to be raised. So this is actually a listener question. How do you approach financing and distribution? Where do you find that? Where did you find this distribution?
Taylor Morden: (38:13)
Yeah. So I learned that as I went. On my first movie, like I said, I had no idea what it would cost and asked for not enough money and then spent all that money and then went out of pocket a few thousand dollars of my own on the hopes that I could make some money back and I didn’t know anything about film distribution. I didn’t know who you would ask, who you would show your movie to, to ask for distribution. I had heard about film festivals, but I had never been to one. I didn’t know anything about it. So I finished that movie and I come from the world of musicians. We make CDs and we sell them out of the trunk of our car and that’s how you make your money back and you sell t-shirts and that’s … So from the very beginning, I knew merchandising as a way to make money.
Taylor Morden: (39:02)
So I made DVDs, sold DVDs direct, put up a website, put up a PayPal button and I’m selling them out of my garage, 20 bucks a pop. I mail them myself. I still mail all the movies myself years later, but I also made posters. And I also, you can click on the website and I’ll sign the poster and that’s worth something to somebody because I know that because it’s worth something to me. I get autographs for whatever reason. I did a soundtrack to one of my movies. I do buttons and stickers and postcards and all of the things that I knew from being in bands was a way to make money. So on my first movie-
Tanya Musgrave: (39:44)
Got to love that merch table.
Taylor Morden: (39:44)
Yeah. I never even tried to reach out to a distributor. I didn’t know what a sales agent was. I didn’t know how you would approach, but I put the movie out on my own, right? It’s on my website, some place, some internet group, probably a Facebook group or a YouTube video told me that Amazon would let you upload your own movie through Amazon video direct. So six months after the movie had been out on DVD, I put it up there for just to purchase because I thought, oh, if I let people rent it, I won’t make any money. Very foolish in hindsight, but this was already when they started reducing the rates for prime, so I never put it up on prime, but it’s still up for purchase and rent on Amazon and I still make a tiny bit of money every month from this movie that I made years ago with Kickstarter money. That was the whole plan with that.
Taylor Morden: (40:38)
I also submitted it to a film festival or two. I got into the Phoenix Film Festival, which was awesome, but it was because the band was from Phoenix. It was like a big deal and we did a little theatrical thing where we rented some theaters, played it, sold tickets, then the band would play and we would do this whole thing. And I did that again with my second movie, but by this time I had learned about distributors and sales agents and how you get a movie to the masses. But again, it was a music doc and it was much more personal to me. So I got 10 different offers from distributors. And a lot of them came right after the Kickstarter because when you raise $118,000 on Kickstarter, the shark starts swimming around. And they’re like, there’s blood in the water. Oh, this one is popular for some reason.
Taylor Morden: (41:30)
We don’t get it. We don’t know why Ska music, what is that? That’s dumb. It’s a niche market, but we want it because it’s going to make money. Right? So I got the offers from all these distributors and some of them were okay. Some had money up front, some were okay terms. But by this point I had spent years now listening to filmmaking podcasts and people on the internet and all the Facebook groups and people saying, “Be careful of distributors.” And the way they connected with me was they associated it like record labels. And I knew what record labels used to do. They take your thing, they give you your money up front. You never see another dime and they’re going to market it how they’re going to market it, you’re not going to have a say, you’re never going to own it again. They’re going to take it away from you and I didn’t want that.
Taylor Morden: (42:20)
So for the Ska music documentary, I knew that I could market it myself. I was convinced and I did math too. I was like, “Well, if my first movie has one band in it with 20,000 Facebook fans and 10,000 on Instagram and it made this many dollars, this movie, and I had a spreadsheet that would say like, okay, well, this person who’s in my movie has 200,000 Twitter followers and this one has 50,000 Facebook, and it was like which platform for which person. But I knew my audience was in the millions versus the first one being in the tens of thousands. So I extrapolated the math and I said, “If I put it on myself, I know it’ll make at least $100,000, which will pay off everything we spent and almost pay me for the three years that I spent making it. If you don’t pay yourself, these all sound very profitable, but I still haven’t made minimum wage on any of them.
Tanya Musgrave: (43:20)
Yeah, no. I hear you from [crosstalk 00:43:23].
Taylor Morden: (43:22)
So I self distributed on that one. I turned down all the distributor offers mostly because they couldn’t tell me how they would market it. They didn’t understand the fan base because it’s such a niche thing. And they would say to me, “We can get you on all the platforms and we can do a marketing push, but we don’t know how to market it. So you’re going to have to do all that.” And I was like, “Well, if I’m going to do that work anyway, I’m going to not give you 30% of my money.”
Tanya Musgrave: (43:53)
Yeah. Like why do I need you?
Taylor Morden: (43:54)
Why do I need you? Right. And I’m not sure in hindsight whether that was the best idea or not, but that movie, I still mail DVDs out of my garage and it’s currently paying the bills. Yeah. But retroactively if you do the math, it’s not minimum wage. It’s like I donated my time for a couple of years and now I have passive income. But with The Last Blockbuster, A, I have a partner on the movie. So it’s not even fully my decision to make. B, it’s different. It’s not a niche audience. Everybody knows who Kevin Smith is. Everybody knows what is Blockbuster is, everybody. The marketing strategy is tell everybody about it and then some people will watch it, right? It’s not like you have to target only people who live in this … My first movie, all of the ads are targeted towards Arizona because the band is from Arizona and that does well.
Taylor Morden: (44:49)
And as soon as I run an ad in Michigan, nobody buys it. But I know that. It’s simple. So with this one, we took it more seriously, but also we have bigger names in it and it’s a more popular thing. The distributors gave us better offers. And I think we ended up again, maybe eight different distributors had offers in. And there were a couple that were more legitimate that we were leaning towards. What I look for is what other movies have they done? How did they market them? How many movies are they doing? Are they putting out 20 movies a month and just promoting the popular ones or are they putting out two movies a month and putting all their weight behind those? And so we weighed that and we looked and okay, well, this one has the higher MG, which is the minimum guarantee, but this one has the better terms.
Taylor Morden: (45:42)
And then we sort of pit them against each other and said, “Well, we like this, but if you could just match the minimum guarantee that the other guys are offering …” And we did that. We bounced them back and forth a little bit and then we ended up going with 1091, which used to be the Orchard and they have more of a music background, but they have done What We Do In The Shadows, Hunt For The Wilder People. They’ve had some cool indie movies, but just in the conversations with them, they also seem to really get it. They were like, “We get it, we love this movie. We know how to market it.” And from what I’ve seen, and I think we signed that deal six months ago now. And they do seem to get it. They’re doing the work.
Taylor Morden: (46:26)
They got us I think the week we signed the deal, they got us in variety talking about that deal. I’m like, “Oh, okay, well you get it and your PR team knows what’s up and we’re doing it.” We’re very happy with that, but that’s not to say that some of the other offers weren’t also good. And also the movie’s just now out. We won’t, because of how things are paid, we won’t know like financially how well it’s doing or if we’re being paid on time, we won’t know any of those factors that are very important probably until next spring. Because when you put your movie on iTunes, it sells however many copies, iTunes pays the distributor and then they don’t pay you until the next quarter. They get from everybody, right? Amazon, iTunes, Fandango, X-Box wherever, and then they don’t pay you until the following quarter.
Taylor Morden: (47:22)
So our movie’s out in December. It’ll make some money in December and that’ll be quarter four of 2020, which we will get paid in quarter one of 2021. So in the short term, all I know is we’ve managed to get DVDs on the shelf at Blockbuster and they’re selling them and renting them and we do get paid from those. We kept our physical rights because I feel like I know how to market physical. I’ve done three movies now. So we didn’t sign over our physical or theatrical rights.
Taylor Morden: (47:54)
Theatrical didn’t matter because 2020 is nonsense and we ended up doing a handful of drive in theaters, which was cool. But I feel like it could have had a cool indie theater run because my previous movie, we did 90 theaters in 10 countries or something like that. And it made some decent money in theaters, which indie movies don’t usually especially documentaries. But I feel like because it’s a music thing and I got the bands involved and I knew how to market that, I was able to make a little bit of money, but also a ton of publicity through theatrical. I really wanted to do that with The Last Blockbuster. I think it would have been super fun, but the world had different plans.
Tanya Musgrave: (48:37)
You were talking about what made those particular terms more legit and stuff compared to the others.
Taylor Morden: (48:45)
We’re not allowed to talk specifics about the contract because they put that in the contract, which I can say that. One clause in the contract says don’t talk about this contract. But in general, in signing a distribution deal for an indie movie especially a documentary, some of the things we were looking for were a short term, like some of the offers were like for 15 years, they would own all the rights and okay, I guess, but why not do five years and then renegotiate? If you still want it, great. If not, I can take the rights back. So we didn’t like that. You of course want a minimum guarantee. You want somebody to pay you upfront, not so much for the money, because that’s just a loan against your own money.
Taylor Morden: (49:32)
But if they give you money upfront, then they’re committed to making money with the movie because they’re already out of pocket and they don’t get that money back unless the movie sells. Right? So that was our theory of like, if we can get somebody to commit a certain amount of money in advance, which we were just going to use to pay off our debt that we’re carrying because making movies is not cheap. Thought it was cheap, it’s not cheap.
Tanya Musgrave: (49:58)
More than $5,000.
Taylor Morden: (49:59)
It is more than $5,000.
Tanya Musgrave: (50:02)
Sorry to break it to you.
Taylor Morden: (50:04)
Yeah, no, I did learn that along the way.
Tanya Musgrave: (50:07)
No, I was talking about our listeners. I was telling our listeners, sorry to break it to you our listeners. A documentary will-
Taylor Morden: (50:14)
You can make a documentary for a couple of thousand dollars. I guarantee you could, but actually you can’t because you have to get errors and omissions insurance if you want to sell it and you have to get a lawyer if you have any fair use materials, if you have any licensed footage at all, you need a lawyer for your contracts, for your paperwork, for all that. So I think it’s like $5,000 minimum if you do everything else yourself and that’s just for legal and insurance. So no, you can’t make a movie for $5,000. You can insure a movie for $5,000.
Tanya Musgrave: (50:52)
Yeah. Well, so we have some listener questions. There’s quite a few of them, so buckle up.
Taylor Morden: (51:00)
Alright. I’m buckled.
Tanya Musgrave: (51:01)
Alright. How much scripting do you do and what does that end up looking like?
Taylor Morden: (51:06)
So the Blockbuster had the most, the other two movies I did write an outline and that looked like just bullet points of topics, especially pre-interview you want to know the whole movie so you know what to ask everyone about. So in a documentary, we would write and on the music ones like what’s the beginning, middle and end of this story and what are the points we want to make sure we hit. And that was kind of like an outline. It was like a three page PDF that we’d print out and take with us to interviews. Sometimes it’d be formatted as just the bullet points and sometimes it would be questions. I would change it if you’re going to a big interview like a Kevin Smith interview, you want to make sure they’re specific and you’re not doing extra ones in there. You don’t have as much time.
Taylor Morden: (51:50)
But for the most part, it’s like a three page PDF of topics and questions. For the Ska movie, we did have a lot of historical narration and that was scripted because we’re recording a voiceover obviously. And I had that written by a writer. She had written a bunch of books on the subject. So it was historically super accurate. I went in and punched up some of the language for entertainment purposes, but that looked like a script, it’s just broken up into each chunk and it looks like a script. And then for Blockbuster, Zeke who was the writer and my partner on the whole thing came from writing in television so that was much more structured. Going in, we did that same thing where we knew as much of the story as we could from day one so that the interviews would all touch on the same topics.
Taylor Morden: (52:41)
But there was also much more emphasis on that one with a story because there’s this real time story of the store and what’s happening. And we had years worth of footage. There’s any number of stories we could have told. So not only did we write the script or the outline at the very beginning, but towards the end, before we went into editing, he wrote another like a structured outline for the editor that was like, I know we have this footage, here’s how it should flow. And that was very useful from the standpoint of making sure it had a story arc. We knew it had a beginning, middle and end, but is there drama? Is there tension? Is anyone going to care because everybody knows Blockbuster ran out of business. Can we make that interesting?
Taylor Morden: (53:27)
So things like that were all written in that second, it’s not really an outline. It’s like a two page document that was … I mean, I guess it’s an outline, but it was more like a flow chart of ideas. And I’ve certainly done the thing with all the post-it notes up on the whiteboard. Like for the Ska movie, for sure we had so many topics that I would just like, well, can we move this one here? Does that make sense? And I think pretty much any way you can write stuff down, we wrote stuff down.
Tanya Musgrave: (53:58)
Okay. Next one. So talking about those interviews, you’re talking about pre-interviews. There always seems to be this tension between needing to understand their story ahead of time in order to have the good questions, but you also need the story to come out fresh. So how much do you talk to your subjects before interviewing them?
Taylor Morden: (54:15)
It depends on the subject. If I know a lot about them, I might not do any research and just assume I know what I’m doing. And it depends, some people are talkative when you’re setting up and some people aren’t. Like we did Jamie Kennedy for The Last Blockbuster. We showed up, we did it at his house. He was like, “You can film over there by the pool,” and then he left and we got all set up and we’re like, “Can you come back?” And so there was no interaction beforehand. But like Kevin Smith, we talked the whole time while we’re getting the lights ready and all that about movies and stuff.
Tanya Musgrave: (54:52)
How do you choose who to interview first, like main characters or supporting characters or is it just purely a scheduling thing? Like you’re going to be here.
Taylor Morden: (55:00)
In my world that has purely been scheduling. I will say though that there are certain people for all of my movies that I’ll end up going back and interviewing again. So again, who we can get and then as the story comes together, if there’s somebody who you’re like, “Oh, they ended up being more important and I didn’t even ask them about this one thing,” then you schedule a followup. So that’s why you’ll see I think in all three of my movies, some people have more than one interview background because we interviewed them more than once.
Tanya Musgrave: (55:30)
Got it. So since endings in documentary are unknown, does it require always working on multiple films in order to land one or two that end up in an interesting or fulfilling way, or as you mentioned before, don’t do that?
Taylor Morden: (55:46)
Well, it’s hard because two of my movies are historical. So I knew the ending before I even started. They both take place in the nineties. I am like, “I know the end of this story. It happened 20 years ago and nothing’s going to change that.” That also makes them sort of evergreen documentaries, like a movie about JFK is going to be relevant now and in 20 years. Nothing’s going to change. But with the Blockbuster one, we were following in real time. And so I was grateful that I had other projects going, because I thought the Blockbuster documentary would take two years tops and it’s now been four. And that’s because things kept happening. I had no idea they were going to be the last one.
Taylor Morden: (56:28)
And then when they were the last one, there was so much hype and so much fanfare surrounding it that all these other things started happening. And also because it’s in the news, that’s when you get the call that Kevin Smith will be in your movie and Adam Brody and all these people who probably wouldn’t have done it and had they not seen it on the Ellen DeGeneres show or CNN or something. So it definitely changed on that one. But for the other ones, we knew the ending before we started.
Tanya Musgrave: (56:53)
Last question, what questions should I have asked you?
Taylor Morden: (56:56)
Oh, that’s deep. I don’t know, man. I never feel like I asked the right questions. I always kick myself after an interview when I’m interviewing somebody else the next day. Why didn’t I ask about that one thing?
Tanya Musgrave: (57:09)
This is how you cover yourself.
Taylor Morden: (57:12)
Yeah. Depends on your audience. But I think there’s a lot of nuts and bolts in how the sausage is made stuff about music licensing and waivers and location releases and things like that.
Tanya Musgrave: (57:25)
We’ll just bring you on for a speaker at one of these events.
Taylor Morden: (57:30)
Sure. Are events ever going to happen again?
Tanya Musgrave: (57:33)
Who knows? Who knows at this point? I have no idea.
Taylor Morden: (57:36)
Someone should make a documentary about that.
Tanya Musgrave: (57:37)
Everyone, The Last Blockbuster was released this week on demand. You can find it-
Taylor Morden: (57:46)
Lastblockbustermovie.com should have links, but it’s on Amazon, iTunes, Fandango, X-Box, Google play, the places where movies are. You can also get the DVD Blu-ray combo from Blockbuster. It’s the first Blockbuster exclusive DVD since 2011. You got to order it from their website, bendblockbuster.com. But the kids who work at Blockbuster in the little uniform will pick it up, pack it in a little box and mail it from Blockbuster video to your house.
Tanya Musgrave: (58:13)
Oh my God.
Taylor Morden: (58:14)
Which is pretty cool.
Tanya Musgrave: (58:15)
That is amazing. Taylor, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it.
Taylor Morden: (58:21)
Thank you. This was super fun.
Tanya Musgrave: (58:23)
Taylor, thanks so much again for your time. Be well and God bless. Thanks for joining us on There To Here.