Arrrrgh Jim Lad

Posted August 16, 2010 02:08 AM by Tommy Morghen 1 comments

Now and again, as you’d expect, I Google “Diary of a Bad Lad”. Thanks to the DVD release we were featuring on about 100,000 pages. But when I looked yesterday this had suddenly shot up to more than a million!

So what had happened? We’d finally arrived and been pirated.

Now Hollywood hates pirates and it wants to see everyone who ever rips or downloads one of their movies behind bars.

But it set me thinking. Outside of the blockbusters, people tend to buy DVDs of movies they’ve already seen – or have been strongly recommended by their mates. Hollywood controls virtually everything that’s on at your local cinema. Indie films like Bad Lad don’t get a look in anywhere other than a few screens in London, which will only book your film if you’re prepared to spend a fortune on marketing, and you’ll end up making a really big loss.

But the pirates? They’re doing the no-budget indie filmmaker a service. Overnight you become ten times more visible. Suddenly people are rating your film on imdb, watching it in Bangkok, and even, and I mean this is priceless, tweeting about it in Iran! Think about it: how much would you have to spend on PR to get any of that?

So, all my new fine and dandy friends, I going to have to start thinking about some ways of saying thank you. Maybe it’s time I started making some Bad Lad T-shirts – what’s your favourite line from the film?

Hey, it gets even better – someone’s just started promoting downloading Bad Lad to their mates in Saudi Arabia!

Come on guys, join me on my Facebook page and let’s start at dialogue…

Reader Comments

1 comments

MY OPINION

From: Sibusiso, 07/01/11 06:23 AM

HONESTLY I THINK: DIARY OF A BAD LAD is the best documentary film i ever saw.as a film maker i thnk its inspiring to me and it pushes the realnes of the content you can shoot its my number 1