This is an excellent question. Considering Hell is not a Steven Spielberg movie starring George Clooney, how exactly are we going to get it in front of people when it’s finished? Distributors are not currently on the phone asking if they can open it on three thousand screens at Christmas, though I guess that could just be because they don’t have my phone number.
While the first, second, and third goals of working on Hell are to make the funniest, most entertaining movie we can, we obviously want as many people as possible to see it once it’s finished. How? Are we going to sell it online? Send it to festivals? What?
We could obviously distribute the movie online (and we will), but not many people are going to watch it if not many people know about it.
We could submit the movie to festivals (and we will), but comedies like this aren’t usually the kind of fare people watch at Cannes. There just aren’t enough quiet scenes of characters staring off into space while contemplating their purpose for wealthy festival donors to feel like they’ve encountered art.
We could try to find a distributor for the movie (something we're looking into), but that’s no guarantee of anything. Even distributed independent films may not be seen by many people.
So what’s the plan then?
As it stands, our plan is to tour and promote the film in small theaters in various parts of the US and Canada (and maybe even the UK) for anywhere from around five to nine months. We want to make these screenings into events, where the musicians from the movie might play or comedians might perform sets or there’s a Q&A with the filmmakers before / after the show.
The goal here is to build at least a small following (and mailing list) before we put the movie online, before it’s distributed by a vendor, before it’s been submitted to many festivals. That way we have an audience of people who will know about it and tell others about it before we try to sell it for download and present it on a larger stage. We’ll start with premieres in SF and LA, then tour the Bay Area and Southern California, go to New England and New York, and on from there.