Seven Podcasts & Forty-Five Publications You Can Pitch Yourself To. Plus: Should the Art Director of OBSESSION Have Been Paid More? Warning: you may not like what I have to say.

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Kelli McNeil-Yellen is a twenty year marketing and PR pro who finally made the leap to indie filmmaking with her award-winning Slamdance film DARUMA, now available on platforms. Learn more about DARUMA here. To work with Kelli, click here.

It’s a busy week here at KLA Media Group, with several film launches coming up. In this week’s subscriber post I’m sharing some outlets you can pitch yourself to as all press is good press (right?) and you can use these outlets to build your media footprint.

Last week I launched a new feature in Film Soup Zine called “Indie Film News In Brief”. It’s meant to mirror the weekly round ups that the trades do but for indie film. If you’d like to submit your news, including festival news, casting news, production news, basically anything you’d see in the trades, click on the link below.

A huge thanks to Courtney Romano and the FilmStack Daily Digest for giving this new feature a shout out in yesterday’s round up!

And be sure to check out how last week’s post was formatted to help with your submission guidelines!

Submit News Here

This story is doing the rounds in entertainment circles but here’s the TL/DR version (too long, didn’t read) in case you missed it:

Curry Barker’s breakout horror film Obsession, was made for $750K and has now past $220M worldwide. A discussion was sparked after art director Sally Choi revealed she earned about $6,700 after taxes (or $300/day) on the film. Choi said she accepted the indie-rate pay but later regretted not pushing to unionize the production, which would have provided higher wages and benefits for crew members.

Okay. Here’s my hot take:

1. No one knows if a film is going to be successful or not when they make it. It’s so incredibly unlikely that ANY indie film is going to make its money back ever. In fact, most films are made as proof of concepts so filmmakers can show off their talents and get hired to do something else.

2. If she'd have flipped the production to go IATSE, then there might have been a high likelihood that the film would have never gotten made in the first place. There was no way we could have done our film on an IATSE budget. What with the permits and the insurance and everything else, for a micro budget film, we would have never been able to make the film.

3. This was her first feature film. This in and of itself provided a huge opportunity for her, and now, from a PR standpoint, she’s basically thrown cold water over her future prospects.

4. She signed a contract. I am not sure if they didn’t offer backend or she traded backend for her day rate, but it seems like backend was not part of the deal. And I am sorry, but a deal is a deal.

5. Backend is a myth. Everyone who has worked in this industry long enough knows that the likelihood that you will see backend on ANYTHING is next to none. Don’t believe me? The writer for Freddy Mercury’s biopic famously never got paid a penny more than his fee because of Hollywood accounting. He eventually took the producers to court and sued producers over his 5% backend profits from the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. Despite the film grossing over $910 million worldwide on a $52 million budget, the studio claimed the movie actually lost $51 million, netting him zero backend pay.

So there’s my take on this sticky, nuanced situation. I want to hear from you: what’s your take on it? Because everyone knows, a film like this is the exception to the rule, not the rule itself, and it all depends on the language written in their contracts.

Every week I do a round-up of headlines that are pertinent to our business and list them here in my newsletter. I do my best to provide non-paywalled articles when possible! Here’s this week’s fresh catch:

• MoviesMcDonald’s No-Clips Out of Reality with Unexpected ‘Backrooms’ Short

• Netflix Film Chief Says Streamer Won’t Work With Theatrical Directors

• ‘Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ Passes $1B WW, The First Pic To Do So In 2026

• How Markiplier Monetized His Creator Feature Film, ‘Iron Lung’

• Christopher Nolan's $250 million mythic epic 'The Odyssey' is causing unprecedented ticket madness, pushing the Universal Cinema AMC at CityWalk Hollywood to schedule ultra-rare 3AM and 6AM showtimes

Grave Images is an anthology suspense-horror film from First Features framed by a chilling narrative device: a cemetery caretaker who guides viewers through the stories of the dead. With an eerie calm, he introduces a selection of graves and recounts how each occupant met their fate, turning the cemetery into a gallery of macabre tales. Together, these stories create a haunting mosaic of murder, irony, and suspense, all bound together by the caretaker’s unsettling presence and the quiet dread of the graveyard setting. Watch at the link below.

Watch Here

If you have a finished feature length film (narrative or documentary) that’s available for people to watch that you’d like me to promote, click here to submit your materials. I do not promote crowdfunding campaigns but I also never charge to plug your film! This support matters and I hope you’ll spread the love around.

Submit Your Film Here

This week’s edition of the zine features a review of SEW TORN from C. C. Simmons , a guest post about the merits of slow film from Nexus Production Group Ltd., a profile of filmmaker Makayla McIntosh , this week’s recommended film from the FSZ library is 18 1/2 by Dan Mirvish and the new feature: Indie Film News in Brief.

Check it out!

Indie filmmakers: submit your films for a review and yourselves to be featured in Film Stack Tech Stacks, where you can share what your gear/tech stack is. It’s an easy, quick way to get some visibility for yourself and your films. Publicists, you’re also welcome to submit.

Indie writers: pitch an idea for a story here.

Indie outlets: if you run an indie media outlet and want to be added to my media lists for info about the indie films I work with for screeners, reviews, guests, etc, shoot me a DM.

And now let’s talk about…

Keep this list handy if you’re looking to generate some coverage and articles for yourself!

Content below is for subscribers, so please consider upgrading your subscription! As a reminder I do four in-depth posts per month and a subscription could save you time and money!

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