B-Side Community

B-Side staff continues to run lauded online festival guide
Hyams goes to Slated


For Immediate Release – New York, NY (April 8, 2010) IFP, in conjunction with New York-based company Slated, announced today that B-Side’s Festival Genius™ technology and database has found a new home. Slated has acquired all of recently shuttered B-Side’s intellectual property, and effective immediately has licensed the B-Side Festival Genius to IFP. Senior Executives from B-Side including founder Chris Hyams have joined Slated, while key members of B-Side’s festival team are joining IFP. The move will transform IFP, exponentially expanding its potential membership base and the organization’s ability to build audiences for independent films, and help individual filmmakers identify, build and connect with those audiences. Slated will take over B-Side’s business of providing market research services to independent film producers and distributors and will roll out new products and services later this year.

Festival Genius provides critical infrastructure to support film festivals and independent filmmakers and promote voices that might not otherwise be heard. Over the past four years, B-Side’s Festival Genius hosted online program guides for over 200 international film festivals, capturing audience feedback on 40,000 feature films from over 3 million annual visitors and building a registered membership of 200,000 film fans. IFP will now take over the running of these online film festival program guides and plans to significantly expand the reach of Festival Genius while keeping costs to the festivals nominal. IFP will continue B-Side’s past practice of sharing Festival Genius audience data with festivals and will soon start sharing data with IFP member filmmakers, offering them a direct line to audience feedback.

Several B-Side festival partners, including Sundance Film Festival, Fantastic Fest, Austin Film Festival, Independent Film Festival of Boston, Newport Beach Film Festival, and Phoenix Film Festival have already committed to use Festival Genius again this year in its new incarnation. Notes Joseph Beyer, Associate Director Sundance Institute Online, “Thanks to B-Side, the 2010 Sundance Film Festival program’s film guide was widely and universally recognized as the best in the history of the event. We are absolutely thrilled to see the Festival Genius and B-Side team find a new home, and are looking forward to an even better film guide for 2011.”

Notes Joana Vicente, IFP’s Executive Director: “This is a game changer for IFP and our mission. Festival Genius is an essential service for the independent film-making community – for festivals, film-lovers and filmmakers. IFP has always been the place where filmmakers, the film industry and audiences intersect. This partnership is an exciting step forward in our mission, in that it literally places IFP where audiences interact with filmmakers on the web. We now have the potential to reach all of Festival Genius’s 200,000 film fans worldwide. These fans will be offered a one-year free IFP membership and we will host a network of sites that is in contact with 3 million independent filmgoers a year. We are confident this is a tremendous growth opportunity for IFP and that we are uniquely situated to expand the potential of the Festival Genius platform.”

B-Side founder and CEO Chris Hyams has joined Slated as COO and B-Side’s VP of Engineering Mike McCown has joined Slated as CTO. Hyams and McCown will continue to develop and innovate the Festival Genius technology platform, as well as grow the research and data services that will become the foundation of Slated’s future business. B-Side Director of Festival Operations, Christopher Holland and Festival Account Manager, Jesse Trussell have joined IFP in the same roles, and will continue to run Festival Genius’s Filmmaker and Festival Operations.

Slated founder and CEO Duncan Cork adds: “We all have an immense respect for what the B-Side team have built and their innovation in the independent film space. Slated is also excited to be working with IFP to see the continuation of vital market and data-related services for the industry and filmmaker alike.”
Concludes Hyams, “I can’t imagine a better outcome for B-Side. I am truly thrilled to be joining Slated. Duncan Cork has a visionary plan to apply B-Side’s data and research capabilities in ways that could fundamentally transform the film marketplace. My personal goal was also to find an organization that would be committed to supporting Festival Genius for the long haul. As a non-profit with more than 30 years’ dedication to independent filmmakers, IFP is the ideal home for B-Side’s current festival partners and the many more to come.”

Deal was negotiated by Liesl Copland of WME’s Global Finance & Distribution Group on behalf of B-Side, Duncan Cork on behalf of Slated and Joana Vicente on behalf of IFP.

About IFP
After debuting with a program in the 1979 New York Film Festival, the nonprofit IFP has become the nation’s oldest and largest organization of independent filmmakers, and also the premier advocate for them. Since its start, IFP has supported the production of 7,000 films and provided resources to more than 20,000 filmmakers – voices that otherwise might not have been heard. IFP fosters the development of 350 new feature and documentary films each year through its Project Forum of Independent Film Week, Independent Filmmaker Labs and projects in its fiscal sponsorship program. IFP believes that independent films enrich the universal language of cinema, seeding the global culture with new ideas, kindling awareness, and fostering activism. The organization has fostered early work by leading filmmakers including Charles Burnett, Edward Burns, Jim Jarmusch, Barbara Kopple, Michael Moore, Mira Nair and Kevin Smith. For information: www.ifp.org.

About Slated
Founded in 2009, Slated is a New York-based company in the entertainment and media industry that has recently acquired the intellectual property of B-Side Entertainment. Slated’s first offering is to continue B-Side’s business of providing film market research services to producers and distributors while building on the core Festival Genius technology. The Slated team is currently developing the next generation of their online platform.

About Festival Genius
Introduced in 2005, B-Side’s Festival Genius™ powers the online program guides for more than 200 international film festivals including Sundance Film Festival, AFI, Fantastic Fest, and AFI Silverdocs. Festival Genius is the first festival guide to allow audience members to contribute to the online festival experience by creating and sharing personal calendars, and by rating and reviewing films they’ve seen. Audience feedback and personalized recommendations help attendees discover new films, and creates a direct connection between filmmakers, festivals, and the audience.

Contact: Cynthia Swartz
42West – 212 277 7557

On behalf of the entire B-Side team, I am sad to announce that after 5 years in business B-Side is closing its doors on March 1.

The timing is especially disappointing, as the past year has been our best ever. In 2009, we opened our New York office and launched a new distribution business, successfully releasing 8 films. We grew to 220 film festival partners worldwide and started off 2010 with our widely praised Sundance collaboration.

Unfortunately, in the face of the lingering economic crisis and ongoing upheaval in the film business, our investors decided to stop funding the company. Under extreme time pressure, we were unable to secure alternate financing, and are left with no choice other than to shut down.

Our immediate focus is winding down the business with as much care and effort as we put into building it. We are working with our filmmakers to find the best possible homes for their films. We are working with our festival partners to ensure a smooth transition from the B-Side platform. And we are actively seeking the right partner to acquire our Festival Genius technology in the hope that it will continue to connect festival audiences around the world.

I am sad to have reached the end of this chapter, but am incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved. I am confident that our efforts will have a lasting impact on this business. I am also confident that the B-Side team will bring their experience to new ventures that will pick up where B-Side is leaving off.

We would like to thank the filmmakers who placed their trust and faith in us, the hundreds of festivals who were our partners and became our friends, and the millions of audience members who participated and contributed to the B-Side experience.

Chris Hyams, B-Side Founder & CEO
Cassie England
Chris Holland
Chris Sharp
Jamie Balling
Jennifer Lee
Jesse Trussel
Jessica Wolfson
JR Futrell
Lea Prainsack
Liz Ogilvie
Meetesh Karia
Mike McCown
Paola Freccero
Tory Gast

B-Side’s TRUST US, THIS IS ALL MADE UP, starring master improvers TJ Jagodowski and David Pasquesi (aka TJ & Dave), is available for pre-order from Amazon now and will be shipped February 16th.

Improv fans can catch TRUST US in Chapel Hill, NC as part of the at the North Carolina Comedy Arts Festival on February 25th. Click here to purchase your tickets now.