Friday, March 12, 2010 at 12:29AM In preparation for our upcoming April 15th event Film Financing Online with Kickstarter.com CEO Perry Chen, Kickstarter has put together a handful of success stories for review by The Hollywood Hill's members. These will no doubt get everyone primed for an energetic conversation. Enjoy...
Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 10:26PM 
Prompted by a fan's suggestion, Kevin Smith is exploring funding his next film from online donations. You can read more about it here: http://silentbobspeaks.com/?p=391.
We're going to reach out to him and see if he'll participate in an event we're putting together on financing films online. With KickStarter, our own Armchair Revolutionary, and a few others, the online film financing space is starting to heat up!
Saturday, February 13, 2010 at 1:04AM Two small but potentially meaningful new opportunities for both indy film financing and distribution may be the topic of our next industry-focused events. New websites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are offering opportunities for micro-film financing directly from the public. The Hollywood Hill's media partner Armchair Revolutionary is also moving into this space to finance social change documentaries by way of public funds. Ted Hope's December piece in The Wrap bullet points some of these pioneers and the sense of energy coming from this new movement.
And in the online distribution space, Boxee, Hulu, and Youtube and Netflix are battling it out in different ways. Youtube recently rolled out a limited program to test online film rentals.
We'll see if we can get these players in the same room for an evening. Stay tuned...
Saturday, February 13, 2010 at 12:31AM As Mother Jones reports... Wall Street has finally identified a way for itself to hedge it's bets on Hollywood films...
If this gets authorized by the Commidity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), it will make for an interesting panel event to say the least. :)
If you thought the mortgage-backed securities and other complex financial instruments that crashed the economy were risky, you’ll love Wall Street’s latest brainwave: a new financial market in which players can gamble on whether upcoming Hollywood movies will be blockbusters or bombs.
For years, Cantor Fitzgerald, a Wall Street investment firm, has been operating the "Hollywood Stock Exchange," a fake-money game in which players trade "stocks" to bet on how films will do at the box office. Now Cantor could soon get government permission to make a real-money version of the game—a market in which players can gamble on the success or failure of, say, Pirates of the Caribbean 4. Critics are worried that this new market could be vulnerable to insider trading and create bizarre incentives for moviemakers—and that it will also enlarge the risky family of financial products that helped trigger the economic crisis.