Over at his blog, Caveh Zahedi writes about his experience in distributing his DVD. He found out that in the world of distribution, marketing wins:

The upside of going with The Weinstein Company is that the DVD will be in more stores than it would be otherwise, and in fact they have been very accomodating. But the downside is that the DVD will bear less and less resemblance to the product that I myself would have wanted to put out into the world.

But did it have to be this way?

Actually, it probably did. The distributor is putting up his own money to release this disk and in a specific legal sense, he owns it and it is in his economic interest to make it work for him to the greatest extent possible. So the distributor, whether it is The Weinstein Company or any other distribution organization, will find every conceivable way to maximize the return on what they consider their investment. In today’s world, that’s how it works.

But in a better world, it doesn’t have to work that way. In a world in which the filmmaker doesn’t give up his rights, in which he still controls his creative work, in which the key decisions about the title are made by the filmmaker: in that world it would be different. Anybody know any place like that?