In the twenty-six years Ira Deutchman has spent helping independent filmmakers bring their visions to the big screen, his work hasn’t grown any easier. A major player in the challenging field of independent film distribution, Deutchman finds the digital age to be a place where the devil is in the details. “It’s kind of messy,” he says.

After playing key roles at companies like Cinecom, Fine Line Features and New Line Cinema, Deutchman took the leadership position at Emerging Picturese, where he currently serves as President and CEO. The New York-based company focuses on film production and distribution, with a unique emphasis on circulating digital projection through their Emerging Cinemas network.

While that program has been immensely successful in the push to lower the costs of theatrical releases by eliminating the need for pricey 35mm prints, Deutchman says that the earlier part of the distribution process—where filmmakers must decide if they’re willing to sign away their rights—still tends to be quite frustrating. For numerous outlets, including home video and television, the role of Internet rights frequently becomes a point of contention. “On the one hand, the Internet makes it a whole lot easier to distribute across borders, but you have a lot of territorial issues,” says Deutchman. “We’ve already encountered a couple situations where one set of distribution rights precluded us from being able to sell a different set of distribution rights.”

As an example, Deutchman cites the confounding case of Netflix. The company technically functions as a home video rental service, while an outlet like HBO is defined as a cable channel with video-on-demand, but Netflix has theoretically upset the balance with its Watch Now option. Consequently, filmmakers are asked to give home video and Internet rights to the same outlet, rather than choosing several offers from different places. “You have to incredibly precise,” Deutchman explains. “Download-to-own rights should be part of home video rights, and yet you have companies like the Sundance Channel who have output arrangements with iTunes. So what sort of rights are we talking about there?”

Despite the confusing nature of new developments, most artists are going to have a hard time giving away their work in any case. Caution is essential, but Deutchman emphasizes that filmmakers usually have to make compromises to reach a satisfactory end result. “I try to be logical about what belongs where,” he says, “but you see a point where somebody is offering you money for something, and if you’re one of those filmmakers for whom having money is incredibly meaningful—which is most of them—sometimes you have to bite the bullet, give them what they want and hope for the best.”

And when it comes to giving filmmakers what they want, Emerging Pictures definitely skews toward the little guys. The company’s annual “Undiscovered Gems Award,” which is given each year to a movie without United States distribution, gives the winning title a brief theatrical release in New York, Los Angeles, and at least five other cities. In 2007, the award had a definite new media slant, since the digitally self-distributed Four Eyed Monsters won the prize. For the filmmakers, it was the best possible scenario: They made a decent profit selling the movie on their own website and still managed to get it into a few theaters. “If you make your movie cheaply enough, and [Four Eyed directors Arin Crumley and Susan Buice] are the best examples, then the miniscule numbers add up,” Deutchman says.

Helping independent filmmakers has always been a factor in Deutchman’s career—he contributed to the release of John Cassavettes’ A Woman Under the Influence while still a college student—and he often collaborates with people interested in self-distributing their movies, most recently assisting John Sayles with the release of his last work, Honeydripper. Still, Deutchman is not entirely enthusiastic about taking that process to the web. Not yet, anyway. “I believe we’re in between things,” he says. “I think that a lot of these business models people are experimenting with now are not going to be the panacea you’d like them to be at this stage of the game. However, I do believe all the tools are beginning to fall into place so I can conceive of a time in the not-too-distant future when we will see that.”

—Eric Kohn