[One Nine Four] Save One Nine Four

Hello All
Jai here with some interesting news. The very FIRST and LAST public screening of ONE NINE NINE FOUR will be happening Tuesday September 29th as part of the Calgary International Film Festival in Canada. You can find details, buy tickets and get more information here.

Why will it be the last ever screening of ONE NINE NINE FOUR? Well it's finished. Has been for awhile actually. We had distributors and sponsors in place and were gearing up to have it out by the end of the year. I was very excited to finally get this thing(my "baby" if you will) that I had been working on for 3 years out.

But then a little thing called music clearances got in the way. You see when you make a music documentary there is usually a lot of original music(45 awesome tracks in my case) and you have to pay the labels and publishers for the rights to use this music. Unfortunately, for some of these bigger labels and publishers the money in our budget that we allocated for music licensing wasn't enough and now we are stuck with a finished film but can't legally release it.

At first I was kinda depressed about this but then I found out that I am not the only documentary film maker having problems with the nightmare of music clearances stopping your film from being released. In an article in Variety published in April of this year, it talks about much more established film makers also having trouble releasing their music films for exactly the same reason. Take a minute to read this very interesting article here.

So what options do I have?
1. I can take out all of the music and just release the film soundtrack-less. 90 minutes of talking heads!

2. I could get some teenage garage band to cover all of the songs for $100.

3. I could have my apartment broken into, a DVD screener stolen, ripped and leaked online for everyone to consume for FREE.

4. I can raise the funds needed to clear the music and release the film legitimately. This would be the best way but seeing as we have already spent a considerable amount of money making this film, it's hard to get MORE money for a film that could potentially never see the light of day.

We have decided to try and raise the money needed by selling T-Shirts. Yes. T-Shirts. We have created SAVE ONE NINE NINE FOUR T-Shirts and all profits will go back into the films budget to pay for music licensing.

I might be crazy but making a documentary about the DIY ethos of punk rock in the 90's, I have a pretty good blueprint and precedent that it can be done.

But I can't do it alone, I need your help. I need you to forward this email on to everyone you know, post it on twitter, facebook, myspace, digg, your neighbours window, engrave it into your desk at school whatever.
Please check out the T-Shirts at our online store at www.zazzle.com/jaipar984

If you like the shirts, tell your friends and together lets save ONE NINE NINE FOUR. By everyone coming together it will no longer be my film it will be our film.

Thanks for listening

Jai Al-Attas
writer & director of One Nine Nine Four
www.onenineninefour.com

SpiKeYMiKeY182 wrote:damn, was really looking forward to seeing this... however surely he would have realised before that he'd have to pay major labels to use the songs as soundtrack, bit of a kick in the nuts thing to do to then realise you couldn't afford it.