What Every Filmmaker Needs to Know About Delivery

According to Tom Rothman, who runs Fox, "A film without delivery items isn’t quite a film yet." The delivery items are the things you'll need to sell your film.

Here is a link to an essential article (from the summer of 1994) in Filmmaker Magazine by Anthony Bregman and Mary Jane Skalski that provides a very helpful introduction to filmmaking "delivery items" (also known as "deliverables"). According to Bregman and Skalski: "Simply put, deliverables are the materials that a distributor needs in order to release a film. Without a negative of some sort, the distributor can’t create theatrical release prints. Without a color-corrected video version, the distributor can’t broadcast it on TV or release it to your local video chain. Without a legal trail proving that the producer in fact owns the film and all its elements, the distributor won’t undertake the legal risk of releasing it. And without a good many color slides, black-and- white prints and quirky anecdotes about the shoot, the distributor won’t have the means to publicize the film’s release. Deliverables fall into those three categories: print materials, legal documents, and publicity materials, and the bulk of the expense for the deliverables process lies in the first of them."