Today we’d like to introduce you to Marc Ferman.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Marc. So, let’s start at the beginning, and we can move on from there.
Back in the early 1990s, I used to be heavily involved in music promotions, mixtapes, street team. I would promote mainly hip-hop albums and such. Music was a big part of my life, though my greatest passion was always film. Ever since I was a child, I was obsessed with movies. Nothing else truly mattered to me. I loved my hip-hop, but movies were always at the forefront of my mind. In the early 2000s when the music industry was changing due to the progression of the internet, I dabbled a bit in online fashion retail. It was OK, but it was a tough business to find any kind of success in.
When the opportunity came to try out some crowd-funded movie screenings in Miami, I decided to give it a try as something to do on the side. I wound up drawing an audience pretty quickly and started to do these screenings around Miami starting in 2012. After about two years, O Cinema Wynwood invited me to host screenings exclusively with them, and I was given more freedom to make these screenings special. At the time, I was the only person in South Florida doing retrospective screenings, and attendees were coming from as far as Palm Beach. The series started as Keep It Classic and then renamed to Popcorn Nights.
In 2015, I joined up with a partner to launch Popcorn Frights Film Festival. We both felt that South Florida lacked in something cool for genre film fans. We had seen all these great indie horror films at various film festivals which people in South Florida would have never gotten a chance to see in a theater. For one full week, we would premiere horror films from all over the world with filmmakers and other guests in attendance. To avoid confusion between the names Popcorn Nights and Popcorn Frights I renamed the former, The Film Junkies in which I host a monthly series of non-horror related films.
In 2018, due to various circumstances, Popcorn Frights and The Film Junkies relocated to Savor Cinema in Fort Lauderdale. We will be Hosting the 5th annual Popcorn Frights Film Festival there in August 2019. We will also start doing screening events at Cinema Paradiso in Hollywood Florida as well. As for Popcorn Frights, my partner and I don’t take a single penny for ourselves. It all goes back into the festival, so I work a full-time job on top of all the film stuff. I am not sure if I will ever be able to make a living doing what I do with film, but I am grateful that I get the opportunity to share my love of film with people who have the same passion for it that I do.
Has it been a smooth road?
It has definitely not been smooth sailing. I have hosted many screenings that sold out days before the event and have had some amazing conversations with people who worked on the films I have shown. However, there were screenings that didn’t get the turnouts I had hoped, no matter how hard I promoted them.
Just because I absolutely love a film, doesn’t mean that people want to come out and see it. Over time, I was able to get a better grasp on what people wanted to come out and see. Changing venues was a pretty sudden move, and when you have been promoting events in Miami for years and suddenly shift to Fort Lauderdale, it’s like starting all over again. You are trying to reach a whole new audience.
There are of course other examples too, but those were some of the major ones. Starting a horror film festival in South Florida was a major gamble. We had no clue who would support. People wouldn’t have heard of most of the films being premiered, and they probably have never been to a film festival before either. We went into it excited and super nervous.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
I guess one thing I can say is that I must be doing something right. It seems that when I come up with an idea and make it a reality, others wanted to try and duplicate it or put a different spin on what I was doing.
I can’t speak for others and their motivations, but mine is not money. The thing I am most proud of is that I am hosting or co-hosting events that people are having a great time at. I just want people to have fun. I want to build a community,
What’s your outlook for the industry over the next 5-10 years?
I can’t really answer that. We live in a time where things change so fast, who knows, in ten years a virtual movie theater could be implanted in the human brain. I don’t want to see movie theaters vanish, but everything just seems uncertain. I just want to enjoy it while it lasts.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.thefilmjunkies.com; www.popcornfrights.com
- Phone: 3053351049
- Email: marc@popcornfrights.com
- Facebook: @thefilmjunkies; @popcornfrights
- Instagram: @thefilmjunkies; @popcornfrights
- Twitter: @thefilmjunkies; @popcornfrights
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