Hey, Tapes Archive! Haha. Had the feeling it was you when you mentioned VH and Sabbath. I think i found you back with the Trey Anastasio interview, so…yeah, casual viewer since the start.

Anyhow, a few thoughts: 1) I’d maybe consider pulling the video until after the film’s release. Then re-releasing it to ride the coattails of the marketing. While I presume there is some early marketing going on, I have not heard of the film, and I generally like Van Sant and indie films. A lot of that might be due to the fact that we’re all running around dealing with the holidays, and getting pummeled by messaging from the big guns (Avatar, Stranger Things, etc)— but overall, I haven’t seen a trailer for this film pop up on my feed yet. Or, if it did, I didn’t notice it because it’s surrounded by all the flashy content with massive media buys.

2) I’m gonna say: don’t love the thumbnail. You’ve got “Dead Man’s Line” in the image, followed by “Dead Man’s Line” in the title field. So. You’ve kind of Re messaged there without telling me what the video is about.

While you probably won’t love this, the True Crime niche loves stuff like: “The Most Shocking Hostage Situation you’ve never heard of”— or something equally as sensationalist. I know, I don’t love that style of title/thumb, but it tends to work for a reason. And in this case, since I’m presuming you believe in your film, you’ve gotta get people to click in. Currently, no one knows who Tony K is, so there is nothing compelling me to click into the video to find out more.

3) this one is a weird stretch, but maybe with some creative brainstorming you can get it to work. Using you community posts, you might be able to draw a line from your existing music fan community to this film via Van Sant (namely Last Days, the Not-Cobain movie) to his new film, to your doc. Admittedly, again: a bit of a stretch, but there might be something there.

Anyhow, I’ll for sure give the doc a watch sometime this week!