The recession has inspired a whole new way of promoting indie movies

QUENTIN TARANTINO never had to go through this. When The Age of Stupid, a climate change movie, "opens" across the United States in September, it will play on some 400 screens in a one-night event, with a video performance by Thom Yorke of Radiohead, all paid for by the film-makers themselves and their backers. In Britain, meanwhile, the film has been showing via an internet service that lets anyone pay to license a copy, set up a screening and keep the profit.

The glory days of independent film, when hot young directors like Steven Soderbergh and Tarantino had studio executives tangled in fierce bidding wars at Sundance and other celebrity-studded festivals, are now barely a speck in the rear-view mirror. And something new has taken their place.

Film-makers are doing it themselves – paying for their own distribution, marketing films through social networking sites and Twitter blasts, putting their work up free on the web to build a reputation, cosying up to concierges at luxury hotels in film festival cities to get them to whisper into the right ears.

The economic slowdown and tight credit have squeezed the entertainment industry along with everybody else, resulting in significantly fewer big-studio films in the pipeline and an even tougher road for smaller-budget independents.

"It's not like the audience for these movies has completely disappeared," says Cynthia Swartz, a partner in the publicity company 42West, which has been supplementing its mainstream business by helping film-makers connect with an audience. "It's just a matter of finding them."

Sometimes, the odd approach actually works.

Anvil!: The Story of Anvil, a documentary about a Canadian metal band, turned into the do-it-yourself equivalent of a smash hit when it stretched a three-screen opening in April into a four-month run, still underway, on more than 150 screens around Canada.

"I paid for everything, I took a second mortgage on my house," says Sacha Gervasi, the director.

Gervasi, whose studio writing credits include The Terminal, directed by Steven Spielberg nearly three years ago, began filming Anvil! with his own money in hopes of attracting a conventional distributor. The movie played well at Sundance in 2008, but offers were low.

So Gervasi put up more money – his total cost was in "the upper hundred thousands," he says – to distribute the film through a company called Abramorama, while selling DVD and television rights.

The ageing rockers of Anvil have shown up at cinemas to play for audiences. Fans like Courtney Love were soon chattering online about the film. And an army of "virtual street teamers" – internet advocates who flood social networks with admiring comments, sometimes for a fee, sometimes not – were recruited by web consultant, Sarah Lewitinn.

The idea behind this sort of guerrilla release is to accumulate just enough at the box office to prime the pump for DVD sales and return the film-maker's investment, maybe even with a little profit. Anvil! has earned roughly 600,000 worldwide at the box office, says its producer, Rebecca Yeldham.

Finding even quite small amounts of money to make and market a film is no small trick. The Age of Stupid raised a budget of about 450,000 (about $748,000) from 228 shareholders, and is soliciting more to continue its run, director Franny Armstrong says.

"Money has simply vanished," says Mark Urman, an independent-film veteran, speaking of the financial drought that has pushed producers and directors into shouldering risks that only a few years ago were carried by a more robust field of distributors.

Typically, the distributors have paid money up front for rights to release films. That helped the producers recover what they had already spent on production, but it often left the distributor with most or all of the profit.

Urman's own job, as president for distribution at Senator Entertainment, was axed this year when financing fell through for a slate of films. So he started a new company, Paladin, to support film-makers willing to finance their own releases.

In September, Paladin is expected to help film-maker Steve Jacobs and his fellow producers release Disgrace, a drama with John Malkovich that is based on a novel by the Nobel laureate JM Coetzee.

The film won a critics prize at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, but no attractive distribution offers. One key to releasing it without a Miramax, says Urman, is to minimise advertising in newspapers or on TV and play directly to a friendly audience – in this case through extensive promotional tie-ins with Coetzee's publishers.

"Everyone still dreams of a conventional sale to a major studio," says Kevin Iwashina, once an independent-film specialist with the Creative Artists Agency and now a partner at IP Advisors, a film sales and finance consulting company. But, he says, smart producers and directors are figuring out how to tap the value in projects on their own. Some big companies will still be on the hunt in Toronto this year, where the annual festival is scheduled to begin on 10 September.

"We'll be there in full force," says Nancy Utley, a president of Fox Searchlight Pictures, which last year acquired rights to Slumdog Millionaire and The Wrestler, both of which screened at the Toronto festival.

In fact, the next wave of Tarantinos are in Canada already – coddling not prospective buyers, but concierges, who might steer people to parties and screenings.

Barry Avrich, a member of the festival's governing board, says of the do-it-yourself crowd: "Those guys have figured it out."