Marginal indie films like 'Haze' find a home on Web

With many documentaries, such news can mark the end of the road. For the makers of "Haze" -- and a new online movie service called -- the film's failure to attract a theatrical distributor might have sparked a new beginning, with "Haze" set for an unusual Internet premiere today.

The independent film world is suffering as many wild gyrations as the stock market. Hundreds of movies every year fail to attract distributors, and three of the biggest specialized film distributors -- Warner Independent, Picturehouse and Paramount Vantage -- have either closed or scaled way back in recent months. Red Envelope, a division of Netflix focused on distributing DVDs of tricky movies including documentaries, closed in July.

The healthier distributors, including Fox Searchlight and Miramax, focus narrowly on what they hope are art-house crossover hits. Scores of smaller movies lucky enough to make it into theaters often vanish within a few days, and the chances for even marginal success among nonfiction films are even worse.

With the path to theaters so constricted, a number of movie lovers are trying to create a virtual independent film circuit though cable and satellite television and the Internet.

Some of the film channels follow conventional video-on-demand models, including the Sundance Channel's recently announced Sundance Selects, which is launching Jan. 1, and IFC Entertainment's Festival Direct, both of which focus on narrative movies and documentaries that don't have theatrical distribution. One of the more intriguing start-ups is , a brand-new website dedicated to topical, often activist documentaries such as "Haze."

Unlike many movie services, Snag is free -- the catch being that the movies carry quick commercials every eight to 10 minutes, which can't be skipped, as with TiVo. But what sets SnagFilms apart is its movie-playing widget, which allows everyone from bloggers to hockey moms to install a SnagFilms player on their personal Web pages, creating a network of what SnagFilms estimates as more than 11,000 tiny theaters for its online library of 450 documentary films, a few of which previously were released theatrically.