I was very happy to sign with them. Not only did they turn out to be great people, but a mere week after I gave them screeners to send out (which itself was a mere week after the movie premiered in Los Angeles), they got an offer for US/Canada home video distribution, and I accepted it. So I sold the rights to a man named Stan Wertlieb, who not only runs a distribution company called Silver Nitrate Entertainment but also a side business, set up for movies like mine, called filmnic. Meeting with Stan only once, he explained to me that filmnic would not be putting out my video themselves, but would sublicense it out to a reputable home video label.

That meeting with Stan took place in August 2003. It wasn't until June of 2004 when I found out who would actually be putting the film out: Lionsgate Home Entertainment. In truth, the film was licensed to Artisan Entertainment in March 2004, but this took place as Lionsgate (aka Lions Gate - they lost the space between the words sometime after I made that graphic to the left) was buying Artisan. So Lionsgate wound up with the movie by default. (Note: they don't own it forever; all North American video rights, for what they're worth, will return to me... in 2018!) I was very excited by the news, as Lionsgate is certainly a large and respectable distributor. But no great deal comes without a price: Since everything was now up to the whims of Lionsgate, they first announced that they wouldn't release the DVD until December 2004, and shortly thereafter announced that they were giving it a new title: Serial Slayer. They - or filmnic - created artwork for this release that, in my humble opinion, is what you'd call extremely misleading. But they didn't cut or re-edit the film itself (yes, according to the contract, they could have - it's this sort of thing that a filmmaker gives up in exchange for a decent upfront payment for the rights) and as promised, they put the DVD out on December 14, 2004 all across North America.

North America is but one small part of the world, however, and the struggle to sell the film to foreign countries is ongoing. On September 8, 2004, Norway released the film on DVD (under its original title Claustrophobia), thanks to a deal I personally made with a distributor whom I met at the Norwegian International Film Festival a full year earlier, where I was screening both Claustrophobia and my first film Foreign Correspondents. (He bought that one, too.) That seemed like it for a while, but shortly after the Lionsgate release, I sold the home video rights to Australia and New Zealand, to a distributor called Imagine Entertainment (no relation to Ron Howard's production company).

Integration stepped away from the foreign sales arena at that time, which was lucky for me in a sense because I could make the sale to Australia without paying fees to any representatives or agencies. But soon I realized I was on my own, as far as the outside world was concerned (Integration also arranged a nice domestic Video On Demand deal with the iNDEMAND), so I quickly scrambled to find a new Foreign Sales Agent. These people do essentially the same thing as producer's reps: arrange sales to distributors and licensees in exchange for a percentage of the revenue. In late January, 2005, I signed with a sales agent who represented the film for a year and sold it to the United Kingdom, Japan and Thailand.