Ticket Stubs and Film Touring or, The Road & Reel

Coming home today after being on the road for a bit was making me think a lot about the way we've been touring around the film. Brent, coming from a more musical background, decided to tour his short films around a few years ago opening for bands at small rock clubs & galleries (here are some pictures taken from that tour by an audience member that I found online) which makes perfect sense; when you finish an album you take it on tour, why wouldn't a series of short films be any different? Now we are touring Gravity around in the same spirit, playing live performances or just screening the film, in theaters and museums across the country. The more I think about it the more sense touring a film makes in today's world...just like the music world, that now relies on live performances as a way to make up for the lacking record sales and whose live/theatrical experience is way different than any digital file on a computer, why can't the film world adapt in such a way too?

As indie financing and miraculous tales of independent films being scooped up at film fests for record prices and shown in theaters all over the globe are dwindling why wouldn't touring around an indie film be the next logical step in the independent film world?  

There are a good number of people out there following this idea- the women over at Cut & Run (who even raised funds online to help finance a portion of their experimental film tour) and even our favorite cine-maniac with his Lunch Film series are great examples- but I guess I am more interested in the reasons why film touring, or maybe even just a more accessible/independent way of getting films into indie theaters, isn't more common? In an era where Robert Redford is roaming the festival circuit with his self funded film in hopes of distribution dreams what is the next step in getting indie films in theaters?