The film industry is an interesting one because, much like the music industry, it has a reputation for being full of huge, well-heeled companies.

In fact, says Josh Caldwell, there are a lot more small businesses in the film industry than you’d think. “Production companies and even distribution companies are not as big as the impression that people might have about them,” he told me during our telephone conversation.

“We’ve met with some sizable and fairly known distribution companies out there and it’s actually pretty funny having this impression and then actually going to the company and seeing the operation as it is. It’s often a lot smaller than you would believe. It’s very much an impression industry, I think.”

Josh Caldwell, along with his partner, Hunter Weeks, are co-owners of Spinning Blue L.L.C., a four- year-old nonemployer film production company based in Denver, CO.

Caldwell and Weeks are a youthful (or at least, you get to call them youthful when you’re my age) pair of college buddies who exemplify several facets of the microbusiness-ness that don’t come up often enough, as common as they are.

For example, neither of them is a trained film maker. Weeks is the photographer and director, while Caldwell is the film editor, and both are self-taught. As a matter of fact, a lot of people would call them hobbyists, in that they have essentially walked away from their corporate software jobs in order to do what they love to do.

On the other hand, they both have business backgrounds, which is helpful because it keeps them grounded in reality while they chase their dreams.

The initial result of this felicitous mix of the practical and the whimsical is the quirky documentary movie 10 MPH, the comic and serious tale of a couple of guys who ride across the country from Seattle to Boston on a Segway — traveling at, you guessed it, about 10 miles per hour.

I have not yet seen the movie but, judging from the trailer, it looks like a thoroughly entertaining ride that seems part Charles Kuralt and part John Cleese. My hunch is that this movie is not your ordinary popcorn fare.

According to Caldwell, the film has been well-received at several film festivals and has been named best documentary at three of them. The film was originally released on DVD and has been selling quite well.

Caldwell and Weeks are typical pretty nonemployers in the way they handle their staffing needs. As you might expect, it would ordinarily be difficult to make a movie, distribute it and promote it when you’re just two guys working out of a basement in Denver. In order to get the help they need, they hire independent contractors to “ramp up production” - standard microbusiness personnel elasticity.

At the same time, this tiny company is representative of what has become the entertainment industry nightmare. The standard and historical barriers to entry in the film business are largely gone. Movie production equipment has become much more affordable (witness the success of YouTube) and the Internet offers more direct access to consumers when regular marketing channels are unavailable.

In fact, they are a classic long-tail producer. Working with a sub-distributor, they have been able to make the film widely available through online distribution via Netflix, Blockbuster, iTunes and Amazon. They promote through, among other things, a series of film clips posted to YouTube. They sell their DVD direct to consumers and have their own affiliate program, too.

At the same time, they still wanted to get their movie into theaters in much the same way that micro-music labels want their cuts on the radio and micro-publishers want their books in bookstores.

“Having seen the success of playing it in theaters on the festival circuit, we really wanted to get it out there in a theatrical capacity,” Josh told me.

So, they engaged in the mind-numbingly difficult task of creating a 24-city tour of the movie that traces the route of the original trip from Seattle to Boston. The tour finishes up this week with stops in Dallas and San Antonio.

And it is very clear that there is a lot more involved in getting a movie theater to play your independently produced documentary than one might imagine. There are contracts and scheduling and investments and city-to-city marketing. “It’s a huge undertaking to even try and do that,” Josh admitted.

Asked about Spinning Blue’s biggest business headache, Josh unhesitating names another common microbusiness challenge: organization. That is, it is a real challenge for every nonemployer business and most microbusinesses to find enough hours in the day to do everything you need to do when you serve as everything from CEO to janitor.

I know people who have constructed lucrative coaching practices from simply helping entrepreneurs with the overwhelm.

Even so, there’s no pause for Spinning Blue. The company will parlay the success they’ve experienced with 10 MPH to help them open a few doors when their next film, a documentary on fantasy football called 10 Yards, is released next year.

The film is in post-production now and between that and the tour and the sales for the current film, and the design work (Caldwell) and photography (Weeks) these guys do to bring in extra revenues, it’s easy to see why staying organized is such a challenge.

But Josh Caldwell doesn’t complain. “I guess that’s the nature of anybody who’s starting a business doing something they care about,” he says. “You invest the time and you find ways to make that happen.”