Distribution
Unsuccessful independent producers say that looking for a distributor is when you finally pay the price for your independence. And it’s true that an indie film that no one wants to distribute is not even an orphan in the storm, since storms pay enough attention to smack you around. Orphan indies waste away in a desert of neglect. On the other hand, if the fruit of your independence is a film that a distributor covets, you can write your own ticket and use it to ride into festivals, general release—and even a deal for your next movie.
What can possibly happen to your finished, unaffiliated film?
1. It’s bought by a big or midsized distributor that gives you a national (often art-house) release and puts a lot of money behind you. This is the brass ring. Think of The Brothers McMullen; sex, lies, and videotape; Clerks; El Mariachi; Sling Blade; Swingers; and All Over Me
2. It’s picked up for not much money by a small distributor, which works hard to get you media attention and a decent showing at festivals, art houses, and important cities. Think of Poison, Stonewall, Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche, or Atom Egoyan’s early movies.
3. It has a life on the festival circuit, where it’s seen by enthusiasts in key cities around the world, members of the media, and other filmmakers—ensuring that your next project will receive some attention. Think of—well, you probably won’t think of Cheryl Dunyea’s The Watermelon Woman or Chris Munch’s Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day, because you’ve probably never seen them, but all were well reviewed with almost no commercial exposure.
4. It receives no domestic theatrical release, but has foreign sales and shows up on cable and cassette or laserdisc. Genre movies routinely go this route and still turn a profit; other films—Red Rock West, The Last Seduction, One False Move, and Freeway—had premieres on cable followed by a limited theatrical release on the basis of considerable acclaim.
5. It’s used as a doorstop.
• HOW DO YOU GET DISTRIBUTORS TO NOTICE YOU?
As I mentioned in the chapter on financing, at the point you’re ready to show your film to distributors, they probably know all about it and have already formed an opinion. There are people who work at every company whose job it is to track small movies, and no underling wants to be responsible for missing the next Welcome to the Dollhouse or Clerks. They pore over the trades for announcements of projects, and sometimes they’ll call you up and say: “Show us what you have when you’re ready.”
This is a good time (actually, it’s always a good time) to cultivate relationships with the “smaller” people, the ones without the power to say yes or no but who can still function as your champion within the company. You might have met some of these people if you shopped your script around while financing. I’m always surprised by how many young producers make a beeline for the top of the organization, not realizing that for every Sammy Glick who favorably impresses a mogul with his chutzpah, there are a thousand who are brushed aside without a second thought. I think of myself as a pretty decent human being, but when young filmmakers buttonhole me for the purpose of selling themselves, I start to get that trapped-in-an-elevator feeling. Anyone in this business in a position of power has many people competing for his or her attention. You’re more likely to make it to the top if you start with a lower rung.
Say you’ve made contact with the busy acquisitions person. He or she will inevitably ask if you have a videotape of your film. (Most of us would rather watch a tape than travel to a screening room or theater.) I strongly encourage you to stick to your guns and say: “Tape? We don’t have any tapes.” It’s not just a cliché to say that movies look better on the big screen and with an audience present. If you’re asked to send your film to be projected in the distributor’s screening room, be aware that the acquisitions person might watch ten minutes of the first reel and ten minutes of the last reel and talk on the phone the whole time. Try to control the circumstances under which the distributor sees your movie. If the film is especially quirky, or will work best for a niche audience, screen it at a festival where you think it will have a good reception, so that the acquisitions people can see it in context.
MARK TUSK
former VP of Acquisitions, MIRAMAX FILMS
When I was working at Miramax, the tone was extremely aggressive about acquisitions, so it wasn’t a matter of just opening up a festival guide and saying, “What should we see today?” We would actively track movies—go balls-out to see if we could screen them in advance. That would clear the schedule so we could roam around festivals and look for more off-beat stuff.
Our knowledge stemmed from the trade papers. When there was an announcement of a film, we’d call the producer and find out when the first answer print would be ready; and then we’d call a few weeks before that and say, “We know you must be getting close! Just reiterating our interest!” We’d keep in touch with producers, sales reps, and the filmmakers themselves. Of course, if someone found us, we’d take note of that project and put it into the system.
It wasn’t always typical for acquisitionis to take so aggressive a stance. There was a time, when Farewell My Concubine was screening, that the idea of executives flying to Hong Kong to look at a movie was extraordinary. Miramax raised the ante on both the aggressiveness of screening the movies and taking them off the table before they got to the festivals. And then they raised the advances on things that people wanted to be paid. People were constantly telling Harvey Weinstein. “You pay too much to acquire them! And spend too much to release them!” And he always laughed and said, “Oh yeah, that extra $100,000 for Sex, Lies and Videotape was really overspending.” He often had the last laugh.
How rough could a film be and I’d still look at it? I saw foreign films with no subtitles, with the associate producer leaning in my ear and translating. I watched rough cuts of indie movies on Steenbecks or Avids, and promos or scenes shot in advance of the rest of photography. It’s fairly common that someone struggled to get a film in the can but then was short on postproduction money. If you jive to what you’ve seen at whatever length, that might make you more inclined to ask to read the script.
If someone said, “It’s on video and we want to get the money from you to blow it up,” that wasn’t a real incentive to look at it. The same with film-school shorts. If they sent me a tape I’d look at it, but I wasn’t going to trek to midtown for a screening. It’s less attractive to look at a film in pieces. Although if someone’s looking for completion funds…Producers are at their most vulnerable when they’re desperate to complete a movie. Not that we exploit them…but we do stand to get in for less money. It’s mutually beneficial, though. You’re cutting a good deal as the distributor, but you’re sparing the producer the possibility that the moment for their film will pass.
Sure, in the worst case scenario, I’d look at only the first twenty minutes of a feature. But it’s rare that you capture the audience’s attention in the second or third reel of a movie if you haven’t in the first or second. It sounds kind of callous, but when booking screening rooms, we’d often stack a second film. Sometimes we’d cut right to the last reel. Don’t tell me you’ve never fast-forwarded through a tape and still felt confident about your judgement of the movie!
My powers were limited to recommending the film or passing on it; I couldn’t say, “Yes! Let’s do a deal!” I’d have to go back and make my case in-house, which would involve either showing the movie to the staff and trying to build a consensus before bringing it to the bosses, or going right to Harvey Weinstein and saying, “You really should spend an hour and forty minutes looking at this movie.” Not that you want to lay your career on the line every time you recommend a movie. Sometimes you bring an audience to help bolster your opinion before you go too far up the chain of command.
I always thought that raising people’s expectations only to blow them out of the water later was worse than being candid with them. You do want to generate enough excitement so they don’t turn around and sell the movie to someone else, yet you don’t want to mislead people. There are different types of blow-offs. One is, “Hey, recut your movie, play it at some festivals, and if the response is favorable we’ll consider.” That really does mean you’re interested, just not enough to be overly involved at that stage. It’s only when the movie is really awful or the producer’s an annoyance that you let them go completely. If the producer is a pain, do you want him or her bugging you for the next sixty weeks?
The whole idea of acquisitions seems to be that a movie’s mystique is highest until it has been screened. When you’re at a festival, it doesn’t take a genius to spot the hot film. Usually the dollar will dictate who gets the movie—and then the marketing people have their chance to fuck the whole thing up.
Miramax has caught flak for cutting movies, but there’s another side to that. Filmmakers get so immersed or in love with their footage—sometimes they need an outsider to say, “This character doesn’t come through,” or “This scene doesn’t work.” Smart filmmakers work with you. On Clerks, I introduced Kevin Smith to Harvey Weinstein at Sundance, and he was, like: “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Weinstein. I’ve seen my movie four times with an audience here, we’ve been taking notes, and I know the ten minutes I’d welcome the chance to remove.” Of course, we pushed him to remove, like thirteen and a half minutes, but it was nothing that the movie suffered for. Sometimes it’s a matter of: “Do we keep the scene because there’s one joke that has a payoff?”
No one wants to pull the card of “We’ll only release this movie in Topeka.” You don’t want to threaten that stuff. Unfortunately, it’s the first-time filmmakers who have struggled the most who are the most stubborn. It’s the professionals, the people who’ve done a bunch of movies, who seem to understand that it’s a collaborative process. I’ve had a firm feeling that movies all find their proper place. Between the market forces, independent reps, and festivals, films do kind of find their audience. It’s rare that stuff that deserves to be seen slips by.
To whip up excitement, some producers choose to hold two screenings only, one on each coast; invite the distributors; and then stand back as (this is the hope) they bid against one another like fiends. The producers of Sling Blade held two screenings and fielded only one offer. It came from Miramax, however, which threw its resources behind an unprecedented Academy Awards campaign that brought fame and fortune to all involved.
I know of another movie that fielded a bid from a small distributor of three million dollars sight unseen, simply on the basis of its script and cast. The producer turned it down (perhaps fantasizing that a bidding war was about to begin), held simultaneous East and West Coast screenings, and watched in horror as the picture was all but laughed off the screen. Amazingly, the first distributor still agreed to buy it, but for a fraction of its initial offer.
With Swoon, we had a modest offer before the Sundance Festival from Fine Line, and had to ask ourselves: Do we take the film to Sundance and hope that people start bidding against each other, or do we sell it now at lower-than-bidding-war prices? We chose the safer route because we wanted a distributor behind us at the festival, and because Swoon was such an unusual picture—there was no way to predict how it would be received. Part of you always wants to go for broke. But there are so many stories of producers who decided to hold out and lost a sure deal, watching helplessly as their movies sank into obscurity. Sometimes, people stop being excited once they see the film in a public context.
That happened to the producers of a recent movie, who turned down an offer from a small distributor in hopes of dazzling the skibum executives at Sundance. None of those executives jumped, and the small distributor, feeling slighted, declined to renew its offer. What to conclude? That a distributor in the hand is worth ten on the slopes.
I don’t malign the producers of that movie because I’ve been there myself. Selling Stonewall was an especially harrowing experience, and since the director had just succumbed to AIDS, it seemed especially vital to get the film out in his memory. We fielded a so-so offer from a big distributor, which said it would only be on the table for twenty-four hours. As no one else had seen the movie, we (nervously) turned it down.
Stonewall didn’t get accepted into the Cannes Film Festival. Instead, it was shown at the Cannes market, which meant it wasn’t screened for a festival audience but a tougher industry one. Those industry audiences aren’t there to judge the merits of your mise-en-scène, only whether or not they think they can make money off it. So they’re often dour. And as soon as they realize that your film’s not for them, they walk.
Stonewall went over okay at the Cannes market. Some foreigners bought it right away, but no North American distributor was especially attentive. Executives at one company led me to believe that they were going to take it, but when I got back from Cannes and hadn’t heard a word, I started to get that queasy feeling. Sure enough, they called to say, “We’re passing.” I slammed down the phone; thought, “Who the hell is going to buy this film?”; and promptly dialed the Patric Walker horoscope (just before he died of salmonella poisoning). My girlfriend came home and I shushed her, because you can keep pressing buttons and getting more and more and more information. Walker explained: “You’re going to get bad news, but it will all work out.” He was right. We ended up selling Stonewall to Strand, a small distributor that couldn’t afford to pay much. But it got a decent release, and the film made more than many art-house pictures do. So it did all work out (for me if not for Patric Walker), and it gave a shot in the arm to a company that deserved it.
MARCUS HU
Strand Releasing
I guess it’s fair to say that we distribute “niche” movies. Like a lot of distributors, we started out by taking what was left over from the festivals after the feeding frenzy. But we’ve been very fortunate in being able to get some great films that way—Wild Reeds, for example, and Stonewall, which other people bid on but which we really pursued. We also had the idea of re-releasing older movies that a new generation would want to experience in the theater, like Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt and The Graduate.
I saw Stonewall in Cannes in 1995, at a 10 P.M. screening. I think the screening time was one of the major reasons that reaction to the movie wasn’t sensational. At late screenings people have just eaten dinner, and they’re extremely tired from a full day of looking at stuff in the market and/or the festival. People were exhausted. So we got Stonewall, and it was our widest release ever—46 prints, with a platform release beginning in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. We marketed it principally to gay audiences—we tried to make an event picture. It was the closing-night presentation at the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and we also timed it with the parade. The film did extremely well on the gay-festival circuit—although not commercially, since I think more and more gay people are gravitating to light-hearted films. Anyway, Stonewall was still extraordinarily profitable.
After the acquisitions, the next thing that companies like Strand have to focus on is building and maintaining relationships with exhibitors. We like to tell filmmakers that our motto is: “We suck so you don’t have to.” With exhibitors, you can make all kinds of deals: “If you play this picture next month, we promise that a few months down the line we’ll award you these two other pictures.” At the same time, you don’t want to alienate the competing theaters, so you try to spread the wealth around.
Above all, theater owners want you to guarantee that you’re going to spend a certain amount of money on advertising. One of the conditions for booking Contempt at the Castro in San Francisco, for example, was that we take out larger ads in the San Francisco Chronicle and that our publicist push a previously published essay from the New York Times. Cities like San Francisco—and New York—pay a lot of attention to critics. The one city where Ulee’s Gold bombed was San Francisco, where the Chronicle critic said it was slow and horribly acted.
Postcards from America played the New York Film Festival, and the Times review was particularly terrible. So what do you do? First, let me say: I loved that movie. When I first saw it I was glowing. I know it has flaws, but it’s so passionately made. My partner, Jon Gerrans, said: “There is no way we can take this picture without losing on it.” But the rule at our company is that if one of us is adamant, we can have it. He said, “Okay, if you really take care of this picture, you can do it.” That’s how we got Postcards. We already knew that certain critics wouldn’t like it. So we took countermeasures: We went to the gay press. We ran a provocative ad campaign featuring a bare-chested James Lyons—selling it at the most base level you can sell a picture. But I thought it was worth doing that, because I really cared about that movie. It was hit-or-miss. In San Francisco, we got good reviews and the film grossed nicely. And once the ancillary cable and video money came in, we managed to get into the black, so the story has a happy ending.
One last thing independent filmmakers need to think about—with regard to distributors—when they’re shooting is stills. Good stills. They’re the main sales tool. And when we have to reassemble a cast for a photo shoot it’s a big pain, because by then the actors might be elsewhere and they might all look different. So filmmakers need to think about that, or they will really pay on the other end.
We had a more unusual experience with Kiss Me, Guido, which had a solid screening at Sundance but was deemed “too mainstream” by most of the independent distributors. The coproducer, Ira Deutchman, and I were perplexed, but then we thought, “Let’s see if it is mainstream,” and took it to the studios. Paramount picked up our little million-dollar film and released it to decent business in the months between Face/Off and Titanic.
Another possibility when hunting for a distributor is to work with sales representatives, whose job it is to predict which distributors will be interested in your type of movie. Different reps sell different kinds of films. They work for a percentage of whatever the distributor pays, and their only drawback (if you choose to think of this as a drawback) is that they can be quite money-oriented, and will sometimes push you to hold out for a bigger distributor when you have a modest offer from a small, possibly more appropriate, one. Sometimes, if they have a film that a distributor wants badly, they put together a package deal: “We’ll sell you Film A,” they tell the distributor, “but only if you also buy Film B and Film C.” If you’re B or C, you get a free ride—although the distributor might not make you its highest priority.
If you’re in a situation where only one distributor bites, when do you say yes? Not right away: Distributors can smell fear, and indie orphans with desperate producers clue them in to a fire sale. Learn what you can about the distributor, especially its record with films similar to yours.
Usually, the distributor offers you an advance against the movie’s profits (assuming there are profits). Once you sign, you receive, say, $50,000, which means you won’t see any more money until the distributor has recouped whatever it has spent plus your advance. Subsequent profits are divided by an agreed-upon percentage—sometimes fifty-fifty, sometimes less (for you). It’s really in the distributor’s interest never to show a profit—to say, “Well, we’re still paying for the prints and advertising.” Be prepared for cross-collateralization, which allows the distributor to use profits from TV, cable, and video sales to offset any losses on the theatrical release. The bottom line is that it’s pretty hard to make serious money on the back end—even on movies that make hundreds of millions of dollars. Just ask the producers of Forrest Gump.
I Shot Andy Warhol had one of the more frustrating releases. American Playhouse, which produced it, was crumbling, and the Samuel Goldwyn Company, which was supposed to distribute it, was also falling apart. Goldwyn had sold the video rights to their films as part of a package deal to Hallmark, so they told us we could only sell the theatrical rights to Warhol. Well, it turns out that no one wants theatrical without video. While all this was happening, the film got a fantastic review in Variety and was a hit at Sundance, where it won an award. Everything was working out—and everything was falling apart. At the end of the day, Goldwyn was bought by Orion, which released the movie, and it did okay—it didn’t lose money, though on the other hand, it didn’t cost much—and it launched its director, Mary Harron. But it didn’t have anything behind it. The studio didn’t even mount an Oscar campaign for Lili Taylor, whose performance was remarkable.
Still, any release is better than none. There are two things on the agenda of an independent producer: pay back the investors, and get the film into the hands of the best qualified people—who aren’t always able to put up as much money, but will do a better job of marketing it to the right audience. Hire a lawyer to comb through your contract, and be prepared to cajole, bully, and persuade your distributor into the most passionate release possible.
If your film isn’t feature-length, there are a limited number of entities that will distribute or exhibit it. One possibility is to package it with similar movies. Strand Releasing has put together extremely successful programs of gay short films called Boys Life and Boys Life 2. If your movie has something that ties it to a particular community—be it gay, black, Latino, etc.—it has a good chance of finding a place on a well-entrenched circuit, which might include festivals in smaller cities and towns.
If your goal is simply to sell your movie to television, the process is relatively straightforward. Depending on what it’s about, a limited number of stations will be interested, and you can narrow that list down by finding out who’s willing to see a tape. (In the case of TV, obviously, it behooves you to send a videotape.) It’s a good idea to call and find out the procedure, because you’re apt to hear something like: “We look at unsolicited stuff the first Thursday of the month,” or “We’ve filled our schedule for the year; we take submissions again in August,” or “We’ve spent all our money. Sorry.” Find out—so your film doesn’t just become part of a pile.
In rare cases, filmmakers decide to cut out the middleman and distribute their movies themselves. This is not a course to be embarked on nonchalantly, since it means starting from scratch with scores of potential exhibitors (each of whom can demand a separate arrangement), and getting a crash course in a business that takes people years to learn. The upside is that you get to keep a hundred percent of what you make. The 1992 documentary Brother’s Keeper is one of the more notable self-distribution success stories. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and generated some heat, but the sums offered were not what the producer-directors, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofski, had in mind. Ultimately, Brother’s Keeper did well for them, but for two years, distributing that movie was all those guys did.
Festivals and Markets
When I showed my diaries of film festival life to an associate, he complained, “All that happens in them is you go to parties and get drunk.” I responded, “Don’t you understand? That’s what you do at festivals.” That, and schmooze, and show your film to audiences that generally want to like it, and hold press conferences at which people ask questions like, “What was the budget?” The only time it’s different is when you go into a festival without a distributor. In that case, your life revolves around the acquisitions people, who are now in their element.
JAMES SCHAMUS,
co-chair, GOOD MACHINE, INC.
Sundance is the most commercial film festival on earth. There is no discourse about film, even independent film, in a public fashion, in the halls of the festival, on panels, that is not about the following: “You made it for this little and you sold it for that much?” That’s really what Sundance from its inception was about, although, obviously, there was once a kind of Ralph Laurenish Western individualist ruggedness about the Sundance image that was supposed to rub off on the filmmakers.
A film like Poison or Swoon could do well at Sundance in the late ’80s and the early ’90s because there was still a kind of apparatchik, NEA, public fundy, alternative discourse that was in its own way very careerist. It was tied into the Whitney program, where you could turn pieces of crap tissue paper into million-dollar art or, less lucratively, video art, which would at least get you teaching gigs. Within that context, there was some fantastic work being done, just as in the context of Soviet realism there was great painting, and in the context of Hollywood filth, greed, and corruption there are great movies being made.
The other space that was competing for ascendancy at that time was created mainly by European television, which was itself a publicly-funded thing. American Playhouse combined those two cultures: It was a bridge between the international marketplace and NEA apparatchik culture. A good chunk of the first wave of Sundance winners were American Playhouse-inspired or partially funded. The ideology was replicating Canadian National Cinema, which was itself television and government financed, and was embodied by noble farmers struggling against both the elements and American imperialism. These were faintly anticapitalist-world-order gestures.
Now, with the loss of so much public funding, you have producers like Christine Vachon and me: post-late-capitalist entrepreneurs who aren’t thrilled about capitalism and how wonderful it is but who are nonetheless taking tried and true small business practices and grafting them onto counterculture or subcultural modes of expression—putting those two things together and getting them into the “marketplace of ideas.” The purchase price for speech different from mainstream speech is still handled in hard U.S. currency, and that’s still the system that we’re working in right now.
I think the work out there is as interesting and the audience for it is as big as ever. Look at Todd Solondz’s movie. That script is unbelievable. It’s one of those things that you read and think, “Holy shit, I can help make this!” At the same time, you’re saying, “Five million world sales”—so it’s business as usual. But this is business as usual? Even The Ice Storm, which opened the New York Film Festival and had a wide commercial release—I still think, “Goddamn! They let us make it!”
A film festival can lead to a sale, or it can discourage a sale. Examples of each outcome abound. But festivals generally help more than they hurt, and there’s nothing quite like the thrill of being discovered by press and fans and other filmmakers at the same exhilarating moment.
That happened to Ted Hope and James Schamus in 1993, when their fledgling company, Good Machine, was desperately trying to sell Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (cowritten by James), a micro-budget American comedy with a gay theme in which most of the dialogue was in Chinese. “When we showed it to sales agents, they said it had no commercial potential,” says Ted. “We became convinced it was unsellable. We would have taken ten thousand dollars for a U.S. release! We had two thousand in our bank account, and we thought, ‘We can either keep the company open for another month and pay our two employees’ salaries, or close the office and use that money to fly to the Berlin Film Festival and try to sell it ourselves.’ So we went to Berlin and did three million dollars worth of sales and it was, you know, heaven. I mean, we knew we’d have a company for at least the next couple of years.” (The Wedding Banquet went on, according to Variety, to become, percentagewise, the most profitable film of 1993, earning four thousand percent on its investment.)
Festivals give you two potentially priceless tools for selling a film: critics and audiences. The trick is to find out which critics are thumbs-up so that you can report any positive reviews to potential buyers. If the New York Times reviewer chases your director out of the screening room—which is what happened with I Shot Andy Warhol—you should make sure that the right people hear about it. Many (not all) critics will tell your publicist, or you, if you’re acting as your own publicist, what they think—information that you can selectively pass along. You should also pass along things like: “The LA Times critic was doubled over with laughter at the screening!” Or, “I’m surprised how many women are responding to this movie!” Every film has its own angles, and you need to work each one of them.
Don’t turn your nose up at festival hucksterism—it’s an art. If you believe in your movie and want people to see it, you have to be prepared to thump the tub. Poison was accepted at Sundance, but it wasn’t a film that many people knew about. No one knew who we were. We didn’t have money for a poster, and a lot of movies arrived with custom-made T-shirts and caps. What to do? I went to a pharmacy and bought a roll of orange stickers that said “POISON” with a little skull and crossbones—a thousand for only ten bucks. We took the stickers to Utah, and started putting them on people’s ID badges. Then it became cool to have a “POISON” sticker on your badge. It was the perfect low-budget—but completely distinctive—marketing idea. So much so that the following year, everyone had stickers.
In January 1988, when the festival was less than five years old, Sundance put Superstar on the map. Todd Haynes’ maiden featurette got lots of attention from the press, and from directors such as John Waters. Park City was relatively peaceful and uncrowded, so you could be there with a short film and still feel as if you were part of the festival. There wasn’t as much weight put on the prizes. For a few years, serious movies like Poison and Swoon played as well or better than lighter fare. Now, I think comedies go over bigger. It’s not that the Sundance aesthetic is changing; it’s that the people who go there have changed. Sundance is in some ways the victim of its own success, and many independent filmmakers think the party’s over, spoiled by the swarms of Hollywood types looking for the next sex, lies, and videotape. And it has become something of a cartoon: cell-phones ringing during screenings; predatory agents running up and down the hill; hundreds of executives and filmmakers on the make.
Has Sundance transformed the nature of independent filmmaking? Not single-handedly, although it has become a focus for marketing, and some people think that you’re screwed if your movie doesn’t make it in. It’s true that you couldn’t ask for a better leg up, especially if you don’t have a distributor. But there are good films that don’t get into Sundance and still do fine. Daytrippers didn’t get in, and neither did Swingers.
Go Fish almost didn’t get in—the selection committee dragged its feet for a few weeks before saying yes. But the film turned into one of the festival’s big success stories. I didn’t arrive until after the sale; I was in California producing Safe under arduous conditions (a tiny budget, an inexperienced crew, a major earthquake). John Pierson, the producer’s rep who provided the movie with its much-needed finishing funds, describes his “skillful orchestration of the Go Fish sale” in his book Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes. In the weeks before, he had written to distributors suggesting that “Go Fish just might become for the lesbian audience what She’s Gotta Have It was for the black audience.” (Pierson had also supplied finishing funds to Spike Lee’s first feature.) Then he refused to show it to anyone before Sundance. Moments after its premiere, Pierson writes, he was negotiating with representatives from the Samuel Goldwyn Company at a pizza parlor next to the theater: “It was the first film ever sold during the festival,” he crows. Go Fish went on to an ecstatic premiere at San Francisco’s Gay and Lesbian Festival, before opening sensationally in major cities across the United States.
To which other festivals should you pay attention? The New York Film Festival, which is the showcase of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, is the most selective and the toniest, regarding each acceptance—perhaps justifiably—as a momentous event in the life of its makers. In recent years, it has become less stuffy, and it programs a gratifyingly broad range of works, including shorts, documentaries, and restored or rediscovered oldies. The only thing to consider with the NYFF is that it means an automatic review in the New York Times—which, if it’s bad, can sour a film’s prospects.
If your chief concern is finding a distributor, your festival options are limited. Certainly there are cities where your film will be greatly appreciated. Gay and lesbian festivals in places such as Rochester, New York, and Charlotte, North Carolina, are vital outlets for gay indie filmmakers. And small, regional festivals will afford the only opportunity for locals to see your movie on a big screen. Regional newspaper reviews can also attract attention, although San Francisco and Boston and Seattle are not where distributors reliably go to look for new product. Even if a critic writes, “This is the best thing in the festival!,” Manhattan and LA-based distributors might never know. If a tree falls in the forest, and the New York Times, the LA Times, and Daily Variety don’t report it…
FESTIVALS VERSUS MARKETS…
A distinction needs to be made between festivals and markets. The latter exist purely and simply for the buying and selling titles. Many markets are attached to festivals but function independently. At Cannes, the market takes place in a huge bunker under the Palais du Cinema, where the festival is just a rumor. Sales agents run the booths, each with its own distinct wares. The guy selling Korean action pictures is not likely to feature American independents, or vice versa. Ninety percent of the titles are probably slasher or porn, and not all have finished films (or even scripts) attached. In the eighties, one ambitious exploitation company was known for marketing movies to distributors on the basis of jazzy titles and lurid posters. The problem was that then they had to make the films, most of which were godawful, and some of which they couldn’t even afford to produce.
Where else do distributors go to buy? The big combination international festivals and markets are in Cannes (spring), Venice (summer), and Berlin (winter). Right after Cannes, the American Film Market (no festival) takes place in Los Angeles. Telluride (August) and Toronto (September) don’t have formal markets, but people go to both to buy movies. (The latter, in particular, is a real schmoozeathon.) Distributors also show up at the Hamptons Film Festival, which is close to New York City and happens in the early autumn—a particularly lovely time to be at the beach.
The Independent Feature Project, which serves as a sort of clearinghouse for unaffiliated filmmakers, holds an Independent Feature Film Market in New York every year. The IFP is a wonderful resource: The magazines and booklets that it publishes with lists of festivals and deadlines and contact numbers are indispensable, and its Web site is extensive. But I’m uncomfortable with its market, at which anyone who can pay the fee can exhibit a film. It depresses me to see kids with inflated expectations spend everything they have to travel to New York with some tiny movie that no one will ever buy. The IFFM charges a hefty amount of money to submit a film, and once it starts there are so many people competing for attention and stuffing producers’ and distributors’ mailboxes with flyers and invitations that pretty soon no one goes near their mailboxes. It was at the IFFM that I first thought: “Maybe we’ve demystified this process too much.”
One solution would be to structure the market so that it’s more selective, so that there are one hundred movies instead of four hundred. It would also help if filmmakers had a more realistic attitude about what the market can and can’t do for them. The whole allure of indie films right now has more to do with striking it rich than with making the best movie possible. For every film that some Village Voice writer deigns to say has promise, there are a hundred that no one shows up to watch.
Gearing Up for Release: Your Distributor and You
Christine Vachon: We don’t use cards or questionnaires.
Lawrence Gordon: You don’t use a testing service? Do you test awareness? Tracking?
Vachon: No.
Gordon: You really should stay out of the studio system. You won’t like it at all.
Vachon: Well, they’re not asking me.
—from a conversation between me and Lawrence Gordon, producer of Waterworld and other hundred-plus-million-dollar movies, in the
New York Times
Once you have landed a distributor, you’ll find you’ve barely recovered from the postcelebration hangover before new headaches emerge. You and the distributor are now on the same team, which is when the fighting generally begins. The first question: Who has final cut?
If a distributor finances your film, you’ll have worked out the issue of final cut way in advance. Remember, though, that even if a filmmaker has final cut, distributors will still protect themselves from having to release a four-hour movie or one saddled with an NC-17 rating. An “R” rating is often contractual, as is length (usually 120 minutes or less). A distributor can therefore require a filmmaker who has “final cut” to cut for length or sexual content—they simply won’t accept delivery if the movie is over, say, two hours. That doesn’t mean that they won’t ask for other changes, but they’ll have to use a different kind of leverage. They might say, “If you don’t make the cuts we want, we’ll give your film a small and pitiful release.” A director with a brain in his or her head should at least listen to the company that’s going to be out there selling the movie.
In between a producer or director with final cut and a distributor that can dictate changes there are infinite shades of gray. In the event that all parties are at loggerheads, the distributor might agree to use a trusted third party as a tie-breaker. The tie-breaker on Kids was Gus Van Sant, the executive producer. Gus never had to discharge that particular function (tie-breakers rarely do), but the financiers felt better for his existence.
Test screenings, as discussed in the last chapter, can be extremely helpful after you finish your rough cut, especially if you organize and run them yourself. When the distributors move in with their testing services, however, the process is altogether more terrifying.
For Office Killer, Miramax held a test in its Tribeca screening room. When it began, my coproducers and I fled downstairs, to the bar of the Tribeca Grill, where we got anxiously drunk. Afterwards, the audience seemed upbeat. Some people opted to stick around and serve as a focus group, going over the film in detail with a professional focus-group manager. They liked the movie and seemed to agree on its weak points, most of which we were already dealing with. The co-executive producer, James Schamus, and I sat together, and as each complaint was aired we whispered to each other: “Yeah! We’re covering that in the voiceover!” and so on. By the end, we were beaming.
But the Miramax executive wasn’t. He had tabulated the scores on the questionnaires and wasn’t happy: Below Average. We said, “Yeah, but! We’re fixing everything they complained about! They liked lots of things!” It didn’t seem to matter. He called the next day and said that if the scores didn’t go up, Miramax would release the film straight to video. I thought: “If we tested all my movies this way, they’d probably all go straight to video.” Ultimately, Miramax kept the video rights and we gave the movie to Strand for a limited theatrical release.
Test screenings are also frequently done by distributors to get a sense of the best way in which to market a film. An audience might respond much more to one character than another. Or young women might love the movie and middle-aged men hate it. Test screenings help the distributor to find the audience.
The following is a standard questionnaire, which the distributor used for test screenings of Todd Solondz’s film.
UNTITLED
|
EXCELLENT |
VERY |
GOOD |
GOOD |
FAIR |
POOR | |
|
a.) Dylan Baker (Bill) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) | |
|
b.) Cynthia Stevenson (Trish) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) | |
|
EXCELLENT |
VERY |
GOOD |
GOOD |
FAIR |
POOR | |
|
c.) Rufus Read (Billy) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) | |
|
d.) Philip Hoffman (Allen) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) | |
|
e.) Camryn Manheim (Kristina) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) | |
|
f.) Lara Flynn Boyle (Helen) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) | |
|
g.) Jane Adams (Joy) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) | |
|
h.) Ben Gazzara (Lenny) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) | |
|
i.) Louise Lasser (Mona) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
( ) |
Men ( )
Women ( )
Both Equally ( )
Under 25 ( )
25-29 yr. old ( )
30-34 yr. old ( )
35-39 yr. old ( )
40 or older ( )
Please check one:
Male ( )
Female ( )
Age:
On Safe, the distributor, Sony Classics, desperately wanted us to make a small change, and we debated the issue for a long time. In the film, when Carol (Julianne Moore) and her husband (Xander Berkeley) are walking on the grounds of Wrenwood, the institute where she has gone for treatment of her mysterious “illness,” she points to the house of the director, Peter (Peter Friedman), on the hill. When we screened Safe at Sundance, we didn’t show Peter’s house, only the couple’s faces looking up. Todd Haynes felt that the house we’d actually shot was wildly over-the-top; he thought we were tipping our hand about how skeptical we were about this New Age guru with his expensive mansion. And every time we’d done a screening with the shot of that manse included, it brought the house down. The shot was a release for all the nervous tension that had been building up in the previous ninety minutes: “At last,” the audience thought, “we’re being told what to think.”
Executives at Sony asked us to put that shot back in, and Todd was quite torn up about it. “I wish we could redo it,” he said, “and find a house that wasn’t so ostentatious.” But there wasn’t any time. The distributor, meanwhile, wasn’t making threats. All they said was: “We’d really like you to put the shot back in. It would make our job a little easier.”
So, after a lot of consideration, Todd acquiesced.
THE RATINGS BOARD
The movies I produce don’t tend to have much violence, but as far as the ratings board is concerned, they might as well go straight to the grindhouses. Even the intimation of sex throws up more red flags than scores of severed limbs. Homosexual relations are always inflammatory, especially between two males. (Heterosexual men are not uncomfortable watching two women together; just the opposite.) Swoon is pretty chaste, but there’s a scene at the beginning where the protagonists (Leopold and Loeb) are in their underwear and one climbs suggestively over the other. Very briefly. The ratings board gave it an NC-17, for that scene. I was furious—especially when I saw Basic Instinct the same year and the view up Sharon Stone’s skirt left nothing to the imagination. Sharon’s private parts plus graphic bondage-and-ice-pick slaughter and that was still a film you could take your kids to see.
Some producers insist that big-budget studio movies are cut more slack than indies, and doubtless that’s true. But there’s more to it than that. American culture still betrays its Puritan origins. Kids is unrated with no homosexuality and no genitalia—the ratings board just found the idea of it so offensive. You can get a PG-13 if your film has the “f-word,” but not if the “f-word” is used in a “sexual” context. When Albert Brooks got a restricted rating for Lost in America, he pointed out that the board will give you an “R” if a character says, “I want to fuck you over this desk,” but a PG-13 if he says, “I want to fuck you over with this desk.” Exactly what are minors being protected from?
In an ideal world, an NC-17 rating wouldn’t give you a moment’s pause—there should be nothing wrong with a cinema exclusively for adults. The problem, of course, is that certain national video chains won’t carry NC-17 movies, and if you can’t get your film into them, you’re screwed. You can sometimes get around this problem by preparing special R-rated versions for the video chains, which we had to do with Poison. But no director enjoys eviscerating his or her own work. And no producer enjoys telling them that they have to.
If you have a distributor from the beginning, they will often give you a list of “cover shots”—tamer renditions, in case there are problems with the MPAA. “Cover for excessive blood and violence” or “cover for nudity” is what you’ll read. That means in your second rendition of the shot, the woman who gets out of bed wears a tiny nightie instead of nothing at all. They’ll also ask for cover dialogue. We never intended for I Shot Andy Warhol to play free TV, but the distributor asked for a long list of substitute words: “Shoot” for “shit,” along with standard cover epithets like “Freak off you freakin’ freak!” At one point in the film, Valerie (Lili Taylor) is raving about how long a publisher is taking with her manuscript, and Fred Hughes (Craig Chester) says: “Why don’t you just give him a blow-job?” Someone at Goldwyn proposed a cover line that went: “Why don’t you just give him a foot massage?”
We decided not to shoot a TV version of I Shot Andy Warhol.
Cover shots are a pain, but they can give you freedom down the line. If you know that a particular scene is on the edge, you can shoot it two ways and then pull out the tamer version as a last resort. It’s better than having to butcher the existing version.
You never know, though. In Happiness, the audience doesn’t actually see the main character molesting little boys, but the implication is clear. If the ratings board decides that the implication by itself is NC-17 material, I don’t know what we’d cut. We’d end up with a half-hour movie.
Marketing
If you have a distributor, you hand off the movie for marketing. Distributors typically say: “Leave it to us. We know what gets the butts into the seats.” Sometimes, if it’s a niche movie and you know the niche better than they do, they’ll ask you for guidance. When we sat down with executives at Goldwyn to discuss Go Fish, their first question was: “Uh, which cities have a lot of lesbians?” Smaller arthouse distributors tend to be director-driven and consult the filmmakers more often on marketing, because they can’t afford huge ads and are dependent on newspaper features, interviews, and reviews.
The next step is choosing a strong image that represents the movie. With luck, that’s an image from the film itself—if you were smart enough to have a stills photographer on set while shooting. If you weren’t, you can always take something from the negative or stage a reshoot. Whatever image you use, it should be compelling and provocative and appeal to the desired audience. Who that audience will be isn’t always clear-cut. The distributor of one worthy film about unwed teenage mothers made a tactical error by aiming its marketing at teenage girls. It turns out that teenage girls don’t tend to want to see their lives depicted as they are. They want the romanticized version. They want Titanic.
The poster for Safe featured a shot of a man wearing a gas mask—a tiny figure surrounded by space and yet cowering, as if wary of being crushed. It’s one of the most powerful images I’ve seen on a poster, and it perfectly captured the feel of the film, but it was probably easier to understand after you had seen the movie. The video box, on the other hand, is a little too easy to understand. Sony Classics took an old glamour photo of Julianne Moore in spike heels and then airbrushed an oxygen tube into her nose. Todd hit the roof, but Sony said, “Trust us. This is how you sell video tapes.” I guess it worked, because the movie shipped a lot of units.
When Todd Haynes, Barry Ellsworth, and I ran a small company, Apparatus, in the eighties, we didn’t have a distributor. Nor did we have much money to promote our short films, or to hire publicists or conduct test screenings. We were artsy and not-for-profit, and we fancied ourselves above all that. But it was important that people see the movies. This was before the days of laptop computer ease, so we made posters with collages of photos from the films, copied them, and then put them up in the obvious places—coffeehouses, bars that were frequented by young bohemian types like ourselves, and theaters. We had a mailing list that was sent to general media, especially to those (few) writers who were interested in experimental filmmaking. If you showed your movie at a repertory house, you could use its mailing list, and sometimes it would even cover your costs. Alas, the Collective for Living Cinema—along with most other New York “calendar” houses—no longer exists.
Press clippings can make a company look more real, which is important if you’re always scrounging for funds from private donors, arts agencies, and foundations. Katherine Dieckman wrote about us in The Village Voice, which didn’t cause a surge in our box office, but did give us something impressive to mail out. You shouldn’t overdo it with the clips, though. A pile of reviews from the Toledo Community Shopper—however well written—won’t count for as much as one review from a paper perceived to matter.
If you’re self-distributing your film and can’t afford a publicist, you’ll need to figure out what will make the movie pressworthy. It might be you, or the director who has made the movie against terrible odds. Or an actor. Or the subject matter. What’s the hook?
Sometimes you can prevail upon a big publicist to work for less as an investment in your career. Our publicist on Poison was Jeff Hill, who at the time was young and hungry and working for a bigger agency. Ours was one of the first movies he did on his own. Today, he’s a partner in that firm and has a soft spot for us. After all, we started out together.
What a firm like Jeff’s does is look at the film, look at the media, and tell you who you need to reach. “These are the magazines we’re going to target,” they’ll say, “and these are the radio and TV shows.” You should put in your own two cents, because they can’t think of everything. “Don’t forget that the film’s about a dentist,” you might say. “So try to get something in Dentists Monthly and Hygienist’s Life.”
Distributors think carefully about when to release. Do you want to go up against Titanic? Your film can get lost in the shuffle, or yours could be the one that everyone turns to in relief. Distributors tend to use film festivals as jumping off points, especially in the fall. It’s no coincidence that such indie prestige films as Boogie Nights and The Sweet Hereafter premiered at the New York Film Festival in September and October. That means they’re still very much in the minds of the critical societies that give prizes in December—prizes that have a strong influence on Academy Award voters.
If Miramax buys your movie in December and wants to open it in April, that doesn’t leave much time to prepare. Your publicists might screen it immediately for the long-lead reviewers and the editors of glossy magazines. Then you’ll get reports: “Esquire declined coverage, but GQ decided they want to run a picture of the lead actor.” Pretty soon you’ll start to hear what the critics think—which of them are supporters and which aren’t. Some critics will be on the fence and can be worked on a bit.
As the opening approaches, it gets exciting, especially if the response is good. I’ll call the director, or the director will call me, and we’ll compare notes on the coverage. The director will say: “How about that stupid New York Post review?” And I’ll say, “Oh, who cares?” I wouldn’t say, “Yeah, that’s going to cost us tons of viewers.” I might think it, but I wouldn’t say it.
RELEASE…
On opening day I always go to the theater and try to hear what people say when they exit—to get a sense of whether or not they liked it and, more importantly, if they are going to recommend it to their friends. What can you do with that knowledge? Not much. It’s just to know. After all the work, there’s something gratifying about watching people pay to see your movie. Not your pals, or the people who worked on the film, or the people at festivals, who were there as much for the celebratory atmosphere as for the movie. This is what it all comes down to: Will people put down money? I sometimes go for the first show at noon on a Friday, watching the first dollars come in; then I go that night at eight to see if it’s selling out. If you get good reviews from the major papers, and you’re only in one or two theaters, and you’re not selling out the Friday 8 P.M. show, you have cause to worry.
There’s not a whole lot you can do, short of forcing people into the theater. You can’t get a paper to review it again. If there’s a drop in business, you can change the ads—take out bigger ones or feature a different actor. After the first couple of weeks of I Shot Andy Warhol’s release, when business was starting to drop off and Goldwyn wanted to regenerate interest, all the ad quotes focused on Lili Taylor’s performance. Another week they decided that all the quotes would be about Stephen Dorff’s performance—to make sure that people knew he was in the movie. As a moviegoer, I respond to ads that have one good quote after another: “Full of comic ingenuity!” “Fresh and funny and original.” I think, “All those guys are saying that? Okay. I’ll go.”
When business drops off, the distributor must decide whether or not to pour more money into the film. Can more ads kindle more interest, or will this approach just be throwing good money after bad? It’s hard to know. When a movie does badly, you can always blame the distributor. You can always say, “They didn’t spend enough money.” But if Sony had spent another $200,000 on Safe, would they have done an additional $200,000 worth of business? Unclear.
JAMES SCHAMUS
co-chair, GOOD MACHINE, INC.
Independents, structurally at least, are the victims of their own success. The minute that you have a film like Pulp Fiction or Il Postino or, to a smaller extent, The Wedding Banquet or The Brothers McMullen, you have a situation where initial capital investment in the films is relatively minor by studio standards, and yet the infrastructure that must be created and serviced has got to be pretty bulky.
That is to say, if you’re going out eventually on two thousand screens with a modestly budgeted film, you have to go through a distribution entity that must maintain an overhead that starts to look and smell like a studio overhead—and it must act like a studio, both in terms of the way it deals with the disposition of rights and the way it conducts business with the talent community.
When in 1992 Reservoir Dogs moved from its initial release in the twenty-screen range up to four or six hundred screens—which in those days was a lot—it didn’t make much money. But the point is, someone sat down and said: “If this is going to make any money at all it’s going to have to get pushed out into the wider market quickly.” And the infrastructure that was being pieced together would need, in order to maintain itself, another six-hundred-screen release the next month and another six-hundred-screen release the month after that. And it’s going to need at least one one-to two-thousand-screen release a year that does pretty well: The English Patient, say, or Scream.
Rewind now ten years, when the reigning champions of the independent world were a management team running Orion Classics (and who have since moved over to Sony Classics). These folks took Howard’s End and cycled a very few prints around the country in a very slow release pattern. Howard’s End was a film that played on particular screens for upwards of sixty weeks. It grossed twenty million, of which a huge amount went back to the distribution company because the prints and advertising coasts were extremely low—because they’d go into one market, find an art-house screen, and lock. Nowadays, that same film would probably have to go out and—even in a small platform release—be in the top forty markets within five weeks and in two hundred to six hundred theaters shortly thereafter. The distributor would hope to be able to cull fifteen to twenty million because the movie would probably get thrown off screens relatively quickly.
The cost of doing that kind of business—as opposed to the old Howard’s End business—is phenomenally higher. So the entire system has gotten to the point from a distribution angle where the stakes are enormous. You’re really playing high-stakes poker up front. You have to have the stomach to look at the grosses from the very first weekend, the first Monday, a mere seventy-two hours after the thing has begun to do business, and decide: Am I going to throw another million or two million dollars into the pot to see if this thing will break? And if you don’t have the stomach to make those kinds of decisions—or the capital to make those kinds of decisions—you’re in the wrong business. And it’s a very different business than what we used to call the independent film business.
Yes, I guess in some respects it’s a tragedy, but it’s the result of success. Like most tragedies, the opening act is the war hero coming back into town, the conqueror.
The big problem with theatrical exhibition now is that movies have to go in and perform right away, and if they don’t—good-bye. A film isn’t given a chance to build an audience. One statistic that Ted Hope is fond of quoting is that Mike Leigh’s Life Is Sweet did its best business in its eighth week. Word of mouth was good, and people were talking about it at dinner parties. Less than a decade later, a movie would never get to its eighth week unless it was doing gangbusters. I’m not saying that every film deserves a two-month trial run at a theater owner’s expense, but more complex movies could use some room to breathe. Safe would never have been a blockbuster, but it might well have caught on. By the time people were starting to talk about the film, it was gone from the theaters.
The Press and the Critics
In 1997, when The English Patient won a bunch of Academy Awards, the press began to focus on the phenomenon of independent films, and to devote whole issues of magazines to independent filmmakers. I got called a lot. I even agreed to participate in a “dialogue” for the New York Times Magazine with Lawrence Gordon, a mega-budget Hollywood producer, to see what studio and indie producers had in common (more than you’d think). Independent films, we learned, were hip, new, etc. Only they’re not new. It’s just that the public eye has turned toward them after a few crossover hits—and it will turn away again.
Talking to the press is always tricky, because people in this business are very sensitive when it comes to what you say about them in print. This applies to books as well as articles. An approach that some might call “take-no-prisoners,” I call “burn-your-bridges.” I learned a lesson on Poison, when I mouthed off a lot in the face of the NEA controversy and the quotes sounded garish. Now I’m pretty cagey with the press—some might even say boring. My litany is: “It’s great…everything’s great…the studio’s great…the actors are all great…” I tease my colleague, Tom Kalin, for never being able to keep his mouth shut. On the set of I Shot Andy Warhol, I gave my usual boring interview to a New York magazine writer, and then, later, overheard the following:
TOM: All the actors are competing because they want to wear more fabulous outfits than the others.
REPORTER: Oh really? Like, which actors?
TOM: Well, [NAME WITHHELD] was furious when [NAME WITHHELD] showed up wearing—
ME: Shut up! Just shut up!
Tom always realizes what he’s said a second too late.
The best thing to do in the face of controversy is decide on a party line and never waver. When reporters quizzed me on whether the actors really drank beer and smoked pot in Kids, the distributor, Excalibur, didn’t want me talking at all, hoping that without any quotes from people involved the whole thing would go away. But I decided—to protect my own image as much as anything—to speak directly and honestly, to say: “I’m sure they got loaded all the time—but not on my set.” And Cary Woods told me afterwards that he thought it had defused some of the indignation.
In the chapters on development and financing, I discussed how important it is to have a filmmaker who can be a source of good copy, because that’s when the issue first arises. The films I’ve produced are as uncompromised and challenging as anyone’s, but I’m still concerned about marketability—about giving distributors something they can sell and someone they can use to sell it. It’s important to train yourself, your director, and others to speak cogently about the work, because ambitious movies need “spinning” as much as ambitious politicians. Todd Haynes is great with the media. He’s friendly, and he’s articulate about his own process without being glib. On the other hand, I recall a screening I attended of an extremely gruesome and upsetting film, where, at the press conference afterwards, the director was asked some pretty basic questions about why he’d chosen such a “difficult” subject. He responded with shrugs and monosyllables and silence, and I found myself thinking: “You jerk. If you’re going to make a movie on this kind of subject, you should at least be able to defend it.” I know that’s unfair, because a lot of filmmakers aren’t especially left-brained. But if I—as a producer of controversial films—was feeling that kind of irritation, I can only imagine what the press was feeling.
CRITICS…
If you put your work out in public, you have to deal with the fact that some people will like it and some won’t. Some critics won’t get it, and some will write reviews that will be painful to read. I still get upset at bad reviews. More upset than I should. When critics I know write nasty reviews of my films, they’re off my Christmas list so fast.
Todd has something which I think is important for a director: an absolute serenity about his work. He doesn’t need confirmation from critics that a movie is good. Safe was savaged by many of them. When we showed it at Sundance, people came out making noises of bewilderment; a few reviewers looked embarrassed when they saw me and murmured, “I don’t know what to say.” The next morning, Variety described the film as boring and pretentious. I was devastated. But Todd just said: “Oh, well. Not everyone’s going to get it.” Today, only a few years after its release, Safe has begun to acquire the kind of reputation that I thought would take decades. Two of those critics at Sundance who threw up their hands when they saw me ended up including the film—a year later, after they’d had a chance to let it percolate in their systems—on their Ten Best lists.
After the opening-night dinner for Safe, I walked a few blocks in a hard rain and read the New York Times review as I was standing at a newsstand. It wasn’t bad. At least we got a pull-quote, something like “Eerily Evocative!” It’s hard to underestimate the power of the New York Times to open a small movie. I was with a distribution executive the night his picture opened at the New York Film Festival. We were having dinner, and someone brought him the Times review, and he started to read it and his face dropped and he said: “We’re fucked.” It wasn’t that it was a savage review—it’s just that it was casually dismissive, and that’s enough to bury a little art movie when it’s the Times. Actually, that film ended up making a small profit, but the distributor had to work hard and spend a lot of money to overcome the Times review—much of it going, ironically, for ads in the movie section of the Times.
The thing that most rankles me is when I read a scathing review of some tiny little movie that doesn’t have a prayer anyway. I think: “You don’t have to go to such lengths to crush a film that’s so far down on the totem pole.” Of course, I know critics who’d respond, “That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to sit through all the horrible independent pictures I do, made by people who shouldn’t be let within a mile of a movie camera.” And I don’t—although I don’t get paid to, either.
I also get angry when reviewers make mistakes. One critic went on and on about the leading man’s “fake Southern accent” in Stonewall. Except the actor grew up in New Orleans and was speaking the way that he normally spoke. You shouldn’t harangue critics for not liking your movie, but if they screw up something like that, you have a right to call and bust their chops, especially if you know them. Otherwise, it’s best to keep your distance.