The $11 Billion Year

by Anne Thompson

  We were born the same year, 1954, him in Bronxville, New York, and me in Manhattan. He was another ardent movie lover who had grown up watching the Million Dollar Movie and Chiller Theatre on TV. He was on a mission to share the films he cared about, ones with depth, style, integrity, and nuance. Working at various indie distributors, from Goldwyn and October Films to United Artists, he had released key films by Mike Leigh, David Lynch, Lars von Trier, and Michael Moore.

  I make some calls and find out that Ray is at a Provo hospital; Dana Harris drives us through a nasty snowstorm to join other friends and his family at his side. He bounced back from a near-fatal car accident years before. If anyone can tough it through this, we figure, it’s him. We get a brief moment to file into his hospital room and say good-bye. He’s in bad shape. The next day, he is gone.

  At the impromptu January 23 memorial service at the High West Distillery in Park City and at later, more formally organized events in New York and Los Angeles, we wonder why Ray’s death has hit us so hard. The premature loss of a dear friend pierces our hearts, of course, but it is more than that.

  As a journalist I loved talking to Ray because he gave great quote. He was more candid and analytical than most—he could see the overview, the bigger picture. He was a student of the industry, and generous in a non-self-serving way. He liked sharing what he knew. And filmmakers adored him for always being ready to push for that rare, risky, less-than-commercial movie that aimed artistically high. He was always the life of the party, a rebel and a rapscallion who chafed within any corporate environment. Often to his own detriment, he was willing to piss off bosses and power brokers, as recounted in the pages of Peter Biskind’s 2004 Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film.

  In fact, Biskind gave Ray the final word in his book’s postscript:

  I still believe that there are decisions that you make that aren’t motivated by financial gain. The independent world isn’t like the Hollywood world. The motives are different, the goals are different, people aren’t necessarily trying to get rich and powerful, they’re trying to push art first while thinking everything else will take care of itself. That’s the naive part of it, it doesn’t happen that way. You can’t even talk about that with a straight face or people will laugh you off the planet. But there’s a big part of me that really does believe that. And will always believe that.

  No question that Ray fought hard, with guile and wits and strength, for the better movie. He figured he was going to make you like what he liked. Ray wasn’t in the game of predicting and numbers-crunching. He believed in challenging the specialty film crowd. He saw his job as making them want to sample his discoveries. Sometimes he succeeded and sometimes he didn’t.

  On February 9, the Bingham Ray memorial at New York’s premiere East Side art house, the Paris Movie Theatre, was filled to bursting with more than one generation of people in the indie world who looked up to Ray. As several speakers noted, it was never about money for him (although he did more than okay); it was about sharing great movies with the culture at large. At the same time he also embodied what they were most afraid of: the career in autumn decline, along with the sagging fortunes of limited-release specialty films.

  Ray knew the art of picking, marketing, and distributing smart films, but as distributors balk at the punitive costs of releasing movies in theaters, the market is shifting toward the microbudget DIY digital self-released model, if not in multiplexes then via online streaming and cable VOD. After decades of pushing movies into the marketplace, Ray was moving west to run the San Francisco International Film Festival, where he had intended to continue to push his avocation for great cinema. It seemed like the perfect fit, but it was not to be.

  The New York memorial was a who’s who of the indie world. Sony Pictures Classics copresident Michael Barker took part in the moving tribute, comparing Ray to Jimmy Stewart and even showing a clip of It’s a Wonderful Life. Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch recalled being too broke to buy tickets at the Bleecker Street Cinema in Greenwich Village; Ray, who managed the theater at the time, helped him to sneak in.

  Actors Oliver Platt and Patricia Clarkson told of Ray’s role in Pieces of April, one of many commercially risky films championed by Ray. After the ceremony, writer-director Peter Hedges reminded me that Ray had also backed Clarkson as the lead when no one else wanted her. Ray’s loss means one less person pushing for movies that often don’t get made without that extra boost from a passionate advocate.

  Robert Redford said it straight out at Sundance: “We lost a true warrior.”

  The film industry has changed dramatically since 1979, when Redford founded the Sundance Institute in Utah. The activist, actor, Oscar-winning director-producer, and avid downhill racer has told the story of Sundance’s founding many times in the succeeding decades. He saw the need to counteract the prevailing studio trends with a support system for indies, starting with mentor workshops that eventually led to a place to showcase the work—the Sundance Film Festival. (The name comes from the character he played opposite Paul Newman in William Goldman and George Roy Hill’s Oscar-winning 1969 buddy western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.)

  At a 2013 Sundance Institute fund-raiser in Los Angeles, Redford again told the story of the first 1980 meetings at his Provo Canyon ski resort in the Wasatch Mountains, and how he and the film program’s founding director Michelle Satter (who became a nurturing angel to countless films that might never have come to life without her) sat on the lawn imagining how to organize workshops with mentors: “There were no buildings. A ski lift and a restaurant, that was it. We were gathered together to sort out how this process might work, this mechanism to create opportunity for new artists to have a voice and focus on a category that was DOA at that time, independent film.”

  The Sundance Institute wouldn’t officially take over the Utah/U.S. Film Festival, which Redford had helped to launch in 1978 as chairman, for another six years. It was director Sydney Pollack’s idea to lure Hollywood players by moving the festival from Salt Lake City in September to Park City for the 1981 January ski season. The early festival morphed from a classics and good-for-you granola film showcase—at a time when foreign films were thriving but the American independents barely existed—to a vital hub in indie distribution, serving as a gatekeeper and exhibition platform for filmmakers, and a farm system for emerging talent heading for Hollywood. “We didn’t know if it would create enough interest to increase audiences for independent filmmakers,” Redford told the crowd.

  Sundance has done far more than that. The festival has grown with the burgeoning indie film movement, evolving over the years into one of the most influential forces in American cinema. And through all the changes in the world around it, Sundance’s mission stays the same. “It’s about the filmmakers,” Redford repeats like a mantra, every year.

  The first big Sundance breakout came in 1989, the year that twenty-six-year-old writer-director Steven Soderbergh introduced sex, lies, and videotape. Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s Miramax Films scooped it up and entered it in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the top prize, the Palme d’Or—and started the indie new wave. I was among the first to interview the Louisiana filmmaker that year, for my LA Weekly column “Risky Business.” I watched him grow from brainy indie (King of the Hill) to Hollywood player (the Oscar-winning Traffic and Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels) and back to maverick again (Haywire, Magic Mike, Side Effects). Many of the filmmakers who are invited to Sundance lead the rest of their lives in quiet obscurity. But people remember that Soderbergh showed what a zero-to-sixty festival rocket launch looked like. That fantasy lures more and more filmmakers every year to apply to the festival.

  Ever since, Sundance has been a magnet for the movie industry, a place to mark a fresh new year with marathon sessions of networking and talent-scouting at movies, at parties, or on the slopes. Sundance has proved so effective a venue to view and discover new films and talent that
agents, producers, managers, lawyers, distributors, casting agents, exhibitors, and media all attend—along with the lucky few whose movies are selected each year from the thousands submitted.

  Sundance audiences were the first to see not only sex, lies, and videotape, but also Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Richard Linklater’s Slacker, Kevin Smith’s Clerks, and Tilda Swinton as Sally Potter’s androgynous Orlando. That moment of recognition of major new talent is what Sundance is about.

  Year after year in Park City, I scoop up and interview rising directors and actors just as their careers are taking off: Edward Burns (The Brothers McMullen), Sam Rockwell (Moon), Ashley Judd (Ruby in Paradise), Kerry Washington (Lift), and Brit Marling (Another Earth and Sound of My Voice). After I pulled actor-turned-director Todd Field off Main Street into a local bar to grill him on his first feature, In the Bedroom, he got so intense about what it took for him to make the film that we ended up in tears. Miramax Films pushed In the Bedroom to an unexpected Best Picture nomination. I like to talk to emerging talent before their heads get turned by sweet-talking Hollywood agents, managers, producers, and executives who tell them how brilliant they are. All too soon they get used to the sycophantic attention and, as part of their job, begin to conduct themselves as smoothly as PR professionals. It’s never the same.

  Every year a few Sundance grads go on to participate in the Oscar dance later in the year. In 2006, I interviewed former vice president Al Gore and filmmaker Davis Guggenheim in a small Yarrow Hotel suite for eventual Documentary Feature Oscar winner An Inconvenient Truth, and Original Screenplay winner Michael Arndt for Little Miss Sunshine; in 2009, I talked to Best Actress nominee Carey Mulligan for An Education and Best Actress nominee Gabourey Sidibe for Precious. In the watershed year of 2010, nine films first introduced at Sundance scored fifteen Oscar nominations, including Blue Valentine (Best Actress), The Kids Are All Right (Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor), and Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, which earned nominations for Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay as well as landing Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes their first Oscar nominations.

  Going into the festival, I try to check out films with awards potential. The trick at Sundance is staying flexible and keeping your ear to the ground so that you make the right choices about what movies to see in which section—not just the snazzy star-studded films featured as “Premieres” at the big Eccles Theatre, but the unexpected gems in the dramatic, documentary, and world cinema selections. It’s torture to be missing the hot movie as your Twitter feed lights up with raves. But catching everything is just impossible. Everyone wants to cover the big stories: the talent breakouts, the hot acquisition titles, and the possible Oscar contenders. 2012 had all of the above.

  Even though a pall had been cast by Ray’s death, his friends soon rejoined the festival’s common cause: finding the players who would nourish the community for years to come.

  SUPPLYING SUNDANCE

  The independent film community has thrived in myriad ways. It’s on the one hand more corporate and more risk averse than it used to be, and on the other more DIY and cooperative. And it has never been more vital. As Hollywood seeks to bank on risk-free brands and eye-popping epic entertainment, the studios are letting go of more and more of their modest-scale ventures. As those budgets evaporate, the indies are the only way to get these movies made, either via foreign sales companies who sell advance guarantees to films, based on what the cast can command territory by territory, or through an always replenishing list of equity investors who look to get into Hollywood by plowing their cash into a movie.

  The Hollywood talent agencies are more than eager to help. As the studios have stepped back, the agents have stepped forward to find more work for their clients. William Morris Endeavor (WME), Creative Artists (CAA), and United Talent (UTA) are among the agencies who advise leading investors such as former eBay president Jeff Skoll’s Participant Media (Lincoln, An Inconvenient Truth); Oracle scion Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures (Zero Dark Thirty, The Master, Foxcatcher, American Hustle), which also owns foreign sales arm Panorama; production and foreign sales company Red Granite (Out of the Furnace, Friends with Kids); Tom Rice of Sycamore Pictures (The Presence, The Way, Way Back); Chicago-based Hyatt Hotel heiress Gigi Pritzker’s OddLot Entertainment (Rabbit Hole, Drive, The Way, Way Back, Ender’s Game), which has acquired stakes in foreign sales company Sierra/Affinity; and New York lawyer John Sloss’s independent distributor and sales company Cinetic Media (Exit Through the Gift Shop).

  The increase in independent production means that Sundance Film Festival director John Cooper and his programmers must sift through a burgeoning number of annual submissions. To their credit, the programmers are rigorous about quality, even though they’re under pressure to help provide a launchpad for films without North American distribution. For 2012, they logged more than 4,000 feature submissions for the 114 narrative, documentary, midnight, and international sections. Cooper believes there are more movies getting made partly because over the years a vital independent film community has materialized. The quality of submissions has gone up, he says, not only because “well-known actors are willing to be in indie films,” but also because of “the creation of better film teams, creative producers, art directors, and the surge of talent that is both creating and staying with indie films as a career.”

  By staying true to Redford’s help-the-filmmakers mission, Sundance has continued to thrive, even as attendees (46,731 in 2012) and Main Street swag suites have spread like kudzu. Redford and the festival staffers say they try to distance themselves from the hordes of marketers who descend on the resort city to trade on the cachet of the young and hip, handing out free designer jeans, complimentary facials, and snow boots to young celebs like Kate Bosworth and Andy Samberg at the Vevo PowerStation and Sorel Suite, or at the Puma Social Lounge in the T-Mobile Village at the Lift. But there’s not much they can do about the lack of parking or the tow-away fees or the many other ways that Park City gouges festival interlopers. If Sundance wants to be perceived as successful, legitimate sponsors, swag, and freeloaders go with the territory. Redford’s attitude is to challenge festival visitors by not making the experience too easy: if they really believe in the indie mission, they’ll come.

  The fest lures agents and producers looking for new talent; a ballooning number of global distributors trawling for product for TV and theaters; festival programmers and scouts from Austin, Cannes, Seattle, Telluride, and Toronto; and more than 950 members of the press from twenty countries hungry for access to movie stars and new films to review.

  Starting Friday evening, the opening weekend in Park City is always party central, from Park Avenue hotels to the condos in Deer Valley. At Tuesday night’s traditional Cinetic Media party, hosted by John Sloss at the restaurant Zoom, buyers and sellers and media converge in the upstairs room to find out the gory details of the latest nightlong condo negotiation or hallway shoving match, and which neophyte distributor hoping to make a splash has overpaid some outrageous minimum guarantee (MG, a cash advance payable to the producer upon delivery of the completed film in exchange for exclusive rights to distribute a film in a sales territory).

  Such deals, though, are increasingly a thing of the past, as MGs are often replaced by hefty spending commitments for theatrical print and advertising buys in multiple markets—which create later value. Looking back, the advances offered in the heat of that first Sundance weekend often seem absurd in the harsh light of what the films take in at the box office.

  The buyers calculate dollars advanced against a movie’s likely returns from theaters, DVD, VOD, and global ancillary markets—and they crunch numbers on what they’re willing to spend to wrest the title away from their rivals. It’s often the new distributor on the block, inexperienced in the vagaries of the market, who will overspend.

  While more pictures are produced in this microbudget era—wherein anyone can pick up a digital camera and shoot—ge
tting movies in front of audiences is still an issue. Long gone are the halcyon days when a movie like Happy, Texas or Spitfire Grill sold for some $10 million. In prerecession 2008, Focus Features spent $10 million to buy Hamlet 2 worldwide and Fox Searchlight advanced $5 million domestically for Choke, while Overture put up $3.5 million for Henry Poole Is Here and $2 million for Sunshine Cleaning. And Paramount Vantage plunked down more than $1 million for high school documentary American Teen. You’ve never heard of those films? None of them made back those advances. Tellingly, Vantage and Overture no longer exist. “I’ve lost money on movies I’ve loved and acquired, and made money on movies I’ve loved and acquired,” Focus Features founder James Schamus once told me. “I’ll overpay this year if I feel like it.”

  By 2011, the business had adjusted to a new reality. While Sundance sales were healthy that year, they were by no means spectacular. Distributors spread the wealth on a wide swath of cautious, modest buys. Out of 117 films screened for the first time at Sundance in 2011, 60 percent were released theatrically in the United States—a higher percentage than at other major festivals. Even so, several high-profile acquisitions underperformed at the box office, including Fox Searchlight’s Martha Marcy May Marlene and Sony Pictures Classics’ Take Shelter. According to Sundance Institute executive director Keri Putnam, who put in her time at both Miramax and HBO Films, “there’s been an independent distribution tipping point. Only a small percentage of independently released films make their money back.”