The $11 Billion Year

by Anne Thompson

  By independently released films, she is referring to those not handled by traditional theatrical distributors. Many films have to take the route of self-distribution, which requires that a filmmaker hire and supervise professional marketers, bookers, and publicists. One problem with this approach is that digital and independent revenue streams, whether theatrical or nontheatrical, need to be reliable and transparent enough to make investors confident (like ancillary markets such as foreign and broadcast and cable television), which is not the case so far. “We’re sitting on the cusp,” Putnam says. “But no model has been developed to take revenue streams to the bank.”

  This is the rub. The independent community is waiting for self-distribution or VOD or social media or crowdsourcing to reach some kind of critical mass. At this point, while it’s never been easier to make a film and it’s possible to raise funds from the public using platforms like Kickstarter, which allows the public to pledge money against an achievable benchmark goal during a prescribed time frame, distribution is still a challenge. Only microbudget films can come out ahead. Under Putnam’s assertive leadership, the Institute created Sundance Artists Services to aid filmmakers—only those affiliated with the workshops or festivals—by bringing them together with marketers as well as digital aggregators such as Hulu (owned by three major studios) and Amazon.

  As someone with a healthy respect for marketing, publicity, and distribution professionals, I worry that so many young filmmakers whose films present marketing challenges face an even more daunting prospect: teaching themselves to market and release their own movies. Film schools have tended to teach students how to make features, not how to market and distribute them. (Though the University of California, Los Angeles, for one, started a festival strategies workshop in 2011.) For every voraciously curious filmmaker like Ava DuVernay (Middle of Nowhere) or Joe Swanberg (V/H/S) who is gifted with self-promotional social media moxie, there are many more who are less comfortable with hawking their wares on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. At what point do you turn people off by sharing too much information?

  At Sundance 2012, the ongoing tension between theatrical release and digital VOD on multiple platforms—cable, iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon—is intensifying. For many of the filmmakers, just getting booked at one festival after another is the most distribution they’ll get. But going into Sundance, each is praying they will not need Artists Services. They want their movie to be one of the lucky, lucky few to land a theatrical distribution deal.

  Over ten days at Sundance, acquisitions and marketing execs and their bosses are like heat-seeking missiles tracking that rare find: the breakout. Many sales agents hold off on showing a film until the festival—usually the filmmakers are rushing to finish against the deadline anyway—because they want the crucible of a theater full of enthusiastic fans and want the press to witness their reaction. It’s often the first time filmmakers have shown the movie to the public. Arbitrage producer Laura Bickford (Traffic) was an anxious wreck carrying her two 35-millimeter reels, still “wet” from the film print lab, onto the plane from LAX to Salt Lake City. Stakes are high.

  At the high-profile red-carpet Eccles Theatre premieres, each buying team assembles at the movies for sale with at least one top decision-maker on hand—Harvey Weinstein or his COO David Glasser, Nancy Utley or Steve Gilula of Fox Searchlight, Rob Friedman or Patrick Wachsberger from Lionsgate, Howard Cohen or Eric d’Arbeloff from Roadside Attractions, James Schamus or Andrew Karpen of Universal’s Focus Features, Jonathan Sehring or Arianna Bocco of IFC Films, Eamonn Bowles or Dori Begley of Magnolia Pictures, Michael Barker or Tom Bernard of Sony Pictures Classics. These leading distributors huddle with their teams afterward to read the audience and press reaction and decide whether or not to make a bid. They need to be able to move quickly and decisively.

  As they try to gauge which movie the media and filmgoers will consider a must-see, they have to calibrate how much they are willing to wager before losing the project to a higher bidder. Most of the time, they’ve already selected the movies they are ready to buy; in some cases they’ve been following them for years, giving notes to the filmmakers and trying to be helpful. Why not prebuy before the film is finished and take them off the table? Sometimes they do, when they are confident in a relationship with a filmmaker or producer. But most of the time, the distributors’ caution is based on waiting to make sure that the film actually plays with an audience.

  Occasionally, a company like Fox Searchlight will fall in love with a little film out of nowhere like John Carney’s 2007 Irish musical Once, starring musicians Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, and be willing to plow in the time and energy to bring it to audiences. They’ll figure out a game plan to sell the movie, even if it’s relying on good old-fashioned audience word of mouth by keeping it in theaters for weeks or even months. They also need to get a sense of how a few key critics will react.

  At Sundance, after each screening, writers from the likes of HitFix, The Playlist, and Vulture tweet immediate 140-character feedback, followed within hours by more thoughtful reviews from the trades. The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy, Variety’s Scott Foundas, and Indiewire’s Eric Kohn post online, as do countless movie sites such as Twitch, Movies.com, Film School Rejects, Badass Digest, Collider, and Slashfilm, which interact directly with rabid movie fans who may buy tickets or stream later on. Review aggregators Criticwire, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic also collect festival reviews and post their rankings. Major newspapers will also post roundups during Sundance, but most top critics save their good stuff for the day the movie hits theaters.

  For filmmakers at Sundance, the fantasy is that an established distributor will plunk down money to release their film. The reality is that only a handful will make the big score, landing an MG from a studio subsidiary, complete with marketing commitment. The rest may land VOD distribution or self-release their film, which allows them to keep more of the proceeds. But even so, most will never make back their production and marketing costs.

  THE BRASS RING: THE STUDIO PICKUP

  On opening night of Sundance 2012, Tom Bernard of Sony Pictures Classics swoops down on the documentary Searching for Sugar Man, convinced that it will prove to be one of the best films at the festival. The next day, his warm breath trailing in the cold air as we talk in front of the Eccles, Bernard is still grinning at how well the movie played; he closed the deal right after the screening. Like the hockey player he is, he knows he has scored a goal.

  Sundance has played a vital role in the global documentary film movement that is now in full bloom. As costs for digital filmmakers have come down, rules of storytelling have become less rigid. Point is, crowd-pleasers like Searching for Sugar Man remind us that docs no longer have to be dull, expository explorations of world issues (as worthy as some of those films may be). They can be crazy fun. Of the 114 films selected for Sundance in 2012, an astounding 39 are documentaries.

  Searching for Sugar Man plays like a narrative feature. Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul cannily manipulates the story so that audiences eagerly follow clues, seeking the answer to various mysteries that unfold in delightful and surprising ways. The film reveals an expert filmmaker who knows what tidbits to unspool and when to withhold information. It’s worked since the dawn of storytelling.

  The Sony art-house film division was founded in December 1991 by copresidents Tom Bernard and Michael Barker, one of the movie business’s most durable partnerships. They met in 1979, when both were working with Films Incorporated, which rented movies to colleges and prisons. The friendship was formed when they pulled each other’s names for that year’s Secret Santa gift exchange.

  Barker and Bernard went on to create and run United Artists Classics, followed by Orion Classics. When Orion’s parent company went bankrupt in December 1991, they needed to find a place to continue releasing the specialty films from around the world they loved. Sony gave them a home—and allowed them to continue running their unit autonomously.r />
  Over the past twenty-one years, SPC has established an enviable track record as one of the most successful boutique distributors in the history of the industry: some 371 releases thus far, which as of 2013 had earned 135 Oscar nominations and 31 wins. Meanwhile, it has forged invaluable bonds with such global auteurs as Woody Allen, Akira Kurosawa, Pedro Almodóvar, and Michael Haneke.

  Searching for Sugar Man, about a seventies Mexican American folk-rocker known as Rodriguez, was only supposed to show on Swedish TV. It took thirty-four-year-old Bendjelloul five years to make. It’s his first feature. After shooting short biodocs on Björk, Sting, Rod Stewart, and Elton John; a Prince concert film; and docs that provided the source material for features The Men Who Stare at Goats and The Terminal, Bendjelloul traveled around Africa for six months looking for a great story to film. Out of six possibilities, the one he finally pursued was “the best story I ever heard,” he says at screening Q&As.

  Bendjelloul discovered that Rodriguez was a huge star in South Africa, as big as Dylan or Hendrix; he was the South African Elvis. Somehow his soft ballads had hit the anti-Apartheid zeitgeist without his ever stepping foot there. He was the spokesman for a generation, a household name who sold countless records. But no one had seen the man in three decades; his Sussex record label had gone bankrupt thirty-five years before. So Bendjelloul went in search of him. The movie reveals what he found, and audiences at Sundance told Bernard what he needed to know: the movie moved people.

  Two of the best-reviewed Sundance 2012 feature film entries landed coveted slots at Fox Searchlight—The Sessions and Beasts of the Southern Wild. Searchlight is one of three thriving studio subsidiaries (Paramount Vantage, Disney’s Miramax Films, and Warner Independent Pictures did not survive) and tends to spend more on marketing budgets than Universal’s Focus Features or Sony Pictures Classics. In fact, Searchlight is willing to invest substantial money, time, and energy into making their handpicked slate work every year. It’s as if they can take a movie like Terrence Malick’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner The Tree of Life and will it into becoming an art-house Oscar contender.

  Run by gifted marketer Nancy Utley and exhibition veteran Steve Gilula, the company still operates on the successful economic model burnished by Rupert Murdoch protégé Peter Rice, who moved on to run Fox TV. Searchlight rarely spends more than $15 million on producing a film, and for every project it finances, or gives the “green light,” and every finished film that it acquires as a “pickup,” the executive team has to agree. Production executive Claudia Lewis works closely with writers and filmmakers, while acquisition chief Tony Safford once programmed the early Sundance Film Festival. This impressive brain trust still make mistakes—for every Hilary Swank Oscar-winning hit Boys Don’t Cry, there’s also an Amelia or Conviction—but they know how to reach their target smart audience (a broader demo than the conventional adult art-house crowd) whether old or young, male or female, via sophisticated social media marketing and substantial spending against the playing out of a movie in theaters over weeks, even months.

  Searchlight is no slouch at cherry-picking Oscar contenders (see Slumdog Millionaire, The Descendants, The Wrestler, and Sundance hit Little Miss Sunshine). At Sundance 2012 they land the biggest buy of the festival, paying $6 million for world rights to The Surrogate (which they quickly retitle The Sessions), an intimate relationship movie that rests on two main performances (Variety slang: two-hander) and is written and directed by Australian Ben Lewin, who has not made a feature film in eighteen years. They take the risk with this almost painfully raw film about the sexual challenges of a paraplegic because it has a ring of authenticity, much like 2011 Oscar winner The King’s Speech, which touched people partly because screenwriter David Seidler brought his own struggle with stuttering to his portrait of the tongue-tied King George VI. Similarly, Lewin, writer of The Sessions, suffered polio as a youth. When he climbs the stairs to the stage at the Eccles Theatre, he limps with a cane.

  Oscar veterans Helen Hunt (Best Actress winner for As Good As It Gets) and John Hawkes (nominated for Winter’s Bone) are nothing if not fussy when they pick roles. They both vetted the script and director and saw rich material in this eighties story about the late intellectual Mark O’Brien (Hawkes), who wanted more from life than lying immobile in an iron lung. He hires a sex surrogate (Hunt) to help him find intimacy. The film is not a romance. While the surrogate comes to care deeply for O’Brien—within the confines of a professional relationship—she is able to teach him how to make another woman happy. He goes on to find the love of his life.

  “I’ve never seen a story where both of them meet with the intention to give him a future,” Hunt tells me during a Los Angeles Screen Actors Guild Q&A. “Anyone who could write like that, he knew how to tell a story. That’s what I clung to before we started.”

  This sexual soufflé is so delicate and sensitive that it could easily have gone flat. Audiences are often uncomfortable with sex in cinema, and The Sessions embraces moments that are awkward and embarrassing, even humiliating. Both actors are literally naked. “I was vulnerable,” admits Hunt. “By the end of the day I needed my clothes on.”

  Yet Lewin and his cast stayed on course; they filmed in chronological order, building trust as they went. This movie demanded subtle, careful handling from everyone involved. For his part, Hawkes was in considerable discomfort as he lay on a soccer-ball-sized piece of foam that twisted his spine, he tells me. “It was a small amount of pain, but it was the most physically challenging thing I’ve ever done.”

  THE BREAKOUT

  Searchlight also nabs the hit of the festival, Benh Zeitlin’s four-hankie dystopian family drama Beasts of the Southern Wild, starring newcomer Quvenzhané Wallis as six-year-old Hushpuppy and, as her father, baker Dwight Henry, who agreed to accept the role so long as he could continue to run his bakery shop. Finished two days before the festival, the microbudget $1.5 million picture was filmed with Zeitlin’s Court 13 film collective, a nonhierarchical gang of artist friends, on a constantly flooding abandoned delta island below the New Orleans levees.

  The group started to coalesce around a squash court in 2002, when Zeitlin was working on his Wesleyan University animated thesis film Egg, and it grew from there. He believes in everyone on the project having creative input into the final film. “The people making the film are sculptors, architects, boat builders,” he told the Huffington Post. “The location person is a musician. The casting person is a surfer. They’re not there to advance their careers. They’re all artists in their own right. And the idea is that we let the material and the script be flexible enough that artists are able to express themselves in whatever they’re doing.”

  They didn’t do it alone. They had some help going into the project (which was loosely inspired by Lucy Alibar’s one-act play Juicy and Delicious) from the Sundance Institute screenwriters and directors labs, as well as a grant from the San Francisco Film Society. “I came with the messy, craziest ideas on paper,” the director tells me during a flip-cam interview on a sunny roof overlooking snowy Park City. At the Labs, “they made me justify my choices and boil it down to the specific core of the film, which I discovered through the process.”

  Flexible and free form, Zeitlin’s filmmaking process yielded extraordinary results. Inspired by the eroding coastal geography of southern Louisiana, Zeitlin and Alibar started with a full conventional screenplay. A group of fifteen went on an eight-parish casting search to find the girl to play young Hushpuppy. When Wallis walked in, Zeitlin knew he had found her, and that she would transform his movie: “She had this quiet moral compass, a fierce sense of right and wrong that I knew deep down had to be there. But it took her walking into the room to bring that out. She saved us; we would have crashed without her.”

  According to producer Dan Janvey, in preproduction they workshopped the script with the performers; Wallis and the other characters opened up the language. Zeitlin was open to changing the script to accommodate them.


  They shot the storm-tossed movie from the limited perspective of a six-year-old girl and her imagination, without computer graphic (CG) effects. “The flooding that was already there made me realize we could make a film about the end of the world without any money at all,” says Zeitlin. “We felt combining the real end of the world with the more mythological end of the world made perfect sense.”

  Shot in a chaotic run-and-gun cinema verité style with handheld digital cameras floating at the eye level of the diminutive leading lady to capture her point of view, Zeitlin says, “it’s really about a giant group of us going somewhere, living the story, and creating the movie. The mentality toward production is more collaborative and free. It’s not a hierarchical machine like most movies.”

  The filmmakers got the most out of their locations and nonprofessional actors. “It’s about a feeling that your place may be taken away and learning how to survive that,” says Zeitlin. “People from the region all understood that better than me. In their eyes and mentality they are already survivors, living that fight, sticking by their place.”

  The filmmakers took their time finding their movie in the editing room: Beasts spent a year and a half in postproduction. Thirty-year-old Zeitlin, the eldest son of folklorists who once worked for the Smithsonian, never imagined that his little movie would gross $12.8 million domestically and travel so far and wide. He says, “I’m grateful that people all over the world will see this story that felt so small and rooted, but the emotions are universal.”

  COLLABORATORS AND MULTITASKERS