The $11 Billion Year

by Anne Thompson

  The new indie model, based on scarce resources, relies on collaborator-friends often encountered at festivals who roam the country helping each other out by playing different roles: editing, writing, photographing, producing, acting. Mumblecore is one name that has been applied to both a generation of young independent filmmakers and the microbudget relationship films they shoot with a low-key naturalistic aesthetic.

  At Sundance 2012, three popular hits are collaborations with writer-director Mark Duplass (Cyrus, TV’s The League), who executive-produced and starred in Colin Trevorrow’s offbeat sci-fi romance Safety Not Guaranteed; wrote and produced his wife Katie Aselton’s second feature, horror thriller Black Rock; and costarred with Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt in Lynn Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister. Duplass is the consummate collaborator-multitasker, producing, writing, and acting for friends as well as directing films with his brother Jay, from indie-financed Paramount release Jeff, Who Lives at Home to Scott Rudin’s planned remake Same Time, Next Year.

  The roots of Safety Not Guaranteed are bizarre, to say the least. The story of a reporter and two interns who track down the source of a strange newspaper ad about time travel was inspired by a 1997 classified ad that appeared in a backwoods survivalist magazine in northern Oregon, later becoming an Internet meme.

  Director Trevorrow’s writing partner, Derek Connolly, saw a glimmer of an idea for a larger story, and the two worked up a draft for an emotional time-travel comedy. They brought in as exec producers Mark and Jay Duplass. Mark, especially, helped to develop the character that he eventually played. “Mark made awesome choices that helped to ground that character,” says Trevorrow. “It was a tonal tightrope walk.”

  A child of the eighties, of Richard Donner and Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg, Trevorrow wanted to infuse his movie with “the same kind of naturalism that Mark and Jay are so good at. Where I come from is where they come from: hybrid, honest, real, and intimate, but you also have cinematic moments.”

  The role of the girlish newspaper intern who pulls a jaded reporter into the plot was written for Parks and Recreation star Aubrey Plaza, with whom Trevorrow and Connolly share a manager. They lined up Plaza and the director’s friend of ten years, actor Jake M. Johnson, and “hit a lot of resistance at a lot places,” admits Trevorrow. “They were not close to being movie stars. I said, ‘We can’t do this,’ and Mark said, ‘You can do this but for a certain amount of money.’ We figured out we could make it for under $1 million. We didn’t want an audience to feel they were watching something cheap or chintzy.”

  They sent the script to Little Miss Sunshine backer Big Beach because their films have a “consistent tone,” says Trevorrow. “They make films that are interesting and dark and in the end uplifting. The first one they read is the one we shot. No changes. We were given complete freedom.”

  Eventually Duplass came around to playing Kenneth, the time traveler, says Trevorrow. “He was the missing piece of the whole project. I didn’t want him to be a broad silly character, but a grounded real person who our heroine is falling in love with. We buy Mark as a real man. He has a naturalistic presence on screen. We asked if he would do it, and he said yes.”

  Duplass wasn’t doing it for the paycheck. “This is a tiny little movie,” says Trevorrow. “Mark was very eager to take on the challenge of a real character, not just playing another version of himself.”

  In fact, several actors on the film had something to prove. Plaza “wanted to show that she could go beyond the eye-rolling intern in the corner,” says Trevorrow. “Mark wanted to show he could act, not just emote, as himself. Jake Johnson wanted to make clear that he was the great American actor, not just the funny guy on New Girl.”

  When they cast Johnson, New Girl hadn’t actually aired yet. “It was me knowing him,” says Trevorrow, “wanting to show the world. Coincidentally other people figured that out at the same time. Now we have a big TV star in the movie.”

  While Connolly’s first draft was more of a “comedy mystery road trip movie, the same characters and scenes,” Trevorrow pushed the movie in a more romantic, heartfelt direction.

  The movie was a balancing act between comedy and drama. “All we did in every scene was to find the truth in the moment and make it honest,” says Trevorrow. “This was tightly scripted, but we took advantage of having Mark there and have everyone be willing to take time to open the scenes and have intimate moments. The difficult line to walk tonally: we felt it in the editing room, and followed our instincts all the way to keep people engaged and be romantic and funny.” But the R-rated movie has sharp edges; Duplass’s character may well be crazy. And Johnson says mean things about women.

  The biggest anxiety came after Sundance accepted the film in the dramatic competition and Trevorrow agonized over changing the ending, moving away from the script. “I knew something was wrong, that people weren’t feeling the way I had hoped. So I did the opposite of [the ending] we had, and turned the movie upside down.” His instincts turn out to be correct. After a bidding war erupts following the movie’s rousing Sunday, January 22, premiere at the Library Center, FilmDistrict beats out the Weinstein Company, Fox Searchlight, Focus Features, and LD Distribution, paying more than seven figures for U.S. rights.

  As a writer who has been working within the studio system for a while, Trevorrow hopes that production executives will now feel comfortable selling him to their bosses. “I like to believe that intimate moments between characters don’t need to be relegated to independent films,” he says. “They can coexist with big exciting things happening; they are not mutually exclusive. Big movies could use a little mumblecore and humanity.”

  Mark Duplass has also enjoyed a close collaboration with writer-director Lynn Shelton, who broke out in 2009 with her Sundance-jury-prize-winning Humpday, costarring Joshua Leonard (The Blair Witch Project) and Duplass, who shares her improvisational acting aesthetic. In fact, they did so well together with Humpday that Duplass came back to her with a new idea for a movie, one she ran with—and totally changed. Her fourth feature, Your Sister’s Sister, debuted at Toronto, where it was acquired by VOD distributor IFC Films, and went on to play Sundance, Tribeca, San Francisco, and Seattle.

  Trained as an actress and photographer, the lanky, strikingly beautiful Shelton shot documentaries and music videos, building her base out of her native Seattle as well as at Sundance, Toronto, and SXSW. With Your Sister’s Sister, the director focuses her roving camera on a complex love triangle that twists through past relationships and issues of sexual identity and sibling rivalry. Duplass plays a man lost and depressed after the death of his brother. His best friend (Emily Blunt) sends him to a remote island to recuperate. He huffs and puffs on his bike out to her family cabin in the woods, where he is surprised to find her half sister (Rosemarie DeWitt). After much alcohol, the two sleep together. And then the next day her sister (Blunt) shows up. Much hilarity ensues, and all is not as it seems. It’s not your ordinary relationship comedy.

  Shelton changed gears on Your Sister’s Sister to accommodate a pair of actresses who were not as fearlessly confident as Duplass with improvising in front of close-up digital cameras. They adjusted. “It’s about intimacy and the ability to create an emotionally safe environment,” Shelton tells me later. “That’s a huge component of how I like to work: to feel totally safe. Collaboration is at its best when everybody is bringing the best out of each other. You have to have an incredible amount of trust. I carefully consider who I’m going to ask onto that set. It has to be the right number of bodies, a baker’s dozen of crew members, and that’s it. There’s no toxicity on the set. The actors know I’m never going to let any of their misfires show up on screen. They know I’m only going to show them at their best.”

  Shelton supports her independent movie habit by directing such television shows as Mad Men and New Girl. This allows her to tune in to her own drummer, living far away from the big studios, in Seattle. “It’s an intimate, mutually supportiv
e community of film collaborators there,” she says. “My gaffer and assistant director are directing right now. Every time somebody starts up (a film), we all go and help. It’s a beautiful, very satisfying community to be part of. We’re hoping for the best for each other. My acting teacher in New York years ago told us never to feel competitive or jealous when other people have success. Success comes in bunches. If people around you are succeeding, it means you are next: only wish well for the people around you.”

  Likewise, Duplass is free to pursue indie directing projects with his brother Jay (such as microbudget The Do-Deca-Pentathlon) with his earnings from the ongoing hit FX comedy series The League, which costars his wife, Katie Aselton. Duplass wrote 2012 Sundance Midnight chiller Black Rock as a directing and starring vehicle for her. It’s Aselton’s second feature after The Freebie, a marital relationship comedy costarring improv whiz Dax Shepard. The R-rated isolated island thriller starring three women (Aselton, Kate Bosworth, and Lake Bell) who fight off male attackers sold to Mickey Liddell and David Dinerstein’s LD Distribution.

  Aselton is yet another indie actress-writer-director who has taken matters into her own hands, figuring there was no point in waiting for her career to come to her. “Mark was my ass-kicker,” she admits. “I was convinced my phone was never going to ring again. ‘Just make something on your own,’ he told me. ‘You can’t say it’s too hard.’ He really was my champion in taking control. I drummed up the idea for The Freebie. It felt simple and easy enough to attack on my own. It was less intimidating than a large story; it was really small, with a couple people.”

  The actress wrote a high-concept six-page outline about a long-married couple who decide to take one night off with someone else. “I had an amazing time doing it,” she says. “It was the biggest confidence booster. It’s not rocket science to make a movie.” Phase 4 picked up The Freebie out of Sundance. “It was so cheap to make,” she says, “that it was one of those rare things where everyone who worked on it made money.”

  On Black Rock, a believable action thriller, Aselton dug deeper with a larger-scale cast and crew and more shooting days: “It was a larger adventure on all fronts.” She came up with the basic idea of three women friends on their own in Maine, but Duplass wrote the first draft of the script during a twelve-hour layover in L.A., complete with a juicy role that would allow his wife to show off her action chops.

  Aselton’s character takes her two girlfriends—played by Kate Bosworth (Superman Returns) and Lake Bell (What Happens in Vegas)—on a bonding vacation to a deserted island off the coast of Maine, where their isolated camping trip is interrupted by an encounter with three hunting ex-servicemen. Unfortunately, the women become their prey and must defend themselves in order to survive. “It’s Deliverance meets Thelma & Louise,” Aselton says. “The story was so compelling to me. Once I had my girls I was ready to go. It happened so fast.”

  She raised $33,000 on Kickstarter toward the cost of a $40,000 Arri Alexa camera package and shot the film in June in her hometown of Milbridge, Maine, up the coast from Bar Harbor. “It was freezing, truly uncomfortable, 43 degrees.” She enjoyed picking camera angles, following all the character arcs from start to finish, and learning to put more trust in her collaborators, she says. “It was like a creative collective jumping off the cliff together.”

  While The Freebie was improvised and shaped in the editing room during postproduction, Black Rock was already fully scripted, prepped, and shaped, she says, “so post was easier, it was clearer to see what the final film was. Look, if the opportunities are not being presented to me, I’m going to take the reins and do it,” she says. “Brit Marling was not waiting for the phone to ring. The great roles are not there to be had. If you have an idea, do it.” Black Rock opened in limited theaters on the same day as a solid VOD release, followed by a strong DVD release through Lionsgate.

  THE VIDEO-ON-DEMAND (VOD) RELEASE

  All the distributors flocked to the first screening of one of the most anticipated offerings at Sundance 2012: Nicholas Jarecki’s Wall Street thriller Arbitrage, starring Richard Gere as a hedge fund tycoon in both money and family trouble.

  As much of a marquee draw as Gere remains overseas, these days it is challenging to sell a wide theatrical stateside release on the power of a movie star. “Gere is a draw for women and men,” insists producer Laura Bickford at Sundance. “This is the kind of film the studios used to make. It’s an emotional family story, a suspense thriller, and a policier.”

  First-time director Jarecki, thirty-two, is the youngest of three filmmaker brothers. Brother Eugene is also at the festival with the war-on-drugs documentary The House I Live In, and brother Andrew had his own Sundance hit in 2003 with Capturing the Friedmans. Nicholas started out as a computer analyst who consulted on the film Hackers and later caught the directing bug. He made music videos and wrote a book in which he interviewed directors about breaking into Hollywood.

  Jarecki executive-produced the James Toback documentary The Outsider and cowrote the Bret Easton Ellis adaptation The Informers, which he and Ellis were pushed out of before the movie flopped at Sundance 2008. Ellis introduced Bickford and the filmmaker in 2009, when Jarecki was developing an early Arbitrage draft with writer Kevin Turen.

  Bickford helped Jarecki to land his ensemble cast, led by Gere, who made it possible for sales company Parlay to raise enough presales to get bank loans for a $15 million budget. Gere happened to be getting on a plane when he got the script, read it, and immediately wanted to meet Jarecki, who with Bickford joined Gere at the restaurant at his Bedford Post Inn in upstate New York. It didn’t hurt when Bickford’s Traffic stars Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones came over to their table in the restaurant to urge Gere to do the movie.

  Gere’s presence in a project helps to get it made—not that he still commands the serious studio millions he once did. Those days are over, as they have been for most movie actors for some time. In a way, that’s a good thing, if not for them, then for the movies. If actors aren’t tempted to star in studio formula fare they’re more apt to consider the quality of a given role.

  “I’m glad I was there when we could make movies like this and get paid really well—that was great,” Gere tells me before the release. “You can make movies like this now and not get paid so well. It’s good for younger filmmaker-writers. They’re like the guys in the sixties and seventies, inventing new ways of making movies.”

  The studios “don’t make the kind of movies I make anymore,” the sixty-three-year-old actor admits. “So it’s not even relevant at the studio level. The drama was part of what the studio did. They made five or six intelligent movies with Oscars in mind . . . No more.”

  Bickford and Jarecki let go of a financier who wanted the Wall Street movie to be shot in New Orleans, but Bickford took to the phone and found five more equity investors. In the end, Yorick Le Saux, director of photography of French TV series Carlos and Italian drama I Am Love, shot the film in New York City, where Jarecki grew up with his commodity trader father. “Nick knows that world,” says Bickford.

  Susan Sarandon joined the cast for her second film with Gere, playing his wife, while the filmmakers cast former investment banker Brit Marling as his daughter just after her 2011 Sundance success in Another Earth. “You could believe she was running her father’s company,” says Bickford, “not the bimbo playing the brain surgeon.” Up-and-comer Nate Parker, thirty-two (who also starred in another film at the festival, Spike Lee’s Red Hook Summer), came aboard as a young family friend of the titan-in-trouble. After Arbitrage was accepted in rough form for Sundance, Jarecki went back into the editing room to make it better.

  Sundance reviews for the film are largely positive. From the start, as leverage to land domestic rights for Arbitrage, Roadside Attractions hypes its success with its 2011 Sundance pickup, the Wall Street drama Margin Call, which worked in both VOD ($6 million) and theaters ($5.4 million) without one format stealing viewers from the other. (
It also scored an Original Screenplay Oscar nomination for rookie filmmaker J.C. Chandor.) The boutique distributor acquired Margin Call for $2.1 million and went on to spend about $2.5 million in marketing.

  One of the strongest independent distributors, Roadside was cofounded in 2003 by ex-agent Howard Cohen and his life partner, Eric d’Arbeloff. After breaking out with such specialty pictures as Ladies in Lavender, Amazing Grace, and Super Size Me, Roadside sold a 43 percent minority stake in 2007 to Lionsgate, which handles their films on home video. Ivy League–educated, experienced, and possessing excellent taste, Cohen and d’Arbeloff are clever at picking films they can market, often with awards in mind (Winter’s Bone, Biutiful, Albert Nobbs), but they don’t always have the deep pockets to compete with their well-financed studio rivals unless Lionsgate or another partner comes in with them.

  With Arbitrage, Roadside wanted to follow the Margin Call template—a simultaneous, or “day-and-date,” release on VOD and in theaters—which was closely watched as a successful paradigm by the film industry. It tends to work best for films with name actors. Because the major theater chains still disapprove of theater bookings concurrent with VOD availability, Roadside had to “four-wall” several hundred theaters—buying them out at a fixed rate—which was slightly higher for Arbitrage than it had been for Margin Call. But the percentage of four-walled theaters for Arbitrage was less, 25 percent, accounting for about $1.5 million of the gross, according to Cohen, who says the movie still came out well ahead.

  Jarecki was impressed with Margin Call’s numbers and thought that his film could exceed them. “I thought, ‘We can do maybe double the business, if not more, with this film,’ ” he says. “We can expand this model, we got to three or four hundred theaters on this one, we believed that there’s a whole group of people missing indie films because they are not going to go to the theater—for whatever reasons. Facebook individuals write me that they’re in a wheelchair with cancer and don’t like to go to the cinema. They’d love to be able to watch this movie at home and still be part of the first cycle of the conversation. I love this inclusive model, where everyone is invited. It appeared to me humane on a business level. Why leave anyone out? Anybody who wants to give us money, let’s take it. If they’re having a party, you’re invited. Not even counting the VOD, it’s groundbreaking what they did. A lot of filmmakers will try this. They sent people to the theater to ask, ‘Did you know that you could watch this at home?’ Ninety percent didn’t know that. They’re a theatrical audience, they’re going to go. They’re not aware of media platforms. And a whole home audience is not going to go to the theater.”