The point is, backing a wide release in theaters demands serious coin. It can cost $20 million to release a movie on three thousand screens, but it takes a fraction of that to open VOD. The cable companies run plenty of advertising. (It also helps to have a title that starts with the letter A.) And where stardom can be hit or miss when it comes to pulling audiences into theaters, it works like a charm on VOD. By that measure, Gere is a major draw.
Arbitrage was the number one movie on iTunes its opening weekend, September 14, 2012—and still opened to over $2 million on 197 screens en route to an $8 million domestic total. Roadside was so pleased with how the movie performed via Internet, cable, and satellite television that it removed the veil of secrecy on VOD numbers and boasted about how well it did—well north of $11 million. Not bad.
Close to a quarter of the 2012 Sundance releases were made available concurrent with or before their theatrical openings on VOD outlets—cable, iTunes, Hulu, or filmmakers’ own websites. Boasting better-known stars and aimed at a broader audience, eight of the sixteen films in the high-profile Premieres section took the VOD route. Thus 2012 marked a huge sea change in delivery that yielded more profits for the Sundance slate.
The Weinstein Company launched its RADiUS VOD division in 2012 with a $2 million Sundance acquisition, the angry-girl comedy Bachelorette. More of a crowd-pleaser than critics’ picture, the film was given a minimal inexpensive theatrical launch (mainly to build awareness) that grossed under $500,000. But the VOD take was $5.5 million, which more than covered the film’s costs—and produced a nice profit.
VOD pioneers Magnolia and IFC together accounted for a dozen Sundance 2012 films released on VOD. None grossed more than $1 million in theaters. Distributor Magnolia, which is owned by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner’s 2929 Entertainment, can book its films day-and-date with VOD at their own independent Landmark Theatre chain, as can AMC Networks’ IFC Films, which specializes in VOD releases, thanks to a deal between cash princes Cuban and AMC Networks owner, Cablevision CEO Chuck Dolan.
Early in 2005, Magnolia and Landmark experimented by opening Steven Soderbergh’s $1.6 million movie Bubble simultaneously in theaters and on VOD. It was a dud, grossing only $145,626. The ‘day-and-date’ model has come a long way since then.
Just because he has to go along with IFC and Magnolia bookings doesn’t mean that Landmark head Ted Mundorff has to like the practices: like most theater owners, he believes strongly that day-and-date VOD could be the death of the exhibition business. Therefore, he won’t allow any other day-and-date bookings.
And the business is evolving. Now that so many movies are heading toward VOD, a pecking order is starting to emerge. It’s better to be branded with an identity and reviews before you hit VOD, so the day-and-date model—or the “premium,” even more expensive VOD release some weeks before a movie hits theaters—is not the preferred way to go for the smaller films with no stars, which are struggling now to land theatrical openings at all. Movie stars like Richard Gere can carry advance VOD, which also demands strong positioning by cable companies and iTunes. The trend now is toward establishing a movie with reviews and one week of word-of-mouth before going to VOD. The VOD model is maturing and evolving but has yet to supplant the successful theatrical studio subsidiary release, which is buttressed by international TV output deals.
THE AGITPROP DOCUMENTARY
Also grabbing attention at Sundance is Kirby Dick’s gripping activist doc The Invisible War, which exposes the epidemic of rape in the U.S. military. Remarkably, perhaps more than any documentary released to date, the film will go on to have a huge impact on redressing the injustice it reveals.
The L.A. filmmaker has made a name for himself by writing and directing documentaries that challenge powerful institutions, from the Catholic Church (the Oscar-nominated Twist of Faith) to the Motion Picture Association of America ratings board (This Film Is Not Yet Rated).
Most filmmakers hope that their movies will be seen, talked about, make money, earn awards, and maybe have some influence on the culture at large. With The Invisible War, Dick and producer Amy Ziering set their sights on the U.S. military establishment. They were determined to shake things up and push for change, because to allow what was happening to continue was intolerable, unthinkable.
Dick tells me at Sundance that he was astonished that nobody had made a movie about the shocking number of male and female rapes in the military—a consistent, unchanging 19,000 a year, about 80 percent not reported. Twenty percent of all servicewomen have been assaulted while serving, often by serial predators; estimates are that 500,000 people total have been sexually assaulted in the U.S. military. Prosecution rates are low: less than 21 percent of reported cases went to trial in 2010. Of 529 alleged perpetrators, only 53 percent were convicted. Plus, there is no sex offender registry in the military.
Dick soon realized that no one seemed to know what was going on due to the gulf between America’s military culture and all-volunteer army and the filmmaking community: never the twain shall meet. That was why the liberal intelligentsia—the sort of people who make documentaries—didn’t know what was happening. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, PBS-owned Independent Television Service (ITVS), and France’s Canal Plus came in to back the film, along with homeless advocate Maria Cuomo Cole (sister of New York’s governor) and other nonprofit donors. But not as many as Dick had expected.
“I had hoped that the movie would bring veterans and feminists together, two constituencies that are not seen as aligned,” Dick says. He did not marshal support from either group until long after he had spent a year crisscrossing the country shooting interviews, most conducted by Ziering. Many of the victims were talking about their rapes for the first time. “You just decide you are going to make this film,” says Dick, “and somehow it’s going to work out in the end. It’s harder to find a really good subject for a film than it is to find money.”
The question was whether the film could light a fire under the Obama administration. “Would they step up and make substantial changes?” Dick asked. The Invisible War shows how many upstanding, idealistic young women patriotically choose to serve their country only to be rewarded with humiliating and traumatic violence that ruins their lives. Isolated in Alaska, Trina McDonald, a U.S. Navy seaman, was horrifyingly trapped in a life-threatening situation with no support. U.S. Coast Guard seaman Kori Cioca was beaten up, suffering an injury to her jaw that has yet to stop producing pain, and the long years she spent fighting for medical support strained her marriage.
But reform is coming. After Sundance, the filmmakers undertook a massive screening campaign for influencers around the country, targeting especially the Washington, D.C., media, major nonprofits, retired generals, the Department of Defense, and the Obama administration. Eventually a screener of the film got to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, although the filmmakers are not sure how.
In a follow-up telephone interview, Dick says that it was soon after Panetta saw the film that he held an April press conference laying out planned changes in the rules governing sexual assault in the military: commanders would pass investigations to an outside, higher-ranked colonel or captain, moving the prosecution up the level of command; each armed forces branch would have a special victims unit, and more prosecutions would be pursued. At the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Panetta thanked executive producer Jennifer Siebel Newsom (wife of California lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom) for making the film and told her it moved him.
Dick is “cautiously optimistic” that these first steps will lead to improvements. But having investigations stay within the chain of command still leaves open the potential for conflicts of interest, he says. Two parallel pieces of legislation are moving slowly through the Senate and the House. “It’s a start. We advocate that people have to be moved outside chain of command so an arbiter makes the decision to investigate or prosecute, as is done in all civilian systems.”
U.S. Representative Niki Tsongas of Massa
chusetts brought up The Invisible War to Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki at a July 25 joint hearing of the House Armed Services and House Veterans Affairs Committees. She had heard that Shinseki had seen the doc the day before. In the hearing she told Shinseki she was “heartened” by his interest in the film, and remarked how the film “painfully highlights” the bureaucratic hurdles that survivors of sexual assault have to endure to get their proper benefits.
Showing the film seems to have an effect. To keep applying pressure on the government, the filmmakers pulled together several groups—victims of sexual assault, veterans, human rights activists, and the nonprofit group Protect Our Defenders—into an umbrella coalition called Invisible No More. A May screening of the film at an armed forces Sexual Harassment/Assault Prevention Summit had a significant impact, says Dick. “We heard immediately that people wanted to order the film. The Army itself seems very proactive on using this film, ordered it for a number of bases, scheduled dozens of screenings at military establishments.”
While Dick was prepared for some real resistance or counterattack from the military establishment, “in fact that has not happened,” he says. “They’ve been receptive in using the film in training.” That’s because the film helps to put a human face on the suffering these attacks cause and reveals the limited tools available to people dealing with sexual assault. “People on the ground know it’s a problem and are doing everything they can to address the problem with tools that are ineffectual,” says Dick. “They’re glad to get hold of the film, to show exactly what happens.” Seeing the film, in other words, hits you in the gut in a way that reading clinical reports could not.
THE SELF-RELEASING MODEL
Another topical Sundance documentary, Detropia, shows that as popular as the DIY distribution model may be, it’s not easy as it looks. Filmmakers are figuring out that while they can do better for themselves much of the time, there’s a steep learning curve.
Shot around the ruins of contemporary Detroit, Detropia marks Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s most cinematic film to date. The filmmaking team zero in on the economic disintegration, the literal downsizing of Detroit—which has shrunk to 700,000 souls from its peak population of 2,000,000—and the city’s ballooning gap between rich and poor. The cautionary tale uses the Motor City as a bellwether for the entire country. But this moving doc is no death knell. The filmmakers find heroes in many walks of Detroit life, ordinary and extraordinary folks fostering new possibilities and surprising hope amid crushing hardships. (In July 2013, the city of Detroit declared bankruptcy.)
As established producer-directors, the duo was able to raise $950,000 in six months for their documentary, including support from the Sundance documentary fund, the Ford Foundation, and other investors. “We’ve earned our luck over the years,” says Ewing, who knew the money they nabbed for TV rights from ITVS would make it tougher to sell later to a theatrical distributor. It’s always easier to sell a movie with all rights available than it is to sell one with only “split” rights. But it was worth it to get the advance fees, she says: “We knew the offers were going to be paltry. But we love ITVS.” Otherwise, Ewing explains, filmmakers have to borrow money and take out loans to make the movie, which often means not paying their support staff.
So they took the movie to Sundance, hired a publicist, and courted the usual suspects on the distribution side. They wanted to show the film in theaters—before the automotive bailout was no longer a hot election topic. (The film wouldn’t air on ITVS until May 2013.)
After Sundance, the Detropia filmmakers were so unhappy with the onerous deal terms available that they decided to jump into self-distribution. They set up their own IFC Center opening in New York, hired industry vet Michael Tuckman to book theaters for them, and paid for some marketing and publicity by raising a $70,000 budget for prints and ads on Kickstarter.
AS EWING AND GRADY FOUND out the hard way, self-releasing demands learning the intricacies of marketing and distribution, skills that take professionals years to acquire. And the landscape is constantly changing. These days, however, distributors often have less time and fewer resources to devote to selling the movies they release. And the deals they offer are skimpy at best. So more filmmakers are doing the math and doing it for themselves. But while some people are natural self-promoters who have an instinct for hawking their wares on social media, others haven’t a clue.
After Sundance, Ewing and Grady’s conversations with distributors yielded offers from three well-known legitimate companies, as well as two smaller outfits. Most of the deals committed to release the movie in two to five cities at most, with some proposing just a one-week minimal New York and Los Angeles run to qualify for the Academy Awards. The problem with the offers, besides the “shitty money,” Ewing tells me during an interview at a Starbucks in Los Angeles, was that they weren’t accompanied by any passion for pushing the movie to audiences. “There wasn’t a lot of vision around it. They’d take it, not try at their end, offer a nice DVD package.”
Ewing’s dissatisfaction may be partly due to her entrepreneurial bent. Her father ran a family business outside Detroit. “I am from a family of manufacturing entrepreneurs who kept reinventing the company,” she says. “All my father’s colleagues went under when everything changed to being made elsewhere, but he made specialty parts that were difficult to produce. He keeps innovating. I took something from that: to stay current and reinvent. Just making films, you think someone else will do the release for you. But it’s a business. Now you have to do it as well. I see a lot of deer in headlights. If everyone doesn’t up their game they will be taken advantage of. You have to know when to shift gears. Filmmakers need to be better businesspeople.”
Figuring that they owed it to the movie not to let it “just drop off a cliff after we do Sundance,” says Ewing, they decided they “needed to consider independent releasing.” One investor, Impact Partners’ Dan Cogan, was their cheerleader through the process. “He said, ‘All the deals suck,’ ” she recalls. “They weren’t inspiring at all.” They decided to research their options. In eleven days they put up a trailer and of the donors who gave a total $71,000 for publicity, prints, and ads on Kickstarter, 866 were friends, 500 were strangers.
Did they know how much they needed? No. They guessed. “We were afraid to ask for more,” admits Ewing. “We asked for sixty thousand dollars and needed ninety thousand. An angel came in with twenty thousand. You get what you ask for.”
Out of their New York Loki Films office, Ewing and Grady organized six interns, who sent out a Detropia newsletter and e-mail blast to the lists the filmmakers have been building ever since their 2006 Oscar-nominated Pentecostal documentary Jesus Camp. “We kept track of every item of press,” says Ewing. “You’ve got to be smart and organized or forget about it. We’re trying new stuff. Even if Sony Pictures Classics was with us we’d be working our ass off. The nature of independent cinema is that distributors have limited budgets for P&A [prints and advertising]. It’s hard to get butts in seats. There’s a lot of stuff in the ether fighting for attention, people wanting to get home to watch True Blood.”
Tellingly, absolutely no 35-millimeter prints were involved. With theater booker Tuckman they slowly rolled out the movie on Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs)—a collection of digital files used to store and convey digital audio, image, and data streams—to thirty-five cities, landing an opening on September 7 at New York’s IFC Center, on September 14 for the hometown premiere in Detroit, on September 28 in the Bay Area, and on October 5 in Los Angeles. Some bookings were limited runs, some open, from two to five days. Boston’s Coolidge Corner booked the film for five days; the Goodrich Theater Chain took the films to little towns in the Midwest for one or two nights only, offering a Skype Q&A with the directors. “How great that people in little towns can see this,” Ewing thought.
With the self-release model, Ewing and Grady own their own VOD and DVD rights. For the first time they collaborated on those relea
ses (January 2013) with New Video through the Sundance Artist Services program.
Ewing still doesn’t know if they did the right thing. “It was not about the money,” she says. “We made an artistic movie close to my heart. We took more ownership. It continues to be creative. I’ll never know if the others would have done better.” The film grossed a robust $400,000 (for a documentary) at the theatrical box office. Other filmmakers are so impressed that they plan to follow this model, including established documentarian A. J. Schnack, who considered taking out his Branson, Missouri, documentary, We Always Lie to Strangers, this way. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
SUNDANCE SALES 2012
In the end, Sundance 2012 sales declined for the top buys. About 100 of the fest’s 114 films landed some sort of theatrical, VOD, cable, PBS, and/or DVD release—or were self-distributed. The theatrical gross for the 2011 Sundance films totaled $90 million; the 2012 films topped out at $75 million, with only two films grossing $11 million or more, and only thirteen grossing $1.5 million or more, which is at the low end for a specialized film.
One of two top grossers was the badly reviewed Bradley Cooper vehicle The Words, which sold to CBS Films for $2.1 million on the basis of a $1.5 million fifteen-city 2,800-screen theatrical commitment for prints and ads. It grossed $11 million at the box office and bettered that take on home video.
The $11 Billion Year Page 5