If you’re a filmmaker looking for an edge in today’s new digital distribution universe, it can’t hurt to come up with a title for your movie that begins with the letter “A” or “B.” It may sound facile or crass, but with Video-On-Demand an increasingly important segment of the business, recent indie movies like “The Answer Man,” “A Quiet Little Marriage” or “Bart Got a Room” will advantageously sit atop the catalogue of cable operator’s On-Demand listings, while movies like “World’s Greatest Dad” and “What Goes Up” will sit at the bottom… So goes my latest Industry Beat column for Filmmaker Magazine.
Money going back to the filmmakers—a.k.a. “overages”—continues to be slow to report and probably insufficient to recoup the costs of a larger-budget film, but it’s still something. As sales agent Andrew Herwitz says in the piece, regarding the small returns on one of his films, “It’s not a totally insignificant amount of revenue.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but it’s better than nothing.
And yet, for the bulk of independent filmmakers, the whole discussion may be moot. After reading my article, filmmaker Ryan Gielen wrote this response which essentially says the IFC model is not only irrevelant, but inappropriate. “The average indie doesn’t get into Sundance, doesn’t get attention form IFC,” he writes, “and focusing on these models can distract from preparing a competent or hopefully sophisticated strategy for release, using all the available tools.” Gielen says Hulu provides far higher percentages than the VOD distribs, but I still wonder how much money we’re ultimately talking about. Is it enough for Gielen and other filmmakers like him to make more movies?
This year, perhaps for the first time, a number of uber-indies have the chance to enter the vaunted ranks of Hollywood’s biggest promotional platform: Best Picture. Here’s my latest story for IFC.com, “Welcome to the Wild Card Oscars”: “If the new rule change presumably happened to help mainstream studio films make the Best Picture cut—the oft-cited example being last year’s slight of “The Dark Knight,” while early talk this year is circling “District 9” and “Avatar” as big-budget possibilities—the shift may inevitably favor indies, because studios are making fewer and fewer of the sorts of prestige movies that are typically Oscar fodder.”
When even Hollywood blogger David Poland becomes enraptured by the latest exploits of Lars Von Trier (all news, big and small, of the Danish provocateur, has been appearing on his MovieCityNews website), I’m beginning to wonder whether Von Trier is beginning to reach some level of critical mass recognition, and that his latest “Antichrist” might blow up at the box-office. Even industry trade Variety got into the act, publishing this account of the “Antichrist” T-shirt “Chaos Reigns” craze, and perpetuating the myth of the audience member who passed out during the New York Film Festival screening. (Did medical technicians actually take the man from his seat, or as one audience member told me, did the man simply walk out on his own two feet?). Whatever actually happened doesn’t matter, of course: The marketing value of the moment has already been established and “Antichrist” is fast-becoming a major cinematic event—the kind of viral triumph that studios dream of cultivating.
Now would be the time for distributor IFC Films to start considering a more aggressive theatrical release. I have no doubt the film will do well via video-on-demand when it becomes available on Oct. 21 (will the cable version be censored for TV?). But its limited rollout a couple days later in theaters could be a missed opportunity if not easily adapted and expanded. A potentially cult event, “Antichrist” is crazy, controversial and enthralling enough to be the kind of “scary” film that catches fire with a younger audience. Of course, it’s arty and challenging, too, but you’ve got to believe there are enough hipsters in major markets that are curious enough about the buzz to catch it on the bigscreen. At least, I hope so, for as much as the movie goes off the deep end, as I reported in Cannes, “one can’t deny the film’s continuing primal power.”
Whatever you think about Von Trier’s filmmaking (personally, I believe it’s pretty awesome), he’s also a master marketer. “Dogme 95” may be one of the most successful global indie-film promotional campaigns in the last two decades. Von Trier is using his newfound moment in the sun to shrewdly announce his next project: a psychological “disaster” film titled “Melancholia”—I suspect that the “disaster” genre reference is another mere marketing ploy, as much as “Antichrist” and “Epidemic!” are “horror” films. According to trade reports, the $7 million movie will shoot next summer targeting a Cannes 2011 launch. Zentropa’s Peter Aalbaek Jensen told the Hollywood Reporter that the film promised “a mix of spectacular, cinematic imagery with Dogme-style handheld camerawork… [and] would be “romantic, in a Lord Byron sort of way.”
Updated: Todd Solondz’s “Life During Wartime”—playing at the New York Film Festival this weekend—may be the most thorough, penetrating and profound accounting of post-9/11 America and the nation’s utter and dysfunctional lack of compassion. (Its inital title was simply “Forgiveness.”) After watching the film for the first time yesterday, its haunting images and lingering sadness continue to stay with me. Actors Charlotte Rampling, Allison Janey, Paul Reubens, Ciarin Hinds and young actor Dylan Snyder all deliver individual moments of intensity and pain that I won’t soon forget.
But the reason I’m writing about the film here and now is not specifically to champion it—though I’m happy to, as well—but as a sort of corrective to a recent post that my fellow indieWIRE blogger Anne Thompson wrote about the film’s financiers Werc Werk Works.
It’s hard to sit by and read a glowing account of the new WWW producers (Christine Walker and Elizabeth Redleaf) and their supportive relationship of Solondz’s art-form when the true picture of that relationship is far more ambiguous and possibly contentious. Some facts: While tracking the project’s genesis over the years, I always found it curious that longtime Solondz supporter Ted Hope (a producer on “Happiness”) withdrew from the film. Then when the movie appeared at film festivals, why was it that Solondz and Walker/Redleaf never shared the same space: Solondz went to Venice; Walker/Redleaf did not. Walker/Redleaf went to Toronto; Solondz did not. In New York, Walker was present; Solondz appeared, but only via Skype. And what ever happened to the original, much talked-about cast member Paris Hilton? None of these facts, in and of themselves, suggest much discord, and making a movie with Solondz can’t be easy. But I have a feeling that some day somewhere it will be revealed that WWW isn’t necessarily the financing/producing godsend in these difficult times that they might first appear. Money, unfortunately, always comes with strings attached.
Updated: “Aftershool”—opening TODAY at the Cinema Village, where I’ll be hosting a Q&A with the director after the 7:20pm show—was the cool, mystifying and brilliantly executed surprise of Cannes 2008. Antonio Campos’ feature debut—combining teen angst and Hanekean dread—seemingly came out of nowhere, but by festival’s end, many critics, from Howard Feinstein to J. Hoberman, cited the movie as a veritable discovery, convinced they had witnessed the work of a budding auteur.
(Producer Ted Hope has also signed on as an official supporter: He sent out an email to some hundred New York based directors to come out and give their support to the film, which he called the “strongest debut work to come out of NYC in a long, long time.”)
After that first viewing in Cannes, I wrote: “Gus Van Sant‘s ‘Elephant’ and Atom Egoyan‘s voyeuristic visions come to mind, but Campos’s style remains unique: he frequently employs dislocating, fragmentary, or off-center frames - even a major kiss is barely seen, shoved to the bottom corner of the frame in favor of bobbing foreheads. And his thematic concerns are also his own: coming-of-age becomes a pathological condition and strange disconnected state, where the virtual worlds of violence and sex intermingle with the real.”
Since Cannes, Campos has been struggling with getting his film out to an audience. With his high-art sensibility and global ambitions, it’s no wonder he held out for some sort of theatrical release, albeit a limited one, before IFC funnels the film through its massive VOD pipeline. (Fortunately, the movie’s title begins with an “A,” which should help it find viewers on the cable company’s alphabetically-listed menus).
But the film deserves the theatrical screen. Its juxtaposition of pristine wide-screen 35mm film with a prolific dose of pixilated video images, ranging from YouTube clips to DV-camera footage, absolutely needs a large screen to appreciate. As Campos told me for this Village Voice interview when the film played at last year’s New York Film Festival, “I always knew I wanted the video to appear in center-frame, and that jump to anamorphic was important,” says Campos—because, as a result, “the universe and scope of the film [becomes] bigger than just a high-school teen film.”
Do check it out this weekend in the theater. Not only because it’s a smart, disturbing and memorable movie, but it also presents a model for ultra-low-budget films that don’t want to employ a grainy verite digital aesthetic, but aspire to glossy, cinematic celluloid images that recall the glory days of art cinema.
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