Distrtibute This! Independent Film Distribution Seminar Left to right: Bob Berney, Senior VP of Marketing and Distribution for IFC, Eamonn Bowles, President of Magnolia Pictures, Jennifer Todd, producer, Gary Garfinkel, VP of Acquisitions for Showtime Networks, Elvis Mitchell, New York Times film critic, Doug Mankoff, President of Echo Lake Productions, Penelope Spheeris, DGA director member, Mike McClellan, VP and Co-Head Film Buyer of Landmark Theaters and Allison Anders, DGA director member. photo by Robert Hale Click picture for larger view. The following is a transcript of a panel discussion on Independent Film distribution held at the Directors Guild of America on Monday, December 12, 2001.

With the blessing of the DGA, the Independent Directors Committee, or IDC, was established four years ago. Filmmakers such as Steven Soderbergh, Penelope Spheeris, Allison Anders, Rick King, Spike Jonze, Michael Uno, Michael Apted, Mary Lambert, Gary Walkow, Alexander Payne, Charles Burnett, and myself, to only name a few, formed the committee to address the challenges facing independent filmmakers and to expose them to the benefits of the DGA. These benefits include the current Low Budget Agreement that protects the director's creative rights and residuals while allowing for flexibility in salaries and staffing, as well as our support of a diverse array of organizations and festivals within the independent film community. In fact, on your way out there is material you can pick up outside on the security console about the upcoming Sundance and Slamdance Festivals, which are both sponsored by the DGA.

In addition to this seminar, the IDC has not just been active in addressing the herculean challenge of getting distribution for independent filmmakers but we've also been doing something about it. Two years ago, the DGA's Directors Finder Series was established by the IDC to help find distribution for orphaned films of merit. The IDC is pleased to say that the series has been a great success and has resulted in the sale, acquisition, and distribution of almost ten Guild members' independent films.

Not long ago, it was perceived that the real challenge in independent film was getting the damn thing made. The reality today is that most of you can get it made; unfortunately, most if not all of you will find it next to impossible to get it distributed. I would say that the most accurate definition of independent film today means films independent of distribution. In the current marketplace, the ugly reality is that independent film doesn't really exist. Independent film distributors have become dependents owned by giant conglomerates who often apply the same formula to independently-produced films as they do to Hollywood movies.

Today, most acquisitions executives of major distributors are in the business of passing on films. Most are too fearful of losing their jobs; it is always easier to say no than to take risks. But a business without risks is a business that doesn't grow financially. For the last decade, independent films each year continued to lose more and more money. A business without risks means a cinema that doesn't grow creatively but panders to a kind of sheep mentality. Recently, a high-ranking executive from a specialty division of a major studio passed on a critically-acclaimed film telling the producer it wasn't edgy enough. They were looking for edgy this year, they were looking for films like Memento, to which the producer replied, but you passed on Memento. The executive answered, I know, but this year we would have bought it. It almost sounds as absurd as a scene out of Catch-22, but the reality is that it's this kind of narrow-mindedness that continues to hurt film overall.

One very influential film critic a few years ago proclaimed that the American cinema is dead, that it had descended into a kind of stylishly-hollow, ironically-detached, carnival of pretense. Well I say the American cinema is not dead; it is alive and well; it just isn't being distributed. Masterful independent films like Tony Barbieri's One, Rob Schmidt's Saturn and Lisanne Skyler's Getting To Know You, aren't getting picked up because they don't subscribe to the current vogue that dominates the marketplace.

Not long ago I had dinner with Peter Bogdanovich and we discussed how if a number of classic American films were made today, films like The Last Picture Show, Five Easy Pieces, Two Lane Blacktop, or even Midnight Cowboy, they'd be lucky to get a premier spot on cable television. And you know what? Sadly, it's probably true. For many young filmmakers, the doors to distribution are closed. Many feel they can no longer be true to their own voices without fear of not being seen. In this highly-commercialized world, they are living in fear of being ignored, and now the work is beginning to collectively show that. In other words, our model for making independent film is beginning to look more and more like the studio model.

Tonight we ask what can be done before it gets worse? This is no longer just a crisis in independent film distribution. It has and will continue to become a crisis in American culture. We can no longer afford to say, after all, it's only a movie. As Hollywood continues to gain a stronger and stronger foothold into how we see ourselves and how the rest of the world sees us, we must demand not only better from the marketplace, but we also must demand better from ourselves.

And now I would like to introduce Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times.

What we need to do in independent film, in looking at this, is just to sort of say we don't know what it is we want, but we know what filmmakers have to offer. We have to seek this out. It's why festivals exist. And an astonishing number of pictures that never get picked up play at film festivals. So the first thing I would like to say to all of us is go. And get your movies there, because you create a buzz, people talk about it, and it's a way to get work and get your movies seen, which is why I hope you make movies in the first place.

We've got a pretty great group of panelists up here to talk about this. Penelope Spheeris has critiqued Western civilization a number of times, with her Decline of Western Civilization films, remarkable movies about music, society, and youth. Next to her, film buyer for Landmark Theatres, Mike McClellan, a big friend to independent film. Next a maker of an amazing independent film, Allison Anders, whose latest movie is Things Behind The Sun, but whose work includes of course Mi Vida Loca and Gas, Food and Lodging, a great filmmaker. And the producer of Things Behind The Sun, Doug Mankoff. Another friend of independent film, Gary Garfunkel from Showtime, where Allison's film ended up after a good run at Sundance. Also, Eamonn Bowles, whose previous company, The Shooting Gallery, basically went out of his way to make a home for independent film and now he's got a new company, Magnolia. Of Team Todd, Jennifer Todd, whose movies go from Austin Powers to Memento, so we'll get a chance to ask her about that. And at the end Bob Berney of IFC films, but got his start with Landmark Cinema.

I want to ask you guys, we're going to start by talking a little bit about Memento, which as we know had a rather interesting history. I saw it for the first time just before the Cannes Film Festival of 2000, where I was sure the power of the New York Times would somehow find it distribution. But that didn't quite happen, did it?

So then we went off and we kind of made the film in a bit of isolation. We made it and we finished it, and we never previewed it or anything like that. And then we screened it almost two years ago, the Friday night before the Oscars. We screened it for every distributor in different screening rooms around town. And I was telling these guys, that I had the Miramax screening room. I watched it with Harvey and Meryl Poster and ten other Miramaxers and the second the movie was over, they passed. To my face. They just said, nope, not for us. And basically the same thing had happened all over town. To my sister, who was with Artisan and Fox and to Aaron Ryder who was with the rest of them. And we didn't get a single bite on the film. And we all were so depressed, we couldn't get drunk fast enough that night. And honestly, I never thought that the film would see the light of day, and I thought I was going to end up showing it to my friends on videotape. But we all just kind of hung in there and eventually a couple companies kind of circled around the film, but no offers came to be.

So I give these two guys from New Market credit because they were so in love with the film themselves, that they said, you know what? We're going to distribute it ourselves. So they hired Bob Berney to come in and actually self-distribute the film, which ended up costing them a bit of money in the beginning, and it was kind of a great leap of faith. So... I'll let him tell the second half.

So from that point we started putting together a team of people to do it. Kind of like I did Happiness, with MPRM, which is a public relations company; Rodgers & Cowan, which also did publicity; with the producers and the director, and Jonathan the director's brother, who had done originally written the short story but designed the website for the film, which was already in the works. And I took the approach of organic marketing. It was really there. The film delivered, and the website was amazing. We started a year ahead of the release of the film, and the real luxury was from the New Market guys having no pressure. I could pick the date, I could take the time. It was just -- it was amazing that they were willing to just bet on their own film. And also, although they knew my work with Happiness and we had a connection with Good Machine, they were really willing to just do it. And although we had meetings all the time with Chris and Jennifer and everybody, it was one of those sort of things that everything fell together. It was a group of people that just had a blast together, and it went on from there. We started early with the website. We went to the Venice Film Festival, and just built and built until kind of the fever pitch. And really, it became one of the biggest indie films of the year. And then subsequently, now, on video and DVD. It's a huge success.

What's interesting, too, is we went to Venice, Deauville, and then Toronto, and then ended up at Sundance. We went over the summer, and you could tell, it did very well with Europeans. And then we came out overseas first. And not only did we play well, but I was on vacation and a 16-year-old French girl was telling me how it was her favorite movie and it hadn't come out here yet. And I could tell it was broader there than we were expecting it to be here. And so it was a sign, but you know, you just don't know.

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I think the real mystery is why we're up here when the trailer is showing, but that's another conversation all together. Eamonn, let's talk a little bit about what Shooting Gallery was, what it did. I really want to know how you guys found Croupier, which is the case of another movie that was thought to have no audience whatsoever.

So with the Shooting Gallery film series, we were able to get corporate sponsorship. We went to them saying, hey, we're saving independent films. Get behind this, it'll be good for your products. And it worked. They gave us money to defray the costs of getting a slate of films going. So we partnered with Loews Theaters in most markets and Landmark in a couple of markets and some other theaters and we basically had a home of 15 to 17 cities nationwide that the film would get a nationwide release on. So on May 6 film X would be released all across the country all at once, with a fair amount of advertising support behind it, not just like a little toe in the water release, let's see how it goes, and then we'll open another theater maybe. A full, hell or high water, a full nationwide release. And for me it was like so much fun because I was able to go out and get all these films that I had loved and figure out how make the economics work. And actually be able to give them a legitimate shot in the marketplace. And the films that did well, that showed that they would have good word of mouth, got supported more. Like we put good money after good basically, and that's pretty much how it happened.

Our first one was Judy Berlin, which for me was sort of a poster child for the program. Here's a film that played Sundance, Eric Mendelssohn won Best Director, and everyone I talked to liked the film. Critics, distributors, everyone liked the film, but you know what? It was a film about unsexy, middle-aged people in the suburbs, black and white, not quite a rousing, cathartic film. And yet it was beautiful. It was just this incandescent work. And I was like, this is why we're in business, to pick up films like this. We put it out, it actually did very well for its limited release. It did over half a million dollars, and for the economics of what we were doing, it did very well.

Croupier was a film that, to be honest, I just got this fax in my office one day about this film, Croupier. And I knew Mike Hodges' work, and I said oh, I didn't even know Mike Hodges made another film. And attached to it, it had all these kind of glowing reviews from the London press. And it had a really nice looking, almost like an ad image, of Clive Owen standing over a roulette wheel. I'm like, what's this? So next Tuesday, I RSVP'd, went to the screening.

I sat in the screening with a bunch of New York critics, and I think New Yorker Films was the only other distributor there. And the film unfolded, I'm watching it, and I'm just thinking, God, I hope New Yorker doesn't like this because I really want this. And the guy had no other offers. Film Four had it, and apparently the sales agent did not really feel very strongly about the film. It played in the London market a few years ago and it kind of got the code word crappier, was what people were calling it. And so everybody -- a lot of people didn't even actually see it because the initial word of mouth was so bad on the film. I just thought it was terrific, I was really surprised.

I will say one thing I was a little surprised at. For a film where you have the protagonist being so cold and so cerebral and keeping the audience at arm's length. The fact that it became a word of mouth film -- it was actually very gratifying to me that the people would embrace a film like that. Because it didn't have that warm, cuddly, toe-tapping ending. And that was actually great to me.

And one of the things with the film, when we were releasing the film, it was very important to me that we keep it sort of in -- I won't say a controlled environment -- but we really kept it in the art theaters for a long time. Because I thought that those would be the people that would really appreciate the sort of craft involved and the use of voiceover, which was sort of alienating to most other audiences. We kind of resisted putting a wider release into the malls for quite a while. Because we really wanted to build up that core of really, really strong, compelling word of mouth. Not just, yeah, I liked it, it was pretty good. But, oh no, you've got to see it, it's great. And if we went out to the malls right away and released that film widely, there would be a lot of people exposed to the film who would go like, it was okay, I didn't think it was that good. You know? It was really important to me to keep it on a smart filmgoer level for as long as possible. And it ran all summer and actually kept going. So I was really kind of happy about that.

Last spring Howard Cohen from UTA approached us with a script that we just loved, and it was Things Behind The Sun, that Allison had written with Kurt Voss. And Allison and her producing partner, Dan Hassid, had tried to make the film for awhile with some stars at a higher budget but were frustrated with that process. And Allison wanted to make this film the way she wanted to make it and was willing to do it -- wanted to do it really without star cast. And we said, that's fine, but we really have to do it at a low budget because if we don't, if we're going to have two leads who are not well known, we've obviously got to keep it down. And Allison said, fine, I want to get this movie made and I want to get it made the way I want to make it. So we went into this knowing that there were going to be some challenges. In that the film is -- there's tough subject matter. And it wasn't going to have leads that people knew. But what was really exciting to us was the chance to work with Allison, whose films we really admired. All of which had been theatrical except for Mi Vida Loca which was originally supposed to be for Showtime, then went to HBO.

So I was like, it kind of had made me start to think that like if I could have a distribution where lots of people saw it in some other capacity but didn't see it in malls, you know, but that saw it in very specific places, then I would be perfectly pleased to have that kind of distribution. With this particular film. This film in particular because it was very film. The film's about rape, and I felt like I wanted -- I had seen how the film had played with audiences and in particular rape survivors, or people touched by rape, and I just thought, I really want those people to be able to see this movie. And I had had two very disappointing experiences back to back with my previous movies in the distribution process, and I just thought I can't take another, I just can't take it again. Like where the third week, and I really felt like the theatrical distributors, I adored them, and I thought I know they love the movie, but they're not going to love it after that second weekend, they're not going to love it anymore. And I really want people to see this movie. So I started thinking about it, and I talked to a girlfriend of mine at Sundance Channel, Liz Mann, who had left me a message at home just to tell me how much she loved the film at Sundance and we just talked. I just started talking it through with her, and she said, you know, I just think it's so the better thing for you to do. And she said the classic thing, she just said, the thing that turned my head was she said, if you can get past the vanity of the theatrical screening then I think you'll really see that there's no downside for you here. So, it meant I had to talk to my actors about it, and had to talk to people, but ultimately -- and then we went and talked to Showtime and it was just incredible. The kind of things that I could ask for that would just, you know, create such like sighs and huffs, like a benefit screening for a rape crisis center. Just down the line. I can't even begin to tell you all the support that I had. It was tremendous. And at the end of the day, I think everybody must have been shocked that I was like, yes, let's go with the Showtime because it was just one of those things where it was really, not really a conventional way to go. Especially when we had a theatrical offer from a really wonderful group. But I still -- and it's been great because I knew that there were rape survivors in little towns that were never going to see this movie. Or even in big towns, that wouldn't see it after the second weekend or whatever. So I don't know. I had a great time with that whole experience. I mean, I talked to Jerry Offsay shortly after it premiered on Showtime. So it premieres basically in four different time zones -- is it four different time zones?

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How closely did you guys work together on the trailer, I'm curious. Did you talk a lot with them, Allison, or --

But actually we should probably talk about the experience I had with Mike McClellan on the Decline, Part III, which is a film that I made 20 years later in 1997. But I financed it myself from having sold out for so many years to the studios. It cost $250,000 and we shot it in various formats. And actually -- do you remember how we got connected up?

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It really is so cheesy. I did the narration myself, isn't that sad. Decline of Western Civilization. But I am in eternal gratitude to myself and to Mike McClellan for playing the film as they did. Maybe, Mike, you should explain to them the process we went through when we -- I would have to deal with the various theaters around the country with their advertising departments, but you know more about that than me.

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