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"Intelligent, adult films continue to get made, but..."

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on October 17, 2001 at 08:00:30

Here's an *excellent* bit of film news, reproduced in whole because the site disappears it in 16 hours.

clark

More big-name feature films get small-screen
premieres

By John Koch, Globe Staff, 10/17/2001

Want to see Kenneth Branagh in top movie form as a witty, dyspeptic
playwright at war with his creative demons - cigarette in one hand, glass of
wine in the other - slashing the air with profanity and masochistic sarcasm? OK,
then, pencil the upcoming ''How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog'' on your must-see
list. But note that this clever and funny feature film is not coming to your
neighborhood multiplex or art house.

Although it's better and brighter than 80 percent of the fare on local movie screens,
''Dog'' is opening, if you will, on television. It premieres on the premium cable
channel Starz! on Saturday, Oct. 27, at 8 p.m.

This is not what director Michael Kalesniko had in mind when he was filming the
comedy, which also stars Lynn Redgrave, Robin Wright Penn, and Peter Riegert.
Or when he and the film were celebrated in the prime closing-night slot of last
year's prestigious Toronto International Film Festival.

But, increasingly, this is the fate of many films with name stars and first-rate
off-screen talent. Perhaps the best movie ever made by director Paul Schrader, a
hypnotic thriller called ''Forever Mine,'' with Joseph Fiennes and Ray Liotta, also
ended up on Starz! last year, instead of the big screen.

Scores of movies like these get deflected from their goal of theatrical openings to
premieres on TV - so many, in fact, that a term was coined a few years ago to
describe them: busted theatricals. They are almost always independent films that
break down on the way to the theater because of financial woes.

Exactly what happens? The long answer is very complicated. The short one is that
producers manage to put together most or all the money needed to make them, and
then they shoot the films, but without securing a theatrical distribution deal, which
never materializes.

Says Schrader, ''There was a time when it was prudent to finance without a
distribution deal. No longer.''

Now, he says, ''you're jumping without a 'chute.'' Schrader, whose previous film
was the critically acclaimed ''Affliction,'' was not happy about what happened to
''Forever Mine.'' Indeed, few feature film directors are content to give up
big-screen dreams for movies aimed from their inception at theatrical release.

But more and more, like it or not, they are forced to adjust their expectations.

Far more movies don't get theatrical distribution deals than do, says Robert
Leighton. The president of Starz Encore Entertainment, Leighton is instrumental in
dealing for the half-dozen or so busted theatricals that Starz! airs every year. It's a
relatively inexpensive way for pay TV to aquire movies, costing far less than the $3
million to $10 million that cable networks spend to produce their own movies from
scratch.

Starz! and Showtime are more invested in acquiring quality busted theatricals than
other pay TV outlets now, although various networks, including HBO and
Cinemax, also air movies originally produced for theatrical release.

A buyer's market

No one buys the rights to more busted theatricals than Starz!, according to
Leighton. And, he says, it's a buyer's market. Intelligent, adult films continue to get
made, he explained, but they can't compete for distribution with today's
monster-budget Hollywood movies that target young, male audiences and typically
get released in as many as 3,000 theaters at once.

Movies ''with a lot of redeeming qualities that appeal to our audience don't match
what theatrical distributors are looking for,'' Leighton says. What Starz! is looking
for, he says, are movies that are ''more literate and upmarket'' than the average
multiplex movie, but a little less edgy or dark than the usual art-house film.

For all its stylish writing and occasionally strong language, ''How to Kill Your
Neighbor's Dog'' neatly fits this niche between mass market and uncompromising
art. Yes, the Branagh character is ''America's favorite bastard,'' as one character
calls him. He's a misanthrope, nastier now that he's had a few flops, and perenially
sour on the idea of fatherhood despite wife Robin Wright Penn's desire for kids.
The humor ranges from cleverly verbal to wonderfully, sometimes painfully,
physical.

But the shadows ultimately part, giving way to a lighter mood as Branagh warms up
to a little neighborhood girl who limps with cerebral palsy. Does she cure his own
moral limp, undam his writer's block, and reverse his objections to parenthood?
Yes, yes, and yes. But the gathering sentimentality is laced with lemony wit, and the
whole, very well acted enterprise makes for engrossing, satisfying entertainment if
not a film for the ages.

If Starz! searches for smart movies with soft edges, Showtime looks for more
prickly busted theatricals to fit a niche defined by its ''No limits'' battle cry.
Showtime sifts through approximately a thousand busted theatricals a year for the
two or three it eventually buys to supplement its own feature film productions.

Earlier this year, it aired the premiere of ''Things Behind the Sun,'' Allison Anders's
autobiographical drama of her childhood rape and its reverberations. The film was
well received at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where many films essentially
audition for distributors.

Also drawing buzz at Sundance was ''The Believer,'' which took home the prize for
best feature.

Interest from distributors cooled off after the festival, and the film ended up landing
at Showtime. Its scheduled debut last month was postponed after the terrorist
attacks on Sept. 11. ''The Believer,'' based on a true story about a dangerous and
violent religious fanatic, will be broadcast sometime early in 2002.

It's a fiercely intense, disturbing, and timely study of religious distortion and excess,
but it doesn't involve Islam or the Arab world. In fact, it's about a young American
Jew at war with his own past who becomes an incendiary neo-Nazi and gives new
horrific meaning to the notion of the self-hating Jew. As raw as so many of us still
are from the tragic events of Sept. 11, it may not be precisely what we're longing to
see, but it's a relevant and very good movie - surely, one of the better feature films
that won't debut at your local multiplex or art house.

One of the roadblocks to theatrical release was a screening that first-time director
Henry Bean arranged for Rabbi Abraham Cooper at the Simon Wiesenthal Center
in Los Angeles. Directors of films with Jewish themes occasionally ask Cooper to
evaluate their projects. Cooper raised objections to scenes in the ''The Believer,''
which he communicated to Paramount, where Bean had a distribution deal
percolating. Some of the entertainment press reported in the spring that Bean
blamed Cooper's misguided criticism for killing the deal.

Bean, a successful 56-year-old Hollywood screenwriter (''Internal Affairs''), now
says that although he ''did a stupid thing'' by showing the film to Cooper, he isn't
certain that Cooper dealt the death blow. But he's clear about the fact that,
''economics pushed us to cable.'' In a telephone interview from New York, he says
that Showtime ''paid us the way theatrical [distributors] wouldn't.''

Matthew Duda, who acquires films like ''The Believer'' for Showtime, says cable
deals for busted theatricals averaged $500,000 and rarely reached $1 million.
(There are exceptions, like the $4 million Showtime paid for the controversial
Adrian Lyne remake of ''Lolita'' in 1998.) Although Bean readily admits that a
televison debut ''was not the dream,'' he says as many as 4 million viewers will see
''The Believer'' on cable, a far bigger audience than almost any movie in limited
theatrical distribution can muster.

According to Duda, such audience numbers, based on three or four broadcasts of
a movie on his cable network, are the equivalent of a Hollywood movie that
grosses $20 million. Echoing Starz's Leighton, Duda points out that many if not
most independent films actually fail at the box office, very often grossing well under
$100,000.

`Worthless commodities'

These, he says, are the true busted theatricals. By insisting on a theatrical release,
producers of such films risk making their movies into ''worthless commodities'' that
have no significant value as TV or video vehicles, Duda adds.

By contrast, he says, ''we pay several hundred thousand dollars for a premiere.''

Among other things, cable networks are paying for the right to call a movie
broadcast a ''world premiere'' and for the potential to earn coveted Emmy awards
to burnish their reputations. No matter how packed with star power or production
values, movies that ''open'' on television are not eligible for Academy Awards.
Nonetheless, they can and sometimes do go into theatrical release after their initial
showings on television.

A case in point: ''Maze,'' a quirky film directed by, and starring, actor Rob
Morrow.

The story of a respected contemporary artist (Morrow) afflicted with Tourette's
syndrome had its world premiere on Starz! in April. Morrow is convincing as the
tortured painter, whose body-wracking twitches and involuntary honks and
wheezes drive him to lonely introversion. And Laura Linney (''You Can Count on
Me'') gives a beautifully modulated and sympathetic performance as his confidante,
model, and, finally, emotional salvation. Leighton says Morrow adjusted
comfortably to the idea of releasing the movie - his debut as a director - on Starz!,
which reaches 13 million households. Next month, the movie is scheduled to open
theatrically on screens in 10 US cities.

Another Starz! premiere, a movie called ''Tic Code,'' which is also about Tourette's
syndrome and was first broadcast in 1999, had a limited theatrical release in the
summer of 2000.

Bean still hopes for the same for ''The Believer,'' which is tentatively slated to reach
theaters after its cable run next year.

When he contemplated closing a pay-TV deal, the director felt disappointment, ''no
doubt about it,'' he says. ''I was upset for a brief period.''

Now he's more philosophical. ''After years of working in Hollywood, I did
something utterly without commercial considerations,'' he explains. ''The experience
of making `The Believer' affirmed that I should do what I want to do. I want to
make films that are in my heart and my head, and wherever the market for them is,
including pay TV, I'll take that. I just want people to see them - and to pay back
my investors.''

This story ran on page C3 of the Boston Globe on 10/17/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.

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