NATURAL SELECTION
Mary Glucksman returns with her annual "hits and misses" survey of the Sundance Class of 2002.
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| John Corbett and NIa Vardalos in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. |
In 2002, only eight American films acquired by distributors at festivals grossed over $1 million, a surprisingly dismal showing for privately financed U.S. indies. But the one film bought outside of the festival circuit – My Big Fat Greek Wedding – proved to be the title that revitalized equity investors’ dreams of "making it" in the indie feature market.
The film was dropped by original distributor Lions Gate and passed on by everyone else until the producers – Paul Brooks’s Gold Circle Films, Tom Hanks’s Playtone and HBO, which split the $5-million budget with Gold Circle – struck a service distribution deal with IFC Films. My Big Fat Greek Wedding then went on to gross over $200 million. Only Spider-Man, Star Wars: Episode 2, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Signs topped it in 2002.
The other major surprise in 2002 was the performance of In the Bedroom. Miramax landed the $2.7-million Todd Field drama for just $1.5 million at Sundance ’01 and pushed it to five Oscar nominations and $36 million at the box office. That was the year’s best indie performance, tailed closely by two in-house productions: One Hour Photo (Fox Searchlight) and Monster’s Ball (Lions Gate), at $31 million each. Three other acquisitions – USA Films’s Monsoon Wedding, IFC’s Y Tu Mamá También and Searchlight’s Kissing Jessica Stein – ran neck and neck in simultaneous releases that topped out at $13.8, $13.6 and $7 million respectively.
Of the other features acquired at festivals, Searchlight rang up $13.9 million with Sundance buy The Good Girl and pushed raucous Super Troopers, an acquisition from the ’01 fest, to $18.5 million. Nicole Holofcener’s Lovely & Amazing premiered at Telluride and was announced in the trades as a Searchlight buy. But, the deal fell through after the festival, and Lions Gate stepped in, eventually grossing $4.2 million with the digitally shot film. Sony Classics acquired 13 Conversations About One Thing at Toronto and wound up at $3.3 million. Below, you can read more about three Sundance ’02 buys – Secretary ($3.7 million), Real Women Have Curves ($4.6 million and still going), and Tadpole ($2.8 million), as well as Toronto pickup The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys ($1.8 million). Other 2002 productions or prebuys of note included United Artists’s Igby Goes Down ($4.6 million) and Sony Classics’s in-house Sunshine State ($3 million). Another Sony Classics title, Auto Focus, touted by the company as an Oscar contender, will ultimately sweat to pass $2 million, as did Steven Soderbergh’s Miramax-funded Full Frontal ($2.5 million).
Bowling for Columbine’s $10.3 million was the big story among documentaries, a told-you-so to those who scoffed when United Artists head Bingham Ray plunked down $3 million for the film at Cannes. Columbine and the three other docs that made it past the million-dollar mark this year – Comedian ($2.5 million, Miramax), The Kid Stays in the Picture ($1.4 million, USA/Focus) and Dogtown and Z-Boys (a $1.3 million Sony Classics Sundance 2000 acquisition) – all worked built-in media magnets in filmmaker or subject to boost exposure. But the other big success was gay Orthodox Jewish doc Trembling Before G-d, which grossed $783,000 on the strength of a relentless grassroots campaign.
So much for the box office. There was more drama this year in boardrooms and back offices. In early May, Universal bought leading N.Y. indie production company Good Machine and its sales agent sibling, Good Machine International. Partners James Schamus and David Linde head up the new entity, Focus Features, a conglomeration of Good Machine, USA Films and Universal Focus. Good Machine co-founder Ted Hope spun off, along with producer Anthony Bregman and development exec Anne Carey, into a new production company, This Is That, which retains a first-look deal with Focus and already has several larger-budgeted features (21 Grams, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) in production.
Two months later, in the midst of a series of trade articles in which the various My Big Fat Greek Wedding principals jockeyed for position, IFC Films lost topper Bob Berney to Newmarket’s new distribution arm. Ironically, it was a Newmarket service deal (2001’s Memento) that provided Berney’s early momentum at the start of his IFC tenure. The loss of Berney was a blow for IFC, which, despite a good year, had seemingly become entangled in parent company Cablevision’s cash-flow issues. However, at year’s end the company bounced back, announcing construction of a new Manhattan arthouse and a vigorous 2003 slate including The Safety of Objects and Lost in La Mancha.
Among the seven indie labels answering to studio brass, Miramax, Fox Searchlight and Sony Pictures Classics remain the behemoths of this posse, and all have glittering ’03 slates that promise more of the same. Fine Line seems still dogged by topper Mark Ordesky’s responsibilities to Lord of the Rings; look for Fine Line to come roaring back after Return of the King launches. Paramount Classics released a full crop of films in ’02 with first-weekend results as dour as the title of its controversial Bloody Sunday. The exception was German cooking dramedy Mostly Martha, which broke out to the tune of $4 million. At United Artists, Bingham Ray began by releasing the previous regime’s titles (CQ, Pumpkin, No Such Thing) but hit a winning streak with acquisitions like Columbine, Igby, All or Nothing and Personal Velocity.
The only two well-heeled stand-alones, Artisan and Lions Gate, continue to defy expectations. Artisan emerged from a largely inactive year with a late-fall critics’ darling in Tribeca fest pickup Roger Dodger and a $24-million cash cow in animated Christian "veggie tale" Jonah. Lions Gate has taken over Miramax’s reputation as the company most likely to shelve an acquisition or go straight to video. In a New York Press article, director Tom DiCillo angrily publicized the small-screen dumping of his Sundance 2001 acquisition Double Whammy.
Independent Distribution Partnership (IDP), the distribution umbrella combining Goldwyn, Fireworks and currently inactive Stratosphere, coasted through most of 2002 without anything like last year’s $4.5 million for Tortilla Soup. And Lot 47’s Fast Runner—fueled momentum ($3.7 million) shuddered to a halt last summer when founder Jeff Lipsky departed following a sizeable staff exodus. Manhattan Pictures seemed to stall with the arrest of original partner Julius Nasso on racketeering charges just as Enigma, its first release, was cleaning up in theaters to the tune of $4.3 million. The company was active at Toronto, though, buying Alan Rudolph satire The Secret Lives of Dentists.
In better news, two promising new outfits run by indie veterans – Eammon Bowles’s Magnolia and Mark Urman’s ThinkFilm – launched. The smaller Magnolia hit respectable box office runs with foreign titles Late Marriage and Read My Lips at $1.5 million each. ThinkFilm’s first-year slate was diverse: Altar Boys; French gem Time Out; Italian romance The Last Kiss; V.S. Naipaul adaptation Mystic Masseur and two tanking U.S. indies, World Traveler and Love in the Time of Money. But the company scored a minor coup last spring by buying Thom Fitzgerald’s Parker Posey starrer The Event during production and could have an ’03 sleeper hit in Gus Van Sant’s Gerry.
Here then, are seven Sundance 2002 titles with their various fortunes examined.
THE FILM: BIGGIE AND TUPAC
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| Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur in Biggie and Tupac. |
Nick Broomfield (Kurt and Courtney) strikes again with an inquiry into the gang-related deaths of rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls (Notorious B.I.G.).
The Financing: From Film Four, the now-defunct feature-production division of British broadcaster Channel 4.
The Deal: A month after Sundance, Lions Gate announces a deal for North American rights, while Optimum Releasing buys U.K. theatrical. Months later, the U.S. deal collapses and Broomfield takes a small five-figure U.S. advance from tiny San Francisco—based Roxie Releasing; a video deal is struck with Lantern Lane.
The Release: The May 24 U.K. release garners four-star reviews from Time Out, The Guardian and The London Times but translates to just $137,000 in four months. Stateside is a step down when Biggie launches in five theaters September 27 for an okay per-screen average around $3,000 that it maintains for three weeks. U.S. reviews are mixed; the L.A. Times’s Manohla Dargis and Entertainment Weekly rave, but The New York Times’s Dave Kehr is mixed-to-negative.
The Outcome: Dismal. Biggie clears just $98,000 in seven weeks. Cold but true, had the film come out after Jam Master Jay’s October murder, the attendant press might have boosted the audience.
Winners and Losers: Roxie takes a hit, but the surprise success of German sculptor doc Rivers and Tides – $500,000 in five months in the Bay Area alone – offsets it. Broomfield goes to work on a dramatic adaptation of Hollywood cautionary tale Indecent Exposure (the David Begelman story), produced by Ed Pressman.
THE FILM: CHERISH
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| Tim Blake Nelson and Robin Tunney in Cherish. PHOTO: DAVID MOIR. |
Finn Taylor (Dream With the Fishes) gets his second invitation to the ’dance with this wacky romance starring Robin Tunney as an addled animator under house arrest. Tim Blake Nelson, Jason Priestley and grunge girl rocker Liz Phair round out the cast, but the real co-star is the music – a nonstop swirl of pop love standards from The Turtles’s "Happy Together" to Soft Cell’s "Tainted Love."
The Financing: Taylor and producers Johnny Wow (Fishes) and Mark Burton (Asoka) raise the $1 million they need from private investors, and executive producer Steven Siebert reels in Nelson, a client at his management company.
The Deal: Distributors like the picture, but the rumor goes round that the film contains a huge music-rights bill yet to be paid. William Morris Independent’s Rena Ronson and producer’s rep Jeff Dowd team up to sell the picture. Fine Line beats out four other suitors midway through the fest, with a $1-million bid covering all North American rights. Canal Plus buys international for somewhere between $1 million and $2 million. In the end, the producers pay their music bill (somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million) from their advances.
The Release: June 7 in six theaters in Manhattan, L.A. and San Francisco after fest stops at Taos, Florida, Maui and San Francisco. Variety calls Cherish an "agreeable diversion" and that’s as good as the reviews get. The New York Times dismisses it as a "poky little character comedy."
The Outcome: Grounded. Cherish skates out of the gate on its opening weekend with a per-screen average in the $6,000 range, but it’s downhill from there. After an expansion to 25 screens for two more weekends, Cherish is out of theaters with a box office total of $179,000. As for the soundtrack, ’80s nostalgia can’t help the film, although Grand Theft Auto: Vice City works the same angle to greater effect just five months later.
Winners and Losers: Tunney and Nelson are universally praised in the reviews, and Fine Line should come out even in December when the VHS/DVD is pumped through the New Line Home Video pipeline. Taylor, 44, comes out on shaky ground. He’s lobbying now to direct Chaos Theory, his $40-million caper script set up at Universal.
THE FILM: THE DANGEROUS LIVES OF ALTAR BOYS
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| Jodie Foster and Kieran Culkin in The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys. |
Kieran Culkin stars as a ’70s Catholic school teen with a troubled home life who plays pranks on the nuns. Partly animated first feature from music video director Peter Care, the genre-bending seriocomic Boys is an adaptation of the cult novel by the same name.
The Financing: Jodie Foster’s Egg Pictures develops Boys after Apt Pupil associate producer Jay Shapiro brings them the project with Care attached. Graham King’s Initial Entertainment Group, Gangs of New York co-financier, provides the $14-million budget.
The Deal: Boys was supposed to premiere at Sundance 2001, but kinks in animation postproduction forces Egg to pull out. It screens for buyers that spring, but no one bites. Jump cut to the Toronto fest, where former Lions Gate execs Jeff Sackman and Mark Urman’s new ThinkFilm nabs North American rights for a sum in the $1-million range.
The Release: June 14 on nine screens with qualified reviews; Roger Ebert says that the film doesn’t altogether deliver on rich source material. Highest marks come from The New York Times (Stephen Holden) and L.A. Times (Kevin Thomas). ThinkFilm supplements pop comic panel ads and healthy press with a Hollywood-style premiere. Foster plugs the film on Letterman and elsewhere during press appearances for The Panic Room.
The Outcome: Tricky. A first-weekend per-screen average of $6,111 on nine screens drops precipitously when Boys expands to 76 screens and a high of 125 screens on its third weekend. The film makes $1.5 million in six weeks but takes another three months to reach a final $1.8 million. An R rating didn’t help – teens could easily have been lured to this film – and the first paperback edition of the out-of-print 1994 novel came a year early in 2001. Boys’s title may have incorrectly caused moviegoers to think it was about sex scandals in the Catholic church.
Winners and Losers: ThinkFilm gets indie branding and breaks even with a Columbia TriStar video deal; a TV deal will send them into profit. Culkin gets a boost from both this and Igby Goes Down, and Care can expect a warm reception for his next project. IEG takes a hit, but it will be Gangs that will make or break them. Foster closes Egg in late ’01 when her three-year deal at Paramount expires.
THE FILM: THE GOOD GIRL
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| Zooey Deschanel and Jennifer Aniston in The Good Girl. |
Sundance vet Miguel Arteta rewrites the rules again with this defiant comedy starring Friend Jennifer Aniston and indie it-boy Jake Gyllenhaal as an adulterous discount-store-employee couple. Girl is Arteta’s third film at the fest in five years; his debut feature, Star Maps, was snatched up by Fox Searchlight in ’97, and Chuck & Buck, an IFP Independent Spirit Award winner for Best Feature Under $500,000, was a Sundance 2000 talking point. Chuck star and screenwriter Mike White penned Girl and has a supporting role. Not in the cast but present on Aniston’s arm at the film’s Eccles Theater premiere is husband Brad Pitt. Naturally the crowd goes crazy.
The Financing: Matthew Greenfield, Arteta’s producer, gets sales agent and financing company Myriad Pictures to pony up the full budget, which climbs before shooting to $7 million.
The Deal: Rena Ronson and Cassian Elwes work seven bidders until Searchlight takes all English-speaking territories plus Latin America for $4 million. Myriad sells territories as far afield as Japan, Italy, Spain and Scandinavia.
The Release: Girl launches in just four New York and L.A. theaters August 7 and expands to 60 on its second weekend, at which point it passes the $1-million mark. Good reviews bolster a studio-style marketing campaign; the rollout continues to 188 theaters the following weekend and a high of 688 for weekend five, which also happens to be Labor Day.
The Outcome: By the time business tapers off in November, Girl’s box office is hovering close to $14 million. A solid return – the best by miles from Sundance 2002 – and light-years better than team Arteta-Greenfield’s grosses for Star Maps ($600,000) and Chuck & Buck ($1.05 million).
Winners and Losers: Arteta proves he can work with sizeable budgets and star egos, Gyllenhaal burnishes his image and Variety names Greenfield one of the year’s Ten Producers to Watch. Myriad gets a modest success. As for Fox Searchlight, their recent luck with acquisitions like Girl and Jessica have them looking like the indie powerhouse to beat.
THE FILM: REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES
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| America Ferrera in Real Women Have Curves. |
The Financing: LaVoo options the play the day after he sees it in 1998. Cardoso is brought on board, and HBO’s independent division, headed by Maud Nadler, agrees to a $4-million negative pickup.
The Deal: Curves isn’t on the market when it comes to Sundance, but that doesn’t stop impressed distributors from approaching HBO with offers; the cabler remains adamant that theatrical is not for sale and sets an October ’02 TV premiere. Variety’s review, however, cites Curves’s "distinct potential to reach a broader public." Heat builds with screenings at the Cannes market, where HBO shops overseas theatrical and Optimum picks up U.K. rights. Midsummer, Bob Berney jumps ship from IFC to run Newmarket’s theatrical releasing division, and word swiftly follows that Curves is his first acquisition. HBO still gets the cable premiere, now scheduled for 2003.
The Release: Curves opens to rapturous reviews October 18 in a lopsided 55 theaters – two in Manhattan and 53 around L.A. The L.A. theaters target both arthouse audiences and a mainstream Latino demographic. The first weekend’s average is a so-so $3,341, with the two New York venues returning the highest grosses at $18,000 and $13,000. Us Weekly’s Thelma Adams says Curves is the next Greek Wedding, and that goes on Newmarket’s print ads.
The Outcome: Network TV ads pop up as the film widens to 108, 147 and 165 theaters. It passes $1 million in three weeks and $3.2 million in six. By year’s end, the film is still playing and looking at perhaps a $6 million ceiling.
Winners and Losers: Newmarket gets branding, and HBO scores, amplifying the recognition factor of what will be strong audience draw when it shows on the small screen. The My Big Fat comparisons don’t ultimately ring true box-office wise, but then again few films reach that level of crossover. Still, Cardoso is hot, and LaVoo snares his first shot at directing from HBO.
THE FILM: SECRETARY
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| Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary. PHOTO: BRUCE BIRMELIN. |
The Financing: Shainberg raises $2 million from his Hit Me investors; Double A producers Andrew Fierberg and Amy Hobby (also at the fest with 13 Conversations About One Thing) waive a fee and sign on for profit participation. Completion funding comes from TwoPoundBag Productions, an equity fund set up by brothers P.J. and Joel Posner, whose Next Big Thing Double A produced in 2001.
The Deal: A black market Secretary tape reportedly circulates among distributors before the fest, and the word going into the screening is mixed. Buzz is that the film’s sexual content will scare away the studio-owned distributors. Still, the world premiere in a prime first-Friday-night slot draws big guns who witness thunderous audience response. Variety, though, throws cold water on the party with a review praising the film but predicting a poor theatrical performance; Secretary leaves the fest without a sale. Three weeks later, executive producer Michael Roban negotiates a $1-million deal with Lions Gate for North America. By Labor Day they also pick up all overseas rights from sales agent Alibi Films International in a deal that has them servicing distributors for territories already sold like Italy, Japan and Scandinavia; Metro Tartan buys it for the U.K.
The Release: September 20 in 11 theaters for a $16,573 average – could this be the year’s date movie? The New York Times (Stephen Holden), L.A. Times (Manohla Dargis), Entertainment Weekly (Owen Gleiberman) and Rolling Stone (Peter Travers) rave. Middling reviews elsewhere skew positive while agreeing that Secretary is "more silly than salacious" (The Atlanta Constitution).
The Outcome: Solid. $3.5 million in eight weeks after expansions to 53, 106 and a high of 150 theaters.
Winners and Losers: Shainberg hits this one out of the park, and Variety names Wilson a Screenwriter to Watch; a repeat teaming is in the works. Gyllenhaal’s in orbit with Lions Gate launching a Best Actress Oscar campaign. Double A, previously best known for Sundance ’97 winner Sunday, can leverage their exposure towards financing two more projects on their slate, an Ian Curtis (Joy Division) biopic and an adaptation of Jim Knipfel’s (Slackjaw) psych ward tome, Quitting the Nairobi Trio.
THE FILM: TADPOLE
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| Gary Winick and Bebe Neuwirth on the set of Tadpole. |
Think Salinger territory for this upscale tale of Thanksgiving in New York, with 15-year-old Oscar Grubman, a prep school student determined to reveal his heart to the woman of his dreams, stepmother Sigourney Weaver. Director Gary Winick (Sweet Nothing) makes this film for InDigEnt, the low-budget DV series he founded with attorney John Sloss and IFC toppers Jonathan Sehring and Caroline Kaplan in 1999. It’s the sixth of 10 commissioned InDigEnt films to roll and the first Winick directs himself. Oscar is played by newcomer Aaron Stanford; his bon mots come from screenwriters Niels Mueller (Molly Gunn) and Heather McGowan (’01 novel Schooling). Audiences at Sundance go wild for Tadpole, but naysayers grumble that digital need not look this gritty. Film is recognized with directing honors amid murmurs that Bebe Neuwirth could have had a discretionary prize.
The Financing: Clean and lean to the tune of $150,000.
The Deal: John Sloss’s Cinetic Media orchestrates a bidding war between Miramax and Fine Line, which Miramax wins after Harvey Weinstein personally lobbies Jim Dolan, head of Cablevision, IFC’s corporate parent. Miramax picks up the film, minus U.S. basic cable, for $5 million. (They also sink additional coin into improving the film’s grunged-out look before its release.) The sale’s a windfall for Tadpole’s cast and crew, who get low up-front fees in exchange for shares of the gross under InDigEnt’s standard contract.
The Release: Could anyone but Harvey have convinced the media that tadpoling – young boy/older women couplings – was a genuine social trend that happened to find its fiction form in Winick’s film? Talk shows and print outlets bought the ruse. Reviews are mostly good, but Ebert doesn’t take to the pic.
The Outcome: The July 19 release in six New York and L.A. theaters brings in a sweet $13,447 per-screen average and its second weekend in 40 houses averages $6,834. But Tadpole never quite takes off. It passes the $1-million mark in four weeks and $2 million after six, at that point in a high of 180 theaters. It stalls after that, though, grossing just $2.8 million in the 11 weeks it lasts.
Winners and Losers: Winick breaks through after directing five films that barely got released; he and McGowan set up a Disney picture, and he and Mueller have a project at Joe Roth’s Revolution. Mueller also gets his first directing gig with Assassination of Richard Nixon – the buzz script that lands him on Variety’s Screenwriters to Watch list – for Alfonso Cuarón’s company. InDigEnt is the goose that laid a golden egg, and IFC re-ups for four more films after the first ten are complete. Miramax takes a pricy hit – they had to have been looking for domestic box office a good $10 million higher.
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