By Leslie (Hoban) Blake
As the odds for indie film distribution get longer, to paraphrase Tommy Tune's show-stopping number ("It's Not Where You Start") from Broadway's "Seesaw" (1972), ranks high among the first commandments of independent film today. On a standard studio film, with a distributor already in place, the time frame from shoot to screen may vary from eight to 10 months, but usually takes just under a year. Two recent examples: "A Perfect Murder" (Warner Bros.) started shooting on Oct. 14, 1997, for a June 5, 1998, opening; and "He Got Game" (Buena Vista) began lensing July 28, 1997, and was released May 1 of this year.
As a rule, indie filmmakers not only have to find their own funding, but must also shop around their films themselves to distributors, often via the festival route, which takes time and patience. Since there must be at least a million different indie filmmaker stories in New York, Back Stage set out to compare the relative timetables of indie writer/directors Whit Stillman, Noah Baumbach, Susan Skoog, Christopher Scott Cherot (Shuh-row), and Victor Mignatti, to find out how long it took them to get their films from shoot to screen. As you might expect, their experiences run the gamut, based on their previous track records (or lack thereof) and the luck of the draw, proving once again, there is no formula for making a movie and "it takes as long as it takes."
The collective skills are many and varied among these five filmmakers. Mignatti and Skoog both studied acting and Mignatti directed and edited music videos and commercials, while Stillman and Skoog directed episodic television. (Skoog also won two Cable Aces.) Stillman, Skoog, and Cherot are their own co-producers, and Mignatti and Cherot even edited their films. Although Mignatti and Cherot are both film school dropouts, Baumbach, Stillman, and Skoog never attended film school at all. Stillman acted ("playing ridiculous Americans") years ago in films shot in Spain, but Cherot and Skoog currently appear in theirs--Cherot stars and Skoog has a cameo. Coincidentally, Stillman and Baumbach cast Chris Eigeman in all their films; and Mignatti and Skoog hired Michael Mayers as their director of photography.
Now in his 40s, Stillman is the great-granddaddy of the quintet, with his trilogy of films about young, well-to-do WASPs: "Metropolitan," "Barcelona," and, most recently, "The Last Days of Disco"--which opened the last weekend in May. Baumbach's sophomore effort, "Mr. Jealousy," followed the first week in June. The remaining three filmmakers are all debutants--Mignatti's "Broadway Damage" opened the same week as "Mr. Jealousy," while "Hav Plenty," by Christopher Scott Cherot, the "baby" of the group, opened last weekend and "Whatever," by Skoog, our lone female filmmaker, hits local screens the weekend after July 4th.
"Disco"
On Sept. 19, 1997, "Backlot Buzz" reported a change in wrap date for Stillman's "The Last Days of Disco," which had started shooting on Aug. 12, 1997, with Kate Beckinsdale (A&E's "Emma"), Chloe Sevigny ("Kids"), and Robert Sean Leonard ("Swing Kids"). The Castle Rock film, about a group of recent college grads approaching adulthood during the tag-end of the disco era, already had a distributor in place. Therefore Stillman himself never had to shop the film, but there was some behind-the-scenes scrambling among his producers and distributors. "Although Sony was mentioned as a possible distributor," Stillman reports, "Polygram made a deal with Castle Rock [now owned by Ted Turner] and my domestic distribution went to Gramercy, which is great, because they really understand films like mine." This is a distribution situation any indie filmmaker would kill to have!
But, he remembers, "We were forced into early production because of the other disco film ("54"), and we ended up working seven days a week during post. I only took off Christmas and one other day, but filmmaking for me is always a four-year process, from initial writing (at least two years), through shooting and post to opening." He notes, "A lot of other films shooting around us then [see above] have just come out too," and laughs. "In fact," he confides, "we shared both our disco location and its carpeting costs with John Turturro's 'Illuminata' [scheduled for fall '98]. Shoot-to-screen time for "Last Days of Disco": nine and half months.
"Jealousy"
Noah Baumbach may have been named one of Newsweek's Ten New Faces of 1996, after his first film, "Kicking and Screaming" was released, but it still took him a year and a half to find the necessary funding for his second film, "Mr. Jealousy." The latter film shot for six weeks during February and March of 1997, starring Baumbach regular Eric Stoltz ("Little Women") as a would-be writer obsessed with his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend (Annabella Sciorra of "Cop Land" and Chris Eigeman of all Whit Stillman's and Noah Baumbach's films). "Among other things," Baumbach explains, "we sold all the foreign rights in advance"--a common enough practice in the indie film world. What isn't so common is the second movie he shot very quickly in April, using the same cast and crew, ˆ la Wayne Wang's "Smoke" and "Blue in the Face." "That one's a screwball comedy," says Baumbach, "[aptly] titled 'High Ball,' and after watching the dailies, I put it away to work on the post later." (Which is, of course, now.) The post for "Mr. Jealousy" was only four months, "but I'd love to have had a year." He brought "a pretty much finished print" to the Toronto Film Festival last September, to check audience reaction; and his distributor, Lions Gate, picked up both films "based on how well 'Mr. Jealousy' does." Shoot-to-screen time for "Mr. Jealousy": one year and three months.
"Damage"
Back in July of 1996, Back Stage went "On Location" with co-stars Hugh Panaro (Broadway's "Side Show") and Mara Hobel (young Christina Crawford in "Mommie Dearest"), during their 26-day shoot around town for Victor Mignatti's gay romantic comedy "Broadway Damage." Mignatti, who once shared office space with Stillman, describes the shoot and his subsequent five months of post as the "joyous part" of the process. Then came "the intense part": the actual selling of the movie! "My background is in directing music videos and commercials and I've done post-production editing. I now have a PhD in acquisitions! We went the festival route, and we didn't have a copy in time for the deadlines at Sundance or Berlin; our world premiere was at the Seattle Film Fest, where the audiences loved us, so we thought the rest would be easy.
"We went to the Cannes Market--not the Festival--and we didn't even know what to bring. In the first five minutes, we knew we were in over our heads and there would be no multi-million-dollar deal waiting at Cannes, but we did meet a lot of distributors and we got invitations to submit to other festivals. It was a grueling year for us because even though both straight and gay festival audiences loved the film, we still weren't getting calls from major distributors. There were several offers from smaller companies and we became the very first acquisition of Jour de Fete Films, a brand-new production entity co-founded by Mike Thomas and Dan Castle, both formerly of Strand Releasing. What we finally learned is there is no such thing as a standard deal--everything is negotiable--and you must never give up. It only takes one person to get behind your film! "Broadway Damage" shoot-to-screen time: one year and 10 months.
"I have to admit," says Christopher Scott Cherot, "I began writing this film [a romantic comedy about a lovesick young filmmaker] as a catharsis, as a healing." He was heartbroken himself and " writing helped." Cherot ("call me Chris") is no stranger to the pages of Back Stage either. "Back in the fall of '95, I dropped out of the NYU Undergraduate Film Program and put a casting ad in your paper." It just gave the breakdown description of his three female leads, and he received 100 headshots a day for three months. Moreover, he actually cast two of his leads (Tammi Katherine Jones and Robinne Lee) and several supporting roles from that initial ad. The title "Hav Plenty" is a pun on the names of his two leading characters: Havilland Savage (Chenoa Maxwell) and Lee Plenty (Cherot, himself). He's been described as a charming cross between Spike Lee and Woody Allen, in terms of both acting and filmmaking styles. "I never set out to act in my own film, but at the last minute, the actor who was cast got a smaller role in a bigger picture. I had no previous experience in front of a camera at all."
The story from 'shoot to screen' on Chris' film is a movie script in itself. It took a long time due to lack of funds, from casting (August to November l995) to the preliminary reading that December and once-a-week rehearsals beginning in January of '96. Finally, the film shot for three weeks, six days a week, 14 hours a day, from April 29 to May 19. Four weeks after the shoot, Chris sat down to all 20 hours of video dailies. Chris tells his story: "There was no money or time while we were shooting and I lied to Duart [the renowned post-production house] to get the dailies at all. The editing, which I did alone, ran from June to Sept. 26. I'd never edited on a VCR before and that took me a week just to learn. Then, from October 1996 to January '97 came the sound mix with a temporary score. We couldn't afford music rights and Bill Markle did all the post sound for the original cut by April 29 (one year from the start of the shoot).
"By now, I'd spent over $65,000 of my own money--that I didn't have--not to mention $40,000 to $50,000 more owing, but I had an actual composite print with an optical sound track--which is the way you blow up a real 35mm print! May 14, we held a first screening at the Tribeca Screening Room, and in the audience were directors Warrington Hudlin ("House Party 1 & 2") and Bill Duke ("Hoodlum") who just happened to be scouting for the First Annual Black Acapulco Film Festival in June. They said this was just the kind of film they wanted to open the Festival, and three weeks later, I'm in Mexico with my film cans and my sunglasses. Tracy and Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds (producers of "Soul Food") missed the screening, so we sent them a tape and they called saying they felt we'd get lost in the 'indie whirlwind.' So they came on as executive producers--not distributors--to help spotlight the film.
"From there it was up to Toronto, where Geoff Gilmore of the Sundance Festival saw it and said, 'Come to Sundance.' Harvey Weinstein, of Miramax, also saw it at Toronto and shook my hand, agreeing to distribute 'Hav Plenty' even before it went to Sundance."
From February '98 to now, Chris has been working nonstop on the new sound track and generally cleaning up the film--"you know, re-shooting little things and getting the cuts tighter." On the eve of his film's official New York opening, his advice to other young filmmakers is to "persevere. It's as much ambition as it is talent (maybe more)--until now, I had to almost kill myself, just to get my film made." "Hav Plenty" shoot-to-screen time: two years and one-and-a-half months.
An award-winning veteran of 10 years in cable as well as network television, Susan Skoog learned and honed her directing skills on the job. Pre-preparation for "Whatever," her young-Jersey-girl-comes-of-age (in the early '80s) film, began back in April of 1996. She had scraped together enough initial funding (some $115,000, including her own and borrowed money plus another $30,000 available on credit cards) by Sept. 5, l996, to start shooting. She remembers the date because it was exactly one year later that she held the first cast-and-crew screening, followed by an October 1997 screening for distributors. Skoog tells yet a different filmmaker story as she explains, "Circle Films [credited with discovering the Coen Brothers' "Blood Simple" 13 years ago] liked our pre-shoot script originally, saw a few scenes, watched our dailies, and became executive producers along with Irwin Young of Duart ("Caught"). It's most unusual for that to happen," she comments. "We had sent avid [video] cuts to several film festivals and they'd all rejected us, but we were still waiting to hear from Sundance. There was an incredible amount of interest at our distributor screening and Sony Pictures Classics approached us afterwards.
"Circle Films was invaluable in terms of advising us to go against conventional wisdom and not to wait for Sundance. They said if we waited and didn't get into Sundance, then we'd have to hold off another three months until after January to proceed. Ted Pedas of Circle also said, 'Distributors will buy a film they like.' The distributors felt 'Whatever' was both marketable and commercial, so they could make their money back. We sold our rights within three or four days of the screening and 'Whatever' joined 'Hav Plenty' in the American Spectrum section at Sundance"--for films that already have distributors.
"But for every me," Skoog cautions, "there are 100 films that never get picked up by a distributor. It's important to know that there is a marketplace, but not to make your film for it. Just know it exists. I made the story I wanted to make because I always believed there was an audience who'd come to see it. If you make a film, you'd better know who your audience is." When "Whatever" opens on July 10, its shoot-to-screen time will be one year and 10 months.
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THIS IS FOLLOWED BY THE MONTHLY FILMING LIST