What happened was, Tom Noonan won at the Sundance Film Festival, and his movie disappeared.
“The film barely sold,” Noonan said of What Happened Was” which earned the festival’s 1994 grand jury drama prize. “And then the company went bankrupt. Their whole library got sold to one company, then another company. The film came out on video, but not DVD. It was buried in some library. I tried repeatedly to buy it back from people, but it took real strong-arming to even get the lawyers to call me.” Over lunch in the East Village, Noonan explained life in indie limbo: no one cared enough to rerelease the film. But no one was going to surrender it either.
Deals eventually expire, and rights revert; Noonan, the well-known character actor (Damages, Hell on Wheels), got his film back recently, and the timing couldn’t have been better: a wormhole has opened up between Sundance Past and the Online Present. Through it, films seemingly lost in time — or swallowed up by the gaping maw of bad distribution deals, or no distribution deals — might find commercial redemption.
Photo: Bloomberg
Thanks to a recent arrangement between the Sundance Institute, which operates the festival, and the Manhattan distributor New Video, six Web homes — Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, iTunes, YouTube and SundanceNOW — are making Noonan’s movie, and any other eligible Sundance film, available for streaming online. The option is open to every film ever shown at the festival, or brought to a Sundance lab, or given a Sundance grant. Filmmakers don’t surrender their rights. They (17 so far, with thousands of potential participants) can opt to go with any or all of the half-dozen sites. They have, in essence, a guaranteed means of distribution.
That sigh of relief you hear is from directors heading to this year’s festival, which begins Jan. 19. The director Erin Greenwell said that before she began making the comedy My Best Day, which is part of the festival’s Next section, “I made a promise to my producer that if I had to personally go from town to town with a duffle bag of DVDs, I would.”
But for others the implications are more profound. Hal Hartley, director of indie landmarks like The Unbelievable Truth and Simple Men, was already involved with Sundance. He was financing his next film (Meanwhile) through the institute’s alliance with the crowd-funding site Kickstarter, when he was contacted by Chris Horton, the institute’s associate director of artist services, which assists filmmakers in financing, marketing and distribution.
“Chris had written me and asked whether any of my older stuff that showed at Sundance was available, and I said ‘Yes, as a matter of fact, Flirt,’ which I now have the rights to for North America,’’ Hartley said. “The licenses I gave in 1996 have finally expired. It was the opening-night film in 1996. So that’s great.” The New Video setup is impressive, he said, because it “will take on the job of positioning the film on iTunes, Amazon, all these places which deal only with aggregators and would never deal with a producer.”
Hartley called the financial arrangement exceptional. With all the legalities involving rights, he said, “you need a Kickstarter campaign just to hire the lawyers.”
To Robert Redford, who in 1984 founded the institute (which took over the festival a year later), “it’s all kind of exciting for us, because there’s a whole category of orphan films that we think are really quite good, but they don’t necessarily get picked up by distributors, who may be a little more mainstream in their thinking.”
Given the cacophonous nature of current pop culture, in which time-strapped consumers are faced with a paralyzing number of entertainment choices, Sundance is expanding the role it has always played: curator. “I kind of balk at the word ‘brand,”’ Redford said. “But I realize that the brand, or whatever you want to call it, gives us an imprimatur to cross into new territory with some kind of value-added appeal.”
With new titles the system will work easily, Horton said, but “obviously it gets a little trickier clearing older titles.”
He added, “It’s a lot murkier when you go back and examine deals from a dozen years ago that couldn’t even have envisioned digital distribution.”
While the New Video deal could prove a godsend for some long-neglected filmmakers, others can’t take advantage of it.
“I wish this was around 20 years ago,” said Matty Rich, the original credit-card filmmaker, who maxed out his family’s accounts making Straight Out of Brooklyn (Sundance 1991). “In the 1990s there were only two options: theatrical or video.” Now the chief executive of the video game maker Matty Rich Games in Los Angeles, Rich said he couldn’t take advantage of the new option because Brooklyn is owned by MGM, and his second feature, The Inkwell, is held by Touchstone.
The New Video initiative, underwritten by the Bertha Foundation, is potentially a sea change for independent film distribution, which has undergone dramatic developments in recent years, from a tightening of purse strings among traditional theatrical distributors, to myriad variations on DIY releasing. What has remained constant is a need for filmmakers to be salesmen. But artists are not always natural businesspeople.
“We like the idea of creative marketing, but it’s not for everyone,” said New Video’s co-president Susan Margolin, referring to strategic rollouts and other distribution options. “Some filmmakers just want to move on to their next project and say, ‘Take this, New Video, I’m off to Tanzania to shoot.’”
The point, said the Sundance Institute’s executive director, Keri Putnam, is to advance what Sundance sees as its founding mission: nurturing talent, then getting the work in front of an audience.
“We didn’t want to be a distributor ourselves,” Putnam said. “What the market doesn’t need is another distributor. We needed to offer a helping hand, to be an access road. We also needed to find a partner who could handle not just the coding and delivery to the platforms that decided to sign up, but also royalty payments, indemnification, a lot of areas our institute doesn’t intend to go into.”
She said the arrangement is not intended as a replacement for traditional distribution: “In most cases the idea is: ‘Let’s bring a film out to the world and get professional distribution and traditional exposure.’ Last year we had a great acquisitions market.”
Instead, said Joseph Beyer, the institute’s director of digital initiatives, “we want to offer this as a safety net. To see a film get lost is one of the more heartbreaking things in this business.”
Skating along the edge of heartbreak last year was Obselidia, an eccentric romance directed by Diane Bell, who’s sanguine about why she didn’t get a traditional distribution deal. “It’s a very strange film,” she admits. “I made it and I look at it and say, ‘It’s a hard sell.’”
She was at the point of going the self-distribution route, she said, but there are always obstacles. Like food, clothing and shelter. “Distribution is a full-time job,” Bell said. “You need to go off and do other jobs to make money. And the digital distribution world is a jungle, a maze. You’re making it up as you go along. The deals are all different, and there’s no model at the moment. What’s acceptable? Are these percentages good? Not good? So when Sundance told us about this, well, you know they’ll have your back.”
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