Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Does it take marching bands and a live tiger to get a distribution deal at Sundance?
Jan 31, 2001 | Today, on this crisp Friday afternoon in January, Sidney Sherman walks down Main Street in Park City, Utah. He's a prime specimen of what the locals call the PIB (People in Black), the L.A. film players who overrun this laid-back ski town for 10 days every winter for Sundance, the mother of all indie film festivals. Sherman -- who once worked as the stand-in and body double for Keanu Reeves -- is now 33 and an accomplished producer, and he has a documentary in the festival. "Go Tigers!" is a 103-minute feature about the extraordinary craze for high school football in Massillon, Ohio, an economically depressed Rust Belt steel town that has little else to give it pride.
"Go Tigers" was financed entirely on spec, and Sherman's ideal scenario is to sell it to a theatrical distributor for $1 million, which would lock in a nice profit. The problem is that there are 105 other full-length movies at Sundance, and only a few will sell at all, let alone for decent money. Sherman needs to attract attention for the film; he needs to catalyze the buzz. Luckily, Sherman has a taste for do-it-yourself marketing. So, armed with a staple gun and a roll of cinema-size wall posters (known in the biz as "one sheets") he walks up and down Main Street, posting "Go Tigers" posters along the way. When you're the producer of a scrappy indie film, you do all the shoe-leather jobs that might be beneath the unionized flunkies on a studio project.
Sherman navigates the icy sidewalk past Zoom, the upscale-yet-casual restaurant owned by Robert Redford, patron saint of Park City and founder of the festival. This year Redford couldn't be bothered to show up for his own shindig. He's supposedly on location in Morocco, acting beside Brad Pitt in a big-budget studio flick, but conspiracy theorists among the PIB insist "Bob" is using this as a cover so he can move around town nearly incognito.
Redford's restaurant is at the busiest intersection in Park City's historic Old Town, but the village is normally so placid that even this corner doesn't have a traffic light. It doesn't need one except for these 10 days in January, when road-raging L.A. refugees maneuver their rented SUVs as though they were merging on the 405 freeway during rush hour.
Up ahead, Sherman finds a tall kiosk that Sundance has put up for movie advertising. He plasters it with "Go Tigers!" posters, covering over the fliers for a half-dozen other films. Then he's accosted by an interviewer for the Salt Lake City TV news. As Sherman stops to provide three minutes of sound clips to the camera, he has his back turned to the kiosk, so he doesn't see that the filmmakers for a rival Sundance entry are stapling their posters over his. And once they've left, other cineastes -- hoping to be discovered at Sundance, just like Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh and Robert Rodriguez were in years past -- will come by within five or 10 minutes and bury them with a new layer of doomed publicity posters.
I'm watching this exercise in frustration because Sherman has bravely invited me to follow him around and get a behind-the-scenes view of the festival from the perspective of an indie producer. What I'll see in the following week should serve as both a source of inspiration and a cautionary tale to would-be filmmakers, whether they're looking to make a cheapo flick with a digital video camera and a loaded Macintosh -- all bought for 10 grand on credit cards -- or if they're lucky enough to have a no-strings million bucks from rich friends to turn out a 35mm print with slick production values.
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