posted 04-01-2004 09:25 PM                    

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Films: Have Hard Drive, Will Travel
By SHARON WAXMAN

LOS ANGELES, March 31 — For years independent cinema has been a big-city phenomenon, the non-Hollywood movies available only in major urban centers and — perhaps — on cable.

Now a New York-based company is trying to take art-house movies to small cities around the country by relying on digital projection. The company, Emerging Pictures, has sent computer hard drives to theaters in five cities to coincide with the opening on April 1 of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, N.C.

The hard drives, which can be connected to inexpensive digital projectors, contain 10 digital films from the documentary festival. The movies will be shown simultaneously in theaters in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo, Mich.; Lincoln, Neb.; Charleston, W.Va.; and Sarasota, Fla., in addition to Durham.

The theaters are at museums, science centers and universities that not only have underused spaces but also built-in audiences through their membership lists.

The idea is to show high-quality movies to people who usually cannot see them because of the huge cost of movie prints and marketing budgets, explained Ira Deutchman, a partner in Emerging Pictures.

"A lot of really quality films can never get mainstream distribution," he said in a telephone interview. "Those films left on the table can't find a way to reach theatrical audiences with the current economic model. We're trying to bust through this problem of how much you have to spend on prints and advertising to get your film out there."

Distribution has been a persistent problem in independent film. Independent producers and filmmakers have long believed that audiences in the American heartland were willing to pay to see small, interesting movies like last year's "Thirteen" or the unusually animated "Triplets of Belleville," which were both nominated for Oscars.

But only major art-house distributors like Miramax or Focus Features have had the cash to release such movies, and even those that are released often do not earn enough to justify the costs.

"I'm a big believer that the audience does exist," Mr. Deutchman said. "It may not exist in numbers necessary to make it a business to attract a big studio, but that doesn't mean there isn't an audience."

With digital technology each package of 10 films for this year's festival arrived on a single hard drive in a compact box. The cost of the hard drive, owned by Emerging Pictures, is about $10,000.

"Projecting is as simple as working a P.C.," explained Barry Rebo, another partner in the company and a technology expert. "They double-click on a film, and it starts." After the festival the hard drives will be sent back to the company to be reprogrammed with other films and then sent out again. "This is a prototype," Mr. Rebo said. "Clearly we want to grow this as big as we can."

The documentaries at the Full Frame Festival, which is co-sponsored by TheNew York Times, include movies like "Farmingville," about immigrant workers on Long Island; "Home of the Brave," about a civil rights worker who was murdered in the 1960's; and "Dirty Work," about the unsung lives of a septic tank cleaner, a bull-semen collector and an embalmer.

In the past independent filmmakers seeking broader audiences have taken their one or two prints on the road, driving from one regional art-house theater to another. With digital replication, which costs a tiny fraction of the amount necessary for striking a print, the travel is no longer necessary.

Directors of regional art-house theaters say they are eager for sophisticated content, and this is an economic model that makes it possible to get such films more often.

"My whole idea is that eventually this is going to be very important for low-budget independent films we show here regularly," said Dan Ladely, director of the Mary Riepma Ross Media Center in Lincoln, Neb., one of the festival's regional participants. "It will enable filmmakers who do documentary films, for example, to distribute films without spending money on 35-millimeter prints."

Emerging Pictures will share profits from the box office receipts with the theater owners.

Distributors of art-house films in Hollywood say they like the Emerging Pictures concept. "I think it's a noble idea," said Ruth Vitale, co-president of Paramount Classics. "I go to Cannes and Venice and see amazing small films, and we rack our brains — how can we take these on and make money? At the end of the day we don't, because we have to make a financial decision."

If the syndication of the Full Frame festival is a success, Mr. Deutchman and his partners say they will branch out to a few dozen cities in the coming year, though that plan will require advertising funds to attract new audiences.

"Our goal is to have as many as 400 outlets, and we would call it a network rather than a theater chain," he said. "We want to show the world it can work, with the hope that by next year it will be all over the United States."

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posted 04-02-2004 03:51 AM                       

quote:

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In the past independent filmmakers seeking broader audiences have taken their one or two prints on the road, driving from one regional art-house theater to another. With digital replication, which costs a tiny fraction of the amount necessary for striking a print, the travel is no longer necessary.

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