Today’s guest post is from George Rush, producers rep and attorney. Yesterday George started telling us about how he engineered the sale of Michael Tully’s Sundance At Midnight hit, SEPTIEN. Today’s post concludes the dissection.
I had been to Sundance before with Midnight films and know it can be difficult to get good buzz. Sundance audiences are not reflective of real audiences. It is a mixture of film nerds, rich party people, and earnest do gooders seeking some culture. I’ve found most people want to see the buzzed about stereotypical Sundance films—The Are All Right, Winter’s Bone. These tickets are hard to come by. However, midnight screening tickets are easier to come by and thus people get stuck with them. They come in hoping for some culture and get blood and guts and farts.
I’ve seen packed houses at Midnight screenings pretty empty by the time the lights came up. Because Michael’s film, SEPTIEN, is so different, I felt a good number of the audience and some critics would dismiss it outright because it did not fit their expectation of what a Sundance film should be. It sort of reminds me of a friend of mine who hates Wes Anderson movies because he expects Bill Murray to always play the Bill Murray of Ghostbusters.
Those who stayed, who bought in, would be massively rewarded by SEPTIEN, but there would be some naysayers. So my feeling was Sundance was going to be a wildcard, with champions and detractors.
Casting is one of the obvious essentials of any film, and like all aspects of the process worth examining: the assumptions that define it and the possibilities of how it might be used to best advantage. Casting’s key place comes in financing, where attaching the right star allows raising money based on their monetary value to specific regions or demographics. Enough attached stars offer the promise of pre-sales in distribution, and enough pre-sales can then determine a base budget. This would seem to follow the simple logic of a star’s popularity guaranteeing viewers, a shortcut in the task of finding an audience. 