Digging through the files this afternoon, I came across this document I’d written for The Nines three years ago, which outlines a lot of my production philosophies at the time. To complete my process-geekery, I thought I’d annotate it to show what we did versus what we planned.
You can download it [here](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/nines_philosophies.pdf) (.pdf). **Note:** Attentive readers will notice some mild spoilers, particularly in the visual effects breakdown.
I spent the morning doing phone interviews for The Nines, which gets its theatrical release in the U.K. this Friday. We’re playing at three locations in London…
* [West India Quay Cineworld](http://www.londonnet.co.uk/cinema/westindiaquaycineworld.html)
* [Cineworld Chelsea](http://www.londonnet.co.uk/cinema/cineworldchelsea.html)
* [Cineworld Shaftesbury Avenue at The Trocadero](http://www.londonnet.co.uk/cinema/cineworldshaftesburyavenueatthetrocadero.html)
…plus other screens throughout the country. It’s a bit frustrating that in this age of Google, it’s so difficult to come up with a master list. (Part of this is my difficulty with U.K. postcodes, which are more specific than their U.S. equivalents.) So far, I’ve been able to find listings (but not showtimes) for Glasgow and Edinburgh, but if readers discover other locations, by all means share.
The British site for the movie, lookforthenines.co.uk, is better than the American one. (**Update March 2011:** The UK site is no longer active.) We’ll be re-doing ours in the next few weeks in anticipation of the DVD release (January 29th).
I promised that as soon as The Nines had reached its widest U.S. opening, I’d be putting the script up in the [Downloads section](http://johnaugust.com/downloads). That time has come.
You can find a .pdf of the screenplay [here](http://johnaugust.com/downloads#nines).
We have a bunch of overseas dates coming up for The Nines (starting with the U.K. on November 30th), but in terms of North America, we’re basically done. There are some one-off screenings on the books, but nothing resembling a true expansion.
We ended up playing in Los Angeles, New York and Austin.
Am I bummed? Yes. Even though I knew 99% of viewers would end up seeing the movie on DVD, I wanted more people to have the chance to see it in a theater.
But I get the economics of it, too: every print, every newspaper ad, every local PR push costs a fortune.
And yet.
My frustration stems largely from seeing how it all played out. It feels like we were one of those movies that basically gets its hand stamped in theaters before coming out on video. And from the distributor’s side, that’s not far from the truth: we didn’t go wider because they didn’t need us to go wider. New York and Los Angeles got us the good reviews they were banking on, so spending more money on the theatrical release wasn’t a priority — either at launch or later on.
When a movie costs $40 million, or $100 million, you have to make a lot of money in theaters. When a movie costs a fraction of that, there’s no pressure, no incentive. So instead of spending millions of dollars on marketing, you spend thousands. I won’t know the final marketing budget on The Nines for many months, but it was probably less than one national TV commercial.
But there was still the chance that our limited release would become a platform release, and that we could use the momentum from the opening weeks to shake out money for more prints, more ads, more cities. That didn’t happen. But I’m **incredibly** grateful to the people who bought tickets for screenings they knew they could never attend. I promise I’ll return the favor, or at least pay it forward.
We’re hard at work on the DVD, which will be coming out in a timely and feature-rich fashion.
And to re-iterate, if you live somewhere other than the U.S. and Canada, there’s a strong chance The Nines will be playing theaters in your neck of the woods. The U.K. kicks it off in November, with other European dates to follow. (Along with the rest of the world.)