The Nines

A [quote from Mark Gill](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_picture/2008/06/the-sky-is-fall.html) in the LA Times last week would seem discouraging for independent filmmakers:

> Of the 5,000 films submitted to Sundance each year — generally with budgets under $10 million — maybe 100 of them got a U.S. theatrical release three years ago. And it used to be that 20 of those would make money. Now maybe five do. That’s one-tenth of 1%. Put another way, if you decide to make a movie budgeted under $10 million on your own tomorrow, you have a 99.9% chance of failure.

There are lots of ways to criticize his logic. For starters, most Sundance movies are way under $10 million. Many are under a million. And he seems to omit a figure for how many indie films are getting a theatrical release now as opposed to three years ago.

We need to ask, “Failure for whom?” Even a movie that doesn’t earn its budget back will likely make money for its distributors, once you factor in video and TV sales. More crucially, a good indie film generates future work for its stars and filmmakers. So there’s a lot of success to be found in that 99.9% failure.

All that said, he’s kind of right.

I’ve held off writing a post-mortem on The Nines, but now that everything is said and done, I should probably say and do it. The short version is this: the movie turned out just the way I wanted. The release of the movie was deeply disappointing.

Here are the key lessons I learned from the release:

1. Sundance buzz is annoying and meaningless
—

The Nines premiered at Sundance in 2007. We were happy the film got in — we were by no means a lock, despite our cast, our credits, and my involvement with the Sundance screenwriters lab. We got a slot out of competition on a big screen on a good night. We got a sales agent. Things were looking good.

My first inkling that something was amiss was when our first choice of publicity teams watched the movie and passed on representing us. They didn’t love the movie. The publicity team we ultimately hired did love the movie, and worked their asses off for it. Yet that first “pass” should have clued us into the reality that the movie was polarizing, and that every subsequent step along the way would be determined by our champions and detractors.

We did Sundance the way you’re supposed to do Sundance, with all the press interviews and trudging up and down snowy streets. We kept running into the same movies doing the same song-and-dance, several of them represented by the team that first passed on us. It was all smiles, but every time I heard festival-goers discussing another movie, I got jealous — unless it was negative, in which case I got a little happier. That’s a natural instinct, I guess. Indiefreude.

Looking back through the coverage of the festival, The Nines was one of approximately 20 movies ((This list is reconstructed by memory and Googling. If I’ve omitted something that was there and buzz-generating, I’m happy to append it.)) that got significant buzz — either spontaneous or self-generated — while up on the mountain. The others included:

1. The Signal
2. Chapter 27
3. The Good Night
4. Joshua
5. Teeth
6. The Ten
7. Waitress
8. Under the Same Moon (La Misma Luna)
9. How She Move
10. Son of Rambow
11. Once
12. Nanking
13. The King of Kong
14. Grace is Gone
15. Dedication
16. Clubland (aka Introducing the Dwights)
17. My Kid Could Paint That
18. King of California
19. In the Shadow of the Moon
20. Hounddog

All of these except Hounddog (the “Dakota Fanning Rape Movie”) sold, either while at Sundance or shortly thereafter. ((A few more sales came later, including cable premieres. I haven’t heard the ultimate fate of Hounddog.)) Let’s call these the Graduating Class of 2007.

I’d put The Nines in the middle of the buzz pack. It was hard to get a ticket, and they kept adding additional screenings. But after the debut, it was clear we weren’t going to be in a giant bidding situation. Other movies were selling quickly, and new titles kept debuting.

Eighteen months later, it’s fascinating to see how little the festival buzz mattered. Prices for these movies — a key component of buzz, as in, “Did you hear how much it sold for?” — were all over the board, from the low six-figures to $7 million for Son of Rambow.

But it made no difference. They all pretty much tanked.

Waitress sold quickly, was released quickly, and made the most by far at the box office ($19M). ((Because we’re accustomed to looking at domestic box office, that’s what I’m showing. But keep in mind that international is a crucial component, as noted later.)) Second place was Under the Same Moon ($12.5M), followed by Once ($9M) and How She Move ($7M). Son of Rambow will likely end up in fifth. It’s currently in release, and made $8M overseas.

In terms of box office, none of these are hits in the way Little Miss Sunshine was. But you’d be happy being any of them, because beyond those five, the other movies on the list fell off a cliff. None of them made a million. **In fact, most didn’t make it over $100,000.** The Nines didn’t, despite opening well.

But at least we opened. At least we sold. For our year, 3,287 feature films were submitted to Sundance, of which 122 played. Roughly 20 played in theaters. ((The grand prize winners — Manda Bala and Padre Nuestro — both got released, but I didn’t know until I just checked.))

The other hundred films played other festivals, and ultimately hoped for a DVD deal. And maybe that’s not all bad. Because you know what?

2. Theatrical release is kinda bullshit.
—-

Even while I was making The Nines, I knew that the vast majority of viewers would ultimately see it on the small screen. In that spirit, we worked to make the shiny disc version extra-rewarding, with commentaries and special features planned from day one.

But at the same time, we were anticipating theatrical. A lot of effort went in to making the 35mm prints — eight prints in all. We would have conference calls to discuss dates and markets and theaters, with special screenings for opening night and whatnot.

It was a fool’s errand.

It didn’t feel like it at the time, but the theatrical release was really a token, contractually-obligated gesture. We were getting our hand stamped before the DVD.

It was billed as a platform release, opening in just a few key markets before going wider. But from the distributor’s perspective, there was no reason to even consider expanding beyond New York, Los Angeles and Austin. Each new market meant more money they would have to spend on newspaper ads, and there was no incentive to do it. From a cost perspective, New York and Los Angeles gave enough national exposure to drive the DVD release, which was where they hoped to make their money.

The only problem was…

3. The DVD should have come out much sooner, maybe simultaneously
—

Because of Ryan’s relative star power, we were able to generate a ton of national publicity. He went on TRL and Conan and every other New York outlet you can think of. But making a college student in Iowa aware of a movie that will never play Des Moines is useless. He’ll forget about it in a week.

So the smart thing would have been keeping our New York and Los Angeles dates but having the DVD come out immediately. ((Alternately, make it pay-per-view on cable and satellite, or downloadable on iTunes.)) I know that invokes the stigma of straight-to-DVD, but if it means that potential viewers nationwide can actually see the movie, hooray.

The shortening DVD windows are a legitimate concern for mainstream Hollywood movies, but for indies, I don’t think it’s even worth serious objection. Arthouse theaters’ biggest competition isn’t DVD, but TV in general. The people who used to keep them in business are staying home to watch HBO and Bravo.

If I had an arthouse theater, I’d swap out a different movie every week, on the assumption that you can skim off the enthusiastic filmgoers — bolstered by fimmaker Q&A’s — and move on to the next batch. And that’s exactly what they do. As a result, The Nines and most of the other movies our graduating class played at theaters I wouldn’t normally frequent, often for only a week.

Putting out the DVD right away wouldn’t have cannibalized theatrical. There was no meat on the bones anyway.

4. I should have paid a lot more attention to foreign
—-

By focusing on the U.S. release, I largely ignored the international markets until the Venice Film Festival, where we played in Critics’ Week. The smarter plan would have been going to Sundance with the intention of going to Berlin right after, followed by Cannes, followed by every other meaningful festival which invited us. ((Altogether, The Nines got more than 100 festival invitations.)) Given family and work commitments, there was a natural limit to how much I could have done. But a real first-time filmmaker could easily spend a year traveling with his movie.

We ended up getting a theatrical release in the UK, along with a pretty solid DVD. But the rest of Europe — Germany and France in particular — was left hanging. Even a good sale in Australia hasn’t led to release yet. Which is ridiculous, because…

5. Without an alternative, everyone will just pirate it
—-

IMDb searches for The Nines peaked at #11 on January 20th, 2008 — two weeks before the DVD was released. That’s because it finally [got leaked on BitTorrent](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2008/the-nines-on-bittorrent). Suddenly, that college student in Iowa and that programmer in Arles could finally see the movie.

Let’s try a thought experiment: what if The Nines had leaked shortly before the theatrical release, say, August 19th? At that point, we were number 836 on IMDb, and that was during a concerted publicity campaign which would ultimately get us as high as 47 on the chart.

Would the leak have helped us or hurt us?

Given we were only playing in two cities in the world, I can’t think it would have hurt us much. And if there had been a legal and easy way to let people watch the movie — say, through iTunes — I think we could have capitalized on the attention. The pirated version was going to be available on or before the release of the DVD regardless, so one might as well benefit from it as much as possible.

To my thinking, leaking a decent-quality, watermarked version ((I’d have it read “lookforthenines.com” in the corner.)) would have greatly increased the awareness and discussion of the movie, which could have paid off if the DVD and/or iTunes version were available shortly thereafter.

Should anyone bother making an indie film?
—-

I know that a lot of this article comes off as a downer. The odds of getting your scrappy indie in front of paying audiences are pretty low, and the odds of really making money at it are subterranean.

But I stand by my earlier observation that there’s a lot of success to be found in that high failure rate. The Nines didn’t make a big splash, but it has a fair number of super-fans, including some filmmakers and critics. It has led to new opportunities for me and its stars, and a solid credit for the folks who worked on it.

Financially, the movie is a wash. I’ve never publicly stated its budget, but it was low enough that no one got hurt. And from the distributors’ perspective, the upside of undermarketing is that there’s not so much to earn back. For all parties, you can calculate the “opportunity costs” many different ways. I certainly could have made a lot more in my day job writing movies for other people, but in the long run, The Nines was probably more rewarding.

My advice? You should make an indie film to make a film. Period. Artistic and commercial success don’t correlate well, and at the moment, only the former is remotely within your control.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have made the same movie but completely rethought how it went out into the world. I would have challenged a lot of the standard operating procedures, which seem to be part of an indie world that no longer exists. The Nines would have likely made just as little at the box office, but could have made a bigger impact on a bigger audience. Ultimately, I think that’s how you need to measure the success of an indie film’s release: how many people saw it.