My Life and Times

Peter Foley/European Pressphoto Agency

The TriBeCa Film Festival, which recently ended its two-week run, sold 135,000 tickets to 700 screenings

May 12, 2005
New York: 'Little' Films Grow Big
By DAVID CARR

When the Cannes Film Festival opened yesterday, the first of what could be a long stream of distribution deals was announced: "Transamerica," a comedic road movie starring Felicity Huffman of "Desperate Housewives," will be coming to a screen near you soon. The film is a New York project from beginning to end, written, directed and partly shot in a city that has carved out its own place in the film industry - a place that only occasionally intersects with what Hollywood likes to call "the movie business."

Culturally vibrant, if economically still fragile, New York has quietly been emerging as the world's primary clearinghouse for a fast-expanding pool of very-low-budget movies. A ragtag posse of former college film series promoters, ex-gofers at major studios and chronically underfinanced filmmakers - their way paved by the low costs and relative ease of digital technology - has coalesced here into a commercial brokerage and cinematic salon devoted largely to the "little" film.

Long a force in the independent film world, the industry in New York suffered a bit of a slump in the 90's as Hollywood studios trimmed Manhattan staff and all but stopped holding big premiere parties in the city. And while the two men who embodied New York filmmaking over the last decade, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the co-founders of Miramax Films, are parting ways with the company they built after a drawn-out battle with the Walt Disney Company, even they are playing a role in the city's new film game. Even as they round up financing for a new company to be based in Manhattan, they are buying the North American distribution rights for "Transamerica," directed by Duncan Tucker and produced by Linda Moran, René Bastian and Sebastian Dungan, New Yorkers all, on a budget of about $1 million. "New York used to be seen as this kind of colonial outpost of L.A.," said Mark Urman, head of theatrical distribution for New York-based ThinkFilm, which earlier this year won attention for its "Murderball," an unlikely documentary about quadriplegic rugby players, by screening it at the New Directors/New Films Festival sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. He expects the picture to compete against Hollywood fare like "Bewitched" and "Fantastic Four" this summer.

Now, Mr. Urman said, filmmakers, many of them based in New York, are increasingly inclined to gamble by shooting their pictures without waiting for a green light from a Hollywood studio, hoping companies like his will find viewers for them.

While Hollywood concentrates on selling blockbusters around the globe - and has crashed the party with well-financed art house divisions like Universal's Focus Features and Sony Pictures Classics, both based here, New York companies like ThinkFilm and Killer Films have emerged as central players in a more guerrillalike industry, reaching far beyond traditional independent production and finance. The latest generation of New York players are creating a system of their own to get movies seen. They win recognition for hundreds of pictures a year via film festival screens and a Rube Goldberg patchwork of local sites, both commercial and nonprofit, garnering just enough exposure to push the movies into the marketplace, including the increasingly lucrative DVD market.

"Transamerica" opened last month at the TriBeCa Film Festival, which cast its own light on the robustness and growing power of the New York film industry. In its fourth year, the festival sold 135,000 tickets to 700 screenings even as the popcorn index soared: Regal Cinemas, in TriBeCa, peddled more than 5,000 bags a week during the festival, versus its usual 800.

For the first time in its short history, several pictures that opened at TriBeCa, including a Showtime documentary, "After Innocence," and the Dutch drama "Simon," were picked up for national distribution. Conceived as a civic gesture for a neighborhood down on its luck after the events of Sept. 11, Robert De Niro's brainchild had taken its place in a booming local commercial film culture.

"When we announced what we were going to do, who knew how successful or powerful it was going to be?" Mr. De Niro said.

Hollywood studios - which accounted for about $7.4 billion in worldwide film revenue - released about 138 pictures last year, according to Exhibitor Relations Company, which tracks box office revenues. In all, more than 500 films are released in domestic theaters in a typical year, many of them by about a dozen Manhattan companies like Think and Killer.

Several more players are poised to join the fray, including the Weinsteins' still-unnamed new company and two Time Warner units, New Line and HBO, which have combined to form another independent film distributor in New York. At the end of last month, 2929 Entertainment, a digital entertainment company based here, signed a six-picture deal with Steven Soderbergh, the director of "Traffic" and "Erin Brockovich," for six high-definition films that will be simultaneously released in theaters, on DVD and on television.

"Ten years ago, the driving force behind the movies we show was Miramax," said Graham Leggat, who helps program screenings at Lincoln Center. "Now there are a number of other distributors." The growing echelon of New York distributors appears to be matched by an expansion in the ranks of film being shot here. Last year, 202 movies were filmed at least in part in New York city. And the enactment of a combined city-state tax break of 15 percent has already yielded almost $300 million in new business, according to the Mayor's Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting.

The New York distribution companies are also fed by a torrent of new films from around the world. This year, more than 2,600 feature-length pictures were submitted to the Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, Utah, up 29 percent from a year earlier, providing a rough measure of the growth in the pool of films made outside of the studio system.

As those pictures scramble to be seen, New York - with its confluence of ethnic communities, film schools, enthusiasts and media outlets - has forged a cultural ecosystem, processing the pictures and pushing many of them toward commercial release. The New York Times, by some accounts, plays a part in the process: Under longstanding practice, every full-length feature that plays on a New York screen for at least a week is reviewed in the paper.

If the film business, especially as it is practiced in New York, remains a notoriously chancy affair - Dan Talbot, longtime head of New Yorker Films, describes it as "a casino" - that has not doused an optimism that was palpable only weeks ago in TriBeCa.

During the festival, fans lined up around the block at Stuyvesant High School to see "The Great New Wonderful," a film about the aftermath of 9/11, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and directed by a Brooklyn native, Danny Leiner. The young crowd buzzed with the sort of anticipation that usually accompanies the opening of a new downtown club.

"Ninety percent of the industry is in L.A.," said Mr. Leiner, who now lives there. "But the 10 percent who are here are among the most creative people making movies."

A peculiar hallmark of New York's cinematic counterculture is the role that the city's intense, sophisticated audience has played in pushing once-fragile films like "Open Water" and "Garden State" into prominence. Often, small movies that break out have taken root on a single screen at the Angelika Film Center, Film Forum or Lincoln Center, where an enthusiastic reception has opened the door to a wider audience in other cities and on DVD. That audience seems to renew itself each generation, with fans of newer styles and genres (like Asian horror or Dogme, the Danish-based film movement) joining the aging cinéastes who devour sophisticated European fare. And the tribe has grown through the Web, which is alive with blogs and enthusiast sites like indiewire.com that create viral marketing and lead fans elsewhere to order up DVD's of lesser-known films.

"If you want to integrate a film into the culture, this is the place you have to start," said Michael Barker, who with his partner Tom Bernard established Sony Pictures Classics, a unit of the giant Japanese entertainment company, as one of the most active studio specialty divisions.

If the current blossoming of New York filmmaking, some of it shot with digital equipment that does not require the time or expense of film, has put an unusually democratic face on the local film culture, some players caution that to make a movie worth seeing still requires sweat and magic. "The fact is, most of these movies deal in narrative, which should be something that works well in digital form," said James Schamus, co-president of Focus Features. "The fact remains that you can compose a poem with a pencil and a piece of paper, but not everyone can do it."

And for many in this reinvented industry, the big dollars that represent a measure of success remain elusive. "Nobody is making any real money," said the New York director Eugene Jarecki, whose documentary, "Why We Fight," won the American Documentary Grand Jury prize at Sundance this year and will be distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. Besides, he said, "it is less than six degrees of separation between all of us, so we tend to depend on each other as opposed to seeing each other as competitors."

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