Go Big or Go Bust: the challenge of finding distribution for a NY indie film (Part 11 of 11)

November 02, 2015 in go big or go bust

(I’m reprinting the last two paragraphs of the last blog post for context.)

Jackie Raynal, who had been on the crew of early Godard films I had loved and watched at her Bleecker Street Cinema, was the first to call. She loved the film and wanted to invite Mr. Green and me to her Central Park South apartment for drinks. It was all very understated, all very restrained but I’m telling you, it was a love fest. Jackie is French, Jackie is sophisticated, Jackie is a woman. Jackie felt that people in France would go crazy for this film and she and her husband were interested in talking about launching it at the Bleecker Street and then distributing it.

My first New York apartment had been just off Bleecker Street. I’d gone to art school in Paris. The Bleecker Street Cinema was my favorite downtown movie theatre. It was all coming together.

I never heard from Jackie Raynal again. Nor did I ever hear from Lucky Red. The Fort Lauderdale Festival sent press clips which included two wonderful reviews of How To Be Louise on two different days in The Miami Herald. I clung to them.

It was a hot July that summer in New York, hot and humid as I remember. Ralph McKay the director of Jonas Mekas’ Anthology Film Archives on Second Avenue in the East Village had called to ask me to come over to talk about the possibility of screening HTBL. I stuffed myself into a pair of black jeans as I was going to the East Village, after all, where a tough version of cool trumps even the weather. Or so I figured.

Ralph McKay was not at all what I expected. He was young and gentle and seemed more like an artist than a businessman. He and Jonas Mekas wanted to give HTBL a month long screening. (!!) They thought the film would do well and build an audience and they wanted to open it on a Thursday. Most films in New York City opened on Friday so this would make a bigger audience and longer reviews more likely. And, Ralph McKay assured me, this was just the kind of film that Vincent Canby of The New York Times, a friend of Jonas Mekas, would love. They would do everything they could to make sure Canby came to the press screening. We wouldn’t have to pay for a four-wall. We wouldn’t have to buy ads. And if we got a good review in the Times, I could go back to Dan Talbot and his offer from New Yorker Films. Indeed, all my dreams were coming true.

I went into high gear designing and having a poster made up to plaster downtown New York. The poster came back not looking anything like a movie poster but I figured that by getting a strip to paste over the top and another strip with all the credits to paste over the bottom, we could salvage it. And in spite of the cat and Frank and glue all over everything, a handful of our old crew and I hand-pasted headers and footers and made up a gorgeous black and white poster.

On the day of the press screening, I got a call from the Anthology. Vincent Canby was in the hospital. He wouldn’t be at the press screening.

The next morning, on the day of our opening at Anthology, I heard NPR’s Neil Rosen give HTBL a very positive review live on WNYC and rushed out to get the papers. The New York Post had given us three stars and called it “very sexy”. After reading the first few lines of the review in The Times, I called Lea Floden who had starred as Louise, and shouted them at her into the phone: “A Judy Holliday character who seems to have fallen into a Jean-Luc Godard film.” Lea, in Los Angeles, had already read the review and told me to take a deep breath.

Caryn James, who had reviewed it for The Times, was not a fan. In fact, her ‘review’ seemed to veer into personal attack territory. “Anne Flournoy, who wrote, directed and produced this low budget film ... sometimes pulls back to suggest an arch superiority … “How To Be Louise” quickly becomes a low-energy exercise in directorial attitude…” Ow ow owww.

The New Yorker Films deal was contingent on a good review in The Times. Our hopes for distribution, which only five minutes before had seemed well-founded, were suddenly bleak.

The audiences at the nightly screenings at The Anthology grew over the month but they never filled the house. The review in The Times put a pall over everything.

My artist energy and whatever free time I had went into writing the script for ‘the next film’. Mostly I was focused on all that goes into keeping a family clean and fed and the job of raising two children. Telling other mothers at the playground that I was a filmmaker began to feel like a fiction from another lifetime. Time after time, I wrote and rewrote my script with notes from producers, with notes from friends. On good days I was certain that all this would come to something. On the many bad days, I swallowed the bitter pill that my life as a filmmaker was over.

Seventeen years later, in a summer of desperation, The Louise Log sprouted out of my experiences of marriage and motherhood and my fear that if I didn't set some deadlines for myself, I'd never finish anything again. I'd make one video a month. Six months later I 'finished' the first one. It was supposed to be a one-off thigh slapper and it was anything but. It was dark. It was a meditation on mortality and wasted time. Armed with some self-knowledge at this point, I realized I could spend the next seventeen years bringing it up to my standards. I uploaded it to YouTube on the last day of the month which happened to be the last day of the year. People in my address book wrote that they loved the actor (Christine Cook) and asked for another one with her. Thrilled at the response, I did one video a month for four months in a row. But I was running out of ideas as everything I had was in that script of so many rewrites. With Bob Berney and Mr. Green's encouragement, I decided to shoot and throw this enormous effort up on YouTube for free. It became the basis for episodes 5-17 of The Louise Log.

In 2013, The Sundance Institute launched How To Be Louise online and to celebrate that, we had a screening at Indiescreen in Williamsburg.

And that's my whole, never-before-told, story.

What did I learn from all of this?

I leaned the importance of working on what I love and with people I respect. That way, regardless of artistic or commercial success or failure, I’ll have used whatever (days, years) it takes, feeding my soul.

And I learned that 'failure' is not necessarily all bad. In the clear light of twenty-five years later, I think this ‘failure’ may actually have been my lucky break. With my tendency toward maniac workaholism, if I’d had the option of a career when my children were small, it’s possible that I might have managed to avoid the life-changing experience of that surrender historically demanded of mothers. Had I been busy as a bee with my big career, I doubt that being completely broken by the loneliness, the drudgery and the exhaustion of motherhood would have been anywhere on my agenda. In avoiding that, I might have also missed out on the great love of my life, of and for my family.

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Go Big or Go Bust: New Efficiency Model - The Berlin Film Festival (Part 6)

October 19, 2015 in go big or go bust

After having the ‘World Premiere’ of How To Be Louise at the Sundance Festival (trailer below), I flew from Salt Lake City to Newark to pick up one year-old Frank at my parents in New Jersey.

(2:07) trailer for How To Be Louise starring Lea Floden as Louise and Bruce McCarty

On arriving at my parents, guess who didn’t recognize me? Guess who wouldn’t even look at me? Choking back tears, I wallowed in heartbreak until my mother suggested that I pull myself together.

Frank and I headed back to Brooklyn to join Mr. Green who had arrived from Japan to meet with students in his lab and to take over with Frank. Having schooled Mr. Green on what he needed to know, I set off for our European Premiere. (Premieres are a very big deal in the world of film festivals.)

Having never been to Berlin, I didn’t know what to expect but my hopes were high from what I knew from Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya, Marlene Dietrich, the Bauhaus and Max Beckmann. I was not disappointed.

In spite of it being a bitterly cold February with the usual icy streets and sidewalks, the mood of the city was jubilant: the Berlin Wall had come down just two months earlier. Lea Floden and I stayed in a small hotel and had schedules packed from morning til night. We went to a festival party in a high-ceilinged room hardly bigger than an over-sized living room. The draw was neither movie stars or film producers, but rather the Soviet Army marching band in full uniform. They played Swing Era music with lots of brass and I can't find the words to describe how explosive, how loud and incredibly exciting it was. It was like the music was coming from inside my body.

And then there was Berlin. On one of my forays into the streets around the festival, I came upon a pharmacist who seemed to be trapped in the 14th century. The pharmacy had large windows through which I could see that it was a jewel box of exquisitely functional wood work - shelves, drawers, cabinets and mirrors. But it was the pharmacist himself who made my jaw drop. He wore a perfect white lab coat and his white hair was cut in an impeccable Prince Valiant bob with a page boy curl. This vision eventually inspired Everett Quinton’s character Ethelred’s hair in Season 3 of The Louise Log.

Everett Quinton in the Prince Valiant wig - (We didn't have the budget for the curl of a pageboy.)

Lea and I met up with some other filmmakers who were taking a trip over into what had been behind the Iron Curtain ninety days earlier. The drab and barren-looking architecture and the looks on the faces of the people in East Berlin were in striking contrast with the opulent and free feeling of the western part of the city. In the guarded way the East Berliners looked around (or didn’t look around} while sitting on a bus or walking past us on the street, it was clear that decades of a repressive regime had affected them.

I spent most of my time in Berlin at the festival, walking in one direction or the other of a very long hallway in the building which housed The Market. It was easy to meet new people and find old friends. Our friend and long-time champion Lynda Hansen who organized American Independents in Berlin was there and we met Josef Wutz, a producer and actor and many others I've lost touch with.

Like everyone, we had a few screenings set up at The Market. As you might expect, The Market is where the business happens in modest screening rooms for small groups of people in the industry. A very nice bonus of Market screenings was the Sign-In List which was handed to the filmmaker after the audience had been seated. I was thrilled to see that a number of film festival directors were at our first screening, including Richard Pena of the New York Film Festival. My first short had screened at New York before he was the director and I held my breath imagining that my first feature might be invited too.

Less than ten minutes into the screening, the bulb in the projector burst. Eventually the lights came up. Some time later, a technician poked his head in and asked for our patience in several languages. There was complete silence in the room. I was in the back row chewing off my nails. After a few more minutes, Richard Pena got up and left.

(to be continued)

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Go Big or Go Bust: New Efficiency Model - Sundance A Cautionary Tale (Part 5)

October 16, 2015 in go big or go bust

In November, we left for Toyonaka outside of Osaka, ‘the business capital’ of Japan. Normally I would have been a nervous wreck, figuring that I’d lose myself, my focus and any film momentum I might have gathered now that I’d be a faculty wife in exile in suburban Japan. But with my new status as a successful filmmaker with a feature in competition at Sundance, nothing could stop me. Or so I thought.

Lea Floden as Louise with Michael Moneagle and William Zimmer

From the minute we arrived in Japan until the day we left, my love for our lodging, the Guest House of Osaka University, its minimalist architecture and heated floors, never diminished. On the contrary, the charm of my new social situation wore off faster than the jet lag.

Mr. Green came home from his first day at the lab, his eyebrows raised, “These people work twelve to fourteen hours a day! I’m not going to get into that. I want to enjoy you and Frank and our time here.” I raised my inner eyebrows.

Within the week Mr. Green was working twelve hour days. Hey, I’m not a pathetic person clinging to her husband’s arm, I’ve got stuff to do too. I’d soon be leaving for Sundance! I set out to lock in a babysitter a few afternoons a week so I could collect my thoughts before setting off on the festival circuit.

At eleven months, Frank was a terror on all fours. He knew he wasn’t allowed in the refrigerator but as soon as its door swung open, he’d dash over at his top speed crawl, lace little fingers between the wires of a shelf and pull himself up to standing, shrieking with delight. For extra fun, he’d grab things off the shelves and hurl them into the room.

My first inquiries about getting some relief were to narrow-minded traditional types who tipped their heads to the side and screwed up their faces. “Babysitta? In Japan, babies stay with mother. Or grandmother.” Seriously? I thought to myself. Get a life. Weeks into my search for a few hours of relief, I realized that I was up against something a whole lot bigger than I’d ever be. According to everyone I asked (this was 1989) I would not find anyone willing to watch the kid if I scoured the entire country. Peoples’ best suggestions were that I take him to Baby And Me Swim classes. I’d meet other mothers, too!

I turned to dark chocolate and more and more coffee trying to bring my energy up so I could make do on less sleep, getting something done while old Frank recharged his batteries. Unfortunately, the stimulating effect reversed and made me more tired than ever.

Heck, I figured, what’s there to do to ‘get ready’ anyway? We didn’t have the budget for a publicist. Lea Floden would join me in Park City and we’d do the best we could.

One month before setting off for Sundance (and dropping Frank at his grandparents in New Jersey) I started giving him more bottles of baby formula and weaning him from nursing. He was eleven months old and though I’d loved this incredibly tender and intimate part of motherhood, it had to end in order for me to go to Sundance alone. A measured tapering off would spare both of us the misery of going cold turkey. One afternoon, watching his beautiful profile, peaceful and confident as he nursed, he pulled off my breast and looked up into my eyes, his mouth full of milk. He cooed at me with such love, the memory of it is a high point of my life.

Note to filmmakers who haven’t been to Park City: before you go, read up on how to prevent altitude sickness. “Headache, fatigue, nausea, loss of appetite, shortness of breath … the common symptoms of mild altitude sickness can be similar to a bad hangover.” I knew about this and I thought I took precautions. Maybe I didn’t do enough.

In Park City the festival organized for me to stay in a condo with other filmmakers. They all seemed to know each other and to sleep in ripped t-shirts. I remember one of them looking me over in disbelief (and what felt like hostility) in my nightgown and housecoat. Here I’d made it to Sundance and now was going to feel alienated … because I wore a nightgown?

Jet-lagged, with the altitude sickness and now feeling ostracized by my immediate peers, I wasn’t in top form to face the career opportunity of my life. Legendary PR man Mickey Cottrell and Doug Lindeman and I exchanged cards on the bus to a screening and Mickey said he’d heard good buzz about How To Be Louise. Claudia Lewis, young, hip and smart, sat in front of Lea and me at a screening. She’d worked on Drugstore Cowboy. She encouraged us to stay in touch.

Pretty much the rest of the festival is a blur. There were parties. There were lots and lots of people all of whom I knew i should at least be trying to connect with. But how do you do that? Especially when you feel tense, when you feel needy. Opportunities were certainly all around and just as surely slipping through my fingers. I was anxious, wanting to try but not to try ‘too hard’, and always feeling in the wrong place at the wrong time. Roger Ebert and Steven Soderbergh were on the judging committee. I don’t remember ever even seeing them.

We had our packed screenings which seemed to go well and after them our Q&A’s where there were lots of questions. People approached me afterwards, people with cards from companies I’d never heard of, saying they’d like to talk about distribution and television sales. Naturally when I glanced down and saw that neither Sony Pictures Classics, Miramax or Orion Classics were on their cards, I'd smile politely, knowing that our film was destined for greater things. Lea and her husband Dan Bonnell convinced me to leave Park City for twenty-four hours to go skiing at Powder Mountain and get our feet back on the ground. When we returned to Park City, I went back to crash at the condo only to find someone else sleeping in my bed. Hmm. Sorry Mick Jagger, I’ll have to disagree with you here: You can’t always get what you want, you get what you get.

I left Park City for the airport without having talked distribution with anyone.

(to be continued)

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Go Big or Go Bust: New Efficiency Model - It's the Tiny Little Actions (Part 4)

October 14, 2015 in go big or go bust

So I’ve dropped all semblance of an attempt to wrest control of the direction of this story and am going with the flow.

It was the end of February of 1987 when we finished shooting the second half of How To Be Louise. To my eye, the dailies were stunning. The performances by Lea Floden and Bruce McCarty were beyond my wildest dreams. The performances by the circle of friends they’d cast in the other roles were equally top-notch, friends like theatrical legends Maggie Burke and Lisa Emery, Mary Carol Johnson, Hollywood and tv regular Josh Pais, and Michael Patrick King (who went on to write, produce and direct Sex and the City, The Comeback and more).

Lea Floden and Bruce McCarty in the scene about which The New York Post said: "This is very sexy." — Lea Floden and Bruce McCarty in the scene about which *The* *New York Post* said: "This is very sexy."

Josh Pais (dancing with himself in the mirror), Mary Carol Johnson and Lea Floden

Michael Patrick King and Alice Spivak on the steps of the WIlliamsburgh Savings Bank on Broadway near Peter Luger's

Our Director of Photography Vladimir Tukan had shot footage which itself had a power and beauty independent of the story. Yes it was 16mm, but it was luminously rich black and white: Vladimir had studied cinematography in the classic old school tradition in Russia. He was passionately committed to this film, so much so that there were more than a few unforgettable moments when I had to put my foot down about the complexity of the camera moves. In pre-production, we’d watched Bunuel’s Viridiana and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz specifically for the long moving shots. Vladimir was going to the mat to give me what I wanted, so much so that I once had to pull out all the stops and use tears to get him to agree to a simpler shot.

Along with the job he did shooting HTBL and Nadja Yet, I'll always be grateful to Vladimir for a life lesson he taught me as one artist to another. Sometimes, in the heat of the moment of blocking and framing a shot, I'd lose my confidence and dismiss what I'd sketched out in a storyboard. Vladimir would turn to me with the full force of his considerable personality: "No! Ehnn!" (That's a phonetic spelling of my name with Vladimir's accent.) "Don't deesmiss your idea. That comes from unconscious. That's very valuable. Let's see if we can do it."

Vladimir is on the left in profile.

And we did. And when we finished, it looked so good. I realized that we weren’t just going to be able to have a babysitter, we’d be on Fifth Avenue with a nanny. I got pregnant within the month.

While Walis Johnson assembled a rough cut, I wrote every person and grant organization I could get to, asking for money for post-production.

Flash-forward three months: the production had run aground, out of money. I painted the apartment and sewed curtains for every window in it. Our downstairs neighbor Charles came up and commented to Mr. Green that I’d turned the place into a womb.

One day, getting thick around the middle and out of breath trying to do a little yoga stretch, the full reality hit me: I’ve really done it this time, seriously shot myself in the foot. I was exhausted and couldn’t even touch my toes. How was I ever going to finish this film? A voice in my head I didn’t know answered: “You’re on the right track.”

And so I went back to taking the tiny little actions I could. We got a very nice grant from The Jerome Foundation. Amy Taubin wrote a profile piece for the Village Voice which a young man in Rockford, Illinois read and then sent us $5000. And we got other donations including a big one from someone who seemed so cheap that I’d thought twice about wasting a postage stamp on him.

We screened at what was then called the Independent Feature Project (IFP) in New York in October. Ulrich Gregor of the Forum at the Berlin Film Festival ran at me after the screening: “Are you the filmmaker? I LOVE this film!” A well-connected entertainment lawyer from Los Angeles told me to call him. Jim Stark who had produced my favorite indie film Stranger Than Paradise stopped in to one of the screenings and gave a thumbs up: “You’ve got something there.” This was happening.

The sardonic and sometimes dark Philip Johnston started composing a score with his band The Happy New Yorkers and Kathleen Killeen worked on locking the picture.

Ten weeks later, Frank Thurston Green was born. Someone told me about a documentary filmmaker who gave birth to her first child on Sunday and went back to work on Monday. The story made me wonder about both my commitment to film and her sanity. My picture wasn’t locked, the sound was still to be edited, the score had to be recorded and laid in and I didn’t give a damn about any of it. I was out of my mind with hormones and sleeplessness and falling madly in love with this chubby little baby.

The next thing I remember was feeling irritated that my attempt to lay in the music (as if it were wall-to-wall carpet) had ruined the film. Fortunately Mr. Green has a deep intuitive connection to storytelling and somehow knew how to cut in the score so it would amplify instead of flattening out the story.

Soon after, we scheduled a sound mix with Dominick Tavella at Sound One. As an assistant film editor, I’d been to many sound mixes, dreaming of the day when I’d be the director working with the mixer. But as my passion for this baby was growing, so was my irritation at any distraction that could take me away from him. Self-discipline pure and simple got me on the M train to the F train to midtown and the mix. And then there was what I thought was ‘the last step’ of my job: submitting to film festivals. Sundance and Berlin were at the top of our list.

In the meantime, Mr. Green had been invited to spend six months as a guest professor at Osaka University in Japan. Of course we would go with him. But what if the film got into festivals? Mr. Green and I agreed that we’d “work it out.”

Ulrich Gregor from Berlin’s Forum, who had professed love for our rough cut the year before, was the first to respond. In a dagger to my heart, he let us know (by telegram, I think) that he wasn’t excited about the final film and had passed on it. I was packing suitcases and chasing Frank, now an energetic nine-month old, as he crawled around the apartment terrorizing the cat. Still there was no word from Sundance. This was 1989, before email and cell phones and I was frantic that, off in a suburb of Osaka, I might never get word from Sundance or any of the other festivals we'd submitted to.

The night before we left for Japan, I got the phone call from Sundance that they wanted How To Be Louise for the Dramatic Competition. Soon after, Manfred Salzgeber, curator of the Berlin Festival’s Panorama, sent similarly good news.

(to be continued)

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Go Big or Go Bust: Day 226 (on justifying hanging out as working 'smarter')

September 02, 2015 in go big or go bust

The divine Lea Floden, star of (my first and probably only feature) How To Be Louise, is in New York for a few days. We hung out all day long eating tomato sandwiches, guzzling kale smoothies (kale from the garden) and even went to my friend Heather's birthday party in a penthouse loft. SO elegant. Really interesting-looking people, especially one amazing guy who defies description and bust out multiple psychic insights about Lea scattered through a regular conversation.

So guess who lost track of the time and didn't get around to writing a blog today? Me! The same person who didn't take one single action toward going 'Big'. Unless, of course, you count being around Lea who is so inspiring and fun.

I'm chalking it up to a "working smarter, not harder" day.

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 197 (Lesson from the garden - self-confidence from potatoes and courage from a dream)

August 04, 2015 in go big or go bust

A number of weeks ago, I mentioned that I'd been down in the basement and the poor potatoes looked like Rapunzel without the benefits of gravity. My gardening filmmaker friend Marian Evans (of Wellington, New Zealand) advised me to "Stick those spuds in the ground!" (something like that). And so I did, I went and dug six inch holes and stuck them in the ground with their 'eye stalks' pointing toward the sky. These poor potatoes are left over from our crop last Fall and, try as we might, we hadn't gotten around to eating them. By the summer, they were a little squishy and, as you can see, actively taking matters into their own hands.

I finally got around to planting them in early July and a week or so later, was thrilled to see what Marian must have know would happen. The little stalks had turned green and were even sprouting tiny leaves.

Look at what's happened in the past three weeks. One potato produces a whole bush.

Which brings me to the lesson I got from these potatoes: each one of us, potatoes included, has a yearning to do what we were brought to Earth to do. And I'm moved by the faith of those potatoes in the basement. They weren't getting what they needed even though they were giving all the signals that they were ready to get planted ... and still they kept on trying, growing, using up the energy of their potato selves to get to some sunlight. (There are two very small windows in our basement, just enough to give you hope.)

It reminds me of a night back in 1985 or 1986 when I sobbed myself to sleep after wailing to Mr. Green that I didn't know what to do anymore, if I was supposed to make a feature film, then okay! I'll make it but I need money from somewhere. (I'd been applying for and not-getting a lot of grants.) Or should I give up on this artist/filmmaker idea and try to get a job in advertising or something? Or should I devote myself to being a mother and have a whole bunch of kids? I felt willing, I felt open and I felt desperate to know what I was supposed to do..

That night, I had a dream. It was one of those dreams which feels important, like a message. I was in a 1950's type kitchen with a witch. She wasn't good or bad, but she was powerful and forceful. She commanded me to make the feature: "Don't stop now! You're almost there!"

That dream gave me a powerful confidence to keep on going. It wasn't easy and it wasn't finished til the Fall of 1989 but then the film, a feature starring Lea Floden as Louise, got into the Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Festival and the Panorama of the Berlin Festival and forever changed my life.

I'd love to have that kind of dream again. The difficulty of this job of getting The Louise Log out to a larger audience has me doubting if I should be devoting any more time to it. On the other hand, it feels like that's what I'm supposed to be doing. And then I think of what those potatoes had been going through from January to June. I bet they had their doubts.