What’s the fate of day-and-date?

BY ANTHONY KAUFMAN

The day-and-date distribution revolution stormed the Indiewood gates less than a year ago. HDNet’s Mark Cuban nabbed cover stories with his audacious new endeavor, and at least one rival company, Cablevision’s IFC Films, announced its own simultaneous release plan. Now, after half a dozen films have been cranked through the day-and-date distribution mill, is the strategy a savior for independent filmmakers, the only way out of the impossibly competitive theatrical marketplace, or a curse, further undermining indies’ potential to perform?

It all depends on whom you ask.

“I think they’re flogging a dead horse,” says Alex Steyermark, director of HDNet’s One Last Thing... “I would say at this point, having gone through it, if you have other options, I’d seriously explore them. In the end, I thought it was a miserable experience.”

Steyermark is among the harshest critics of the release strategy that Mark Cuban and his partner Todd Wagner pioneered earlier this year. A few months after the bow of Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble in January, Steyermark’s One Last Thing... was also broadcast on HDNet and released in theaters and DVD. The film grossed less than $14,000, according to Variety box office charts (for a dismal opening weekend per-theater average of $635).

One of Steyermark’s chief complaints is that large theater chains still refuse to exhibit day-and-date releases, severely limiting a film’s rollout possibilities. “If you can only get the Landmark Theatre chain” — also owned by Cuban and Wagner — “to show a Soderbergh movie, that’s not a success,” he says. (Day-and-date releases may one day be ineligible for Academy recognition; see related story, pg. 16.)

The counterargument, however, is that the type of small films that HDNet makes and releases — original films budgeted at about $2 million but now reaching up to $5 million — don’t need to expand to additional theaters beyond Landmark and other arthouse venues to be dubbed successes. HDNet Films’ Jason Kliot admits theatrical grosses may be affected by the boycott of non-Landmark cinemas, but he says the distribution platform is appropriate for the films. “If you’re making a smart movie for a Landmark audience that will go into Landmark theaters, I think this is a safe environment for a filmmaker,” he says.

Other HDNet filmmakers agree with Kliot. “The great thing about making movies for this company is you know you have a theatrical [platform] going in,” says Katherine Dieckmann, who was hired as a director on HDNet’s Diggers. (Dieckmann’s last film, A Good Baby, languished without a proper release.) “It’s a huge incentive for directors who have been beaten down in the distribution wars,” she adds.

Matt Tauber, director of The Architect, which is going out day-and-date this December, agrees. “If this model can help movies like The Architect get out there and help the financiers leverage their risk,” he says, “then I think it’s a good model worth exploring.” However, Tauber acknowledges that he doesn’t expect to get rich from The Architect, a modest independent film which HDNet paid $1.6 million to produce. “We have some back-end participation, but my expectations are so low that I’m not counting on anything,” he says.

But is it possible that more people will see these films if they receive a more conventional release? Steyermark argues that the HDNet plan to distribute DVDs before a movie has the chance to garner valuable word of mouth and critical plaudits is severely detrimental. “Typically, you’d put your quotes on your DVD, but the DVDs are already manufactured,” he says. “For a review-driven movie, you can’t exploit [positive notices]. It means that you have to get your marketing materials right from the get-go.”

But Randy Wells, head of Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner’s Magnolia Home Entertainment, says Bubble and One Last Thing... “exceeded expectations” on DVD. While Wells acknowledges DVDs must be prepared well in advance, he says retailers have been supportive based on the understanding that the films are not direct-to-video titles and that they have name talent attached. “They’re not dependent on a good quote,” argues Wells.

IFC’s First Take series, which launches two movies per month simultaneously in theaters and video-on-demand, gets around the DVD debate by sticking to the standard few-month-window before releasing their movies on home video. “We’re not paying huge advances and we’re keeping the P&A low,” admits IFC Films’ Ryan Werner. “The idea is to keep costs low so down the road people will make money when it comes out on DVD.”

While a number of the films released through IFC’s First Take program have been IFC and InDigEnt productions (Sorry, Haters, American Gun, Coastlines), the future of First Take will consist of 100% acquisitions, according to Werner.

One such film, Caveh Zahedi’s I Am a Sex Addict, wasn’t exactly an unequivocal success, grossing $115,000 theatrically on a $100,000 marketing budget. But Zahedi says knowing what he knows now, he’d do the same thing again. He even sold IFC the DVD and TV rights to his entire back catalogue for the same deal points: No money up front and a 50/50 split after the company recoups its costs.

“My sense is that the movie was seen by more people than it ever would have been otherwise,” says Zahedi. While he has not yet received numbers from Comcast on how many people watched the movie on demand, he believes it was enough to offset theatrical costs.

But will he see any money? Not yet, at least — though he believes he’ll “be ahead” in the long run. “Ultimately, visibility was more important to me than money,” Zahedi says. “The idea is that if I have distribution for this film, it will give me more credibility when making my next film.”