Dancing With The Real Sway: The making and releasing of “The Song of Sway Lake”

We invited longtime TFC friend Ari Gold to muse about his experience making and distributing his latest film, The Song of Sway Lake.

When I set out to make “The Song of Sway Lake,” I figured it would be a quick summer movie—designed to be shot in one location with mostly natural light—a cheap “practice movie” to get myself back into the groove of working with actors after my first film.

My co-writer Elizabeth Bull and I both loved the intellectual-romantic movies of Éric Rohmer that were set in a stunning vacation zone that provided beauty to a filmmaker who could only afford to choose shots wisely. But we also had our own American way of thinking, so of course our script became something completely different: a love triangle about family, nostalgia, theft, the lost jazz of the 1930s, and a young Russian’s passion for a much older woman. But it retained its eye towards being able to be shot very cheaply and still feel big and beautiful.

Spending summers in the Adirondacks as a kid, I was fascinated by this place that seemed to exist outside of time. On the lakes lived a declining American royalty. Along with having unfair privilege, its members were saddled with emotional paralysis. Still, I was jealous of those private lakes. For me, the “real sway” was always out of reach. Maybe I could get the life I wanted by recreating it in this movie—and traveling the world as a glamorous European style film director!

I knew that casting carefully was crucial to my success, and I figured that providing a rich and sexy role to a woman in her 70s or 80s would give me access to a neglected but glamorous movie star for a price I could afford. That’s a key with getting big actors into indies—give them chance to do something that mainstream Hollywood doesn’t.

However, low rates can lead to slow responses, and our casting director (who was also being paid a low rate) didn’t actually bother to send out my offers and inquiries. Realizing summer was rapidly approaching, we replaced the negligent casting director, and a great new one, Jessica Kelly, sprinted in to cast the film under the gun. With only weeks before the warm weather ended, we had to go by instinct, and I took the risk of casting an Irishman to play the Russian, since Robert Sheehan was the only actor of any nationality who seemed to understand the seriocomic aspects of a character we’d written based on a wild man friend from St. Petersburg. Seeking an immigrant whose adoration of a fabled America meets reality in the Sway family, a real Russian director helped me feel confident that Robert Sheehan was our man.

For the character of the broken family heir Ollie Sway, we needed an actor who could carry the shock of family trauma on his face, and found it in Rory Culkin. And for the role of the matriarch Charlie Sway, which demanded icy majesty, sensual beauty, and hidden layers of feeling, we were lucky to find Mary Beth Peil—who came in at the last minute, with a cheerful and super-pro attitude (from lots of TV and stage experience) that was able to help us through indie nights without heaters or electricity.

Every movie thinks it doesn’t have enough money. Shooting a low budget film can be crazy making, but it also can help a small crew feel like they’re all on the same team. We filmed on Blue Mountain Lake, New York, pretending that the entire lake was once a glamorous private estate, and its residents played along. The schedule was in constant flux as we danced to the ever-changing weather, which was written intricately into the plot—but never quite on the days we planned.

Plenty of adventures were there for the summer camp atmosphere. I’ll never forget rowing under the moon for a secret midnight conversation with Elizabeth Peña, who played the resentful family maid. Elizabeth asked me to consider adding a secret about her character: that she’d had an affair with the patriarch “Captain Sway” decades before. I loved it and suggested new dialog to tease her secret to the audience. “I’ll play a secret better if no one knows it,” Elizabeth said. What a rare actor to ask for less lines! Her loss is a huge one.

By the time our four weeks of shooting were up, I felt that we’d triumphed by finishing on time and on budget. I didn’t expect what happened next: my brother Ethan, who was composing the essential jazz score, suffered a traumatic brain injury; our rough-cut was politely turned down by my old standby Sundance; and my support-team moved on to other projects.

Suddenly I was sitting alone with an unfinished film and no prospects. It’s hard even for me to admit this, but I then spent several years, on and off, cutting and re-cutting the movie to figure out how to resurrect its rhythm, while my brother worked his way back to health—and finally to an ability to create the beautiful orchestral-jazz score that was essential to the story.

Music is a boobytrap that yanks us into the past, which can be intoxicating or toxic, depending how we process it. But feeling I’d orphaned the film and my own aspirations, I sunk into a depression. I didn’t have proper funds to finish the movie, without a festival acceptance to give my investors confidence; I couldn’t get into a festival without proper funds to complete it. Classic Catch-22!

Nostalgia and trauma are often linked. My characters were in it, as was I. Two days into my first silent meditation retreat, the image of a sinking wristwatch shot into my mind. I didn’t understand what it meant. When I emerged, I realized that this vision was both my life’s greatest challenge and the meaning of my film. I was linked to the three main characters not by biography, but by the struggle to let go of my mistakes. I had to look at my characters: Charlie Sway, a glamorous matriarch in her seventies, seeks her own past; her burdened grandson Ollie seeks the past’s perfection only to destroy it; and the outsider, Nikolai, wants to steal someone else’s past as his own. I was also stuck on the past, trying to relive it or destroy it or steal it.

Understanding that this sinking watch was the missing shot, I got a watch on eBay, used my iPhone to film it sinking in a local pond, did some VFX for it to match the lake water, and with this simple change and a new voiceover recorded on my bed with the noble Brian Dennehy, was able to complete the film and get it into the Los Angeles Film Festival.

We had great reviews–riding on 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, as long as the reviewers knew we were a tiny film—but no sales agents came to the screening. Feeling great about the reaction but scared about the finances, I accepted an invitation to be the opening night film at a festival on the island of Mallorca, Spain. Eight hundred people showed up—more great press!—and I sat with Oscar winner Paul Haggis to hear the thunderous applause. Surely this would mean I’d get the film out! But still, no one in the industry cared. Paul commiserated, and made a subtle suggestion: cut another ten minutes from the movie.

Terrified to open that can of worms, I rolled the dice with an editor friend, to see what we could do to unlock the mixed and colored cut and shave off 10% of the film. Three laborious months later, I began to swap the new cut into dozens of festivals, from Emir Kusturica’s Kustendorf festival in the mountains, to a Chinese festival, all of which were now playing and awarding the film with prizes. Still, even with Paul’s help, no distributor wanted to touch a European-style American movie about nostalgia—even with some sexy nudity and a pile of festival trophies. “Americans critics aren’t going to get it,” I was told. At one industry screening, we were told that “for a $20 million movie, it’s very gentle.” When we told them that we’d spent well below one million, people were totally confused. “But it looks so expensive!”

Realizing that for my own sanity I had to make the film available to regular people—and gamble that I could make some kind of return for my investors—we granted world-sales rights to a company called Kew Media, and worked with The Film Collaborative and The Orchard to release it in theaters in my home country. Kew made a bunch of small sales in the countries we’d had screenings, but in the States, despite massive work by our tiny team, we could barely get anyone to notice the film except a few hostile reviewers who reluctantly watched it on their laptops. The market was in a state of massive change, and these years of work got chewed into the wheels. Then, worst of all, Kew Media declared bankruptcy without having paid a single penny of my earnings. I learned the hard way that one has to be relentless about invoicing your own partners, and my team also learned the hard way that no one is to be trusted until they write you a check.

However, the movie is now available all over the world. Ever so slowly, fans are trickling into Instagram, some telling me it’s their favorite movie of all time. All my pain and nostalgia for the old world of cinema as an art form is there on the screen—and in the movie itself. I stuck to my guns and got the film into the universe, and I am finally “dancing with the real sway”—which the movie told me to do from the beginning. Sometimes our creative dreams are telling us the truth.

admin September 11th, 2020

Posted In: Uncategorized

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love The Cloud: Exhibition/Distribution Technology 2020

by Jeffrey Winter

Sometimes revolutions happen with a bang, sometimes with a whimper. More often they arrive in stealth mode; one day you look up and is everything is different…just not quite the way you thought it would be.

Ever since 1) I have worked in film exhibition/distribution and 2) there has been an internet, there has been one shimmering vision on the horizon… that 1 & 2 would fully merge and the physical formats and pipelines of so-called “print” delivery would merge seamlessly into the digital data flows of the world wide web. Simply put: no more 35mm prints, no more VHS tapes, no more DVDs, Digitbetas, HDCAMs, or suitcase sized DCPs. No more trips to the post office, Fed Ex forms, tracking numbers, fretting about customs and worrying whether a snowstorm would screw up the print delivery and cancel the screening. Most importantly of course, none of the hideous and often prohibitive costs associated with all of this, that can heavily weigh down the distribution balance sheets. Simply put, something akin to distribution heaven.

Sometime in 2019, it dawned on me that after many years of twists, hiccups, re-visions and rude awakenings, the future wasn’t just the future anymore. We have finally arrived at the moment where a working draft of end-to-end digital distribution/delivery is actually in place, in rough-cut form. It’s certainly not the push-one-button, send-a-film-over email nirvana I had imagined; instead it’s a hodgepodge of file formats, myriad cloud-based services, and calculations around uploads/downloads, storage space, and piracy considerations. But it is happening and it is wonderful, with tremendous upsides and seemingly negligible negatives other than an investment of time, technical education, and reasonable precautionary practices.

Allow me to throw some numbers at you. Every year, The Film Collaborative books and executes a few thousand screenings of our films at public venues such as film festivals, theatrical venues, universities, community centers, etc. For many years now, we have been tracking the formats we show at each booking, and analyzing the data to show how the exhibition formats are evolving. It should be noted that not all of the factors are in our control, regardless of what formats and delivery services we OFFER to a venue, THEY have to have the willingness and technical capacity to receive and show it. So, as an industry made of up many players and technical capabilities, we evolve together.

Consider the following change between bookings in October 2015 and October 2019. We typically use the month of October for purposes of analysis because it is reliably one of the busiest months of the year, so the data holds the most statistical significance.

click image to open larger

Let’s look at just 2015 versus 2019 for a moment:

Exhibition Formats: 2015 vs. 2019 (2015/2019)
total October bookings = 279/249*
Bluray: 123/83 bookings (44%/35%)
DVD: 24/4 bookings (8.6%/2%)
Physical DCP: 109/58 bookings (39%/24%)
Digital Tape Formats (HDCAM, Digibeta etc): 0/0 bookings (0%/0%)
Apple ProRes (Physical HARD DRIVE formats): 8/1 bookings (2.7%/0%)
Digital Download .MP4 FORMAT: 15/51 bookings (5.7%/21%)
Digital Download DCP Format (cloud service download): 0/43 bookings (0/18%)

*note: 9 of the Oct. 2019 bookings required no deliverables because the venue already had the film in house from a prior booking, either in physical or digital format.

Of course, in all the data, the physical versus digital delivery comparison stands out well above the rest…

• In 2015: entirely digital delivery was in its infancy at 5.7% of 279 bookings in a 31-day period.
• In 2019: digital delivery rose to 39% of all bookings in the same 31-day period.
• In 2015, digital DCP delivery was not even something we discussed, and all digital delivery was made via .mp4 downloads sent either through direct download from a website or, mostly, though DropBox links.
• In 2019, we delivered 45.75% of our total digital downloads as standard DCP files made available from an Amazon cloud based storage service, and 54.25% of all digital downloads were sent as .mp4 download links shared via Dropbox.

Looking at this dense array of formats, stats, delivery systems and storage spaces, it seems safe to revert to my pervious assertion: we have certainly not yet arrived at the push-one-button, send-a-film-over email nirvana we might once have imagined. I now currently suspect that we never will, and that was a fundamental misunderstanding of how distribution systems and broadband technology could ever work…in much the same way the flying cars in the Jetson were an absurd vision given the contemporary reality of 2019 urban traffic patterns.

And that, my filmmaking friends, is just fine…and definitely heading in a good direction!

In looking at the current data points, we clearly see that physical formats have not turned into dinosaurs, or at least not yet. A lot of that is due to residual resistance from both festivals and filmmakers, especially the most established ones. Most big film festivals, especially in the United States (we have always been the furthest behind in digital cinema in the U.S. for reasons associated with government funding structures and de-centralized infrastructure), still see digital delivery of their films as risky and substandard, and perhaps even not worth the time and energy since they can get filmmakers to deliver at their own cost. Indeed, a majority or festivals and screening venues ask for PHYSICAL BACKUPS to digital delivery…which on some level is patently absurd since once a venue downloads a film they literally have a pristine copy that can be duplicated and is just mirrored by the physical backup, which is much more susceptible to damage, loss, etc. Also…there are still plenty of smaller venues and grassroots venues, especially at universities as well as in countries with less robust broadband, that are not yet set up for internet delivery of film yet (though this is rapidly changing).

Just as significantly, many filmmakers who have been around a while still worry that internet delivery makes their films less safe, and are reticent or slow to give us full access to their pristine digital files. In analyzing the October 2019 data, it is critical to note that one well-performing film that premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and was peaking in October festivals refused to allow us ANY access to digital files, even forbidding us from creating an emergency digital back-up to send over if the physical format failed or did not arrive! As such, the percentage of the October bookings in digital delivery would have most certainly been higher had we not been denied access to the film’s digital assets, perhaps as much as 10% higher.

It should also be noted that while digital delivery has tremendous upsides, it is also much more complicated and technical at the outset. Burning Blurays in a lab is arduous but compressing a file to decent exhibition specs and making it small enough to conform to DropBox capacities is no simple matter either. We at TFC have only been able to achieve successful digital exhibition capabilities through years of exploring technology partners and services, and amazing staffers who understand far, far more about bits and bytes than I ever will. And you’ll have to spend a lot of time prepping the films for delivery to those technology partners too.

However lest this all starts to sound frightening to filmmakers, let me list some of the ways that embracing digital exhibition has greatly enhanced our business and our sanity.

1. Enormous savings in time. No, we can’t just attach a movie to an email and hit send. However, once we’ve uploaded a film once to the cloud, it’s mostly just as simple as messaging a download link to the venue (my print traffic colleague assures me that it is at least a bit more complicated to work with large files stored with Amazon Web Services). The fact that we can service a booking of four films in in Bratislava in 30 seconds by just sending an email with four links is miraculous. Multiply this by many dozens of bookings across a month, the time saved is breath-taking.
2. Enormous savings in shipping costs and resources. Although the data above shows that the number of digital bookings was generally less than 50% of the total, our shipping and duping costs for the associated business quarter was actually more than 80% less than normal! At first, I was so shocked by this reduction in cost, I genuinely freaked out and assumed we had lost a huge number of our receipts! Upon closer examination, it became clear that by having digital delivery as an option, we were able to convince the venues that would have required the most expensive shipping to switch to digital receivership, and also we were able to adjust the distribution supply chain to save money in many places, especially from labs. NOTE: I generally draw the nerd/wonk line once I start using words like “distribution supply chain,” so enough about that for now. However, discussion of resources is critical…and not just in terms of saving money from duping. Obviously, any significant reduction in duping of plastics and use of carbon-based fuels associated with shipping has a tremendously positive and feel-good effect on the climate science of it all, even if I cannot offer you numbers to prove that.
3. Huge reductions in stress and emergencies. One cannot overestimate the fact that now we have emergency digital backups that can resolve any sort of delivery/exhibition snafu. Throughout the entire history of film exhibition, there has always been the worry that a print will malfunction, or a delivery truck won’t arrive on time, etc. That has resulted in many a week, weeknight, or weekend filled with panicked calls and crisis management. Those days it seems, are very nearly gone, and good riddance.

To close, it should be stressed that there are lingering questions as to whether digital delivery of films makes our intellectual property less or more safe, and if filmmakers and distributors should worry how piracy will evolve to take advantage. It is important to note that for as long as there have been physical formats, especially following the decline of the all-35mm supply chain with the introduction of video, there have always been those who will figure out how to a pirate a film, regardless of format. The internet at least offers passwords, analytics, tracking, and geo-blocking that are a far cry safer than sweatshops in Asia copying DVDs smuggled out of a lab.

I, for one, have not seen any data to suggest piracy is on the rise due to digital cinema, and am open to re-evaluation should I see some. However, for now, I have learned to stop worrying so much, and hope the rest of you can see clear to join me at this exciting new juncture.

admin January 28th, 2020

Posted In: Uncategorized

Bunker 15 Films brings a modern tech twist to Indie Publicity

We invited Bunker 15, whom we worked with on the theatrical release of The Light of the Moon, to write a guest blog post for us, explaining who they are and what they did for TLOTM and other films.

Tech Entrepreneur bringing Influencer Marketing to Hollywood

Technology may be making it easier to get a film made and distributed…but how do you get your film to stand out in such a crowded marketplace? Sundance just had a mind-blowing 14,000+ applicants for their festival. Even with a theatrical release, it is difficult to capture the mind-share of viewers and build a critical mass when you have a small marketing budget and no A-list talent. To publicize their films, distribution firms and filmmakers are turning to social media campaigns to get in front of an audience because they are easy to run, relatively cheap and (hopefully) you can target a niche audience. However, in practice, again and again, social media campaigns cost more than the viewership they produce.

There might be other options. Daniel Harlow, a tech entrepreneur and founder of Bunker 15 Films, has a strategy that seems to be working—even for small indie films with limited budgets.

Background

Harlow sold his IT Consulting company (founded right out of UCLA) in 2015. After 23 years of work, 6 offices, and 300 employees, he suddenly nothing to do. He ended up going back to UCLA, this time for their post-graduate Film Studies Program for Independent Producers—mostly for fun. Harlow became fascinated with the technology changes in the entertainment industry. DVD sales had mostly gone away and theaters were primarily for large Special-Effects-driven studio blockbusters. Indies were seen at home through streaming services where piracy cut into revenues even further. “There were no answers at UCLA Film Studies for how to draw audiences to a particular film,” said Harlow. All new technology players in the film space were making their money from the Long Tail theory. Less revenue per film but a massive number of additional films will lead to more revenues overall. The game is volume. Players like Apple, Amazon and Netflix were making money but each individual film was getting a smaller and smaller share of a larger overall pie.

At his former company, Harlow ran several marketing campaigns for clients like Walmart, Nike, Macy’s, Sephora, The Gap and others. “In many situations we had exactly this Long Tail issue: an infinitely large storefront of the internet. How do you make a product stand out? Most times, we used Influencer Marketing campaigns – which are now common for the Makeup, Fashion and other industries,” said Harlow. “I went to SXSW thinking that I could find the thought leadership on this and work on real solutions, but there was no leadership on the subject. The only solution anyone proposed was the Do-It-Yourself model which I thought was only applicable to a small number of filmmakers.”

Do-It-Yourself

The DIY movement in film certainly has a lot of buzz and momentum. The Sundance Institute and other prominent institutions advocate filmmakers marketing their own films. “I had interviewed dozens of filmmakers and I just don’t know if you could possibly find a worse fit than a filmmaker with marketing. They aren’t oriented toward that and they really don’t want to do it,” said Harlow.

The DIY process for PR is fairly simple. Go online and hunt down journalists and critics yourself. Find them or their editors and email them about your film. You are bound to find some interested in watching or writing about your movie which is, by definition, more PR than you had before. And you Did It Yourself. Voila.

For a small minority of filmmakers, it works – if it fits their personality. Some producers are exhausted after the filmmaking process and would love to do something more left-brain like monetizing, marketing and distributing the film. “These types of filmmakers would probably have been involved in the business side of the film no matter what happened,” said Harlow. But it is a small group. The majority of filmmakers are artists, right-brain thinkers, and writers. Monetizing the film is too tedious for them and they probably have a queue of scripts and projects they want to move on to. The majority, once the film is finished, want to do a little press then start working on the next project. Often, these projects take so long to come to fruition that if they don’t move on quickly, it could be years before they have another finished film.

Plus, there are practical obstacles of trying to publicize your own film. Many publications have rules forbidding communicating directly with a film producer. The publication needs to be communicating with a third party to keep the article unbiased. And the sheer difficulty of chasing down critics one by one and asking them to review a film is a daunting task, particularly when coupled with the time-critical nature of the job. Film critics usually want to publish an article within a week of a film’s release. If it’s already been released, it’s ‘old news’ and if it’s not going to be released for 3 months, then don’t bother me yet, they think. That’s a narrow time window to communicate with dozens of journalists.

Thinking Forward

Despite the fact that it would be difficult for an individual filmmaker, Harlow thought that if Influencer Marketing could work in other industries, why not film? After all, film journalism already has a rich and storied history. “There must be a way to leverage the hundreds of entertainment writers out there, at least I hoped so,” said Harlow. But his initial research wasn’t encouraging. Project Lodestar did a study that surveyed 750 entertainment writers worldwide and found an overall downward trend in the coverage of Indie films. Publications had downsized their writing staff and decreased the size of their Entertainment sections, and thus they mostly needed to focus only on the biggest films. Journalists were more restricted than ever to covering only theatrically-run films in their local market.

“SXSW, UCLA and now Project Lodestar all gave off this grim picture for individual filmmakers, but I thought that what they were missing was this burgeoning space of film writers that were taking to the internet to blog on their own. More entertainment publications (especially websites) were decoupling from any given geography. And it was the geographical boundary that tied a publication to theaters in their area. The hard copy nature of old-world, established journals limited physical space available for Indie articles but these limitations also didn’t apply to website and blogs. For example, Roger Moore’s Movie Nation covers a large number of Indie films every month. So why not work with publications like that?” Harlow thought.

After several initial Beta-tests with tiny films that gave Bunker 15 Films encouraging results, it took on a big festival winner: Light of the Moon by Jessica M. Thompson. Light of the Moon was one of their first major efforts to see if the system would work. And did it! 75 Rotten-Tomatoes journalists requested to see a preview screener of the film. As expected, many of them couldn’t get their publications to publish a review about an Amazon Prime release but even some of the larger outfits did cover the film in other ways. The LA Times, for example, made Light of the Moon their VOD Pick of the Week based on Bunker 15’s outreach. The Chicago Tribune interviewed one of the actors for a piece in the paper and several of the writers wrote reviews for their blogs, many of which had huge followings. All in all, Bunker 15 Films secured 17 additional Rotten Tomatoes certified reviews for the film and a number of other pieces like the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, FilmINK in Australia, etc.

What Bunker 15 Does and How it Works

Bunker 15 doesn’t just have a large database of film and entertainment journalists but also it catalogs the films they have written about. There is information on what they have liked and disliked over time. Therefore, they can target the journalists that cover and like small Indie films. Mike Bravo, the company’s CTO, says, “There’s quite a bit of technology in place now to find entertainment bloggers and reach out to them when certain films fit their profile. We are building profiles of both critics and the publications they write for, which is complicated, because one writer might write freelance for one publication doing VOD Streaming movies but might only cover theatrical films for another publication. Plus, writers move around and change publications all the time. We are also trying to build resources for the critics themselves so the critics have an interest in being in contact with Bunker 15,” Bravo says.

“The key for us really is finding that subset of critics that are going to be interested in a particular film and that’s not real easy. Each journalist and publication has geographical and theatrical constraints, genre interests, timing issues… there are a lot of variables but we try to find the journalists that are really into a particular film or genre and focus there,” Harlow says.

The results have been amazing. Turns out that critics really want to watch Indies and like them when they watch them. It’s all about expectations. If it’s a small film, the critic will judge it on its own merit, not by its production value or special effects budget.

Critical reception for many of their films, like Light of the Moon, Stay Human, A Boy Called Sailboat, and others has been overwhelmingly positive. “Not every film we work with has a fantastic reception among the critics but our ability to get to journalists that do like Indies (as opposed to those whose expectations are met only by large Studio efforts) can make a big difference,” says Harlow.

The Future of Bunker 15 Films

“We see ourselves moving into other industries eventually because the same macro-trends that are affecting film are also at work with literature and music. The technologies that allow them to be created and distributed have resulted in an explosion of content for the average consumer to wade through with little except Influencers and reviewers to help choose among everything coming at them each day. But for now, we continue to build out tools and content for entertainment journalists and focus on film,” he says.
“As we move forward, I think the ground will shift in our favor,” say Harlow. The MN Star Tribune now has a Rotten Tomatoes certified movie critic reviewing VOD releases for the week. The LA Times is expanding their coverage of Streaming films and so is the New York Times. In addition, many publications are treating Netflix Originals in the same category as Theatrical releases. Harlow continues, “The trend to cover more and more VOD Streaming releases will increase which will put more journalists within our reach for our Indie films.” If it’s working now, then it’s safe to say it will work better as time goes on.

About Bunker 15 Films

Bunker15’s smart-tech Publicity Engine helps find the right journalists to promote your film (VOD or Theatrical). Even VOD releases can earn Press. Every film deserves to find its audience. Whether you have a small film with a limited theatrical release or you have a Straight-to-VOD feature, they can reach out to the journalists that are interested in your story.

admin April 15th, 2019

Posted In: Uncategorized