Steal This Movie

A year ago, Martin & Orloff began its circuitous journey through the film-fest maze, where it received unanimous, and well-deserved, critical praise. Lawrence Blume, who directed the movie and secured its financing through investors, had tried to get into Sundance earlier in 2002, but was waved off; it hurts when you're not pals with the fest's directors or don't have Patricia Clarkson in your movie. The problem is, you can show up to every tiny fest in the United States and Micronesia, but movies don't get bought there, because the guys who buy them send receptionists to scout for talent they're going to ignore anyway. So it's Sundance or sunset on hoping you're ever going to get a deal--and both Super Troopers and Wet Hot American Summer were hits there, for whatever reason (maybe people thought they were dramas?).

Here's how it works: Sundance programmers filter out the thousands of indie-film hopefuls to, oh, a hundred, who are then invited to the ball. At this particular mating dance, the men who actually carry the checkbooks--Miramax's Harvey Weinstein, say, or UA's Bingham Ray--will all sit in the same screening room and eye each other as often as they look at the screen. If one's hot for a movie, suddenly everyone's got to have it, to the point of paying millions for movies bound to make pennies on the nickel; Tadpole, for which Miramax shelled out 6 mil, is a good example, since it made about $80,000 in U.S. theatrical release last year.

"At those lesser festivals, you've got someone three down on the food chain who has to talk to their boss who has to talk to their boss," Roberts says. "Even if someone liked it, head-over-heels liked it, that's the beginning of, 'OK, now let me talk to my boss.' Then they tell you, 'We need you to do screenings in New York and L.A.,' which we do."

Everybody does, and it's one more waste of time. Like Roberts says, you'll invite 100 people, 50 will R.S.V.P, five of them will actually show up to the screening, and only one, if that, actually possesses the finger that could pull the trigger on a deal. Even then, they'll still have to go back and talk to a higher-up. If, by some stroke of luck a moneyman sees the movie and digs it, he'll likely say he doesn't get it. That's what Blume heard. All the time.

"You have a group of acquisitions executives at these small companies, and most of them are white balding Jewish guys in their late 40s and early 50s," he says. "They're not hip. They don't listen to hip music, they don't know what's going on in pop culture, and across the board, none of them had ever heard of the Upright Citizens Brigade. Seriously, none of them. None of them knew who David Cross was. They had no idea. So I would send them articles: 'Here's what we just got written about us in Variety,' 'Here's a full page in Time Out.' I was trying to explain to them who these guys are, and what I discovered was this sense that if they've never heard of it, they think it doesn't exist, and no matter how much press you give them, how many fan letters you give them, how long the line around the block is to the theater, to them it's an accident that doesn't count."

Blume, Roberts and Walsh know precisely how Martin & Orloff got stuck in the "passed" pile. They know because they've heard all the reasons from all the distributors in all the land--15 of them, give or take, from Miramax to MGM/UA to New Line to Sony Classics to smaller companies such as Magnolia. They've been told it's too edgy. They've been told it's too indie. They've been told there are no stars. They've been told it's too dark, it's too light, too smart, too dumb; the only thing they haven't heard by way of criticism is that it's too in color and too in focus.

"Nobody actually passes," Roberts says. "They all sort of give some excuse in case interest develops and they can say they're still interested." He laughs. "Everything they said had something in common. It was something about it being...I don't know, in my mind, I'd say original." Again, laughter. "I don't think anybody said they didn't like it or didn't get it. In fact, a lot of them said it was very funny but not mainstream enough. When they'd say it was funny, in my mind, well, that's the end of it. You kidding? Finally, a funny comedy!"