  PRESS | Home | Premiere | Showings | FAQ | Gallery | Order | Email | |
|
Oscars no guarantee of fameBy John Horn LOS ANGELES (AP) -- In the days leading up to the Oscars, nominees are supposed to worry about what to wear, what to say if they win, or how to pretend to smile if they lose, and what parties they'll attend. They're not supposed to go nuts trying to rescue their Academy Award-nominated film from a Utah blizzard. Oscar nominees are not born equally, and Amy Sommer and Dan Gifford's documentary feature, "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," has never come near the star treatment. While most other Academy Award invitees are basking in post-nomination afterglow, Ms. Sommer is frantically working phones, laboring to get her nominated movie through the Salt Lake City International Airport during a blinding snowstorm. While "Titanic" plays in 3,000 movie houses a weekend, many Oscar selections may appear in fewer than a dozen theaters in their lifetime. A surprising number of Oscar-nominated films -- theoretically, the best cinema has to offer -- do not receive any national release at all. Distributors uniformly declined to release "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," and Sommer and her filmmaking partner, husband Dan Gifford, released the movie about the Branch Davidians themselves, shuttling prints from city to city. "It's been one heck of a long ride," Ms. Sommer says, anxiously waiting to hear the fate of her film print, stuck somewhere in Utah only hours before it's supposed to start showing in Texas. "The hardest part is getting theaters." Almost all the films nominated in the top Oscar categories are playing across the country: Even "The Full Monty" and "L.A. Confidential" are still in theaters. but in the lesser known categories, national distribution is far more elusive. A full month after the nominations were read, one of them, Spain's "Secrets of the Heart," still had no distributor. Nominated documentary features and shorts, live-action shorts and animated shorts face the longest odds. Most of the films are self-financed and don't attract the buyer attention of independently produced feature-length dramas such as "Shine" or "Sling Blade." "The market for this kind of film is very small," says Chris Donahue, the producer of the nominated live-action dramatic short film "Visas and Virtue," a 26-minute look at a Japanese consul general who helped 1,600 Jews escape the Nazis. "It's very difficult to recoup your investment. But that's not why we made the film. We made the film to tell the story." Since the short animation and live-action films run about 30 minutes, they cannot stand alone in theaters: They're simply too short. Consequently, they are most often shown as compilations or in film festivals. The festivals range from the well-known to the ad hoc. The short "Geri's Game," a computer-animated work from the makers of "Toy Story," has screened at Dallas' USA Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival. Mel Damski, director of the documentary short "Still Kicking: The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies," took his film to several festivals, too, including what must be one of the world's most obscure. A librarian in Kansas called Damski after the nominations were announced. "She always shows the nominated shorts to the people in Wichita," says Damski, who directs television's "Ally McBeal" and "The Practice" and financed "Still Kicking" with his own and relatives' money. "I don't think there's a theatrical life for it, quite honestly," Damski says of "Still Kicking," a profile of the spry and talented septuagenarian and octogenarian singers, comedians and dancers in the desert city revue. "It's very hard to get it into theaters. It is frustrating, especially since it's such an uplifting story. I think it can be a very therapeutic film for a lot of people." Several Oscar-nominated documentaries qualified for Academy Awards only because the International Documentary Association booked a Pasadena theater for a week in October, showing 14 nonfiction films. (Oscar contenders must debut in theaters and be shown to paying customers for at least a week). Three of the 14 films shown at the so-called "Doctober" festival received nominations, including "Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life," "Still Kicking" and "Colors Straight Up." Michele Ohayon directed the latter, a feature-length documentary about inner-city teen-agers who spend time not on the streets but in an after-school performing arts group. Like most nominated documentaries, distributors said the film had artistic merit but lacked commercial prospects. "I tried," says Ms. Ohayon, who is releasing her film herself. "I went to New Line, Miramax, Paramount, October, Fine Line, Sony Classics, and they all turned it down. They absolutely loved it, but they didn't know what to do with it. "The distributors are interested in prestige, and if they already have a prestige film they're usually not interested in a documentary feature. ... I'm telling you, this is a tough world." Most of the obscure Oscar nominees won't be seen until a cable channel or public television picks them up. Fees are often minuscule -- sometimes no more than several thousand dollars. "Colors Straight Up" is scheduled to show on PBS on May 19. "There is no television sale in place yet," producer Donahue says. "We have been talking to people and they're much more interested now (that we're nominated). We had a call an hour after the nominations were announced from a distributor from Spain." Rabbi Marvin Hier, whose Simon Wiesenthal Center produced the nominated documentary feature "The Long Way Home," has been selling videocassettes to some of the center's 400,000 national members. The film tells the story of Holocaust survivors rebuilding their lives. Showtime plans to air it in April. "Theaters who didn't want to show it called up right after the nominations," Hier says. "Even people who had no interest in the subject matter were calling asking about the film." All the same, "The Long Way Home" faces a decidedly uphill road. With only eight prints in circulation, the movie can only skip across the country, missing many towns along the way. "It's still a very small, minute number of cities," says Udy Epstein, whose Seventh Art Releasing is distributing the movie. "In several markets, we were losing money showing it. The smaller the market, the less economical it is to show it."
|
