Zero-Sum

When someone tells me they want to go into any of the arts, I always have a one-word answer for them: "Don't." My reasoning is this: the arts are, collectively and individually, brutal, cut-throat, vicious and nasty. On good days. There are certainly those people who are born to be artists and who will, therefore, pursue their craft no matter what I say, in which case more power to them--but if someone can possibly be talked out of a career in the arts, then by gum they should be.

How exactly, you ask, are the arts brutal, cut-throat, vicious and nasty? Here's one example.

The Los Angeles opening of Zen Noir went perfectly well. There was a bit of projector craziness at the Westside Pavilion, but these things happen, and because that particular audience included a lot of cast, crew and friends, they were in one of those jovial moods where a little bit of craziness just makes the party atmosphere swell. Certainly we were all having fun, as this picture taken just outside the lobby of the theater, showing your humble scribe peeking in, demonstrates.

And then the after-party, at a gallery in Santa Monica, was really great fun in a cool space, as we finally got to unwind from all the stress and worry. The film had opened in three theaters now, the numbers weren't bad, we'd already gotten one extension, we could afford to relax and have a nice night celebrating.

Time passes. Overall, our weekend numbers were a bit depressed, but that was because it was Rosh Hashanah and our theaters were in neighborhoods with large Jewish populations. Even with that, the manager at the Pavilion told us that of the four movies they had running, ours was doing the best this weekend. So it certainly seemed that we were likely to extend into a second week, at least there.

Instead, this morning there came the news that we had been booted from the Pavilion. The fact that we did the best of the movies playing there didn't matter because every movie playing there got booted. Even Lassie!

What happened? An increasingly crowded schedule, in part--no one really cares why a film's numbers were a little depressed, they just look at the fact that there's a bunch of new movies that might do better, and that's that. (Actually, now that I think about it, it isn't actually vicious or nasty, it's just brutal: it's hard cold business, the dollar triumphant, and of course that's true in any business. Still, they booted Lassie!)

But something else happened, something we couldn't do a thing about: The Science of Sleep.

Now bear in mind, I'm a big fan of Michel Gondry's work (Eternal Sunshine is easily one of my favorite movies of the last ten years), and when I saw this movie a couple months ago I really enjoyed it. Thus, when I looked at the calendar of films to be released on the weekend of September 22nd, and saw this one, a little part of me said "Oh, crap." Because if our audience was going to be attracted to weird, off-beat art movies, those same people would be just as attracted to a new Gondry film. More so, in fact, because Gondry is a proven entity, an artist whose work is always interesting.

As it turns out, the movie-releasing business is what they call in the investment world a "zero-sum game." If one person wins, it's because someone else lost. Science of Sleep averaged about $25,000 per theater, so it's going wide. And for it to move into a theater, something else has to move out. Our movie, like a whole bunch of others, is moving out. It's the nature of the business: one man's success is, almost without fail, at some other man's expense.

A tough business, but we're learning fast how this stuff works. We're already close to being able to announce a new theater in the L.A. area, we still have our opening in Denver/Boulder on the 29th, and having won the Moondance Festival there a couple years ago, we have high hopes as returning champions. So we're not dead yet, not by a long shot; still, there isn't a bit of this process that has been easy. Then again, if it were easy everyone would be doing it. Plus, there's the thing I haven't talked about yet: our audiences.

One woman at a screening came up to Marc and told him that her husband had recently died, and that the film had helped her deal with it a little better. People have even come up and hugged me after a screening, and I was just one of the several producers. Maybe we're not getting the sort of numbers that set Hollywood atwitter, but we're reaching people. Here and there, one or two at a time, we're reaching people.

And how much is that worth?