Those of who live in the 99.999% of the country that lies between New York and Los Angeles long ago came to terms with being second class citizens when it comes to movie release dates. Sure, we’ll get your Indys and Hulks at the same time as everyone else, but it’s always irritating when the rave reviews for a There Will Be Blood start rolling in and we still have to wait two months to see it. We’ll begrudgingly admit that it does make some sense for movies seeking buzz to open in the two largest media centers first, particularly late in the year when Oscar-qualifying rules require week-long runs in New York and L.A. theaters. Still, in an online age when buzz is transmitted globally with a single keystroke, the platform release begins to seem like an outmoded convention.
Still, it’s at least somewhat gratifying when a movie bucks the conventional wisdom and opens in one of these other American cities you may have read about or seen on the TV. As Michael Cieply notes in the New York Times, it does happen on occasion. “Thus Samuel Goldwyn Films four years ago picked up the New Age semidocumentary What the Bleep Do We Know? after its producers had already found an audience in the Pacific Northwest. It then expanded the release to other heartland cities but stayed out of central Manhattan, confining itself to what Goldwyn’s president, Meyer Gottlieb, called ‘the fringes’ of New York…In June 1980, 20th Century Fox defied conventional logic by opening The Stunt Man, directed by Richard Rush and starring Peter O’Toole, in Seattle. Months later, when it played New York, the film was panned by The Times.”
The latest example is Baghead, the mumblecore horror movie from the Duplass brothers. “The movie will show first in Austin, Tex., where its writer-directors, the brothers Mark and Jay Duplass, got their filmmaking careers in gear. Then Baghead will probably move on to Dallas, Houston or, maybe, Portland, Ore. — cities that, in the words of Tom Bernard, the co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, ‘tend to connect with what’s new and different.’ In July or August, if all goes well, Baghead will finally make it to screens in Manhattan and West Los Angeles, where independent film gems are supposed to be discovered by sophisticated viewers who live on the culture’s cutting edge. Or used to.”
Mark and Jay Duplass spoke with the Austin Chronicle about the strategy. “Too often with a small movie like Baghead,” Mark says, “if you open it in New York or L.A., it never gets a chance to find its legs. We liked the idea of opening up in a place where people might give it a chance and where it actually might play for more than a week or two before it gets knocked out by the next big summer movie… Austinites are smart, and they're looking for something different; you've gotta keep them on their toes. For us, Austin is the quintessential movie-watching town, because people there will go to the movies without even knowing what they're going to see, just to see something new.”
Related:
Tribeca Film Festival Review: Baghead
