This past September, The Orchard was lucky enough to “shack up” with the Quad Cinema in an exciting partnership that pairs the old-school (theatrical release in an actual cinema) with the new-school (The Orchard’s streamlined digital distribution model). Now, less than six months later, we are thrilled to be releasing four more high-caliber documentaries that have played or will play at the Quad, and we are on track to sign a total of 25 Quad films in 2013.
Tales From Dell City, Texas, directed by Josh Carter, was filmed over a period of 10 years. According to the New York Times’ warm review, the film “immortalizes a dusty slice of vanishing Americana, delivering a parched ode to hard work, endurance and desert dreams.” The Orchard released the film on iTunes on February 26th.
Fast-paced and looking toward the future, American Autumn: An Occudoc, is the aesthetic opposite of Dell City, Texas. An impassioned look into the Occupy Wall Street movement, Variety’s glowing review describes it as “a strong, well-crafted documentary [...] that impresses most where many docs disappoint, expanding its scope without short-changing the wider subjects it covers.” You can find it on iTunes starting April 9th.
It’s not often that you come across Emmy-winning directors who are also accomplished sailors, but that is what you might expect from someone named Sprague Theobald. His latest documentary, the stunningly beautiful The Other Side of the Ice is the chronicle of his harrowing 2009 journey, with his complicated family, through the Arctic’s legendary Northwest Passage. It opens March 8th at the Quad and will be released by The Orchard on iTunes on March 19th. You can read a Q and A with Theobald about the life-threatening process of making the film on Travel + Leisure’s website.
Finally, on the heels of the phenomenal success of the Civil War biopic Lincoln, comes Wendy Jo Cohen’s laugh-out-loud mockumentary, The Battle of Pussy Willow Creek. Filmed in the style of Ken Burns, who calls the film “an incredibly wonderful and funny film,” it tells the “true story” of four forgotten Civil War heroes: an opium-addicted gay colonel, an aging Chinese launderer, a nerdy escaped slave, and a one- armed teenage prostitute. The film, which will be released digitally by The Orchard in the late summer, opened theatrically at the Quad last week.
When filmmakers start to go on the festival circuit and attend panels about distribution, a term that comes up a lot is “window-ing.” While the choice between drapes and blinds may come to mind at first, this term is something that is integral to the successful release of a film, and it is something that The Orchard Video team has to consider very thoughtfully when negotiating our deals.
What “windows” are in terms of a film release are periods of time in which certain rights are available exclusively. For example, in the traditional model, a feature film would have a 6-month window solely for the theatrical release, and then several more months solely for the broadcast, and then a separate window of time following that for physical DVD, with the final window of distribution being opened up to a digital release. In recent years, the trend has been a “day and date” model, in which the windows collapse.
Over the last year, a few independent films have made headlines, and a lot of money, using this model. This past fall, the indie flick Bachelorette made headlines when it’s VOD release — a full MONTH before the theatrical — shot to #1 on iTunes within 48 hours, and proceeded to make over $5.5 million on VOD — a massive amount of money compared to the $418,000 it earned in theaters. And as Entertainment Weekly pointed out, Bachelorette was hardly the first to succeed using this model: “Bachelorette is just the latest indie film to find great success in the burgeoning world of digital distribution. Movies like 2011′s Margin Call and 2010′s All Good Things have paved the way for a new release model in which films destined for theaters also debut via a cavalcade of on-demand outlets, from satellite and cable providers like DirecTV and Comcast to web-based companies like iTunes, Google, and Amazon.”
All of this is a great thing for The Orchard’s video business, which is increasingly encouraging filmmakers to collapse windows and do a day-and-date release. Recently, we signed an award-winning, audience-pleasing documentary called One Night Stand, a funny behind-the-scenes journey from the blank page to the live stage, as top Broadway and television writers, actors, and directors produce four original short musicals, all within 24 hours. It features hot TV actors like Modern Family‘s Jesse Tyler Ferguson, 30 Rock‘s Cheyenne Jackson, and Rachel Dratch. On January 30th, the film will screen for one night only in over 450 theatres nationwide. A day later, we will make it available for pre-order on iTunes, using the momentum from the screening to maximize the iTunes sales and profile.
While theatrical is still a big sell for filmmakers, it is digital that has become a lucrative money-maker for them, with screenings generating press for the digital release. This puts The Orchard in a fantastic position as more and more filmmakers and sales agents recognize the advantage of collapsing the windows to maximize profit.
The Orchard is thrilled to announce that Electoral Dysfunction, a critically-acclaimed, humorous and incisive look at voting in America, is now available on iTunes. After playing theatrically in New York and L.A., the film went on to be broadcast nationally on PBS channels and is still enjoying a national screening tour.
It’s no surprise that the film is witty; it stars Mo Rocca, a so-called “political humorist” who went from being a correspondent on The Daily Show to his current role as a regular on CBS This Morning. It follows Rocca as he journeys to investigate the complex, sometimes barely comprehensive and often flawed voting system in the United States. Never have these issues — the antiquated nature of the Electoral College, voter fraud and ballot design, to name a few — have been more important to the future of our country.
The critical response has matched the enthusiastic popular interest in the film. Great reviews have poured in from national publications ranging from The Hollywood Reporter, which calls the film “a timely look at an important issue that’s getting more hotly contested every month,” to the New York Times, which describes it as a “light-hearted, colorful, nonpartisan documentary.” And Mo Rocca has probably not slept in days; he’s been interviewed about the film on a laundry list of national television and radio shows, including CBS This Morning, MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Current TV’s Talking Liberally with Stephanie Miller, CBS Sunday Morning, Huffington Post Live, Salon.com, The Leonard Lopate Show, Joy Behar: Say Anything, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and Chicago Tonight.
Whether you’re thrilled with the way the election turns out or you have a bag packed for your flight to Canada, there is no question that voting in this country needs to be seriously reformed. Electoral Dysfunction should be required viewing for every U.S. citizen, so get to iTunes and start watching.
Just two weeks after an inspiring long weekend attending one of the country’s fastest-growing documentary film festivals in the U.S. — Maine’s Camden Film Festival – I’ll travel into the midst of the fall foliage to speak on a panel at the Hudson Valley’s Woodstock Film Festival. A gem of a festival, Woodstock has long been a retreat for N.Y.C. industry players, who get to stop texting their assistants (there is no cell phone service in town) and actually soak in entire movies.
At Camden, The Orchard’s Happy Hour attracted dozens of young filmmakers and industry people, many of whom participated in the festival’s Points North Documentary Forum. These included Daniel Chalfen, one of the nonfiction world’s most esteemed producers (Code of the West, The Revisionairies), Elisabeth Holm, the film program director of Kickstarter, Beth Janson of the Tribeca Film Institute, and the legendary Simon Kilmurry, Executive Producer of PBS’s award-winning documentary series P.O.V. Among the many filmmakers I got to talk with were Meghan O’Hara, whose fascinating documentary about a group of young Oregon men who re-enact the Vietnam War won the Points North Pitch Award, and Angad Bhalla, whose film Herman’s House has been a staple of the festival circuit since its premiere at True/False Film Festival in March.
Woodstock is sure to bring more fantastic interactions with filmmakers, along with the ability to share ideas with some esteemed film distributors at a panel called Distribution Paradigms. The panel, which also features Oscilloscope Picture’s David Laubis, Richard Abramowitz of the theatrical release company Abramorama, and Ron Mann, acclaimed documentarian and found of Canadian distributor Films We Like, will be moderated by Scott Macaulay, editor of Filmmaker Magazine. It takes place on Saturday, October 13th at 4:00 pm.
And just for fun, here’s a picture of me with filmmakers Iyabo Boyd and Rodrigo Reyes at CFF, courtesy of Meghan Brosnan Photography:
The Orchard is thrilled to embark on an exciting relationship with The Quad Cinema, New York City’s first ever four-screen movie theatre (it opened allllll the way back in 1972) and one of the only independent arthouse movie theatres still thriving in this city. But getting “butts in seats” (to use industry-speak) at indie cinemas is increasingly challenging, so the Quad has developed their forward-thinking QuadFlix Select program, in which curated filmmakers get a week-long theatrical release at The Quad Cinema, combined with a dedicated film publicist and reviews in major N.Y. publications (that coveted N.Y. Times review cannot be underestimated), and now, digital distribution via The Orchard.
Our first release in this partnership is Chronicling a Crisis, the latest film from international renowned director Amos Kollek. The son of the Mayor of Jerusalem, Kollek made his film debut in 1985 with Goodbye, New York, starring Julie Hagerty (best known for her lead role in Airplane). In his ensuing career, he has been celebrated by the Cannes Film Festival (with one award, and a nomination for the festival’s top prize, the Palme D’Or), Berlin Film Festival (with three major awards and 2 nominations), and several of the other most esteemed film festivals in the world.
Chronicling A Crisis, now available on iTunes, is a daring and intense personal documentary that the New York Times called “illuminating [...] deeply honest [...] a naked portrait of successful self-analysis, of a man reaching backward for the strength to move forward.” After a major film failure, Kollek seeks to examine his addiction to filmmaking and his conflicted family relationship, in the meantime falling into a strangely co-dependent relationship with a Lower East Side drug addict.
The Orchard plans to release some of Kollek’s “lost classics,” which have been played theatrically around the world and captured star turns from the likes of Alec Baldwin, Audrey Tautou, Justin Theroux and Faye Dunaway. Watch in the coming couple of months for his 1998 masterpiece Sue, a Berlinale-winner which Variety calls a “haunting portrayal of a lonely Manhattanite who slowly descends into madness.”
We here at The Orchard Film are super excited to bring more high-caliber cinema to the digital space via our relationship with this groundbreaking NYC institution.
