The phrase “making a positive first impression” is apt, literally, for a growing number of artisans at this year’s Sundance Film Festival which runs January 17-27 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah. Consider such projects as: Austenland, which marks both the directorial debut of Jerusha Hess and the first narrative feature film produced and developed by Moxie Pictures (in concert with Fickle Fish Films); The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman, which is noted commercial director Fredrik Bond’s first theatrical feature; and Ass Backwards, a dark comedy representing director Chris Nelson’s entry into the feature film arena.
Bond is a five-time DGA Award nominee for Best Commercial Director of the Year, the latest nomination coming this month based on his work in 2012. He helms spots via production house MJZ. Bond’s The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman will play in the out-of-competition Premieres section of Sundance. The storyline finds Charlie Countryman traveling abroad and falling for Gabi, a Romanian beauty whose unreachable heart has its origins in Nigel, her violent, charismatic ex-significant other. As the darkness of Gabi’s past increasingly envelops him, Charlie resolves to win her heart or die trying. Topping the cast are Shia LeBeouf and Evan Rachel Wood.
Drawing Bond to the project were its many facets. “It’s a mash-up of different genres and tones,” he related. “The story centers on a youngster in Chicago whose mother dies from cancer and he goes on this journey to Bucharest to find himself. The film is primarily a love story but it’s also a gangster story and a coming-of-age story. The script attracted me immediately–it has humor, is endearing, has violence, sex, character studies. It’s rare that you get a script like this with so many aspects to it.”
Bond observed that his extensive spotmaking experience proved valuable as applied to his first feature-length film. “Coming from commercials, I’ve been working with so many different genres and tones in the form of short stories. To some degree, this [The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman] suited me very well in that it incorporated a lot of the tones I had been doing over the years [in commercials].”
Commercials also played a part in Bond getting on the same page with Roman Vasyanov, his cinematographer on The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman. “He’s a young Russian guy who had come to America to start his career and broke into features,” said Bond of Vasyanov. “He read the script by Max Drake [for The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman] and was consumed with the film. But it took time to get everything together in terms of financing and the cast. It was time well spent as we worked together on commercials for about a year. We got to the point where we could communicate and understand each other well, establishing a shorthand with each other–which helped tremendously on the feature film.”
Those spot collaborations between director Bond and DP Vasyanov included a 2012 Super Bowl commercial for Budweiser (“Eternal Optimism), as well as ads for Puma and Pepsi.
This will be the first time Bond has attended Sundance. “The festival has this mythical air about it,” he observed. “It’s always been a dream of mine to have a film open at Sundance. I don’t really know exactly what it will mean to have a film there but I’m very excited.”
The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman is one of 18 films in 2013 Sundance’s Premieres section, a showcase featuring world premieres of highly anticipated dramatic films.
Austenland Meanwhile, Austenland is one of 16 movies selected for Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Competition. First-time director Hess is well known as a writer, having co-scripted the indie hit and Sundance (2004 Festival) favorite Napoleon Dynamite with her husband, director Jared Hess.
The big screen adaptation of author Shannon Hale’s novel, Austenland centers on 30-something single Jane Hayes who’s obsessed with the Mr. Darcy character in the BBC rendition of Pride and Prejudice–to the point where it’s ruining her love life as no real man can compare. But when Hayes decides to spend her life savings on a trip to an English resort catering to Austen-crazed women, her fantasies of meeting the perfect Regency-era gentleman suddenly become more real than she could have ever imagined. Hayes is played by Keri Russell (Felicity, Mission Impossible II, Waitress) who heads a cast that includes JJ Feild (from Captain America) and Bret McKenzie (Flight of the Conchords). Stephenie Meyer (The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part I, Breaking Dawn Part 2, The Host) produced Austenland via Fickle Fish Films, the production house she is partnered in with Meghan Hibbett. Gina Mingacci produced Austenland for Moxie Pictures. Exec producers of the film are Moxie’s Robert Fernandez and Dan Levinson.
It was Moxie’s former representation of director Jared Hess for commercials and branded content that led his wife to seek out the company on the feature front. “She was a friend of the company and had a comfort level with us,” related Levinson, president of Moxie. “She knew we were actively looking to get involved in narrative features and gravitated toward us for her first directorial venture.”
Jerusha Hess had worked on developing the script with the book’s author, Hale. Hess brought the project to Moxie in spring of 2010; the company then helped in the film’s development. In late 2010, Meyer came aboard as a financier and producer. “To be involved with Stephenie on this is very exciting,” said Levinson, citing her filmmaking pedigree spanning writing and producing of the Twilight Saga films.
For Moxie’s first narrative feature to make the Sundance cut is a major accomplishment. “When you consider the sheer number of films submitted and Austenland being one of 16 in the U.S. Dramatic Competition, you find it hard to give it a proper perspective,” said Moxie CEO Fernandez who noted that this isn’t the company’s first taste of competition at Sundance. Back in 2006, the Moxie-produced short, Dealbreaker, was selected for Sundance’s Short Film Program. Directed by Gwyneth Paltrow and Mary Wigmore, Dealbreaker was based on a story written by Glamour reader Gail Hildebrandt as part of a contest initiated by the magazine. The competition asked Glamour readers to write a short essay about an event, encounter or moment in their lives that made them victorious, stronger and/or wiser. Moxie partnered with Glamour to produce Reel Moments, a series of five shorts based on stories from the magazine’s readers. Dealbreaker was one of those films. Sponsored by Nokia, Dealbreaker starred Arija Bareikis as a woman who is finally able to look beyond superficial flaws when she finds the right man. The short marked Paltrow’s first turn in the director’s chair and her longtime friend Wigmore’s initial narrative directing experience.
Moxie also has a track record–albeit it more recent–in long-form filmmaking. The company’s first feature, the documentary Tabloid directed by Oscar-winning documentarian (The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara) Errol Morris–who is handled for spots by Moxie–was a hit on the festival circuit, debuting in 2010 at Telluride and then screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, and in 2011 at the South By Southwest (SXSW) Fest. Sundance Selects acquired North American rights to Tabloid in early 2011. Tabloid tells the tale of Joyce McKinney and the infamous “Case of the Manacled Mormon.” In 1977, McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming, flew to England with a pilot and a bodyguard to abduct the love of her life. Or was it to liberate him from a cult? McKinney, the people who cross her path, and the British tabloids help construct an epic Rashomon-like tale that is hilarious and surprising, part dark comedy, part film noir.
This past year has been eventful in long-form for Moxie. In addition to Austenland, Moxie has teamed with History Films, Radius TWC and Participant Media to produce the Morris-directed documentary The Unknown Known: The Life and Times of Donald Rumsfeld, which will be distributed this fall. Moxie has also produced and developed a TV series which is its first for general mainstream cable. Though Levinson said he wasn’t at liberty to discuss the show in detail, he noted that it is slated to debut in the middle of this year on the Animal Planet network. Additionally, the Moxie-produced, Tim Skousen-directed documentary The University of Sing Sing is slated to appear on HBO this spring. And Moxie continues to maintain a relationship with independent film company Killer Films which includes talent management firm KillerMoxie. Killer, Moxie and Michael Eisner’s film company Vuguru have teamed to produce a theatrical feature, Deep Powder, which was directed by Mo Ogrodnik.
Killer project Killer also has a film in the Sundance U.S. Dramatic Competition, going up against other features such as Moxie’s Austenland. The Killer entry is Kill Your Darlings, which tells a previously untold story of murder that brought together a young Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs at Columbia University in 1944, providing the spark that led to the birth of the Beat generation.
Both Kill Your Darlings and Deep Powder were music supervised by Megahn Currier and Randall Poster of Search Party Music. Moxie is a partner in Search Party.
Kill Your Darlings marks the feature directing debut of John Krokidas, getting us back to theme of first-time filmmakers at this year’s Sundance Festival. There were 4,044 feature-length films submitted for consideration to the 2013 Sundance Fest, from which 119 were chosen, representing 32 countries. Of the 119 features selected, 51 are from first-time filmmakers.
Overall, there were more than 12,000 films submitted to the 2013 Sundance Fest. This tally included 8,102 short film entries, from which 65 were selected to be part of the Sundance showcase.
Chris Nelson Another in the ranks of those first-time feature filmmakers is Chris Nelson who ad roost is HSI. He has his film Ass Backwards in Sundance’s Park City At Midnight program. The film centers on lovable losers Kate and Chloe (played by June Diane Raphael and Casey Wilson) who take a road trip back to their hometown to claim the beauty pageant crown that eluded them as children, only to discover that what really counts is friendship.
Raphael and Wilson penned the script. They and Nelson are represented by UTA which is how they came together on the project. UTA helped package the rest of the cast which includes Vincent D’Onofrio, Alicia Silverstone, Jon Cryer and Brian Geraghty.
“It’s been a lifelong aspiration for me to direct a feature film, let alone get it into Sundance,” said Nelson. “For me, being in Sundance is a true honor and privilege.”
Nelson sees Ass Backwards as a natural fit for Park City At Midnight. “It’s a full-throttle comedy that seems just right for the Midnight program audience.”
Ass Backwards qualifies as Nelson’s first feature but just barely. It had a protracted schedule which entailed shooting in Albany, New York, Manhattan, and Los Angeles done at different times, with lulls in between. Lensing started in 2011, and after some interim stretches, spilled over into 2012. Meanwhile Nelson went off and embarked on another feature, Gay Dude, for Lionsgate. The film focuses on the relationship between two high school students who make a pact to lose their virginity but find their friendship tested when one comes out of the closet.
The two features have been all consuming for Nelson over the past few years, pulling him away from commercialmaking. After Sundance, he plans to get back into spot directing via HSI. He cited the instant gratification of commercials–seeing the final work shortly after shooting–as a welcomed departure from the feature schedule and discipline. “I appreciate both features and commercials. I’ve learned so much from the feature filmmaking experience. It’s an amazing process. And what I’ve learned from one [discipline] helps me to bring more to the other.”
Nelson’s roots are in spotmaking. He gained inclusion in SHOOT’s 2005 New Directors Showcase back when he was on the roster of Little Minx. There he directed one of the shorts in the Exquisite Corpse series as well as portions of the web films in the lauded HBO “Voyeur” initiative for BBDO New York, with Jake Scott of RSA serving as the lead director.
Rundown Moxie Pictures and directors Bond of MJZ and Nelson of HSI aren’t the only spotmakers to gain inclusion into the 2013 Sundance Festival. Among the others are:
• The directing team of Sean and Andrea Fine whose Life According to Sam is in Sundance’s Documentary Premieres section. The Fines are repped for commercials by production house Rabbit. The helming duo’s Inocente recently earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Short Subject.
• Director David Gordon Green of production house Chelsea–and who helmed last year’s Chrysler Super Bowl spot “It’s Halftime in America”–finds his Prince Avalanche, which he also scripted, in the Premieres showcase. The film centers on two highway road workers who spend the summer of 1988 away from their city lives. The isolated landscape becomes a place of misadventure as the men find themselves at odds with each other and the women they left behind. Cast: Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsch.
• Oscar-winning documentarian (Taxi to the Dark Side) Alex Gibney, also repped by Chelsea for spots, has his We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks in the Documentary Premieres section. In 2010, WikiLeaks and its sources used the power of the Internet to usher in what was for some a new era of transparency and for others the beginnings of an information war.
• Oscar-nominated director (Waste Land, The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom) Lucy Walker, whose roost for spots and branded content is Supply&Demand Integrated, earned inclusion in the Documentary Premieres showcase with The Crash Wheel. The jaw-dropping story of athlete Kevin Pearce encompasses an eye-popping sport, snowboarding; and one explosive issue, traumatic brain injury. An epic rivalry between Pearce and Shaun White culminates in a life-changing crash and a comeback story with a difference.
• Directors Jane Campion and Garth Davis (who is repped by Anonymous Content for spots) will have their Top of the Lake screened in the Premieres section of Sundance. This film finds a 12-year-old girl standing chest deep in a frozen lake. She is five months pregnant, and won’t say who the father is. Then she disappears. So begins a haunting mystery that consumes a community. Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Holly Hunter, Peter Mullan, David Wenham.
• RJ Cutler, who’s handled by RSA Films for spots and branded content, teamed with Greg Finton to direct The World According to Dick Cheney, a Documentary Premieres selection (SHOOTonline, 1/4).
• Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts, also of RSA, has his Toy’s House in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. The storyline centers on three unhappy teenage boys who flee to the wilderness where they build a makeshift house and live off the land as masters of their own destiny–or at least that’s the plan.
• Director Sean Ellis, who’s on RSA Films’ U.K. roster, has his Metro Manila in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition. In the film, Oscar and his family, seeking a better life, move from the poverty-stricken rice fields to the big city of Manila where they fall victim to various people whose manipulative ways are a daily part of city survival.
• Making her debut as a narrative feature executive producer is Rhea Scott, president of Little Minx, collaborating with exec producers Lars Knudsen and Jay Van Hoy of Parts and Labor on the Andrew Dosunmu-directed film, Mother of George, which is in Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Competition.
• Oscar-winning documentarian (American Dream, Harlan County USA) Barbara Kopple, handled for spots and branded fare by Nonfiction Unlimited, directed Running from Crazy, which made the Documentary Premieres showcase. In the documentary, Mariel Hemingway, granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, strives for a greater understanding of her family history of suicide and mental illness. As tragedies are explored and deeply hidden secrets are revealed, Mariel searches for a way to overcome a similar fate.
• John Ramsay, partner and producer at Therapy Content, and Paul Crowder, a director/editor with Nonfiction Unlimited are involved in Sound City, which is in the Sundance Documentary Premieres lineup. Crowder edited the feature documentary which teamed legendary rocker and first-time director Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana) with producers Ramsay and Jim Rota. Through interviews and performances with the notable musicians and producers who worked at America’s greatest unsung recording studio, Sound City, this documentary explores the human element of music, and the lost art of analog recording in an increasingly digital world. Therapy Content (the film division of Therapy Studios) and Grohl’s company Roswell Films co-produced Sound City.
Shorts
And on the short film front at Sundance, filmmakers with spot affiliations include:
• Guillermo Arriaga, who’s repped by iM (Independent Media) for commercials and branded content. Arriaga directed and wrote Broken Night in which an accident turns a car trip into a nightmare.
• Nadav Kurtz, an editor at Cutters, moved into the director’s chair for the short Paraiso, which tells the stories of three immigrant window cleaners who risk their lives every day rappelling down some of Chicago’s tallest skyscrapers. “The film,” related Kurtz, “explores why they have chosen this occupation, what their spiritual beliefs are given that they face their own mortality on a daily basis, and what they see inside those buildings, which lends itself to several funny stories.” Paraiso was co-produced by Kurtz’s The Strangebird Company and Dictionary Films, which is part of the Cutters’ family of shops. Kurtz noted that he would have never been able to bring the short film to fruition without the production resources of Dictionary and post support from Cutters.
• And director Julia Pott broke into Sundance’s Animated Short Films lineup with The Event, which is cryptically described in the festival program as, “Love and a severed foot at the end of the world.” Pott is handled for spots and branded content by mixed media/animation studio Hornet.
