(6 of 7)
Rather than shell out $60,000 to make a celluloid print of the movie so they could show it on theater projectors, Avalos and Weiler partnered with satellite companies to retrofit theaters in five cities to project the movie digitally--from hard drive straight to the big screen. That stunt made Avalos and Weiler, who live on a 200-acre sod farm in rural Pennsylvania, the first to project a movie digitally in movie houses. They became instant icons of the film-geek crowd. They also became pretty rich. Through video rentals and sales--and distribution in 20 countries--The Last Broadcast has grossed more than $1 million, making it, percentage-wise, "one of the most profitable movies ever made," Avalos says.
Spurred by these success stories, would-be New York City auteur Devin Crowley, 32, joined an unprecedented swell of self-financed filmmakers at this year's Sundance Festival. Actually, he didn't get into Sundance. So he screened at No Dance, an all-digital video Sundance imitator held at a nearby mall. Crowley's movie, Show Me the Aliens!!!, was yet another mockumentary, this one about alien abductions.
Convinced that his movie would get picked up by a distributor that could get it into theaters--if only he could reach one--Crowley dressed his production crew in alien costumes and set about annoying everyone in town. The aliens accosted pedestrians; the aliens faked public brawls; the aliens disturbed screenings with staged abductions; they shoved flyers for their movie in strangers' pockets. By midweek Crowley's aliens decided to crash a party for the Independent Film Channel, smuggling in a monitor and two subfunctional speakers under a trench coat.
And then it happened: Crowley spotted Roger Ebert. "You're going to show it to me right now?" Ebert, still in his coat, asked as two of the aliens thrust speakers on either side of his face. They started the trailer, but Ebert was far more concerned with the dwindling battery power of the digital camera he was using to record this spectacle for his own website. Finally, mercifully, the trailer ended. Ebert congratulated the happy aliens, who spent the next 15 minutes beaming. "This is a new high," Ebert said under his breath as he walked away. "Or a new low."
The next day the filmmakers' guerrilla-marketing tactics proved more successful: the audience that turned up to watch the movie nearly filled the dank screening room at No Dance. After a few promising minutes, though, SMTA!!! became a mess of dull, endless, off-color jokes. By the movie's climax, about a third of the audience had left, and those remaining (family? friends? people who were sexually probed by aliens?) weren't laughing. In the end, Crowley didn't win the award for best picture or best director. But the aliens did get the nod for "Best Guerrilla Marketing."
Crowley returned to New York and went back to his iMac, trimming the movie down by dumping some of the its clunkier gags. Two distributors who saw the film in Park City have expressed interest in it, he says, along with StreamSearch, a new Web company that wants to make SMTA!!! a pay-per-view feature film on the Web. "It's a whole new playing field," Crowley says.