Tonight, millions of viewers will tune in from home to watch the annual Oscar telecast, a cherished ritual of long standing for movie buffs the world over. A few thousand select and privileged few will join the festivities in person at the Kodak Theatre, honoring their peers and maybe sharing, even briefly, the glamorous limelight.
This year, I plan to be elsewhere. My wife and I will be joining an intimate and very special Oscar party hosted by entertainment industry colleagues Mike Fleiss, Graham Taylor, and Lynette Howell to honor our friend Nicolas Chartier. He’s the neophyte producer of Best Picture nominee “The Hurt Locker” whose overzealous indiscretion in lobbying fellow Academy members cost him his seats at this year’s awards, and dashed his lifelong dream of proudly strolling down Oscar’s red carpet with his 74-year-old mama on his arm.
Nic’s notoriety over his lost tickets quickly became well-known media fodder, but those in the film-financing business know there is a far more compelling story here.
Independent producers and financiers in the U.S. are painfully aware of what it takes to get a movie made in today’s economy. Banks aren’t lending, buyers aren’t buying, and Wall Street packed up and left our party long ago. Striving for safe and unthreatening commercial films is the order of the day. Moreover, there are deeply entrenched beliefs about the type of films foreign distributors and buyers will or more importantly, won’t buy from American producers: comedies, urban films, political films, or Iraq war films.
The year is 2006. “The Hurt Locker," an Iraq war script, is bucking the trend and seeking funding for a roughly $20 million production budget, modest – even humble – by today’s standards. But still, as a first step, it needs to interest a foreign sales company.
Voltage Pictures – owned by Nicolas Chartier – is among those receiving the script, and charged with making a decision on whether or not he and Voltage will roll the dice and rep “The Hurt Locker” for foreign distribution.
Producers hire foreign sales companies like Voltage to sell their films’ rights around the world (e.g. theatrical, DVD, television, etc.) Few people are better positioned than sales agents to know and understand who is buying and what they are buying. In addition to selling completed films, they pre-sell territories before movies are even filmed, and these presale contracts serve as collateral to help finance the script. They commit the buyer to paying for the film, regardless of how it turns out, or how it performs in their country.
Nicolas loves the “Hurt Locker” script, phones back and against all experience and precedent, tells CAA - the agency repping the film – that not only will he take on this Iraqi war movie to acquire the foreign pre-sales, but he wants to help in producing it. The subject matter, he tells them, speaks to him.
There is one small problem, Nicolas believes that, even at $20 million, the budget is too high — it must be lowered substantially, slashed by some 35% to $13 million, in order for him to be able to sell it and stand any chance of making a profitable film.
