‘You Take an Ambien, and You’re There’

The co-chairmen of Roadside Attractions hold forth about independent film and how they got to be a “last man standing” in a business where many have failed

Second in a series

See also: Amy Pascal: The Movie Theater Is Our Soul; We Just Need Better Films

The partners in business and in private got Hollywood’s attention after winning the Best Documentary Oscar for "The Cove" earlier this year, and lately in winning bidding wars for sought-after films like Robert Redford’s "The Conspirator," and the awards hopefuls "Winter’s Bone’"and "Biutiful." Howard Cohen and Eric d'Arbeloff sat down with Sharon Waxman to talk about why they still believe in critics, why they’re profitable and why they fly coach to Europe.

Sharon Waxman: You guys seem to have come out of total obscurity to where you’re making  waves and getting peoples’ attention. How did that happen?

Eric d'Arbeloff: We’ve been around now for seven years. We started partnering with Goldwyn Films and then that lasted about two and half years and we broke off  in, I think it was …

Howard Cohen: 2007.

ED: Four years ago we started our own releasing organization because we looked around and said, "The model that the studios are producing under doesn’t make a lot of sense." With their big overhead, they’re spending a lot on a limited number of movies. Yet there are a lot of really cool movies out there that are getting under-showed.

Movies that do between $5 and $10 million at the box office might not be that interesting to the studios. So we started a full service organization where we strategize on the marketing, we can book screenings, we have a full finance department in place so we can collect money and do all the things the people expect from a studio but we have a much much lower overhead.

SW: How many people are you?

ED: We’re 15.  And we really run it at a fraction of the cost of what the mini-majors are doing.

HC: I think it’s 17.

ED: Yeah, but really we bring people in as we need them.

SW: This year it seems like you’re much more active. You bought some hot pictures at Toronto. Are you changing your strategy?

HC: We’re not changing our strategy radically, but I think we’re being rewarded for the way we’ve been handling films in the past few years, so we’re getting a higher profile of movies than we got in the past.

SW: Well it helps that you won an Oscar.

HC: It made a big difference that we won an Oscar.

SW: So let’s talk about "The Cove."  How did you win it?

HC: I think it really came down to the critics. We went into the fall a little bit as an underdog, and in that arena it almost helps to be an underdog.

ED: We did a lot of outreach. We were working with Participant. They came onboard and really handled the outreach. It was actually a three-way pick-up of Lionsgate, Roadside, and Participant. But Participant was the producers of "Food, Inc." too, and they were really the favorite going into the fall.

HC: "Food, Inc." did more box office and they were on many more of the sort of blogging world’s lists. But then right around the end to the middle of November and through those first couple weeks of December, every single awards critic was going to "The Cove."  There were like 25 awards and maybe 23 of them were for us.

ED: This was a small movie — a lot of people had heard about it. There was a scare factor with it, people were afraid to watch it. So we basically sent out screeners, called every critic, made sure they understood the power of this movie, made sure we had people thinking about it and talking about it. The great thing about "The Cove" was once people watched it, I would say 30 percent of them not only became excited about it but became evangelists for this movie.

Also the fact that it’s kind of this genre movie, and it works almost as a piece of espionage — a lot of people talked about that. So it was actually a movie that gave critics  something to sort of grab hold of that they could write about and talk about.

SW: But you didn’t make much money.

HC: $800,000 at the box office.

SW: Oh my God.

HC: It made at least $2 million on DVD.

ED: And it has almost 5 million Facebook fans.

SW: Well, I’m not sure that’s a good thing — maybe that’s a problem with having lots of Facebook fans …

HC: I would say a million and a half in DVD, that’s probably closer.

SW: So how does that impact your ability to to negotiate for movies at Toronto?

ED: I think it made a huge difference, and I think also with the other two films that we bought right before Toronto, "I Love You Philip Morris" and "Biutiful." So now we’ve got four films that are all big star movies. Four, five months after the Oscar and its success with "Winter’s Bone" — I think it was both those things.

SW: Was there a bidding war over ‘Winter’s Bone’?

ED: There was a small bidding war — we won out over Sony Classics. It was a good example because we basically sealed the deal by the time they came in with an offer.

HC: Sony heard that they were going to win the grand jury prize, and that’s when they came around. And the seller, to his credit, stuck with us. Editor's note: Sony disputes that their bid came after learning of the prize.

ED:  I think that when we are really very passionate about a film we can win.

HC: Well, we’re in L.A., too, which in some cases is a big plus.

ED: We’re used to cutting deals for films that have break-out potential from the filmmakers’ standpoint. There’s really a case to be made that we can turn a lot of money back to them — more so than any of our competition.

HC: I would love for the article to say that because people don’t focus on that. On "Winter’s Bone," we made $6 million spending $1.2 million, which is an astonishing rate for us.

SW: Wow. For P&A  (prints and advertising)?

EC: Yeah. All the P&A. Before the awards came in but $1.2 million in terms of actual releasing cost.

SW: And that’s before the DVD and before the awards season?

HC: Yeah, that’s before everything else, but I think that’s a very unusual ratio. People don’t talk about it but Sony is probably going to gross like $10 million on "Get Low." I’m going to guess they’re spending you know six or seven (million dollars).

SW: Really, to release it?

HC: I have no idea, but that wouldn’t be out of line with the way that the industry usually works. They’re cheap, so maybe it was $5 million. But I know they did television.

Editor's note: Sony says they spent less than this sum to release "Get Low."

SW: And for "Winter’s Bone," what was your formula like?

ED: We did no television. This was all about critics and press. This is a director with a track record at Sundance, and this was an emerging talent in Debra Granik and an incredible script.

SW: Honestly — falling back on the critics? That’s so damn 20th century!

ED: I’m not really sure how else you sell a really great film. I mean, this is why we have cultural gatekeepers, to champion things that are not the obvious. And we took a real risk on opening it very early on in the Midwest — we opened St. Louis, we opened Springfield, MO. We went very early on with a non-traditional footprint for the release.

SW: So you opened in the Heartland.

HC: St. Louis, Arkansas, Missouri (towns) — all the places where it takes place.

ED: It’s done amazingly well at the Angelica (in Manhattan) and along the Coast, but really the extraordinary numbers have been everywhere else, and that’s what’s gotten it up to over $6 million at this point.

SW: People in the Heartland are reading the critics?

HC: Once we got a four-star review in the Kansas City Star, that market way over-performed. It got a four-star review in the Denver Post, got a four-star review in the St. Louis Post, and I do think that that’s what started it in those markets.

SW: So you bought "The Conspirator" and "Everything Must Go," the Will Ferrell movie. What are your plans for releasing those?

HC: "Everything Must Go" is in March and "The Conspirator" is opening in April. I mean, I’d say that "Everything Must Go" is going to be, you know, a more typical, platform release, but I think that because of Will Ferrell, we will do some television advertising to open it.

SW: How wide is a typical release?

ED:  We’ve done a number of films that opened like in 300 screens, but I’d say our typical release is opening seven screens in New York and L.A.

SW: What is Lionsgate’s role in Roadside?

ED: They have a minority stake in the ownership.

HC: When we split off from Goldwyn, we sold a minority stake to Lionsgate.

SW: What percentage of the company do they own?

HC: Under 50 (percent).

SW: Like 40 or 45, something like that?

ED: Yeah. It allows us to continue calling the shots, but they have a healthy piece of the upside plus we have a video output arrangement with Lionsgate. So they have a vested interest not only in servicing our films on video, but also in making sure that the company continues to grow and thrive. Michael Burns was really the architect of our deal, and he’s been a big fan of ours.

SW: What about when you buy a movie? Do you have to call him up and ask him?

HC: No, and he doesn’t want us to do that.

ED: And I think frankly, that’s been one of our great advantages in terms of why we can go in so quickly on things like "Winter’s Bone," because it’s us, we are the decision-makers. So, if we like something, we just go, we get it, we make our offer, we’re done, and most companies can’t run like that. Either there’s an executive who’s got to go flying all over the globe for some reason, or you can’t get anybody on the phone, or the business affairs person has to do that stuff. We are lean and mean in that way. Howard negotiates all of our deals.

SW: Are you a lawyer?

HC: I was an agent.

SW: Where were you an agent?

HC: UTA.

SW: Oh got it, and how did you guys meet?

HC: Oh little interesting detail, we are actually a couple.

ED: We’ve been together for 15 years, and Howard, actually I was an independent producer and I think, I produced my first movie that was at Sundance in 1999. It was called "Trick," it was a little gay romantic comedy starring Tori Spelling, and Howard actually repped it.

SW: Nice, and that’s how you met?

HC: The first eight years of the relationship, we had separate jobs.

SW: And then one day…

ED: You know, we have a kid too. We have a five-and-a-half-year-old. And we kind of looked into the future and saw that as a producer, you’re away for three months at a time; as an agent, you’re kind of 24/7 on the phone, and plus the whole idea of navigating two careers, we just thought, "Why don’t we join forces and see if we can make this work?"

S: So that means you guys are together 24/7?

ED: We are but we have a tendency to do different things.

HC: I do the deals. Anything involving movies coming in that aren’t done is Eric, he is really involved on the production side and finishing films. I tend to be more involved in distribution, and you tend to be more involved in global marketing.

ED: So it works out pretty well.

HC: We took a weekend off last weekend and went to Palm Springs, turned everything off, asked our nanny to watch our son and tried to recharge our batteries.

ED: But I think that for us — and it’s true for the whole business — we entered the business at a time when the DVD golden goose was starting to go south. I don’t think we knew that necessarily was going to happen, so I would say one of the things we’ve been fighting is that there hasn’t been a ton of growth in the business.

Our first movie was "Supersize Me."

HC: And we did uh "Amazing Grace," which did $24 million. We did have some stealth successes, but there was a lot more noise then on this side of the business because there was WIP and Picturehouse and Paramount Vantage and Miramax, and all of the above. And so I think it was harder to get noticed. Now I think it’s sort of last-man-standing — us, Sony, Focus and Searchlight.

ED: There’s no question, we benefitted from that noise going away, frankly. But the other thing I was going to say was that I do think that in the last six months, especially with this announcement, we have an output deal with Epix, and the announcement of the Epix relationship now with Netflix … I think they’re starting to feel like maybe there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

SW: Who’s starting to feel that way?

ED: I think the industry. There is the idea now that perhaps a Netflix or an Amazon or a Google somehow will work with the distributors and creators of content to try to monetize that content.

HC: And I think to an extent Redbox also is sort of a big, big change. Everyone is nervous about Redbox, but Redbox is definitely ponying up.

ED: In the first four or five years, we were in business almost every story was kind of …

HC: … Gloom and doom.

SW: And now?

ED: Well, it depends on what your parameters are. If your parameters are "Pulp Fiction" then it’s not. But if you’re parameters are, ‘I spent a million bucks, and I’m easily getting $6 million …’ 

HC: Right. I think it’ll be very hard to go back to the days where Searchlight and Miramax — who are the pioneers in this — spent really large sums of money to make the movies ape commercial films. That’s a permanent change. But the idea that there is a continuing audience for independent film released prudently — where you can get millions of people to see independent films — I think that that is still there. They’re just not buying DVDs for $22. That’s just not a good deal anymore in anyone’s mind. I don’t know many people who are still continuing to build big DVD libraries — except for your mother; your mother still buys them.

ED: Right, yeah she does.

HC: Your mother likes to own them.

ED: Yeah, she likes to own them.

HC: But everyone I know watches them in some other way where it’s basically some version of $4, $5, $3 … whatever they’re watching movies in the secondary markets in some range

ED: What we’ve learned is that on a movie that is critically driven — and this is why we’ve built this whole model around movies like "Winter’s Bone" or last year's "Good Bye Solo" — is that you can put them out there in a way that doesn’t cost that much money. You can create a poster and a trailer and do a publicity campaign for a few hundred thousand dollars, and the advantage of that is that you can see what you have.

If you think of a studio model, they have to roll the dice on thousands of screens; they have to roll the dice on getting hits. There’s a big risk there. But we can see how this movie plays. Chicago is a great example: you can open it downtown, then you can open it in sort of the hipper upscale suburb, and then you can open it in the far suburb, and then see how did this movie play as it goes out into the world.

SW: But here’s the other thing: you guys aren’t not making movies, you’re only buying them.

ED: Correct, that’s right.

HC: Typically, it was the production that killed all of these independent studios. They bought into these giant negative costs, and the giant P&A costs, and had these on top of each other.

SW: So do you have any intention to make movies?

ED: No, we don’t have a passion to move the company into production. I think we’ve felt like we have enough on our plate to learn how to be the best distributor we can be, and there’s a need for what we do. It’s hard to produce good movies. It’s one of these things that if the right thing came along and we felt that this was a perfect opportunity on every level and it had a distribution component, we’d absolutely do that.

HC: When we were partners with Goldwyn, we made a very significant offer on "The Kids are Alright" as a production. We came really close to doing that. We danced with that for a long time, and Lisa (Cholodenko, the director) actually went out to have a baby, and there was a three or four-year hiatus, and it sort of got away from us.

SW: I thought you guys would like that movie.

ED: Yeah, exactly. But we also flirted with "The Last Station" for quite a while …

HC: The level of contribution we can usually make to a production is not necessarily enough for us to get it up front, but I think that’s changing. I mean, we’re definitely not going to get into development; if we got involved in a project that was already a moving train, that’s probably the most likely.

ED: We’ve always been very excited by out-of-the-box films going back to Morgan Spurlock and his documentary ("Supersize Me"). With Final Cut Pro being available for the first time where you can go and make a movie for $50,000 dollars with his own money. That kind of vibe has always been really exciting to us — same thing with the Duplass Bros.' first movie, "Puffy Chair." That was a movie we made for $15,000.

SW: Is the company profitable?

HC: For the first time it is. You know, we’re in the black now. It was a struggle for a few years, but we’re in the black now.

SW: Well, congratulations.

HC: Thank you. We had one really bad year, but it was so instructive because it was so severe for  a company our size.

SW: What year was that?

H: It was the second half of 2007 and first half of 2008. We had three films, "Starting Out in the Evening," "Caramel," and "How to Cook Your Life." They were all movies where we took too much risk in relation to the upside when the DVD market was crashing. It was all those things all at once.

ED: We had say "no more acquisitions" for probably about a year, and, "how do we do this the most intelligent way so that we’re spending the least amount of money we possibly can."

HC: And we engineered a new model. It’s no secret that we’re doing some films where the producers bring some costs to the table

SW: You mean not pay for the prints and ads?

ED: Yes, we’ve done three movies now where Mickey Liddell came in — he did "Good Hair," the Chris Rock movie …

And it’s a very good partnership in the sense that he has access to capital that we don’t have. We’ve been bringing him movies to show him, and we’ve been essentially co-benefitting on them.

HC: And he had nothing to do with actually the making of the films. So that’s one case, and the other one is where the producers themselves either put up some or all of the releasing costs. I think we’ve pioneered being a first-class operation, if I may say that, and I think that’s really important and everyone we’ve done a deal like that with, whether the film has worked or not, pretty much speaks incredibly highly of us, and that’s a big thing. We’re very, very careful about that.

SW: Talk a bit about how you are going to use your niche strategy on "Conspirator" and ‘Biutiful.’

ED: On "Conspirator," six months out we are doing a campaign with teachers in schools. We’re holding screenings for teachers and historians. On "Biutiful," the niche is probably the Latino niche.

SW: Do you think it’s a hard sell?

ED: I hope they’ll say it’s a must-see. We’re counting on that. And we’re doing tastemaker screenings and sending out screeners. We’re positioning it to take advantage of Best Actor and other nominations.

SW: And you’re planning on spending on these campaigns?

E: Well, the first time you get a bill for someone’s dresser and private jet, it’s a little shocking.

SW: Will you be saying 'yes' to a private jet?

HC: No. And we fly coach everywhere — to Cannes, to Berlin. We set the tone for the company. That kind of discipline is why we’re still in business.

ED: I look at it as a badge of honor: you take an Ambien, and you’re there.

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