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Fate, and Two Film Festivals
This is one of Hollywood’s most exciting times of year, when the Sundance festival ends and the Oscar nominations for the previous year are announced. Sundance films have come to dominate other prestige awards, none bigger than the Oscars. Once upon a time, this Park City, Utah festival of independent films was the granola-crunching, Earth-loving alternative to conventional Hollywood thinking. By the early Nineties, it was anointed as Hollywood’s incubator of new ideas and new talent. It’s no exaggeration to say that for a third of a century, Sundance has played a major role in changing our culture in a more progressive direction.
It’s also an annual film industry center of competitive buying frenzy, as fierce, all-night bidding wars take place in $40,000-a-week rental chalets. Fox Searchlight was one of the more experienced, successful predators in those bidding wars. It pushed 12 Years a Slave all the way to the Oscar for Best Picture. Now, convinced it could do it again, it bid a breathtaking $17,500,000 for the rights to new phenomenon The Birth of a Nation, a low-budget independent film that boldly took—some would say, appropriated–the title of the pioneering D.W. Griffith film on its centenary, for a black man’s vision of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831. The filmmaker, an experienced actor, and first-time director named Nate Parker, was ready for his “rocket push”—a term for the most that Hollywood and modern public relations can do. But there was a flaw, a hidden problem here, and it would turn this into a cultural and financial disaster story. Do you know this story? I didn’t.
This 2016 Birth of a Nation was based on a purportedly hidden or forgotten story, but The Confessions of Nat Turner was a national bestseller by William Styron in the late Sixties. The new film’s scenes of horrible abuse of blacks were ended with what history records as a slaughter of whites, about fifty of them, mostly women and children. Tacitly presenting this as something an audience should understand as inevitable, if surely regrettable, justice went considerably farther than even left-leaning Hollywood had gone in the past, and in fact, no major studio made that film. But thanks to their film scouts at Sundance, they didn’t have to: independent finance took the risk of making it, and the studio, egged on by influential writers, only had to open a checkbook and buy it.
True in the age of the Medici, even truer in today’s media age: independent finance is what enables outside forces to effect cultural change. That had been the pattern for Sundance winners since the early days of Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989) and the festival’s real launching pad into industry hipster-dom, the beginning of the true hyper-leap to bigger time money, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs in 1992. By the first and second decades of this century, what could be called the Sundance attitude and philosophy was imbedded in every Academy member’s estimate of artistic value.
Smaller films with prestige and festival buzz generally launch in the fall, in time for end-of-the-year critics’ awards. By the time that film opens, its campaign for an Academy Award nomination has to be well underway. The Birth of a Nation was scheduled to open the first week of October, perfect timing for Oscar, so Fox Searchlight had only eight months to write, design and edit hundreds of pieces of text and video, plan a national publicity tour, reserve and buy media time across a bewildering variety of platforms. As they did all of this, they were closely shadowed by Fox’s overseas divisions, preparing their own materials and translating the American ones. Eight months was not much time. But Searchlight had done it before; they knew the drill.
Even in the first weeks after news broke about Nate Parker’s amazing Hollywood deal, there were disquieting things being written about him in obscure blogs. They didn’t get picked up in the press, though, and Fox Searchlight never saw them.
By early summer, the juggernaut was well underway. Staffing bulked up to handle the growing volume of media requests. Nate Parker continued to do the rounds. Most journalists were clearly charmed by the actor, a “good interview,” a glib and ready talker. At one point, he made a seemingly small but critical mistake. Reaching for that extra measure of journalistic sympathy, he mentioned in passing that he himself had known what it was like to be unjustly accused. Asked about it later, he clammed up. Now curious, some reporters began looking into his background.
In every reality-based disaster show, be it about the Challenger or Columbia space shuttles, Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, there’s the precious use-it-or-lose-it moment of fate when one or more honest and concerned workers see that there’s something alarmingly wrong that has to be brought to the attention of the bosses. At about the same time, women working at Fox Searchlight started looking into it too. None of it was sealed or secret; it had been there the whole time. Nobody bothered to try to find it.
In 1999, while a college student, Parker and his roommate were arrested for rape. He claimed it was a drunken three-way that went horribly wrong, but his roommate was convicted. That conviction was later overturned on a technicality and the state declined to retry the case since witnesses were no longer cooperating. There’s a transcript online of Nate Parker taunting the victim over the phone. That roommate, incidentally, was one of Parker’s best friends, later to be the co-screenwriter of The Birth of a Nation.
Sometimes the public impact of damaging evidence in a case like this can be blunted if a legal or PR team can persuade the victim to offer a message of forgiveness, as Roman Polanski’s teenage victim did. But that wasn’t possible in Nate Parker’s case, because the victim committed suicide in 2012. All Parker would say about it was he was innocent by law and had nothing to be sorry about. No empathy, cold as ice. And with that, dozens and soon hundreds of people, mostly women at first, stopped reading his defenses in anger and disgust.
Once the reality of what lawyers delicately called Nate Parker’s “situation” reached Nikki Finke’s fearless Dateline Hollywood website, her influential industry readership ensured it was all out in the open. Other entertainment reporters belatedly worked to catch up on the story. It was starting to reach the mainstream beyond the showbiz trade papers.
It was now the beginning of August, only two months from an enormous, and enormously expensive launch on more than 2,000 screens, coast to coast. Panicked Fox Searchlight executives considered their options. They weren’t great.
It was still possible, if barely, to cancel the opening, to postpone it into some indefinite time in the next year. Buy time to figure things out. How? The studio releases a statement, something like: “At the request of Nate Parker, we are postponing the much-awaited opening of The Birth of a Nation to allow him to complete the inspired masterstrokes he is adding in editing and music scoring, to what we already know will be a very significant motion picture.” And Parker could respond, “In an age when artists of color are so often marginalized, I am thrilled and gratified to be working with a leadership team at Searchlight that understood and accommodated my need for more time. I intend to repay that trust by delivering a movie we’ll all be proud of.” It would all be understood to be a lie, of course, and the industry would smirk and move on. They’d know why the studio cut its losses. The film would open quietly, overseas. Later in the year, it might return to the US on cable and video-on-demand.
That was the sensible move, but they were less and less sure that Parker could be counted on to play along. It also meant sitting across a board table from Rupert Murdoch and his sons, explaining face to face why you’d thrown away 30-million-bucks-and-counting of his money without doing due diligence. Unthinkable. So Fox Searchlight punted. They were only weeks away from the film’s previously scheduled appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival; they decided to make that their moment of decision. If one film festival made the film, this one could save it.
After all, unlike the hothouse “industry” atmosphere of insiders at Sundance, the Toronto festival attracted lots of moviegoers, and intellectuals not connected to the film industry. In Hollywood terms, normies. Let’s see how they respond. Nate Parker got on the plane to Canada. Searchlight crossed its fingers. And lucked out! Although the festival press tried to ask about “the incident,” he steadfastly ducked the question and our northern cousins were too polite to press the issue.
That deceptively friendly reception at the Toronto International Film Festival gave the studio the unwarranted confidence to maintain its green light and move full speed ahead with the original plan, a wide national release the first week of October. Screenings started for film critics and theater owners. Commercial time was booked on TV. Media buys quickly ramped up to their peak of millions of dollars per week. With a roar of publicity, Nate Parker’s “rocket push” was clearing the launch tower. By now, Fox Searchlight’s risk exposure was nearing $50 million. It just had to succeed.
The studio made Parker attend meetings with a public relations firm that specializes in celebrity image crisis management, and they tried to coach him in answering the questions they knew he’d be asked in on-camera interviews that couldn’t be evaded or ducked. You’ve seen actors and athletes in trouble. You know the euphemisms: “This was a terrible thing, a deeply human tragedy. We all regret what we did that night, but we can only heal and go forward.” PR guys were paid big bucks to get him off the hook with the public, to hand him lies, and the tragicomic thing is, he stubbornly refused to use them. To the shock and anger of Searchlight, he stayed inside his narcissistic bubble and admitted no lingering guilt, no second thoughts, no regrets.
The movie opened badly. Reviewers didn’t think it was all that good a film, the subject matter was difficult to watch, and the unknown filmmaker was introduced to the wider world primarily as an unrepentant abuser of women.
Theaters, on average, do a 50% box office split with studios, so if Fox had $50 million in costs, it needed a minimum of a $100 million box office run just to break even. The kind of success achievable by a film with an opening weekend of, say, $33 million. With a rule-of-thumb typical multiple of 3, that film can anticipate a final gross of $100 million.
The Birth of a Nation opened on 2,100 screens, to a weekend total of…$8.5 million. Its multiple didn’t even reach 2; it finished its run with a dismal $16 million dollars, financially disastrous for Fox Searchlight. Black audiences could have singlehandedly given this film a decent opening with just a fraction of a Tyler Perry weekend. But they turned their backs on him. The Hollywood trade papers didn’t hold back, pronouncing the film to be a flop and an instantly notorious example of a PR misfire.
Studios still make big bets on Sundance films, but they’re better-calculated bets. Even when those films don’t lose money, studios have noticed that they don’t tend to make any significant amounts of it either. With Oscar viewing levels reaching for historic lows, many in Hollywood are re-examining what they consider valuable and good. Some are even wondering if the real counterculture shouldn’t be, you know, unafraid to occasionally counter the prevailing culture. But nobody’s wondering what happened to Nate Parker. Nobody cares.
Nate Parker has continued to work as a character actor, but no major studio has hired him to direct another film. Despite his dazzling debut at the start of 2016, everyone remembered what happened towards the end of it. The industry term for where he’s at is “movie jail.” It’s reserved for attitude cases, and worse of all, pariahs who embarrass their financial partners. Parker attracted derision for posting a picture of himself at a glamorous opening, as if he were back in the good graces of Hollywood. In actuality, he hired the photographer, rented a theater in Harlem for one night, rented a red carpet and probably the tuxedo he wore. Will his rehab campaign work? It hasn’t so far. In real life, you do your prison time and leave. But in Hollywood, movie jail can be forever.
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Gary,
Your insight to Hollywierd always fascinates me. Thank you for this.
You sure can tell a story. Really. Thank you. Now where is the equivalent politics jail to haul the Bidens to? Along with the other repulsive characters not interested in being statesmen.
Isn’t Hillarity already in there?
Doesn’t seem like -not even Ted Kennedy was ever put in politics jail. Too many perps to list. Hillarity (and even her child who doesn’t do anything) seems to never shut up.
We went to Park City few times when it was still a down-on-its-luck silver mining town (last mine closed around 1980) with a middling ski hill and a two block long downtown with a couple of nice restaurants. Robert Redford owned Sundance south of Salt Lake City near Provo. You still get to Sundance up a moderately winding mountain road. There is limited parking and not a lot of room for development. The road to Park City was then a local road, but the area was flat and wide open. Redford initially brought the Californication to Park City in 1985, then add in Mittens and the busy bees that are Utahans who brought the Olympics and the circus continues from there. Lots of California types and tech companies moving in to Utah.
It’s called bridging to your key message. Address the question briefly, then change the subject to what you really want to talk about. It’s an uphill battle media training someone with a gigantic ego.
Interesting article, as usual. Gary, did you see the film yourself? Did you think it was good and could have been a success if not for the controversy? Or was the movie a dud even apart from the bad publicity?
I choose to see the nominations for Everything Everywhere All at Once as a hopeful sign that they may be taking a new look at some of this.
Great job, Gary.
As per your usual, a stupendous account of an interesting film making tale.
With many quotable sentences and phrases, with this being my favorite: True in the age of the Medici, even truer in today’s media age
As something of an aside, I was scrolling the T.V. listings the other day and saw that the prestige television arm of Sundance, The Sundance Channel, was showing a marathon of Gilligan’s Island. Even more hilariously, the episode they were introducing had a disclaimer to the effect that the episode contained stereotypes inconsistent with the present day. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
I saw the movie. It’s got some strong scenes, largely because it’s manipulative. Mostly it’s kind of ordinary. If you saw Roots any time in the past 46 years, you pretty much have the gist of it. Too graphic to be an After School Special, you can imagine it as a Juneteenth “treat” on BET or Bounce.
Redford is now 85, IIRC. Nobody’s ever given him grief about the obvious (and so far as I know, legal) connection between his non-profit activities and the enormous publicity and marketing advantage it gives to for-profit Sundance land development.
Thanks-a-plenty, EODmom. The rough equivalent of movie jail might be the limbo that Stacey Abrams and Beto O’Rourke now occupy: convicted of the crime of getting Democrats’ hopes up and squandering vast amounts of money.
Parker had fairly disastrous interviews on 60 Minutes and Good Morning America. Gayle King, who clearly wanted to boost an important new black artist, was exasperated to the point of giving up. Nate Parker seemed genuinely surprised that a black interviewer wasn’t giving him a break. So Parker’s media team thought it would be a smart move to put him on Steve Harvey’s show–face to face, man to man.
It was a huge mistake. On TV, optics count, and whatever Parker intended, the visuals were bad for him. A generation younger than Steve Harvey, shorter and more slightly built, it looked for all the world like a truculent teenager was called into the principal’s office. Instead of rescuing Nate Parker’s sinking publicity campaign, it finished it off.
He’s Robert Redford dontchaknow!!! I have the feeling sometimes that anything goes in Utah when it comes to business and development.
My dad and I were once in an elevator in Utah with two women who were convinced Dad was Robert Redford. Blonde hair and blue eyes were the only things they had in common. It became a running joke for us. Dad was a surgeon and talked about how he could take the cysts off of Redford’s face for a reasonable fee. Recent pictures show that Redford took the hint…but he’s had a lot of work done…he’s in Pelosi territory.
Sane people will wonder why seasoned, experienced film executives go nuts at Sundance, greatly overestimating the audience appeal of films that don’t play to big numbers in the real world. The answer isn’t specific to showbiz. Ever seen a Barrett-Jackson auction of classic cars? The dazzling lights, TV cameras, and overheated atmosphere of an auction take over, and reason goes out the window as the bidding gets fierce. It’s no different in Park City.
Plus there’s a peculiar contrast between the urbanized Sundance crowd and the natural surroundings that supposedly inspire thoughts about ecology and sustainability. Most movie executives are not the baldheaded, cigar-chomping cliches of 60, 70 years ago. Most of them are relatively young–under 40–and tend to be exceptionally fit. It’s a dating marketplace that gets them out of the city.
I remember hearing about it and wondering why anyone would lumber a work with that title. I had seen the original and knew that, like Citizen Kane, it was the originator of many cinematic techniques that would become standard in future movies. The plot was not something anyone in the twenty first century was going to be putting forward. I classify it alongside Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. In fact, I saw the two of them on consecutive nights during my one and only class on Film Appreciation. (The professor for that class was a headcase for the ages.) I hadn’t heard that it was about Nat Turner until later. I figured I’d go see it if anyone recommended it. No one did; in fact, I don’t remember hearing about it again.
The whole Birth of a Nation scandal has become one of those things that’s simultaneously notorious and little known. Nothing about it is sealed or secret, yet it has the feel of the boarded-up box of the Arc of the Covenant being relegated to the numberless obscurity of a vast warehouse. “Do Not Open”.
I read every @GaryMcVey post. Eventually. I just got to this one, and I am very glad that I did!
Gary, you are a gift to this site and the world.