Boston Globe Article

Want to see Kenneth Branagh in top movie form as a witty, dyspeptic playwright at war with his creative demons - cigarette in one hand, glass of wine in the other - slashing the air with profanity and masochistic sarcasm? OK, then, pencil the upcoming "How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog" on your must-see list. But note that this clever and funny feature film is not coming to your neighborhood multiplex or art house.

Although it's better and brighter than 80 percent of the fare on local movie screens, "Dog" is opening, if you will, on television. It premieres on the premium cable channel Starz! on Saturday, Oct. 27, at 8 p.m.

This is not what director Michael Kalesniko had in mind when he was filming the comedy, which also stars Lynn Redgrave, Robin Wright Penn, and Peter Riegert. Or when he and the film were celebrated in the prime closing-night slot of last year's prestigious Toronto International Film Festival.

But, increasingly, this is the fate of many films with name stars and first-rate off-screen talent. Perhaps the best movie ever made by director Paul Schrader, a hypnotic thriller called "Forever Mine," with Joseph Fiennes and Ray Liotta, also ended up on Starz! last year, instead of the big screen.

Scores of movies like these get deflected from their goal of theatrical openings to premieres on TV - so many, in fact, that a term was coined a few years ago to describe them: busted theatricals. They are almost always independent films that break down on the way to the theater because of financial woes.

Exactly what happens? The long answer is very complicated. The short one is that producers manage to put together most or all the money needed to make them, and then they shoot the films, but without securing a theatrical distribution deal, which never materializes.

Says Schrader, "There was a time when it was prudent to finance without a distribution deal. No longer."

Now, he says, "you're jumping without a 'chute." Schrader, whose previous film was the critically acclaimed "Affliction," was not happy about what happened to "Forever Mine." Indeed, few feature film directors are content to give up big-screen dreams for movies aimed from their inception at theatrical release.

But more and more, like it or not, they are forced to adjust their expectations.

Far more movies don't get theatrical distribution deals than do, says Robert Leighton. The president of Starz Encore Entertainment, Leighton is instrumental in dealing for the half-dozen or so busted theatricals that Starz! airs every year. It's a relatively inexpensive way for pay TV to aquire movies, costing far less than the $3 million to $10 million that cable networks spend to produce their own movies from scratch.

Starz! and Showtime are more invested in acquiring quality busted theatricals than other pay TV outlets now, although various networks, including HBO and Cinemax, also air movies originally produced for theatrical release.

A buyer's market

No one buys the rights to more busted theatricals than Starz!, according to Leighton. And, he says, it's a buyer's market. Intelligent, adult films continue to get made, he explained, but they can't compete for distribution with today's monster-budget Hollywood movies that target young, male audiences and typically get released in as many as 3,000 theaters at once.

Movies "with a lot of redeeming qualities that appeal to our audience don't match what theatrical distributors are looking for," Leighton says. What Starz! is looking for, he says, are movies that are "more literate and upmarket" than the average multiplex movie, but a little less edgy or dark than the usual art-house film.

For all its stylish writing and occasionally strong language, "How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog" neatly fits this niche between mass market and uncompromising art. Yes, the Branagh character is "America's favorite bastard," as one character calls him. He's a misanthrope, nastier now that he's had a few flops, and perenially sour on the idea of fatherhood despite wife Robin Wright Penn's desire for kids. The humor ranges from cleverly verbal to wonderfully, sometimes painfully, physical.

But the shadows ultimately part, giving way to a lighter mood as Branagh warms up to a little neighborhood girl who limps with cerebral palsy. Does she cure his own moral limp, undam his writer's block, and reverse his objections to parenthood? Yes, yes, and yes. But the gathering sentimentality is laced with lemony wit, and the whole, very well acted enterprise makes for engrossing, satisfying entertainment if not a film for the ages.

If Starz! searches for smart movies with soft edges, Showtime looks for more prickly busted theatricals to fit a niche defined by its "No limits" battle cry. Showtime sifts through approximately a thousand busted theatricals a year for the two or three it eventually buys to supplement its own feature film productions.

Earlier this year, it aired the premiere of "Things Behind the Sun," Allison Anders's autobiographical drama of her childhood rape and its reverberations. The film was well received at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where many films essentially audition for distributors.

Also drawing buzz at Sundance was "The Believer," which took home the prize for best feature.

Interest from distributors cooled off after the festival, and the film ended up landing at Showtime. Its scheduled debut last month was postponed after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. "The Believer," based on a true story about a dangerous and violent religious fanatic, will be broadcast sometime early in 2002.

It's a fiercely intense, disturbing, and timely study of religious distortion and excess, but it doesn't involve Islam or the Arab world. In fact, it's about a young American Jew at war with his own past who becomes an incendiary neo-Nazi and gives new horrific meaning to the notion of the self-hating Jew. As raw as so many of us still are from the tragic events of Sept. 11, it may not be precisely what we're longing to see, but it's a relevant and very good movie - surely, one of the better feature films that won't debut at your local multiplex or art house.

One of the roadblocks to theatrical release was a screening that first-time director Henry Bean arranged for Rabbi Abraham Cooper at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Directors of films with Jewish themes occasionally ask Cooper to evaluate their projects. Cooper raised objections to scenes in the "The Believer," which he communicated to Paramount, where Bean had a distribution deal percolating. Some of the entertainment press reported in the spring that Bean blamed Cooper's misguided criticism for killing the deal.

Bean, a successful 56-year-old Hollywood screenwriter ("Internal Affairs"), now says that although he "did a stupid thing" by showing the film to Cooper, he isn't certain that Cooper dealt the death blow. But he's clear about the fact that, "economics pushed us to cable." In a telephone interview from New York, he says that Showtime "paid us the way theatrical [distributors] wouldn't."

Matthew Duda, who acquires films like "The Believer" for Showtime, says cable deals for busted theatricals averaged $500,000 and rarely reached $1 million. (There are exceptions, like the $4 million Showtime paid for the controversial Adrian Lyne remake of "Lolita" in 1998.) Although Bean readily admits that a televison debut "was not the dream," he says as many as 4 million viewers will see "The Believer" on cable, a far bigger audience than almost any movie in limited theatrical distribution can muster.

According to Duda, such audience numbers, based on three or four broadcasts of a movie on his cable network, are the equivalent of a Hollywood movie that grosses $20 million. Echoing Starz's Leighton, Duda points out that many if not most independent films actually fail at the box office, very often grossing well under $100,000.

'Worthless commodities'

These, he says, are the true busted theatricals. By insisting on a theatrical release, producers of such films risk making their movies into "worthless commodities" that have no significant value as TV or video vehicles, Duda adds.

By contrast, he says, "we pay several hundred thousand dollars for a premiere."

Among other things, cable networks are paying for the right to call a movie broadcast a "world premiere" and for the potential to earn coveted Emmy awards to burnish their reputations. No matter how packed with star power or production values, movies that "open" on television are not eligible for Academy Awards. Nonetheless, they can and sometimes do go into theatrical release after their initial showings on television.

A case in point: "Maze," a quirky film directed by, and starring, actor Rob Morrow.

The story of a respected contemporary artist (Morrow) afflicted with Tourette's syndrome had its world premiere on Starz! in April. Morrow is convincing as the tortured painter, whose body-wracking twitches and involuntary honks and wheezes drive him to lonely introversion. And Laura Linney ("You Can Count on Me") gives a beautifully modulated and sympathetic performance as his confidante, model, and, finally, emotional salvation. Leighton says Morrow adjusted comfortably to the idea of releasing the movie - his debut as a director - on Starz!, which reaches 13 million households. Next month, the movie is scheduled to open theatrically on screens in 10 US cities.

Another Starz! premiere, a movie called "Tic Code," which is also about Tourette's syndrome and was first broadcast in 1999, had a limited theatrical release in the summer of 2000.

Bean still hopes for the same for "The Believer," which is tentatively slated to reach theaters after its cable run next year.

When he contemplated closing a pay-TV deal, the director felt disappointment, "no doubt about it," he says. "I was upset for a brief period."

Now he's more philosophical. "After years of working in Hollywood, I did something utterly without commercial considerations," he explains. "The experience of making 'The Believer' affirmed that I should do what I want to do. I want to make films that are in my heart and my head, and wherever the market for them is, including pay TV, I'll take that. I just want people to see them - and to pay back my investors." SIDEBAR: STRAIGHT TO CABLE

FILMS THAT WERE ENVISIONED FOR THEATERS, BUT DEBUTED ON CABLE.

PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA. SIDEBAR2: BECOMING CABLE-READY

The legal agreements that send movies made for theaters straight to cable are arcane and almost comically serpentine. They vary considerably in their details and to a layman resemble the daffy contracts drawn up in Marx Brothers comedies.

Typically, what they allow is a filmmaker to earn back costs while still allowing a window of opportunity to get the movie - someplace, sometime - into theaters.

Robert Leighton, an executive for the cable network Starz!, and Matthew Duda, his counterpart at Showtime, make such deals for a living. They describe the typical arrangement as follows:

First, a film gets a limited, specified number of exhibitions on television, perhaps three or four, during a so-called "initial window," which lasts from a month to 45 days. Afterward, all rights revert to the producer, who is free to contract for different "exploitations" such as theatrical showings or video and DVD distribution.

When this phase, which lasts from nine months to a year, concludes, the film returns to the cable network for approximately a year and a half and may air frequently on its allied channels. Showtime, for example, operates 10 outlets including the Sundance channel.

This ping-ponging between the premium channel and the movie's producers often continues until five years have elapsed and the agreement expires.

- John Koch