Lance Weiller made waves in 1999 when he and Stefan Avalos created, The Last Broadcast--the first film to be distributed to theaters digitally. Now, seven years later, he steps up self-distribution through theaters with his new feature, Head Trauma, which he shot on a DVX100.
KAM: When you did your first film, The Last Broadcast, you made it for just $900 but were able to get enough buzz generated to be the first film to use direct satellite-to-theater distribution to show your film. That’s an amazing feat, and your film even had its own chapter in Fast, Cheap, and Under Control by John Gaspard. Tell us about how The Last Broadcast came to happen and how you were able to get things lined up to make use of this form of distribution.
LW: Basically The Last Broadcast [TLB] is a film that Stefan Avalos and I co-directed and co-wrote and we acted in it. And it was kind of a movie that came out of the frustration of the process of [filmmaking]. At that time, it would’ve been 1995/96, when everything was pretty much being done on film. Stefan had just finished a movie, The Game, which was then retitled, The Money Game. And he’d experienced some difficulties when it came to the distribution of that project. I was trying to raise money for a science fiction film that I wanted to make; it was going to be about $250K, and I was going to shoot on Super 16. Well, I failed miserably when it came to the fundraising part and only raised about $20,000 of the $250,000 and was forced to turn it over. Then Stefan and I started experimenting with–I guess it was late ’95/early ’96—some of the very first desktop hardware where you could capture video on your computer. At that time, it was very cutting-edge; so, Stefan was a computer whiz and I was new to it, and so we taught ourselves and did what we needed to do to build our own system so we could cut [a movie]. So we ended up making TLB kind of on a lark; it was kind of like, “Let’s see how little we can make a movie for.” We kind of failed in some ways, because we were trying for less, but when we tallied up all of the receipts, it was $900.
So, that kind of put it in the realm of being one of the first desktop feature films, and when we finished that, we sat around and thought, “Okay, well, we don’t have the money to make a print…” And at that time in ’97/’98, film festivals were pretty much just showing stuff on film, or bad video projection. So, we said, “Well, we know that we want to show the movie, there’s an audience, people are really responding to it, how can we do it?” And we kind of cooked up this idea where we put together a sponsorship package for it. So, we put together a package and we pitched it to all of the different parties that we thought would be good to create a solution for digital cinema. It didn’t really exist until we started pushing it; it existed in little pieces, you know, the projection was there, the satellite company was looking at ways to do delivery, but they weren’t necessarily pulling it all together, and a solution hadn’t been put together.
So we put together a sponsorship package and went around and pitched like crazy. Our idea for what we thought was the future of cinema delivery and we ended up raising about close to $100K so we could go out and do multiple cities. That ended up being about a couple million dollars in research and development from the various parties that were involved to help make the event happen. In terms of your readership, the thing that was the most interesting about it is that we felt like someone came to us and said, “Oh hey, you guys have a movie, we want to show it this way.” It was us problem solving and saying, “We want to get the movie out there, how can we do it?” and we were thinking outside the box with it. Because the beauty of filmmaking is that, a lot of the time, people will get hung up on process, or what it’s supposed to be. And sometimes it’s really about creative problem-solving and looking out –as in that case—to different markets and saying, “okay, what’s going on and what’s happening and how can that be applied to what we’re doing?” So, we did that on the production side and we did it all the way through the shooting of the film.
KAM: TLB grossed somewhere in the neighborhood of $4M worldwide. With that kind of substantial return on your investment, it seemed likely that you’d have had a large budget for Head Trauma, but you chose to make it for $70,000. Why did you decide to keep it in that price range?
LW: Well, Head Trauma all told to date is about $126,000 but to get it in the can was about $70,000, and the $126K covered the HD transfer, [and making it] all ready for foreign television [and] domestic TV…it covers all the deliverables of it.
I was looking for something where I could have control over what I had done. I had gone off and was working on a television show for a studio; I was a creator and executive producer on the show. It took up about 2½ years of my life; we shot a pilot, and then we kind of got caught in “development hell”. We were slotted, and it tested well, then we were going, then we weren’t going, then we were going…and after going through all the stages with that project, I decided that I wanted some degree of control over my own films. I looked at it and said, “Well, I’ve always had different people who’ve wanted to invest in what I was doing, so I’m just going to keep it small, have control over it, retain the rights to it, and I know over time it’ll recoup. And it definitely has.
