MFM: Give me a bit of timeline from when the buzz started until the film was released.
Monello: "The editing process for the film took most of '98. We started consolidating the mythology that had been established and we shot some additional footage for that. In April of '98, the second episode of Split Screen aired featuring more of the story and some footage and in July John told us we had to get a website up to vacate their chatrooms. That is when the story started to grow in the public and the website started to gain traffic. We submitted to Sundance in the fall and in October '98 the fans started calling radio station talk shows, around Halloween time, to talk about Blair. It got a lot of attention then and started to generate buzz in other media. We got accepted to Sundance in November and January of '99 we premiered there."
"We got a lot of attention out of Sundance for the sale. It was a really unusual story because of the kind of film it was and we got a million dollars for the sale and in the eyes of the media and the industry, we were out of nowhere because we were making the film in Florida. When Artisan bought it, they seemed to get it, the mythology and the fans that were already gathered. From Sundance on, it was all momentum."
"Haxan was involved in the marketing even after that. We wrote, directed, and edited the SciFi Channel special. We had discussions about the posters. We owned the online world even though Artisan repackaged our website and made it more professional and robust, the content was from us or commissioned by us. Even if Artisan had wanted to say 'You filmmakers can go away now, we'll take it from here,' they realized they couldn't. We had written ourselves into the mythology. The parents of the missing college kids had contacted Haxan Films to help put together the 'found' footage. Artisan knew that we were the ones who knew the mythology best, they couldn't hope to market it successfully to the fans without us."
"When the news came out that it sold, we were flooded with emails from fans saying how excited they were and even saying they didn't really understand why, they didn't make the movie or have anything to do with making the movie. We sent back replies telling them they owned the success as much as we did. That sale would not have happened if they didn't love it."
The film made its second festival premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1999 and opened in the US and some foreign markets in July. Monello said that fans were told to expect the film to play on just six screens. This didn't sit well with them.
Monello: "When Artisan bought the rights to the movie, they were tiny small. Their biggest movie was Aronofsky's Pi. They were going to release Blair in the summer, with no way to muscle in on the Hollywood blockbuster big boys. When we told people Artisan would open it on six screens for two weeks and see how it does, we got immediate responses saying 'Wait a second, if I don't live in New York, LA, Chicago etc., I can't see this movie? It'll be out for two weeks and I can't see it?' They asked what could be done to get it in their town and we told them call the theater and tell them you want to see it. And they did. So, the bookers started calling Artisan when they got calls from theaters asking to screen the film. Well, Artisan wasn't prepared with that many prints of the film. They had the lab just keep running prints and they booked more theaters. There was never a strategic intention to create the images of these long lines in order to get attention, that really was the result of so much fan interest."
MFM: With the tools that are available now, how different would Blair's engagement be?
Monello: "First, the tools are so much easier, Blair would be so much cooler now. It is so easy to do things, you can scan stuff and get it up in minutes. I can take a picture and upload it to Flickr and have Flickr pull it into my blog and all my social media pages. Then, it was all tedious and manual, the coding, and we really didn't have time to do all of that stuff. Some of our fans knew how to code and figure this stuff out; we relied on them to spread it for us. Obviously at the time, there was no YouTube, no streaming video. It wasn't very easy to shoot video and get it digitized and put it up online. So the only thing people could really do is put up fan websites and write their own theories about what was going on. One guy started playing a role where he was a detective that was investigating the case, and for us, it was amazing."
"But today, there is a lot more noise than there was then online. At the end of the day, it comes down to the story. When using online tools, you really have to think the story through from the eyes of the audience and what they expect. They expect a form of agency, of being able to direct their own experience within the framework of your story. If you have a blog from one of your characters, people now expect to be able to speak with that character through the blog and the character will comment back and acknowledge their existence. If you are not willing to do that, DO NOT try to fake it. If it isn't genuine, you won't go anywhere with that. Same with YouTube. Filmmakers think they just shoot a little video and put it up on YouTube. People will comment and then the filmmakers don't react, they don't acknowledge the comments. It is really a letdown and you have to be prepared now to answer. You have to leave a space in the story now for people and to give them a certain ownership of the story in order for them to engage with it. It is a very different form of storytelling than just writing a script and making a movie."
