After
being passed over by Park City, German-born filmmaker Sven Pape
drums up an interactive prequel, a distributor and a June 30th
premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theater.
By Richard Horgan, FilmStew.com
Interactivity has always been a main
topic of interest for filmmaker Sven Pape. It was the focus of
his thesis at the University of the Arts in Berlin, where he
studied before attending the AFI in Los Angeles; and it was
certainly a central conceit of Hollywood P.A., Pape’s
live interactive webcast from the Pennsylvania set of an
independent film that, with the help of Microsoft, attracted
some 250,000 visitors back in 1999.
Among those drawn to the idea of being
able to talk to a director and actors on location via computer
was John David Cameron, the younger brother of director James
Cameron (Titanic, Terminator 2). His
recommendation led to assignments for Pape on another Titanic-related
webcast in 2001, Earthship.TV, an editing gig on the
recent IMAX film Ghosts of the Abyss and the loan of five
special cameras from Cameron for an unusual webcast designed to
promote Pape’s latest directorial effort, L.A. Twister.
“When we did the webcast for Cameron,
I was actually on the boat to the return expedition to the
Titanic,” recalls Pape. “We installed a whole bunch of
remote control security cameras on that boat and basically Jim
bought all of those cameras.”
“I knew he still had them sitting
there in the warehouse, not using them,” the 32-year-old
filmmaker continues. “I just asked him if I could use them for
the time being, and I pitched the whole concept to him, and he
thought it was a cool idea and so he was kind enough to let me
use them.”
Over the course of six weekends ending
this past Sunday, June 27th, two separate casts of stage actors
performed the prequel play L.A. Twister: Canolis & Cocoa
at the Hollywood Boxing Club. Once again, with Microsoft in tow
as a partner, the performances and rehearsals were beamed out
over the Internet in order to solicit active participation from
the audience at large.
It was after Sundance’s rejection
last Christmas of L.A. Twister as an official entry in
the 2004 edition of the festival that Pape enlisted Robert
Cannon, an extra on the film, to write a play that fit in with
the universe and two main characters of the film. In the film,
Zack Ward (A Christmas Story) and Tony Daly (Dodgeball)
play a pair of buddies struggling to make it in Hollywood.
In addition to causing some initial
commotion on the stage, some 7,000 visitors to the
LATwisterMovie.com web site eventually cast votes to select an
All-Star cast selected from the two different casts. Think of
all this as basically an interactive version of Project
Greenlight, with half the budget of that Miramax effort and more
of a focus on the on-camera talent.
“The actors were very intimidated and
freaked out,” recalls Pape of the initial interactive
rehearsal process for L.A. Twister: Canolis & Cocoa.
“We had a web host in the theater that would read what was
going on in the chat rooms, and if something would apply, she
would then relay that to the actors.”
“The actors basically, in the very
first week, kicked out the web host,” Pape continues. “It
really led to a huge discussion about whether she should be
allowed back into the rehearsal space, and also caused one actor
to drop out because he felt like this was just a reality TV
show. So it took some time to make the adjustments.”
When Pape spoke to FilmStew, he
had not yet received confirmation from James Cameron that he
would be attending tonight’s premiere at the 1100-seat main
hall of Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Ironically,
for a film that exemplifies the very opposite end of the
spectrum from Sony’s Spider-Man 2 behemoth, L.A.
Twister was able to secure tonight’s prominent address
after plans to open the sequel in that hall changed.
Pape’s $500,000 production has been
picked up by Indican Pictures, the distributor that has also
handled The Girl Next Door, Boondock Saints as
well as the upcoming releases Face and Fabled.
Towards the end of July, L.A. Twister Movie will open in
San Francisco, Houston, Dallas and L.A., with Chicago and then
perhaps Portland as follow-on locales.
“We basically want to stay away from
New York until the movie has grown some legs, because it’s an
L.A. story and we think we’re going to get killed,” Pape
admits. Although Cameron may join other confirmed celebrities
tonight such as Christian Slater, Jason Lee and Erika
Christensen at the Grauman’s unveiling, the Berlin native
confesses he’s most excited about the presence of a different
kind of celebrity.
“The person that I’m most excited
about coming is Lamon Brewster, the heavyweight champion of the
world who just knocked out Klitschko and who’s going to fight
Tyson in a couple of months. I love boxing.”
With the current reality TV craze
showing no signs of abating, it would seem that the premise of L.A.
Twister is perfect fodder for the fall 2004 schedule. Pape
confesses that although he tried to set up pitch meetings for
the tangential marketing of his film project on the small
screen, he couldn’t get his foot in the door.
“We tried pitching L.A. Twister
as a TV angle before we got started, and we couldn’t get to
the right people,” says Pape. “It’s all about who you
know. But now that we have sort of a very good pitch piece,
we’re going to try and do an L.A. Twister 2 that has a
TV angle as well.”
Pape is in the process of closing a
deal for L.A. Twister with a German distributor and says
that same firm is looking at financing his next movie, a
modern-day Hitchcock thriller he plans to shoot in Nova Scotia
in 2005. Along with his efforts to get into Sundance, Pape says
his latest project was also short-listed by the 2004 Berlin Film
Festival.
Perhaps the most telling lessons for
all would-be filmmakers slash marketers out there is that Pape
quickly moved on from the rejection of Sundance and Berlin,
making sure to first come up with a hook that differentiated his
project in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
“I started to realize I needed to
find a different way to find an audience for this film, because
it’s kind of a tweener, in the sense that it’s not really a
festival film,” explains Pape. “It’s not a Whale Rider
and, at the same time, it’s not really a Hollywood studio film
because it doesn’t have the big stars attached.”
“It’s a very mainstream kind of
film that festivals don’t tend to play because they have
different missions or they have different things that they want
to portray in their event,” he adds. “And my film is not
necessarily a good fit with their agenda. So I kind of thought
to myself I needed to find a different way to stand out and find
a unique point of view, so that I can get an audience
emotionally interested in this little film. And that’s when we
came up with the idea of doing a play and a webcast and all that
stuff.”
So how did the critical small group of
Los Angeles alternative weekly and newspaper theater critics
react to L.A. Twister: Canolis & Cocoa when it
premiered at the beginning of May? Not well, says Pape.
“Reviewers didn’t understand the
project,” he insists. “They were looking at the play for the
sake of the play, and when we were trying to explain to them
that this is a process, that this play will change every week
based on what the web audience’s response is to it and the
directors trying to adjust to that, it never really sunk in.
Just flew right over their head.”
“I directed three [stage]
performances where I had the Internet audience chime in during
the show and have them give comments, as long as they were
addressed in character, that then influenced the way the play
was shaped,” Pape continues. “If someone said, ‘Hey Lenny,
I don’t believe a word you’re saying, I think you’re lying
to me,’ I would relay that back to the actors.”
Both Zack Ward (Lenny) and Tony Daly
(Ethan) made a small appearance as mirror images of their stage
namesakes during one of the shows at the Hollywood Boxing Club.
They have also gotten firmly behind the viral marketing of the
film to help fill those 1100 Grauman’s seats tonight, with
Daly’s connections as an L.A. nightclub promoter coming in
mighty handy.
In the end, tonight’s premiere of L.A.
Twister Movie in the shadow of Spider-Man 2 is a
testament to the ingenuity of Pape, someone whose marketing
instincts are accompanied with some good networking skills and a
willingness to take on free wheeling creative partners.
“There’s a scene in LA Twister where
they’re comparing Los Angeles to an atom,” says Pape with a
laugh, who cites Steven Soderbergh and Christopher Nolan as two
favorite directors. “You have all these electrons spinning in
circles and you only have this tiny bit of matter that actually
creates something. That’s kind of the metaphor that we use.”
[Every Wednesday, Richard Horgan’s FilmStew.com
opinion column “Hollywood Spin” takes a look at a notable
entertainment industry media, PR or marketing-driven event. To
reach the author, please email rhorgan@filmstew.com. To comment
on this week’s topic, please go to our Hollywood Spin
Discussion Board.]
