From the Sandhills of Nebraska
to the sandwich boards of L.A.:
The Making and Distribution of
Omaha (the movie)

by Dan Mirvish


Carhenge!

"Carhenge! We've got to shoot a music video at Carhenge!" my musician friend Phil rang me up one day to tell me. Carhenge? What the hell is Carhenge? "An exact replica of Stonehenge made of old American cars stuck in the ground," Phil told me. "And it's just sitting there in western Nebraska." This definitely sounds like a cool location. Perhaps too cool for just a music video. What the hell, let's shoot a feature!

           In retrospect, I may as well have said, "What the hell, let's shoot, promote and distribute a feature." Because for the last four years, that's exactly what I've done.

           I had been at the expensive and overrated USC film school for a couple of years and had seen countless friends make incredible short films only to have agents and producers look at them and say "Yeah, but can you do a feature?" I figured that for all the time, money and energy that I would have spent on a short film (or even for a music video) I may as well shoot a feature-length film. Hell, this was the age where Robert Rodriguez could shoot El Mariachi for $7,000, right?


Say, this looks likes a good place to make a movie!

           So I figured, I'll end the movie at Carhenge (ala Mt. Rushmore in North-by-Northwest - only goofier), and I'll start the movie 400 miles to the east - in Omaha - because my parents still live there and at least I'll be able to get free room and board. All I needed was a script, a cast, a crew and of course some money.

           I wrote a pretty nutty script about a guy with an automobile-phobia who comes back from traveling abroad only to find his family still bickering in front of the TV set and his friends still with dead-end jobs. So he hooks up with an old girlfriend and the two of them get chased by a pair of down-on-their luck Colombian jewel thieves across Nebraska, and wind up - where? - at Carhenge.


Jill Anderson used to cut my hair in high school so I figured she'd be perfect for the part of Gina.

           I knew a few actors in town, and wrote some of the parts for non-actor friends of mine (who really did have dead-end jobs in Omaha). I set up a limited partnership and sold shares to local businessmen who liked the idea of a totally indigenous film that would showcase the city and state in all their glory - or at least that's what I told them.


I'd met Hughston Walkinshaw ('Simon' - seen here at the stockyards) a few years before - he and some pals from SUNY Purchase had started a cool theater group in Omaha called the Blue Barn, with whom Jill had done some work. Hughston and Jill had also both appeared on film in a farm slasher picture.



Lars Madsen (one of several people in the cast and crew with famous-sounding last names) was an old friend from high school who hadn't acted since the third grade. Curiously, he was not my first choice to play 'Lars.'

           I teamed up with local producer Dana Altman (who just so happened to be Robert Altman's grandson) and the two of us created the crew motto: "We want stuff. We want a lot of stuff. And we want it for free." Sure enough, we rallied the whole community behind us. The county government donated office and storage space at the local horsetrack (since it was the off-season); the city park service provided a crane on demand; and local businesses donated everything from free food for the entire shoot to a dolly, copier and fax machines, and numerous picture, camera and grip vehicles. A lot of these donations were prompted by product placement agreements, but it probably didn't hurt that we included cameo performances by the mayor of Omaha and the governor of Nebraska.


Omaha Mayor P.J. Morgan wanted to support the film so much, he asked to be in it. The motorcycle was his idea.

By the time we started shooting, we had only raised $40,000 and were prepared to shoot on a mixture of 16mm and Super8. Fortunately, Panavision in California generously donated two complete 35mm cameras for the entire shoot - easily worth double our entire budget. One of the biggest problems with shooting in Nebraska is that it's at least five-hundred miles away from the closest lab, camera house, source of rawstock or post-production facilities. Shipping bills alone would have torpedoed our meager budget, but a product placement deal saved us again when American Airlines agreed to give us free unlimited shipping.


To get the American Airlines deal, we had to show someone delivering a priority parcel to the airport counter. When the Red Robin restaurant said they'd give us a free lunch if we put their mascot in the movie, we decided to kill two birds with one stone, as it were.

           A lot of American indies succeed by being extremely well-planned and efficient productions that shoot two people in an apartment for eleven days. I made the mistake of writing an epic road story with dozens of characters and a new location for each of our thirty days of shooting. Of course, if none of the cast, crew and equipment are on a daily rate (or any rate at all, for that matter) then why not?


Producer Dana Altman wrangles one of the Panavision cameras away from one of the cowboys.

           The script was somewhat episodic, so it allowed for a lot of improvisation and spontaneity with myself and the actors. For example, while filming in Alliance, Nebraska, the crew heard at a local tavern that there was going to be a cattle drive going across the main road into town early the next day. So we set up both cameras and just hoped for the best. Sure enough, 97 cattle and eight fully-decked out cowboys on horseback crossed the road - and it didn't cost us a dime.

           One mistake I've seen in other indies is people trying to emulate Hollywood movies without the benefit of a Hollywood budget. Don't be ashamed of having an ultra low budget; take advantage of it. For example, I wanted the realism of the Colombian jewel thieves speaking Spanish, but I knew that real subtitles would cost too much money at the lab. So I came up with the idea of having a guy hold up handwritten subtitles at the bottom of the frame. Then I took this idea and pushed it to its rather illogical extreme: by the end of the movie, the subtitle guy becomes a character in the film.


Director of Photography Oslo "Andy" Anderson carefully frames the subtitle card in front of the Colombians (Christopher Dukes and Frankie Bee). This scene was shot at the Henry Doorly Zoo's Lied Jungle (look for it in Alexander Payne's "Election" too!).

           Shooting at Carhenge was quite an experience. "Friends of Carhenge" (a support group of sorts) organized free room and board for the entire cast and crew; the police blocked off streets; and a local plumbing company donated the use of a portable toilet.


One of the sadistic joys of directing was dropping a boot on Chris Duke's head. (Notice that the camera is turned sideways.)



We rewrote the ending of the film when we got to Carhenge. Jill's Dorothy-esque costume inspired us to come up with some appropos Wizard of Oz homages. (After all, the Wizard is based on Nebraska's Williams Jennings Bryant - that's why he flies back to Omaha!)

           But a few days after shooting there, we found out that the lab back in L.A. had inadvertently ruined about 600 feet of critical Carhenge footage. After a fair bit of cajoling, the insurance underwriter paid for us to charter a bus and go back to Carhenge the next week to reshoot - before the prospect of an early snow would have destroyed any semblance of continuity. Although we beat the snow, we didn't escape a blistering wind storm with gusts over 40mph in temperatures that dipped far below freezing. But we huddled together and finished the reshoot, keeping warm in the bus between every take. The moral? Make sure you're insured. Our final claim was over $27,000 and we used that money to pay a little something to everyone on the cast and crew in addition to the actual reshoot expenses.


The insurance company was so dubious that we were even making a film in Omaha, that they flew out an underwriter from New York. Dana impressed him by bringing him to our set, showing him the press we'd already gotten in Variety, and introducing him to the very charming Omaha film commissioners, Julie and Kathy.



Then again, there was the Zesto incident.



When we accidently drove our RV into the store, the damage didn't quite add up to our deductible. Besides, we were too embarassed to explain the situation to the insurance company.



           Our good luck continued into post-production. Paramount Pictures donated the use of two edit suites and all the upright Moviolas we could use. Like most of the other studios, Paramount is turning to more digital post systems, so they have piles of Moviolas just lying around. As for our soundmix, we found a company that needed a guinea pig to test out their new mixboard, so for an amazingly low rate (but with no real time pressure on our part), we got a top-notch sound job.

           The film was completed in September of 1994, and immediately took off with several successful screenings. An AIDS-benefit sneak preview in Omaha, a screening at the Independent Feature Film Market in New York, and the official premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival (near San Francisco) were all sold-out, standing-room-only showings of the film.


I could always tell how a screening was going by the response to the 'photography' scene. Rene Johnson and the rest of the 'family' rehearsed this scene quite a lot, and some of the best lines come from cast improvs.



Luckily, no one at Paramount sued us when Scott Kurz quoted one of the opening lines from Star Trek.

           After the IFFM, I was getting great calls from distributors interested in the film. Unfortunately, most of those conversations ended with the acquisitions person saying, "well, we love it, so just call us when you get into Sundance. We'll talk again then. See ya!" As you may have guessed by now, the film did not get into the Sundance Film Festival. Figuring that there was nothing to lose, I teamed up with Shane Kuhn and Jon Fitzgerald and Slamdance was born.

           Right before Slamdance, the film played at the Palm Springs Film Festival where Duane Byrge of The Hollywood Reporter reviewed it as, "A cerebral, collegiate spurt of irreverence...lubricated with a brainy satirical sensibility." I'm still not quite sure what Duane meant, but it was definitely a great review to stick on fliers for my Slamdance screenings.


I didn't think the septugenarian crowd at festivals like Palm Springs would dig the film, but surprisingly, it did well as well there as it did on college campuses.

           Slamdance was a terrific shot in the arm for Omaha (the movie). We were invited to numerous other festivals, including South-by-Southwest, Houston, Avignon, Florida, Edinburgh, Warsaw, Wales, Troia, Olympia, Oldenburg, etc. All told, it was 32 festivals, including 10 European ones and one in Canada. We even won $500 as the best feature prize at the Great Plains Film Festival in Lincoln, Nebraska (hey, Sundance doesn't have cash prizes!).

           Critical and festival success are great, but starting in May of 1995, Dana and I decided to test the film with the paying audience. Naturally, we started with our base of support. We called this the Federal Hill Strategy: That film had played at multiplexes in its hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, and based on its success there, got picked up by a national distributor.


It's tough to get distribution for a little independent film when it doesn't have 'big star' names. We tried to make up for that by giving our actors 'star treatment.'



You can't compete with Hollywood unless you spice things up with a little violence and police brutality.

           So we cut a trailer (for $800, using out-takes), designed newspaper ads, and used posters we'd gotten a local ad agency to make for free. We got great local press and had a very successful regional release in Nebraska: consistently beating out the likes of While You Were Sleeping, Rob Roy, and Bad Boys when we played at the state's largest theater complex, and we actually doubled the opening weekend gross of Batman Forever when the two films screened head-to-head. But when we called distributors to tell them the good news, it either wasn't good enough, or more discouraging, they said it was too good, and that we'd already used up the film's most natural audience.

           By this point, though, we already had a clue as to how to self-distribute a movie. Bruce Sinofsky, one of the directors of the self-distrib success story "Brothers Keeper" had given me great advice on a national self-distribution strategy. Between that, and our track record locally, we figured we might as well keep doing it ourselves.

           We expanded around the midwest, playing in multiplexes in small towns and more traditional arthouses in bigger cities: places like Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Carbondale, Rapid City, Kansas City and St. Louis. The advantage to the smaller towns was that newspaper ads cost a lot less, and local press was always favorable. We stretched our wings a bit geographically by getting bookings in places like Atlanta, Austin, Santa Fe, Phoenix, Seattle and finally in Los Angeles. Even in places where the local film critics weren't crazy about the film, we were usually able to get a friendly feature story about Slamdance or our self-distribution.

           All along the way, I would use the Malcolm X strategy of shameless self-promotion: By any means necessary. For example, our run in Phoenix happened to start three days after the University of Nebraska football team was to play for the national championship at the Fiesta Bowl (just three blocks from the theatre). So I went to Phoenix in time for the game, and stood in front of the stadium all day wearing a sandwich-board and passing out fliers as some 50,000 Husker fans streamed past me. Let me tell you that independent film and NCAA football do not have a huge demographic overlap. But something must have worked, as the film got held over at the theatre for 6 weeks.

           That sandwich-board came in handy for our LA screenings as well. The film opened at Laemmle's Grand theatre in downtown, as well as playing as a midnight show at the Sunset 5. To help get people to go downtown for our big LA premiere, I offered a discount to anyone wearing a Nebraska shirt, and in a fit of dadaistic frivolity, I threw raw steak and corn-on-the-cob at the audience.

           One interesting thing about the LA screenings was that my friend Paul Rachman bugged me into playing his short film "Drive Baby Drive" before my own screenings. (Paul and I had met because we had screened our films together at the first Slamdance, as well as at several other festivals.) Since the total running time was still relatively short, Laemmle's didn't really care, and I figured Paul could help pass out fliers (though he was never actually brave enough to don the sandwich-board). Omaha (the movie) wound up playing for 11 weeks in Los Angeles at the various Laemmle's theatres, longer than in any other city.


Making a movie is fun and exhausting. Distributing it is just exhausting.

           Foreign sales still have not materialized to date, but at least television has done well: in addition to a few successful airdates on Nebraska Public TV, the film was inexplicably picked up by the Sundance Channel. Yes, the Sundance Channel. And even more bizarre is if you look at their program guide, it says that Omaha (the movie) screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Well, I knew I'd get in eventually.

          

           Portions of this article were originally published in the spring, 1995 issue of the British magazine "Savvy." For more information on the self-distribution of Omaha (the movie) please refer to the April and May, 1997, issues of the AIVF's "Independent Film and Video Monthly Magazine," as well as the Fall, 1996, issue of "Filmmaker Magazine."