Dennis Lee champions his indie ‘Fireflies’

Just a few years out of film school with an award-winning short in his backpack, Dennis Lee moved from New York to Hollywood at age 36 to make movies. Met with the usual crescendo of rejection, he cobbled together $500,000 from family and friends to direct “Fireflies in the Garden,” the first screenplay he had written.

Just weeks before he was to start shooting his tale about a domineering father’s lasting impact on his family, Senator Entertainment, an American offshoot of a German film company, said it would give Lee $8 million to make the film.

“It was an amazing thing,” Lee said. “I couldn’t believe it.” Other remarkable news soon followed: Julia Roberts agreed to star, heading a cast that included Willem Dafoe, Ryan Reynolds, Emily Watson, Carrie-Anne Moss and Hayden Panettiere. Cameras rolled in Bastrop, Texas, in early 2007.

Lee’s luck didn’t last. What looked like a storybook Hollywood welcome soon turned into a four-year ordeal, with “Fireflies” nearly consigned to the direct-to-video display at the local Target after a troubled film-festival debut and financial problems at Senator. But now, thanks to a campaign by Lee and his supporters (including Roberts and her cinematographer husband, Danny Moder, who shot “Fireflies”), the film will arrive in theaters this weekend — months after it debuted in Turkey, Greece and Indonesia.

“As frustrating and agonizing and confusing as the years have been,” Roberts said, “I feel it has all been worth the effort.” Backed by a limited promotional campaign raised by the “Fireflies” filmmakers and some of its producers, the movie opens Friday in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Austin.

“Honestly, I’m just kind of numb,” said Lee, now 41, who was inspired to write the film about a troubled family after his mother was killed in a car accident. “I want to be thrilled, but I’m numb — numb and happy.”

Part of the attraction of independent filmmaking is the freedom to work outside the studio system, with its screenplay notes, casting approvals and marketing imperatives. Yet studios rarely run out of money and close their doors — the fate that befell Senator not long after it opened for business.

Before Senator folded in the summer of 2009, it produced and said it would distribute several films — “The Informers” with Billy Bob Thornton, the science-fiction story “Splice” with Adrien Brody, the thriller “Unthinkable” with Samuel L. Jackson, the crime drama “Brooklyn’s Finest” with Richard Gere and the horror tale “All the Boys Love Mandy Lane.” The company had big plans for “Fireflies,” whose title comes from a Robert Frost poem central to the story, but they were derailed by a series of events, the first of which was the movie’s devastating premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in early 2008.

Senator was hoping a strong Berlin reception would boost the prospects for “Fireflies” around the globe, but festival reviewers — particularly the critics for Hollywood’s trade newspapers — savaged the film. “The movie is one long argument, tiresome and repetitive, that produces more heat than light,” Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt wrote. Lee said the film was not his preferred cut but one assembled by Senator for foreign distributors. “I had never read reviews like that,” Lee said.

Senator couldn’t raise marketing and distribution money as the global financial crisis hit, and the poor April 2009 opening for “The Informers” — a U.S. gross of just $300,000 — sealed the company’s fate. As Senator’s assets were sorted out, “Fireflies” landed at Sony Pictures, where it was earmarked for a straight-to-video release.

The Berlin festival cut of the film debuted in theaters around the world in 2008 and 2009, while Lee and several members of his “Fireflies” team tried to stage an intervention, seeking to find a way to show “Fireflies” in U.S. theaters before Sony released it on video. “Honestly, we got tired of answering the question, ‘When is your movie coming out?’” Lee said.

“We were tangled up in a legal and financial nightmare. No one quite knew who owned the film. Everyone claimed ownership, but no one could produce the papers,” said Lee, who during the effort to regain control of “Fireflies” adapted his award-winning short, “Jesus Henry Christ,” into a feature film about a single mother (Toni Collette), her genius son and sperm donor father (Michael Sheen) that is now looking for a distributor. Lee, who has two young children, said he has struggled to make ends meet. “Those were tough financial times for everyone, myself included,” he said.

Eventually, Lee reverted to the same “Fireflies” strategy he briefly employed to make the movie — he turned to friends, family and the film’s cast and crew to re-cut the film and underwrite its theatrical release. “Everyone got behind it — and no one more so than Julia,” Lee said. He re-cut the film with editor Rob Brakey over several weeks this year; Sony plans to release that cut on video.

While the version of the film released this weekend is not dramatically different from the film shown in Berlin, Lee and Roberts said it is more nuanced and relatable. The Berlin cut, Roberts said, “was tragically convoluted and confusing — I’m glad it’s not what people will come away with.”

Of particular import to Lee is how Reynolds’ character, a novelist, struggles to reconcile his feelings for his domineering father (Dafoe). The director hopes audiences will come away from the film appreciating their families — even those with flaws — more.

As for Lee, he has a new appreciation for Hollywood. “In the four years it has taken to get this movie out, I’ve learned a lot about the business of film,” Lee said. “If you let it, the business of film can be a soul-crushing experience. What you have to do is turn the whole thing on its head. And with this film, we did.”

Said Roberts: “I can’t believe that the time has finally arrived. It’s such a great victory for this little movie.”

john.horn@latimes.com