Can a Short Reel Hook Big Fish on Riviera?

Curiosity about Julie Taymor’s film directing debut, “Titus,” has been building for months, so when she scheduled her first screening here Sunday, the room was packed. Representatives from nearly all the independent distributors were there, as well as at least one major studio--all eager to see what the director who brought “The Lion King” so vividly to Broadway would do with Shakespeare’s most violent play, “Titus Andronicus.”

The lights dimmed. The footage rolled. And just 14 minutes later, it was over. The audience shuffled out, making way for another crowd that had come to get the same brief glimpse of the soon-to-be-completed film.

“This is to give a taste--that’s all,” Taymor said at a press conference later that also featured Jessica Lange, who headlines the film with Anthony Hopkins. “The [whole] film is a lot better.”

Taymor’s comments raised the question: Why give potential buyers just a peek if the full view will be more compelling? It’s part of a coy game she and the company that financed the $20-million film--billionaire Paul Allen’s Clear Blue Sky Productions--play in Cannes along with many other filmmakers: It’s called trying to sell your wares without fully revealing them.

Major studios do it. Disney showed about 40 minutes of “Armageddon” here last year to whet the appetites of international distributors; similar partial showings occurred in years past with “Showgirls” and “Evita.”

Smaller production companies, meanwhile, show short reels to hook U.S. distributors. At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, for example, Fox Searchlight paid about $5 million after seeing 20 minutes of “Boys Don’t Cry,” a movie about a girl in a rural town who masquerades as a boy. And sources say Miramax paid more than that after seeing just a few minutes of “Outside Providence,” an Alec Baldwin movie to be released this summer.

“Titus,” too, lacks distribution, which is why its sales agent, Overseas Film Group, brought it here even though it’s not yet complete. But what’s happened since the brief reel screened four times on Sunday is a good case study in the advantages and drawbacks of that strategy.

The upside is simple: the potential for so-called festival frenzy. By showing less than one-eighth of their film here, where all the acquisitions executives are gathered together like beans in a pressure cooker, “Titus” sales agents are hoping to create an urgency that will lead to a quick and profitable sale.

But the drawbacks are also well-known: Showing only snippets raises suspicions. People in Hollywood who have read the “Titus” script, which follows the fate of Roman general Titus Andronicus (Hopkins) and his vengeful relationship with the Queen of the Goths (Lange), say it is far more bloody than the 14-minute clip revealed. Some wonder if the filmmakers have something to hide.

“A company that flies movie stars to France on a Sunday, throws a big party and shows a fully mixed 20 minutes doesn’t entirely seem to trust its product,” said one acquisitions executive who saw the reel. “In general, if a movie works you don’t sell it based on a trailer. If it’s broken, this is the right thing to do.”

Jody Patton, president of Clear Blue Sky Productions and an executive producer of the film, was unfazed by such comments.

“I have utmost confidence that this [14 minutes] will transport people and whet their appetites,” she said. “I’m really proud of ‘Titus.’ ”

Shot on location in Rome and Croatia, the film--which stays true to Shakespeare’s language but mixes ancient and contemporary sets and costumes--is commanding a high price here. Distributors said the producers are asking from $7 million to $10 million for U.S. rights, $3 million for France and $3 million for Germany, among other territories. As of late Monday, a day after the screening, U.S. rights had not been bought.

Depending on how much you plan to spend to advertise a film, if you pay $10 million for its U.S. rights, you need to make back roughly $25 million at the box office to break even. And while everyone here agreed that what they’d seen of “Titus” was visually stunning--a Taymor specialty evidenced in “Lion King” and various opera productions--few seemed to feel sure it could do that kind of business.

“It looks fantastic,” said one acquisitions executive. “But Shakespearean English is tough. And could you tell what it’s about?”

Another exec from a different company said the footage was original, while vaguely reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann’s vibrant “Romeo & Juliet.” But this executive noted that unlike Luhrmann’s film, “Titus” has no Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes to draw in young viewers.

The plot line of “‘Titus,” which includes murder, rape and dismemberment, is dark. And unlike “Romeo” or the recently released “A Midsummer’s Night Dream,” “Titus” is one of Shakespeare’s least-produced plays and barely known to audiences.

Meanwhile, more than one potential buyer said that the decision to show an unfinished portion of the film in itself made them a bit suspicious.

Noted one film executive: “You can cut a 20-minute trailer out of anything. I saw 20 minutes of a movie in Milan that I thought was another ‘The Commitments.’ I saw it here yesterday and it wasn’t even [worthy of] English TV.”

Producer Christine Vachon, whose New York-based Killer Films made “Boys Don’t Cry,” said that showing part of an unfinished film is “always a risk--you don’t want to get a reputation as somebody who baits and switches. At the end of the day, you must be showing [footage] that really represents the film.”