The ‘Time’ Is Now? An Experiment May Point Film in a New Direction

As experiments go, this one is off to a promising start.

That’s the ebullient feeling at Screen Gems these days after the surprisingly strong reviews and small-scale box-office success garnered by British director Mike Figgis’ experimental film, “Time Code.”

The movie, shot entirely with hand-held digital cameras in a single continuous take with no editing and then shown on a quadruple-split screen, has drawn enthusiastic crowds ranging from film buffs to the simply curious in six North American cities since opening April 28. On its maiden weekend, “Time Code” pulled in $93,148, with a hefty average of $13,307 per screen on only seven screens, including the Nuart in Los Angeles. (It took in almost $8,000 per screen in its second week.) Through last weekend, it had grossed $190,635.

Now, Sony Pictures Entertainment, parent company of Screen Gems, plans to test whether the film can appeal to a wider segment of the moviegoing public. Today, the studio plans to expand the film into 17 additional cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolisand Dallas.

“I think ‘Time Code’ can break out of its perceived enclosure,” Figgis said this week in a phone interview from London. “The attendance continues to be brisk and it has had a lot of publicity. I think word-of-mouth is strong.”

Meanwhile, Sony studio chief John Calley, an early backer of digital filmmaking, is so jazzed with the possibilities presented by “Time Code,” which cost roughly $3 million to make, that he is considering other similar ventures, although he declined to give any details.

Calley said digital filmmaking might be the solution to spiraling production costs that plague all the major studios, where the average cost of producing a film has soared above $50 million.

“On a film like ‘Godzilla,’ we shipped $13 million worth of prints,” Calley noted. “There will certainly come a day that that won’t be the protocol any longer. We will be sending our signals to theaters through satellites or other means.”

Industry observers say Sony is smart to “platform” the film--gradually increasing the number of theaters it is shown in--rather than going for a wide release pattern.

“This is not the kind of movie you dump in 2,000 theaters and expect the whole country to eat it up,” noted Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box-office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc.

Figgis, who wrote, directed and scored the movie, said he is “really very gratified” by the generally positive response of critics. Entertainment Weekly, for example, called the movie “enthralling,” while Variety described it as “a fascinating, sometimes exhilarating, experiment.”

Part mystery, part drama--and sprinkled with humor--”Time Code” tells four stories simultaneously, each unfolding in real-time, in exactly the length of a 93-minute digital videocassette.

The film revolves around four main characters--Stellan Skarsgard as a philandering motion picture executive; Saffron Burrows as his wife; Salma Hayek as an aspiring actress in the midst of an affair; and Jeanne Tripplehorn as an angry woman whose actions will change all of their fates.

It’s Marketed as a

Sort of Film ‘Event’

In marketing the film, Screen Gems has tried to give the film the flavor of an event.

“We’ve done a lot of experimental outreach,” said Valerie Van Galder, executive vice president of marketing for Screen Gems. “During the production, we had America Online on the set. We set up a live chat so people on AOL could have a live chat with the actors before they went on the movie. We had a Webcam. People on the Internet could see what was going on.”

The film “premiered” at the first Yahoo Internet Life Online Film Festival in Los Angeles, where the screening was so overbooked that the overflow theater in the Directors Guild of America had to be used and an additional screening was added immediately following the premiere.

Figgis then went on a four-city “live-sound-mix” tour, mixing the sound live in front of audiences, including one at the Nuart.

Asked what he has learned from the experiment, Figgis said he believes the quality of low-end digital cameras (the one Figgis used cost about $11,000) is so good that filmmakers won’t have to utilize high-end cameras that cost upward of $100,000.

The biggest problem facing digital filmmaking, he said, is distribution. “The studio system has a sort of benevolent monopoly on distribution. They are not exactly welcoming 22-year-old filmmakers right now because they don’t need any more product.”

Figgis, who wrote and directed the 1995 film “Leaving Las Vegas,” said he is now toying with the idea of going further--releasing a digital film in monthly or biweekly installments on the Internet.

“I’m playing around with the idea that would initially be for the Internet but would come together in a feature-length film almost like a Dickens novel written for monthly magazines where you write a chapter and then another chapter,” he said.