Digital’s ‘Tadpole’ Phase

When Gary Winick took Sigourney Weaver to lunch at the Payard Bistro here, he simply wanted her to star in his new film, “Tadpole.” But he did even better. The actress not only agreed to take the part, but snagged the restaurant as a location for a key scene in the film.

“We wanted to shoot a scene where the women in the film have tea at the Plaza Hotel,” Winick recalled over lunch at a considerably more downscale eatery around the corner from his mixing studio. “And Sigourney said, ‘What about this place?’ And before I knew it, she’d introduced herself to the manager and got him to agree to let us shoot there.”

Due in theaters July 19, “Tadpole” is a clever coming-of-age comedy about a precocious 15-year-old schoolboy (portrayed by Aaron Stanford) who becomes infatuated with Weaver, his fortysomething stepmother. Shot in 14 days for $200,000, the film was the Cinderella story of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it was a hit with critics and audiences, setting off a bidding war that culminated in a $5-million sale to Miramax.

The film’s success is a long-awaited triumph for Winick, who’s been scuffling on the indie-film fringes for years. After attending the American Film Institute in the 1980s, where he produced a thesis film for Carl Franklin, Winick has directed five obscure movies, none of which had gotten into Sundance, much less made any real money.

When Winick went to Sundance this January, he didn’t even have an agent.

But after Miramax bought the film and Winick won the festival’s best director award, his stock soared. “I got calls from people I could never get on the phone, met agents who’d never wanted to represent me,” he explained. “I had presents on my doorstep every day. It felt totally unreal.”

The success of “Tadpole” was more than a personal credibility boost. It was a huge breakthrough for InDigEnt, the New York-based company founded by Winick, attorney John Sloss and the Independent Film Channel, which has become the industry’s digital filmmaking leader. In an era when Hollywood is more corporate than ever, InDigEnt functions like an artistic collective. Nearly everyone who works on a movie, from makeup artist to producer, is--gasp--a profit participant in the film. As Winick puts it: “We all get our money back at the same time, which makes us all like Steven Spielberg.”

When the company was launched in 1999, industry observers scoffed. After all, filmmakers are notoriously bad businessmen and most artist-run companies have ended in failure. High-profile examples include the Directors Co. (Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin) and First Artists (Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, Sidney Poitier).

But Winick and Sloss saw an opportunity to attract young talent by marrying the rock-bottom economics of digital video with the creative intimacy of the medium. A savvy entrepreneur who’s helped secure financing or distribution for such films as “Boys Don’t Cry” and “The Deep End,” Sloss went to IFC, which was looking for a way to brand its cable channel as a top purveyor of indie films.

IFC production vice president Caroline Kaplan agreed to finance a package of five InDigEnt films, budgeted at $150,000 each. In return, IFC agreed to give the filmmakers an unprecedented 50% of the films’ first-dollar gross. Sloss then sold the distribution rights to the five-film package to Lions Gate.

InDigEnt’s collective spirit helped lure a host of gifted actors and directors willing to work for scale in return for artistic control and profit participation. The five-film package included “Chelsea Walls,” directed by Ethan Hawke and co-starring Uma Thurman and Kris Kristofferson; “Tape,” directed by Richard Linklater and co-starring Hawke and Thurman; and “Final,” directed by Campbell Scott and co-starring Denis Leary and Hope Davis.

The next batch of films included “Tadpole” and “Personal Velocity,” a Rebecca Miller-directed film that’s being distributed by United Artists. Three more films are on the way, also bankrolled by IFC.

Thanks to “Tadpole’s” Sundance sale, a host of crew members, including the script supervisor, makeup artist and gaffer, are getting $50,000 checks, paid in three installments, with the biggest check due upon the film’s release.

“Our makeup person got to make a down payment on a house in Brooklyn,” says Winick. “By independent film standards, the money is definitely a big deal. This whole company is an experiment, and the jury’s still out on how long it will last, but it’s an experiment that could help push the medium in a new direction.”

I must admit that until meeting Winick, my eyes had glazed over during previous encounters with digital video proselytizers. After all, the only time you really notice that a film’s been shot in digital video is when it looks awful.

Until now, DV’s biggest drawing card has been its low-budget economics and artistic flexibility: Steven Soderbergh told friends recently that when he wanted to cut 10 minutes out of his new DV film, “Full Frontal,” he did it in an hour on his Apple computer. But Winick argues that digital video isn’t just an economic boon for filmmakers, but a creative tool as well.

“Digital video gives you a way of bypassing the formality of the filmmaking process,” says Winick. “The stories that work for digital video are intimate and performance-oriented, stories where you can use multiple cameras and a small crew. Digital video allows you to be more spontaneous and creative because you’ve eliminated a lot of the gigantic machinery involved in taking an idea from conception to film.”

At InDigEnt, digital video is clearly actor-oriented. One reason Weaver agreed to do “Tadpole” was that she could shoot her whole part in 10 days--she spent almost as much time rehearsing as she did filming. When Winick shot an important scene between Weaver and co-star Bebe Neuwirth in Central Park, he had three cameras running simultaneously. If he’d been making a traditional film, Winick would’ve had to stop and regroup after each take. Then an assistant would hold a clapper board in front of the camera with a slate identifying the new take. Operating with three digital cameras, each the size of a pitcher of water, Winick used one slate and shot continuously for 40 minutes, making adjustments as he went along.

“Without slating every time the scene ends, you keep the actors in the mood, so everything is about the performance,” he explained. “The tape costs $10, so you don’t worry about how much you shoot. And there isn’t this big mythical camera and a lot of lights that take time to set up. It’s this little plastic camera that falls on the ground every once in a while and we pick it up and keep going, so everything feels a lot less precious for both the actors and the filmmaker.”

The unobtrusiveness of digital equipment also proved a pivotal sales tool. The InDigEnt team wanted to shoot “Chelsea Walls” at the fabled Chelsea Hotel, but the hotel’s owner was wary about having his establishment overrun by a mass of cables, dollies and other camera equipment. “He kept saying no until I physically brought one of our cameras over and he looked at it and said, ‘That’s it?’ ” Winick recalls. “Once he saw the camera, everything was OK.”

Digital video technology still has its drawbacks--cinematographers are still learning how to use light and move the camera. Variety’s early review of “Tadpole” complained about the film’s technical flaws, and Winick acknowledges that Miramax has spent $250,000--more than it cost to shoot the entire film--on a new sound mix.

For Winick, the biggest benefit of digital video is that it helped reinvigorate his creative process. He’d spent years making films about dark, complicated characters, but the movies never found an audience. Knowing he needed a script he could shoot in two weeks, Winick sought out a simpler, more accessible story.

“Tadpole,” he says, “is like a novella. It’s very simple, with no subplots and very little psychology. After trying to make all these serious statement films, I realized there’s a value in making people laugh.”

He starts to laugh, a laugh directed entirely at himself. “For years my father’s been saying, ‘Gary, why don’t you just make a movie with a happy ending?’ I hate to say it, but maybe he was right. After getting nowhere year after year, now I’ve got the Venice Film Festival calling, saying they want two InDigEnt films--and they didn’t even ask to see them first!”

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“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.