A movable festival

Sundance Film Festival founder Robert Redford says many outstanding independent films screen at Sundance each year that receive only extremely limited distribution -- or none at all -- because they are not easily marketable.

“There are films out there that are absolutely worth seeing,” he says.

To help some of those films reach a wider audience, as well as to take a slice of the Sundance experience to those outside Park City, Utah, the inaugural Sundance Film Series is bringing a slate of four films to 10 major cities, beginning Friday with “The Other Side of the Bed,” a musical bedroom farce from Spain. Each film will play for two weeks at a Loews Cineplex theater in each city, longer if audiences are large enough. In addition to Los Angeles and New York, the cities are San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Boston, Baltimore, Dallas, Detroit and Seattle.

“We’re taking films that were either missed in the marketplace or bypassed for whatever reasons ...,” Redford says. “We’re simply saying, ‘Let the audiences have a chance to see this is what’s out there.’ ”

The other films in the series are “In This World” (opening Sept. 19), Michael Winterbottom’s documentary-style account of two Afghan refugees; “Dopamine” (Oct. 10), a philosophical romance from first-time writer-director Mark Decena; and “Die Mommie Die!” (Oct. 31), an affectionate sendup of classic Hollywood melodramas, based on a play by Charles Busch.

After their theatrical runs, the films will be released on video and DVD through Sundance Channel Home Entertainment and will later play on Sundance Channel.

The series recalls the Shooting Gallery Film Series of a few years ago that notably nurtured “Croupier” into a breakout independent hit that grossed $6.2 million. But Redford says the Sundance Film Series is more an outgrowth of the festival and the aborted plan for a chain of Sundance Cinemas, which was announced in 1997 but fell apart when partner General Cinemas filed for bankruptcy in 2000. With the exhibition business in turmoil, other investors were scarce.

Sundance Channel, which put together the series, recruited four corporate sponsors -- Coca-Cola, Entertainment Weekly, Kenneth Cole and Volkswagen -- who will cover marketing costs for the films. Paula Freccero, senior vice president of film programming for Sundance Channel, estimates that, along with the promotional efforts of Loews, it will be the equivalent of a $3-million to $5-million advertising campaign for each film, much larger than these films would usually be given by a boutique distributor.

To encourage moviegoers to regard the four films as a series, Loews is selling “4-Pack” series passes at a 30% discount off the regular admission price that will be valid at any showing during the two-week run of each film, subject to seating availability.

Series’ site in L.A. area

In Los Angeles, the series will play at the Loews Cineplex Beverly Center, where the films will play in one of the multiplex’s two larger theaters at least for the first week. The filmmakers will travel to as many cities playing the series as they can, and instead of the usual 15 minutes of advertising and trailers for upcoming films, there will be a five-minute pre-show of commercials from the Sundance Film Series sponsors and a taped introduction by the filmmakers in which they elaborate on their films much as they would at a festival.

“The mantra from Robert Redford has been, ‘Wherever possible, let’s try to replicate the festival experience,’ ” says Larry Aidem, president and CEO of Sundance Channel. To further distinguish the series in multiplexes, theater managers will personally introduce the films, Kenneth Cole will outfit some of the theater staff and a separate waiting area will be set up for those holding series tickets.

If any of the films click during their two-week run, Sundance Channel and Loews will offer additional advertising support and extend the run in the initial 10 cities or expand into more, even into theaters other than Loews.

“We’re going to be very flexible,” says Loews Cineplex Theatres president and CEO Travis Reid, who also notes that Loews is offering a “filmmaker-friendly” distributor-exhibitor split on the box office with Sundance. Freccero says any profits in the first two weeks will be split between the filmmakers and the not-for-profit Sundance Institute; the sponsors and the for-profit Sundance Channel will not collect any money.

Where normally a distributor would deduct advertising costs before turning over profits, here “the filmmakers are going to make money off of the box office essentially from dollar one,” Freccero says. In programming the series, Sundance Channel wanted to represent the diversity of what is screened at the festival. “There was nothing really that was off-limits -- foreign-language, documentary, feature,” Freccero says.

Nor were the offerings to be limited to films that played at Sundance. “It’s meant to be the spirit of Sundance as much as it is meant to be literally coming out of Sundance,” she says. “The Other Side of the Bed” was scouted last year at Toronto and “In this World” at Berlin this year, where it won the top prize, the Golden Bear. At this year’s Sundance, their goal was not to compete for the higher-profile film with the larger players like Miramax and Fox Searchlight, “but to try and give a platform to films that we really thought were good and were solid and were deserving of an audience but that weren’t the flashiest kids on the block,” Freccero says.

However, unlike Shooting Gallery, which mainly acquired films on which other distributors had passed, the Sundance Film Series was competing with micro-distributors who might guarantee a release only in New York and Los Angeles. “Dopamine” and “Die Mommie Die!” both had other suitors at Sundance, but the filmmakers chose to go with the Sundance series.

“To me, for a little film like ours, to have the support of this organization and the sponsors was the best possible thing that could happen for us,” says “Die Mommie Die!” director Mark Rucker. “Other distributors didn’t have the ability to get the word out about the film as much as what this looks like it will do.” For “Die Mommie Die!,” a comedy in which playwright Busch (“The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife”) plays the female lead character in drag, the Sundance Film Series offered a distribution pattern outside of the traditional gay art-house circuit.

Thorough support

“Dopamine,” which intertwines an unfolding romance between a computer programmer and a kindergarten teacher with ruminations on the nature of love, stands as the first film to have Sundance support at every stage, from being developed at the writing and directing labs at the Institute to premiering at the festival and now being distributed by Sundance theatrically and later on home video and the channel. “It’s the one film in the mix that represents the total through-line from beginning to end for our commitment,” Redford says.

Although critical reaction to “Dopamine” was mixed at the festival, Freccero says word-of-mouth among audiences was strong. “One of the things we knew we were looking for was the quintessential American indie, the kind of film that you know was put together on passion and gumption that was well-written,” she says.

Director Decena says that without the involvement of Sundance he might not have ever made the film: “They were an inspiration for me to keep going.” Originally, Sundance Channel thought it would book the film series at independent art houses in each city rather than partner with a big theater chain like Loews, which had hosted the Shooting Gallery series for its three seasons in 2000 and 2001.

“We went over there skeptically,” Freccero says. (The Shooting Gallery company went belly-up in 2001.) The Shooting Gallery series “wasn’t in the greatest of theaters, and we didn’t really feel like they supported it all that well.” But Loews eagerly offered its best theaters in the biggest cities and a sizable amount of in-theater promotion.

Redford would like to continue the Sundance Film Series next fall and hopes eventually to revive plans for Sundance Cinemas. “We’re in an experimental stage right now,” says Redford, who sees a hunger for independent film from the audiences that come from across the country each year to the Sundance Film Festival. For the series, he says, “we put together a menu that’s as diverse as possible, saying, ‘Look, this is what’s out there in terms of independent film.’... But finally the test is going to come with the audience.”