A young director gets an education

Frank E. Flowers had his Hollywood bar mitzvah at the Toronto International Film Festival, which ended its 10-day run Sunday. “People kept saying that showing my movie here would affect the rest of my life,” the self-possessed 25-year-old USC film school graduate told me just hours before his first feature film, “Haven,” debuted at the Elgin Theater. “Everyone kept saying, ‘Don’t [mess] up, don’t drink too much, don’t say the wrong thing.’ ”

Like the Sundance Film Festival in the winter and the Cannes Film Festival in the spring, Toronto has become one of the pivotal launching pads for selling a film to one of the dozens of indie film companies and studio specialty divisions that flock to the festival each year, looking for the new “Amores Perros” or “Napoleon Dynamite.” The debut of “Haven,” which happens to costar “Lord of the Rings” heartthrob Orlando Bloom, was easily the most tumultuous scene of the festival. Long before the film started, the 1,300-seat theater was surrounded by hordes of hysterical teenage girls, screaming anytime anyone remotely resembling Bloom emerged from a limousine.

When Bloom finally arrived, Beatlemania-style bedlam ensued. After I got to my seat, I found myself next to two local girls, armed with a digital camera, who had paid a scalper $55 for a pair of tickets to the movie. I asked Sacha Roman, a 20-year-old student at the University of Toronto, why she was such a big Bloom fan. She sighed. “Just look at him!” The Elgin wasn’t packed just with Bloom groupies. As I wandered around the theater, I ran into top executives from Focus Films, Fox Searchlight and Warner Independent, many strategically perched on an aisle seat, making it easier to slip out of the theater, either to phone in an early bid or make a quick getaway, depending on how the film played.

“Haven” is a classic study in the unpredictable nature of festival buying mania. In the days before its Sept. 11 debut screening, it was one of the top films on every acquisition executive’s list. A romantic thriller set in the Cayman Islands, the movie was bankrolled by Bob Yari, a former real estate magnate who has emerged as a major indie film financier. “Haven,” which cost roughly $5 million to make, is one of the first projects from El Camino Pictures, a Yari-backed company formed in partnership with William Morris Independent’s Cassian Elwes and Rena Ronson. (Flowers is a client at the Morris agency, which signed him out of college.)

In fact, the film owes its very existence to the allure of film festivals. When Flowers, a Cayman Islands native, took his short film, “Swallow,” to Sundance in 2003, he was dazzled by several small films he saw there, in particular “Whale Rider” and “Raising Victor Vargas,” which starred Victor Rasuk, who Flowers cast as a fast-talking Cayman hustler in “Haven.” “After seeing how those movies told stories about a specific culture, I thought, ‘I could do that too,’ ” he explains. “I could go to the islands -- my islands -- and tell a story that’s my own.”

Like so many gifted young directors, Flowers has an infectious enthusiasm -- he’s as good a salesman as he is filmmaker. After he wrote “Haven,” he showed the script to then-Dimension executive Robbie Brenner. She liked it so much that she quit her job to produce the film. Aleen Keshishian, Bloom’s manager at the Firm, was so taken by the script that when Bloom was in her office, she made him watch Flowers’ short.

Bloom wanted to play the role of a lovelorn young dock worker, which had been written for a teenage black Cayman Islander. So Flowers rewrote 70 pages of the script, transforming the dock worker into a 25-year old Brit whom Bloom could play. Even before Bloom signed on, Flowers got a commitment from Bill Paxton to play a shady businessman who flees to the islands from Miami with his pot-smoking teenage daughter and $1 million in cash. “Bill was really cool,” Flowers said. “After he read the script, he met me in a hotel, shook my hand and said, ‘I’m going to do your movie, so let’s talk about some other stuff.’ All he wanted to do was help the film.”

Flowers made the film in the Caymans at the end of last year, shooting 300 scenes in 29 days to accommodate a window in Bloom’s busy schedule. And in fact, the Caymans were on his mind in the jittery hours before his film’s premiere. That same night Hurricane Ivan was bearing down on the islands, packing 140 mph winds. Although Flowers’ parents and younger sister were with him here, the rest of his extended family and close friends remained on the islands.

Throughout the evening, he received a series of increasingly harrowing phone calls from the woman who was staying at his parents’ home, with reports of damage to the house and homes of his friends living in neighboring areas. “It was rough on me emotionally,” Flowers said, “because I’d get some awful news from the island and then someone would say, ‘You have an interview with Premiere magazine in 15 minutes.’ I have to admit that I cried myself to sleep every night.”

When the limo drivers got lost on the way to the premiere, Flowers finally lost his cool. He jumped out of the limo and began pounding on the door of the lead limousine, which was ferrying Paxton and other cast members. “I was yelling, ‘Turn the [stupid] car around! I’m from the Cayman Islands and even I know you’re going the wrong way!’ ”

At the screening, the film received rousing applause, as did Flowers and the cast when they took a bow on stage afterward. But when I scanned the area where I’d seen the acquisition executives before the screening, the seats were empty. The buyers had fled.

What happened? When I spoke to buyers afterward, they voiced a chorus of complaints. At nearly two hours, the film felt too long, with too little focus, hampered by an unwieldy multiple flashback structure. Even worse, from a commercial point of view, Bloom, the film’s meal ticket, was absent from long stretches of the film.

Flowers clearly has considerable talent as a filmmaker, but he had succumbed to something you often see from first-time directors: He tried to put too much technique and too many of his favorite stories into one film. As the review in Variety put it: “A seesaw chronology and generally chaotic approach plagues ‘Haven’ ... [which has] a disastrous time-shifting structure that proves nearly impossible to follow.”

Before Flowers and Bloom left the screening, Flowers knew he had fixes to make. After arriving at a fashionable club for a post-premiere party, Flowers huddled outside under some heat lamps with Bloom, Yari and Morris’ Elwes and Ronson, who serve as Yari’s consultants on El Camino Films. Flowers lobbied Yari to let him have the time and money to make another pass at the film. Without any substantial offers from major buyers, it seemed to be the best course of action.

“Taking the movie back was my decision,” says Flowers. “I said, ‘Please guys, don’t sell it now. This is the story of my life. We’ll never have another chance to work on it without a lot of outside influences.’ So I want to bring in a new editor and some fresh eyes and really tighten it up.”

It’s still possible, since so few films were sold here this year, that a company hungry for the DVD sales potential of an Orlando Bloom film could buy “Haven” over the next few weeks. But did William Morris and Yari miscalculate by putting “Haven” up for sale when it clearly needed more work? Many of the buyers were surprised that a veteran impresario like Elwes would put the film on the block in such a rough state.

Elwes insists the debut was not premature. “We’re filmmaker friendly and Frankie is very passionate about the film, so we gave him the benefit of the doubt,” he explains. “We know there’s a great movie in there.”

Elwes argues that the film is by no means damaged goods, saying that Sundance officials saw the film here and would love to show it at their festival. In fact, a number of films have flopped in their festival debut and still found life afterward. Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov’s “Burnt by the Sun” played at Cannes, didn’t sell, was reworked and not only sold to Sony, but went on to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. “Memento” didn’t sell at several film fests, yet went on to become a big indie hit.

“All those acquisition guys will be eating their words later on,” says Elwes. “They’re the same geniuses who passed on ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’ and ‘Memento,’ which went on to be huge hits.”

Flowers has a bumpy road ahead. Even after he reedits the film, he’ll have to survive another trial by fire in the chilly air at Sundance.

“It’s really tough when your premiere is also your first screening,” he says with a sigh. “But I think everyone’s seen the diamond that’s in this movie. Now I have to find a way to bring it more to the surface.”