On an end run around critics

Can a small art-house picture ever find an audience without a boost from the top New York and L.A. film critics?

That’s the question facing Picturehouse Films, the new specialty division run by indie-film wizard Bob Berney, which just released “The Chumscrubber,” a barbed satire about the gulf between teenagers and their parents. Directed by first-time filmmaker Arie Posin and loaded with top actors, including Glenn Close, Ralph Fiennes, Allison Janney and Rita Wilson, as well as “Billy Elliot’s” Jamie Bell, it was on the list of must-see films when it arrived at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

But when “The Chumscrubber” played Sundance it took a beating. The New York Times’ A.O. Scott dismissed it as “a dreadful movie.” Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers said “the film sent me screaming into the snow.” Variety’s Scott Foundas called it a “smug, shrill, over-the-top farce.”

That didn’t stop Berney, the Svengali behind such unlikely hits as “The Passion of the Christ,” “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and “Monster,” from backing the movie -- after all, “The Passion” and “Greek Wedding” made untold millions without any raves from the critical pantheon. Still, burdened with a puzzling title and prickly subject matter destined to turn off many adults, “The Chumscrubber” was a particularly tough sell -- an R-rated art-house film for teenagers, a genre that has rarely made anyone a dime.

So when Picturehouse opened the film Aug. 5, it tried a backdoor regional release, bypassing Los Angeles and New York entirely. Instead, it launched the movie in eight smaller cities, including Orlando, Phoenix, Portland, Dallas and Milwaukee. “When you’re facing daunting odds, you have to try something different,” explains Berney. “I liked the movie personally, but we knew from the critic response that we’d be dead if we started in L.A. and New York.”

Berney knew the odds were long. But not every film that’s taken a drubbing from top critics has gone down in flames. In 2001, when Berney was running Newmarket Films, he released “Donnie Darko,” which despite bad reviews went on to be a cult hit and a moneymaker in its DVD release. Fox Searchlight did even better with “Napoleon Dynamite.” When the film debuted at Sundance in 2004, it was greeted with critical catcalls, led by a vitriolic review from Variety’s Todd McCarthy. But even though the adult art-house audience never embraced the film, Searchlight kept it in release for months, turning it into a huge word-of-mouth hit.

It’s easy to see why Berney wasn’t willing to give up on “The Chumscrubber.”

It has attracted some influential supporters, from the “Today” show’s Katie Couric to Elvis Mitchell, who recently had Posin show the picture to his film class at Harvard. In addition to its stellar cast, it has a pair of well-connected producers: Bonnie Curtis, a longtime Steven Spielberg associate, and Lawrence Bender, Quentin Tarantino’s producing partner.

Most important, it feels like the work of a filmmaker with something to say. Though it has its flaws, “The Chumscrubber” is a smart, black-comic portrait of a lost generation of overmedicated kids cut off from their self-absorbed parents. It does what satire does best -- it helps you see something important in our culture, in this case the disintegration of the American family, in a fresh light. As Jim Lane wrote in the Sacramento Bee earlier this month, the film “is a true original -- bleakly funny, exhilaratingly unpredictable and, by the end, strangely optimistic.”

Its portrayal of a suburbia teetering out of control is viewed through the shrewd eye of a pop anthropologist. Although Posin grew up in all-American Orange County, he is the son of a Russian filmmaker who spent six years in a labor camp for his anti-Communist politics. This background gives him the same stranger-in-a-strange-land perspective found in many gifted film satirists, from Billy Wilder to Mike Nichols. Born just after his parents fled Russia, Posin, 35, moved to Irvine as a boy after living in Israel and Canada. He was immediately struck by the airy unreality of affluent America, a land where he imagined anything -- good or bad -- could easily happen.

“One of the film’s big inspirations was what happened at Columbine, because it felt like such a carbon copy of the Irvine I grew up in,” says Posin, who shares story credit on the film with Zach Stanford, who wrote the screenplay. “Being an immigrant, you felt all the alienation every teenager feels, but even more sharply. There was always the sense that whenever you’d walk into anyone’s house, there was something secret going on beneath the surface -- drug abuse, affairs, criminal activity.”

Posin remembers his immigrant parents always referring to America as paradise. “But as kids, we didn’t see that. We saw people in pain and lots of hypocrisy. There were always two very different experiences -- the one adults had and the ones we had. After Columbine, my mother couldn’t believe how these wealthy kids in America, with so much opportunity, could do something like that. And all I could think was -- what took so long?”

Posin grew up surrounded by film and literary culture -- he learned to read Russian by reading Pushkin’s poetry. His parents, who met at a Fellini retrospective at the Moscow Film Festival, were fans of Bunuel, Antonioni and other filmmakers whose sense of the absurd clearly left a mark on their son. Uncomfortable with both the language and the culture, Posin’s father never found a foothold in America. But he managed to introduce his young son to a filmmaker acquaintance who did -- Billy Wilder.

Posin remembers Wilder telling him, in typically blunt Wilder fashion, “How can I help you when they won’t even let me make any movies?” But when Posin was desperate to get into USC Film School, he cajoled Wilder into watching a primitive student film he’d made. “He said, ‘OK, leave me alone,’ so I wandered around his apartment, which had African fertility dolls he’d gotten from Sigmund Freud and all these great paintings, stacked up three or four deep in every corner.”

After Wilder finished watching, he said, “To tell you the truth, it reminds me of a Hungarian stag film from 1912. But I guess you have some talent.” Wilder wrote Posin a recommendation, telling him, “I’m sorry if I made you look like the next Eisenstein, but maybe it will do the trick.” Apparently a letter from Billy Wilder did not go unnoticed -- Posin got in.

Posin eventually got his primary backing for “Chumscrubber” from one of film financier Bob Yari’s companies. Thanks to Curtis’ ties with DreamWorks, which is co-distributing the film, the director also received helpful notes from Spielberg, who helped him reshape the film’s ending. Still, Posin was unprepared for the testy reaction he received at Sundance. “It was pretty rough,” he says.

The best reception the film got was in June when Posin took it to the Moscow Film Festival, where it won two awards, including the Audience Award for best film at the festival. “It’s fascinating that we went over better with the critics in Russia than here,” says Posin, who speaks fluent Russian. “At the press conference afterward, people kept saying, ‘Everything comes to Russia from America six months later -- is this flood of kids taking pills what will be coming next?’ ”

The film definitely inspires a generation divide. When Posin and Curtis were out on the road promoting the film, a dad and his 18-year-old daughter came up after a screening in Dallas to say how much they’d liked the movie. “The dad said his one problem with the film was how out of it the parents were -- he said ‘I’m certainly not like that,’ ” Curtis recalls. “And his daughter laughed and said, ‘Come on, Dad, you’re exactly like that.’ ”

Despite the promotional tour, the box-office results were grim. The film made barely $1,000 a screen. The movie did best in Phoenix, where it got a four-star review. But the majority of reviews were unenthusiastic.

Curtis feels Picturehouse did little to support the film. “We didn’t even have posters in the theaters until five days before the movie opened. It was an invisible release -- no one knew about the movie.”

Berney insists he hasn’t abandoned the movie, saying “there was more advertising on that film than on most indie movies.” Moviegoers simply didn’t know what to make of the film. Even critics who liked the movie saw its title as an obstacle. But Posin always felt the title, which refers to the headless hero of a video game popular with the teens in the film, offers an important metaphor for their experiences.

The film’s future remains cloudy. Picturehouse is obligated to open the picture in a number of other major markets, though it may opt to put all its resources on a New York or L.A. release in September. For Posin, the experience has been instructive. He says Curtis told him that Spielberg never reads his reviews until after the movie’s finished its run -- then he has a better perspective on what the critics have to say.

Posin flashes an uneasy grin. “I wish I’d done that on this film -- it would’ve made things a lot easier.”