After credits roll, deals are struck

It’s high-stakes poker played out in library stairwells, on snowy sidewalks and inside coffee bars and ear-deafening nightclubs, as well as in swank condos and hotel rooms spread all across this picturesque mountain resort.

Every winter, Hollywood studios descend on the Sundance Film Festival to scoop up independent movies. But because of the condensed period during which buyers and sellers can meet and negotiate, Sundance is a far cry from the way deals go down in Beverly Hills.

Ask Jeremy Barber and Rich Klubeck, two agents at United Talent Agency.

“It’s a circus,” they chime in unison. “We were in the freezing cold at 4 o’clock in the morning wondering where can we sit down?” Klubeck recalled.

The two were key players in the biggest movie sale at this year’s Sundance, Robert Redford’s annual celebration of independent film.

Barber, 39, and Klubeck, 42, helped negotiate the deal that saw Paramount Pictures and MTV Films win an intense bidding war involving five studios, paying $9 million for distribution rights for director-screenwriter Craig Brewer’s streetwise, hip-hop romance “Hustle & Flow.” It was the third-biggest sale ever at Sundance. Under terms of the deal, filmmaker John Singleton, who produced the movie, will receive an extra $7 million to develop two future films, bringing the value of the package to $16 million.

During an intense 12-hour period that began last Saturday afternoon and ended around 5:30 a.m. Sunday, Barber and Klubeck crisscrossed Park City, going from the screening of “Hustle & Flow” to a cast party thrown by their agency and Amazon.com, then winding up on the frigid sidewalks of Main Street, pursued by clusters of buyers eager to make a deal.

Not every deal is this big. Many filmmakers at Sundance wait nervously while their representatives try to get a nibble.

Beadie Finzi, the producer of a documentary called “Unknown White Male,” said she comes to the festival “penniless” but with a feeling of excitement. Like many others, she hopes to land a big sale.

Marc Levin, who walked away with a $2.5-million deal and the festival’s Grand Prize in 1998 for “Slam,” is back with a documentary called “Protocols of Zion.” He said this time he is much more relaxed and won’t be too anxious to sign a deal, knowing he could try to sell it next month at the Berlin Film Festival.

“I’m confident enough that we are going to get a deal, but one that’s the right one,” he said. Micah Green, a consultant with Cinetec Media in New York, which represents more than a dozen films, said he often discusses deals at parties like the one his company hosted Sunday night at Zoom, the downtown restaurant owned by Sundance founder Redford.

“We’ll negotiate during the party,” Green said, as the crowd thickened and his voice could barely be heard above the music. “Sometimes we’ll close the deal here; usually not.... We’re either sort of courting a film with a distributor or we’re in the middle of negotiating with some of them. And that negotiating process often stretches out over a number of days.” It doesn’t seem to matter where a deal goes down, as long as it goes down.

“We’ve been in coffee shops, we’ve had meetings downstairs in the stairwell at the library, we’ve had meetings around the corner of the Holiday Village [theater] standing outside. We’re talking important meetings. It’s not like [casual] conversation,” Green said. “We’re talking about spending millions of dollars on a film.” Among films his company was representing were “Strangers With Candy,” starring Amy Sedaris, Sarah Jessica Parker and Mathew Broderick, and the Slamdance Film Festival documentary “Mad Hot Ballroom,” which Paramount Classics and Nickelodeon Movies bought.

Attending the Cinetec party was Josh Deighton, vice president of production at Fox Searchlight, who described vividly what he believed the role of a buyer at Sundance is: “My job is to be the advocate. My job is to get excited. My job is to set my hair on fire, to not let us leave without the movie that we should buy.”

That attitude could certainly explain why a gaggle of studio executives were frantic to make the winning bid on “Hustle & Flow.” The action began just after the film’s Saturday night screening at the Racquet Club. Executives from Paramount-MTV Films, Universal-Focus Features and New Line Cinema, among others, were present.

“What basically happened afterward was, we had about six collections of studio executives in the lobby of the Racquet Club and each one was sort of waiting for a moment to set a meeting with us,” Klubeck recalled. “You could tell: Here’s the Paramount-MTV team, here’s the Universal and Focus Features team. Coming on the phone is the Miramax call.”

“And they caucus,” Barber noted. “The executives actually get together and say ‘What do you think?’ ‘What do you think?’ The marketing person, the home video person. ....They come together, they weigh in, they say ‘Let’s do it’ and then they immediately disperse to try to talk to the director, talk to the producer, talk to the agents.”

After the screening, buyers followed the two agents from the “Hustle & Flow” party in one of the festival lounges at the base of Main Street to the Riverhorse Cafe halfway up the steep street.

“They try to lock a person on you so nothing will happen,” Barber continued. “We literally had so many follow us to the UTA party from the ‘Hustle & Flow’ party that you literally want a bodyguard.”

Because during Sundance thousands of people descend upon Main Street to drink and party, negotiating deals is not always private.

“When we were at the Premiere Lounge, we had people just huddling around us that had no involvement whatsoever just because ‘those guys seem to be involved in this, so let’s hear what they’re saying,’ ” Klubeck said.

“And we didn’t want to go outside and have a cup of coffee with them because we were still cold,” Barber added.

“It’s not like we were trying to lay low and not be found,” Klubeck said. “We could have stayed in one room. The key to us was the ability to talk to all the parties and see what their appetite was, frankly, without playing one off against the other.”

The agents were accompanied on their rounds for much of the night by their boss, Jeremy Zimmer, and his client, Singleton. Zimmer is a board member at UTA and heads the agency’s motion picture literary department. It was Zimmer, the two agents said, who often looked over their shoulders to stay on top of the unfolding offers and counteroffers.

“We don’t play them off of each other,” Klubeck emphasized. “That can get pretty ugly. All they say is, ‘Here is what we are proposing.’ ... Then we sat together and said the only way we can respond to all this is to say this is what we want.” From the street, they finally set up camp in a room with a fireplace off the lobby of the downtown Marriott Summit Watch.

“From 3 to 5 o’clock in the morning, the real, intense deal-making occurred, with seven or eight of us in their space with different telephones,” Barber said.

In the lobby predawn were Singleton, his producing partner Stephanie Allain and Singleton’s two lawyers, Larry Kopeikin and Stephen Barnes, along with director Brewer and his manager, Brad Gross, along with agents Zimmer, Klubeck and Barber.

“All of us were sitting on the couches and on the floor, then we would go have conversations on the side, then we would huddle,” Klubeck said. “You don’t often have the financier, who is John Singleton, with the filmmaker and his manager in the room.”

Meanwhile, some studio executives flew to Sundance to screen the film. Others, like Sony’s Amy Pascal, Universal’s Stacey Snider, Warner Bros.’ Alan Horn, and Paramount’s new chief, Brad Grey, were provided prints to view in L.A.

Klubeck and Barber would not discuss deal points but confirmed that Paramount made an attractive package that included two future film projects. Other discussions centered on whether Brewer, a newer filmmaker, would have final cut and approval over the film that the studio eventually releases as well as back-end money should “Hustle & Flow” achieve a certain level of box office.

By 5 a.m. Sunday, the agents knew they had pushed bidders as far as the respective studios were willing to go and knew from analyzing the offers that “this was a top-of-the-market deal.”

Barber noted that he was at the festival with a newborn and his wife, who directed a short when she was five months pregnant that got into the festival. He said he literally had his mother, wife and baby in a hotel room upstairs while he was in the lobby downstairs selling “Hustle & Flow.”

“I said, ‘You’re probably not going to see me come home tonight.”