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Hollywood Spin
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Crash Course
A PR firm’s hollow promise to deliver Roger Ebert and a New York opening days after 9/11 are just a small part of Jerome Courshon’s movie marketing education.
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
By Richard Horgan
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It seems only fitting that God, Sex and Apple Pie, a comedy-drama written, produced and co-starring 32-year-old Chicago native Jerome Courshon, will take center stage next weekend at the Marina del Rey branch of Hollywood Video as part of the store’s first ever DVD signing event.
Sure, it has something to do with the location’s recent redesign, which finally gives it the requisite amount of space to even consider such gatherings. But quite simply, very few filmmakers would have been able to persevere for ten years and overcome the various obstacles that Courshon has surmounted in getting his film made, released and then distributed on both pay-per-view and home video, where it has sold 31,000 copies since its release last October.
Take for example the panel on theatrical distribution that Courshon attended a few years ago when he was planning to self-promote and distribute the film in his hometown of Chicago. Despite being harangued for several minutes when he asked for advice – starting with legendary producer’s representative Jeff Dowd, who bellowed, “Don’t do it. It’s a mistake. You’ll lose your money.” – an annoyed Courshon soldiered on and learnt some hard lessons in the Windy City in November of 2000.
“Chicago was a friggin’ disaster,” recalls Courshon, who traveled to nearly a dozen U.S. film festivals before raising $50,000 to complete post-production on the film for its debut theatrical showing. “And the first thing that went through my mind was, ‘Oh my God, those guys were right.’”
Even though Courshon engaged the PR firm of John Itlis & Associates, one of Chicago’s top two film-related outfits, it was a mess from the word go. For example, the company was unaware that DePaul University, which was right next door to the theater that Courshon had chosen, would not be publishing its campus newspaper the week of God, Sex and Apple Pie’s release, thereby nixing plans for a critical print ad.
“I’ve learned a lot of lessons about PR people and I really see how people can become cynical in this business,” admits Courshon. “PR people promise you the moon. In the case of John Itlis, they promised me that Roger Ebert would look at my movie and they would be able to get him to review it because of their prior relationship with him. One of the agency’s staff members used be a producer on Siskel and Ebert.”
“That never happened and, in an email conversation with Ebert after this all went down, he said to me, ‘Gosh, I’ve never even heard of your movie. What’s the story?’” adds Courshon. “So they hadn’t even contacted him."
In the end, the film was reviewed at the Sun-Times by the newspaper's music critic. Which is another hard lesson learned by Courshon - when you have an indepen~dent film not released by the studios, you never know who you’re going to get to review it.
Courshon admits a few mistakes of his own. He relied on the advice of friends and chose the wrong theater in Chicago; he failed to consult Nielsen’s weekly theatrical box office receipt reports when evaluating potential exhibition halls; and his original movie poster artwork made it seem as if God, Sex and Apple Pie was a porn film, thereby scaring away female moviegoers.
Undaunted, Courshon borrowed money from another friend and arranged for a second grassroots showing at a United Artists 14-screen complex in Lower Manhattan beginning Friday, September 21st, 2001. Although he made sure this time to hire a smaller, specialized PR firm, he suddenly found himself in limbo when the city was devastated by the attacks of 9/11.
“When 9/11 hit ten days before my movie was supposed to open, I didn’t know whether to cancel the movie or go through with it,” Courshon explains. “I was in limbo for several days, because I couldn’t reach the theater manager until the Friday of that week. The theater was actually on the demarcation line for No Man’s Land that New York City had cordoned off.”
“In the end, I said, ‘What the f***,’” he continues. “If I pulled the movie, I would lose money spent on advertising in the Village Voice and another major publication, which was thousands and thousands of dollars. So I flew to New York and it did $5,300 for the week. That beat out a third of all the theaters in the city that weekend, no matter what they were showing.”
Courshon revamped his movie press kit to include information about his relatively triumphant one-week run in New York and set about re-pitching the same home video distributors that had previously turned his back on him. But first came a pay-per-view deal brokered through HBO, who told him they needed a digital Beta video master in order to complete the transaction.
Thanks to $10,000 from a friend, $10,000 from an earlier group of east coast investors and net 30 terms on a critical related item, Courshon was able to master the film onto video and eventually hook up with Light Year Enter~tainment, a husband and wife owned New York company with its own Warner Home Video distribution deal.
| Keep in mind that Courshon has yet to repay this latest batch of financing. Although there are countless stories of filmmakers finding success after financing their productions on credit cards, which Courshon did back in 1998, they usually meet with success sooner rather than later. Who, besides Courshon, would have been willing to wait and persevere for another five years until he could make good on that gamble? Not many, I assure you.
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“When I first wrote the script, there were some things in it that had never really been done in mainstream movies up to that point,” remembers Courshon. “Having a straight woman kiss a lesbian, or the light bondage stuff. It wasn’t until we hit probably the mid to late 90s that we started getting that.”
“So there was an aspect of this that really bothered me,” he adds. “I wrote this, I thought I was on the cutting edge, but by the time it got made and distributed, it wasn’t on the cutting edge in any fashion, I don’t think. I’m just being brutal.”
Courshon continues to check Amazon.com every few days to see where his film ranks in the hearts of online buyers and was initially puzzled by the fact that it would quickly jump one day from the 20,000th to the 5,000th position, only to then fall back down a few days later. He eventually found out that the difference between those two rankings is often only three or four copies sold.
| Having survived everything from the bankruptcy of his first foreign film rights buyer to objections in Bible Belt areas over a title that dares to juxtapose the words sex and God, Courshon is sure to be smiling on Saturday, February 28th, from 4 to 6 p.m., when he will be signing DVDs alongside director Paul Leaf and cast members Greg Wrangler, Mark Porro, Katy Kurtzman (Dinner for Five), Maria McCann (The Practice), Andrea Leith and possibly Phil Palisoul.
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“I’ve talked at length with Jerome and am familiar with the intricacies of his amazing story,” says Craig French, District Manager for Hollywood Video’s Los Angeles area stores, which initially carried 38 copies of God, Sex and Apple Pie in the New Releases section of its 13411 Washington Boulevard location in Marina del Rey.
“A video store’s performance depends on the demographics of the neighborhood and its overall gross potential,” French continues. “We will have 50 DVDs of God, Sex and Apple Pie on hand to sell that Saturday afternoon and couldn’t think of a better way to kick off our new ability to do in-store events at our Marina del Rey location.”
| So many how-to books and industry seminars focus on what it takes to sell a script. But as Courshon’s ten-year odyssey proves, the real work begins when you fail to raise that initial $3 to $5 million you were hoping for, despite getting help from the likes of director Jeff Kanew (Revenge of the Nerds) and casting director Rosemary Weldon.
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Believe it or not, Courshon is about to take second shot at selling the film in international markets, something he started years ago with Brimstone Entertainment. And he has just a signed a deal this week with a company that will take a crack at rest of the U.S. pay-per-view market.
Personally, I don’t put anything past him at this point. Don’t be surprised if a year from now, this little film shot over three weeks in Lake Tahoe for $155,000 becomes a belated phenomenon in the unlikeliest of far flung locales.
“In terms of Hollywood, I understood that my movie wasn’t weird or edgy enough to have a niche [theatrical] market,” says Courshon, who has survived over the years by working as a temp and recently optioned a script by another screenwriter. “It didn’t have a gay theme, it was missing things that distributors look for to market a movie for the niche market.”
| “Also, ensemble pieces are a tough sell, especially when they don't have any marquee name actors,” he adds. “A theatrical distributor isn’t going to pick it up, they can’t compete with studio movies. That’s kind of the sense I got and when I reached a point where I could understand that, I was able to move on.”
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[Every Wednesday, Hollywood Spin takes an opinionated look at Hollywood media, PR and marketing related matters. To reach the author, please email rhorgan@filmstew.com. To comment on this week’s topic, please go to our Hollywood Spin Discussion Board.]
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