Selling 'Frozen River' (The Big Money)
February 20, 2009
When Courtney Hunt, an irreverently tough 45-year-old mom, heard her name and film among this year's Oscar nominations, she was simply shocked. In her hometown of East Chatham, N.Y., she had long been considered the town failure, she says, asked by befuddled neighbors about her "documentaries." Her nominated feature fiction film, Frozen River [1], was not your typical awards pleaser. It was as bleak as a Great Lake in January: an impoverished white single mom and a Mohawk Indian woman smuggle illegal immigrants for cash across an obscure U.S.-Canada river border crossing. The star of the film was Melissa Leo, an actress in her late 40s who is no plummy Kate Winslet-type; she's as hard-bitten and anti-glamorous as she is talented. The supporting actress was a Native American named Misty Upham, who still keeps a day job laundering clothes. The film was visually spare, partly because Hunt had made it for $500,000, money she had raised with her husband from five donors. Frozen River's budget was so tight that the most advanced effect was achieved by shooting from a cherry picker. Hunt constantly feared being shut down during shooting for running out of money.
And yet the film has received nominations for best original screenplay and best actress.
Hunt may have been surprised by her good fortune, but the nominations for her and her film weren't pure serendipity. In the past, the Oscars for best feature film and best actor were more or less the exclusive realm of Hollywood's biggest names and budgets; now, even the most serious, marginal-seeming films are sometimes marketed for the Oscars. (The foreign picture and documentary categories have long been open to more challenging fare and so has the best screenplay category occasionally.) But now grittier and worldly best picture nominees are sold to the Academy in much the same way that Hollywood movies are, but with far less money and far more crafty marketing strategies.
While the truly big films may fight for their nominations with cocktail parties and "for your consideration" ads, films like Frozen River have to use off-season release dates to get their films out there, as well as novelty items—cupcakes!—distributed in Los Angeles. Perhaps the most powerful selling tactic of the small films is their "little film that could" narrative, used to get Little Miss Sunshine [2] and Juno [3] into the mix.
Frozen River's nomination, along with the nominations of these other films, also suggests that the Oscars are becoming more akin to a shadow Sundance, rewarding more difficult and smaller budget fare. The story of Frozen River and other recent nominees also shows that in an everything-is-flat world, films with global themes now appeal to Oscar voters. That's why the Oscars have smiled upon Slumdog Millionaire [4], giving it 10 nominations. Frozen River has also benefited from this trend: While it is set in the coldest reaches of upstate New York, the film's main character is a white woman who through her immigrant smuggling comes in contact with a wider world. She does so not by choice but by carrying people from Pakistan and Eastern Europe from Quebec to the United States in the trunk of her car.
So how do you make the once-insular Academy pay attention to such fare? Michael Barker, the co-president of Frozen River distributor Sony Picture Classics, explains his careful Oscar strategy for the film, which started sometime after he bought it at Sundance in 2008, where the film won grand prize. Sony opened the film in August 2008, rather than waiting for the film festivals in the fall, which would only lead to greater competition between Frozen River and other art-house features that might be competing for both the Oscar nominations and audiences.
Sony Picture Classics' second move was to send the Frozen River DVD to Academy members in September, long before other studios sent their DVDs in November or December. This was also, luckily, before the Academy's members developed the yearly condition that could be called PFF—Pious Film Fatigue, which sets in after too many screenings of films about the Holocaust that are really about Jewish macho (Defiance, Munich [5], etc.) or, more troublingly, nudity and actorly ambition [6] (The Reader). Then Sony set up screenings for Academy members in a range of American cities, pulling a page from the Hollywood-and-then-Miramax marketing handbook.
What also helped Frozen River get the nomination was the Oscars' indie-ified taste this year. The Oscars have embraced independent films before—most famously in 1999, when Miramax film Shakespeare in Love [7] won best picture—but recently more and more industry outsiders and perceived outsiders are getting nominations and wins. This includes once-unlikely Oscar-winning films like Crash [8] and Junebug [9], which both received major awards. This is happening because of the new clever "guerilla" campaigns, but it is also a result, I think, of the creeping distrust of the sort of sentimentality the Oscars used to trade in. As with other cultural industries, the appearance of independence or even amateurism, as well as a multiracial casts and Web-influenced multinarrative structures, are the new taste. I recognized this a few years ago and coined a term for it: hyperlink cinema [10].
This year, though—a year with few high-rolling film purchases at Sundance and with so many indie film companies closed or shrunk that the form itself was declared "over"—it seems like the Academy is becoming a sort of second Sundance. I tend to see this as a good thing, although it could also be described as evidence that many of today's independent films are not ultimately "independent" in spirit. And the independent films that are nominated are a lot more challenging than Masterpiece Theater 2.0 film Shakespeare in Love. There's the $14 million crossover hit Slumdog Millionaire, which is mostly in Hindi and has an entirely nonwhite cast. Milk [11], another best picture nominee, is also an independent film, made by Focus Features, and resolutely about gay liberation. And don't forget that M.I.A.—the Tamil-London art rock/hip-hop star who has taken "global beat" back from the poncho-ed Paul Simon types—is up for the best song Oscar. It appears that at least for the moment the Oscars are forgoing the all-American popcorn movies—15 years ago, Benjamin Button surely would have won (its analogue, Forrest Gump [12], did so in 1995). But now it seems unlikely. Perhaps the new, younger Academy voters are less interested in the Gump-Button fantasy-time travel, agelessness and are more attracted to another fantasy that has seemed so out of reach for eight whole years—both a political and personal global connectedness.
Barker thinks this year's picks may be a phase, and if so, he attributes it to nothing less than Barack Obama's election. America's renewed "openness to globalism" this year, in particular, Barker says, has helped Slumdog and Frozen River as well. While Frozen River might seem hyperlocal on its face—call it upstate New York noir—it's really a film about how a wary white woman is forced by her own economic desperation to come in contact with the desperation of some of the rest of the globe. Hunt sees her nomination as "part of the evolution of America as it becomes part of the world."
"In the future, there will be a lot more crosscultural movies that are nominated," says Hunt. "They will be more normal. Frozen River's central character didn't care about the world. But despite all that, Pakistan and China popped out of the trunk of her car."
Barker cautions, though, that it's too early to judge whether the Academy from here on in will let the wider world in for good and limit the all-American titans of yore. And even if it does, how seriously should we take this transformation? Slumdog is a fun, rose-colored musical romp ultimately comfortable with big-film conventions for all its commentary about poverty and globalization; Frozen River is a difficult, ashy, realist film about poverty and globalization. While Barker sounds hopeful notes about his film's revenue potential, no one knows for sure how the film will do long-term if it wins, or if it doesn't. For now, even the welcome Oscar bump has added only about $120,000 to Frozen River's box-office receipts, far below the $6.6 million that The Big Money estimates a best picture nomination is worth [13].
But whatever happens, for Hunt the professional benefit of her unexpected nomination has been huge. Frozen River was her first feature after years of fighting to get the film made. Now, new Hollywood "friends" are circling. She's already directing another film, set in 1904. She has not had to strain to raise money for it.