January 25, 2006 - Bob
Park City, UT
Apparently the head of the Mormon church is deathly ill and that beats any and all news outside of Armageddon. My interview is bumped once, twice, three times -- indefinitely.
I start the scramble to figure out the DVD issue. I find a few blank DVDs at a coffee shop (they load up on lots of weird stuff during Sundance the friendly Barrista tells me). The Park City news station is kind enough to try dubbing off the old information from the bad DVD on to fresh disks with the hope the content is well and the DVD itself is to blame.
We go to the screening and I put the DVD in. It’s working...sort of. It doesn’t matter at this point. It’s go time and we’ll just have to get through as much as possible. Maybe it’ll work (I delude myself). Then, in a strange way, we are blessed: nobody shows up for the screening. Sometimes people (myself included) exaggerate the vacuous nature of “nobody”. People will say “nobody” was there to indicate a low-energy crowd or no one of any celebrity status, for instance. In this case, when I say nobody showed up, I mean NOBODY in the loudest most literal sense.
Though sad about the no-show, it appears a blessing as the new DVDs, in truth, are no good either. Then, just as we're walking out the door. Steven (the musician Sylinda put us in contact with) shows up just. We walk back in and let what will roll. He loved the small bit of our movie he saw (just the opening teaser) and invited us to screen in his festival in the fall.
January 26, 2006 - Bob
Park City, UT
The DVD arrives, but I'm no longer worried about screening anymore. The JCC wants us to return and screen again when there's more time to do a full marketing of the film as they believe in it very strongly (we booked this location on the Friday before the Wednesday screening). It's clear that I don't have the man/advertising power to compete with the Sundance/Slamdance big boys when it comes to getting an audience. It's not that I didn't know that before, but this just hammered it home further.
The good news is, we met tons of good contacts and I feel very strongly about Salt Lake City as a market we can go back to and be very successful in. We also got a nibble from a distributor -- they wrote to inquire about the status of our film. It may be something, it may not. The other good news came in the form of an e-mail from my former professor at UCLA, Robin Russin:
Bob, where the hey are you? I've emailed you at various addresses, and your 310 phone number is dead. The Riverside International film festival wants to screen Boys of Summer, so get in touch ASAP with Nancy Douglas.
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