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| Entertianment Weekly Interview |
Entertainment Weekly 10/20/2000
Getting into the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on New York City's Wards Island is difficult. That's a good thing. Ringed with several barbed-wire fences and teeming with muscled guards and security checkpoints, it is home to some of the most notorious criminally insane inmates in the nation. Right now, at 1 o'clock on a September morning, it's playing host to significantly less disturbing guests: the cast and crew doing 11th-hour reshoots on Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.
Strapped to a gurney in an unused corner of the decades-old hospital is actor Jeffrey Donovan; his head is shaven and he's drooling thick yellow goo. Extras mill about in ratty robes, staring vacantly while munching on doughnuts. Director Joe Berlinger fidgets and yells "Cut!" from behind monitors in a cramped closet. He stops to consider the scene, one of several demanded by the film's distributor, Artisan, at the last minute. Why? To amp up the terror in a sequel that cynics believe was conjured because, as cast member Tristen Skyler puts it, Artisan "caught lightning in a bottle the first time and now they're trying to sell it."
Berlinger looks again at the footage of Donovan's slobber. "This scares me," he concludes.
Understandably so.
A year ago, amid the clamor over The Blair Witch Project, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY received a call from an office worker in Atlanta who had bet a colleague $500 that the film's "found" footage was authentic. He was one of dozens who called. And one of perhaps thousands who lost bets.
It's the stuff of marketing legend: Artisan Entertainment picks up the $30,000 low-tech horror flick for $1 million at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. Once the laughter from rival studios dies down, the midsize indie launches one of the most fiendishly successful campaigns in movie history, composed of a companion "documentary," unflinchingly deadpan TV ads, and websites boasting police reports, personal biographies, and historical documents--all of it marshaled toward one purpose: bamboozling moviegoers into thinking that Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams really disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Md.
"We wanted people to have the experience of seeing a snuff film," says Artisan CEO Amir Malin. "Almost." Or as Amorette Jones, his executive VP of worldwide marketing, says: "We duped people. They were tricked." Never mind the covers of national magazines, the actors' appearances on Leno (see box on page 34), even the "written and directed by" credits at the end, the movie phenomenon of 1999 was born. And when the rocks and twigs settled, the film (released that July) had grossed $141 million domestically and more than $109 million overseas--and spawned comic books, ski caps, and countless parodies. P.T. Barnum would have been proud.
But while the attendant media circus led to the inevitable furious backlash, Artisan was faced with a daunting question: What do we do for an encore?
"We could have said in July, 'Let's go with Blair Witch 2; we don't give a s--- what it is. Slap it together for $4 million and cash in,'" says Malin, sitting in his downtown Manhattan office underneath a framed copy of Variety that screams 'WITCH' BREWS BIG B.O. "But that would have ended the franchise." It didn't help that Blair Witch cowriter-directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick told Artisan that they were interested only in doing the third film in the series--envisioned as a prequel--and would make a Monty Pythonesque comedy, Heart of Love, next. (The pair, who receive executive producing credit on Book of Shadows, declined to be interviewed for this article.)
By September, Artisan started shaking tents around town, commissioning script ideas from relatively unknown--and presumably inexpensive--writers Jon Bokenkamp, Neal Stevens, and Robert Parigi. Meanwhile, Joe Berlinger--who, with Bruce Sinofsky, had made the critically acclaimed documentaries Brother's Keeper (1992), Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996), and Revelations: Paradise Lost 2 (2000)--was trying to persuade Artisan to finance his first fiction film, a noir thriller set in the '30s. Listening to the pitch from Berlinger--described by cast member Stephen Barker Turner as "one dark dude" who "looks [like] a Fraggle Rock Muppet"--execs began to think they'd found the perfect guy to entrust with their franchise.
"All of a sudden I realized we weren't talking about my movie anymore," remembers the 37-year-old director, interrupted by screams from the adjacent studio, where engineers are adjusting Book of Shadows' sound mix. "Was I dying to make the sequel? Absolutely not. I wasn't even sure a sequel could or should be made. But I'd been banging my head against the Hollywood wall and I said yes."
Berlinger promptly scrapped the early script drafts--which had news crews tracking the original kids or Donahue's relatives searching for her remains--in favor of a more radical approach. "I was fascinated that people were hoodwinked, that they actually emerged from the theater still convinced it was real," he says. "I wanted to make a sequel to the phenomenon, not to the movie."
So his two-page outline submitted on Dec. 1 showcased a postmodern twist, acknowledging the original film as a work of fiction. The sequel is a supposed re-creation of real events that occurred following the release of The Blair Witch Project. In other words, instead of pretending that Heather, Josh, and Mike were real people who disappeared in the woods, the movie follows obsessed fans who believe they may have been real people who disappeared in the woods (or, at the very least, are willing to pretend they believe to cash in on the sensation). Led by a local of questionable sanity, the quintet head into the cursed Black Hills for a tour, only to spiral into paranoia, mystical terror, and murder.
Got that?
The studio did, and within two weeks had greenlit the project and begun pushing for a 2000 release. Berlinger enlisted Dick Beebe (House on Haunted Hill) to work on the screenplay while he looked for a cast. "God, it was f---in' tense," remembers Beebe, who tapped out more than 20 drafts with Berlinger. "I got my first draft in one day late. And [the studio] was like, Omigod! This...is...unacceptable, and I was like, it's just one day. Jesus."
With the final script (polished by an uncredited Bokenkamp) falling into place, Berlinger busied himself with New York and Los Angeles cattle calls that yielded more than 5,000 videotapes and 3,000 in-person tryouts. From them the director culled his top five, all unknowns ("It seemed a nice tentacle back to the first movie," he explains), whom he promptly assigned intensive occult research.
"I watched hours of videotape of the head of the Church of Satan," sighs Skyler, whose character is researching a book on the Blair Witch phenomenon.
"I went to a Goth festival and had to fit in," says Kim Director, who plays an ultra-pale, black-clad psychic.
"I was supposed to visit a witch and missed my appointment. We ended up getting into a fight," shudders Erica Leerhsen, who portrays a Wiccan trying to clear the Blair Witch's bad name.
Barred from filming in the real Burkittsville, which was still stinging from the invasion of curiosity seekers spurred by the first movie, the cast and crew crashed the sequel in a top secret eight-week shoot. A lockdown was deemed necessary after early scripts and shooting schedules were leaked to the Web. But it didn't help: 20 minutes of footage still ended up online. It was in early August, when Berlinger screened his cut for Artisan execs in Los Angeles, that things got even stickier.
"There were flaws. We needed to deliver scares earlier," says the director, who was left with little more than two months to do some reworking. "A fundamental restructuring of the story [was needed to] satisfy a commercial audience." But that wasn't enough to satisfy Artisan. Fretting that the movie still wasn't disturbing enough and the resolution was too ambiguous, the studio asked for the asylum shoot to beef up Donovan's tour guide character with a mysterious past.
"I had improvised this line about being in an institution and they loved the idea," says Donovan. "And my performance lends itself to that back story. So I guess they didn't really so much put the cart before the horse--they just liked the cart so much they made it bigger. Or, um, added more things to the cart." Which is how Berlinger and co. ended up filming brand-new material about a month before the movie's release.
"It's cool footage, but I'm not entirely happy with how it's integrated into the movie," sighs the director, bags of exhaustion under his eyes. "If we weren't up against a release date I would have tried to figure out a [better] way. But all those posters say 'October 27,' not 'Coming This Fall.'"
Even if the additional footage helps, there's still the challenge of selling the film. Web-heads have been mixed on the project and some audiences have reportedly hissed at the trailer. Amorette Jones--who has posted "23 days to Book of Shadows. And counting" outside her Santa Monica office--isn't surprised. "The original divided people into thirds: those it delivered for, those who were mixed, and then," she says, "those who hated it, were left totally unsatisfied, and walked out wondering what the hell they spent their money on."
The trick, then, is convincing that last group that Book of Shadows is different, while reassuring fans of the original that it's not too different, something Jones and her team will try to accomplish with a 64-hour webfest (www.blairwitch webfest.com), beginning Oct. 18, that will feature cast interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, and live musical performances. They've also put a new, more explicit trailer in theaters and are planning an onslaught of books and other tie-ins, not to mention a mock investigative report focusing on Donovan's character, set to air on the Sci Fi Channel on Oct. 22, five days before the movie opens. "At least we have amazing awareness," says Jones, who anticipates a $30 million first weekend. "But the number of people definitely interested is just as high as the number of people definitely not interested."
Back in New York, a relaxed Malin gestures at the only other framed object on his wall, a poster for The Godfather. "That is my greatest film of all time," he says. "And when I heard they were making Godfather II, I said, Why? But Coppola knocked it out of the park." Not that Artisan really has to worry--financially at least. Though the studio hasn't had another film since that's crossed the $20 million mark (including The Ninth Gate, Cecil B. DeMented, and The Way of the Gun), with a budget of only $15 million, Book of Shadows is already in the black after foreign sales are factored in. And that can only help the much-delayed IPO the company has now slated for this fall.
"On average, sequels [to] $100 million movies drop 40 percent and sequels [to] horror movies drop 45 percent," says box office analyst Tom Borys of ACNielsen EDI. "So you'd expect this to do about $85 million total. That's all upside to Artisan."
"It'll add a few shekels here or there," agrees Malin. "The greater impact will be on the sizzle coming off the company." But if the movie doesn't connect, that sizzle could quickly turn to fizzle. "There hasn't been much buzz," says Patrick Sauriol, founder of the entertainment-gossip website Coming Attractions. "People just don't know what to make of it." Adds costar Kim Director: "I'm definitely ready for [audiences] to hate us. Honestly, I think people want to see it fail."
Joe Berlinger is worried. what he's crafted may seem more thematically yoked to his Paradise Lost films than to The Blair Witch Project. It's a commentary on media, violence, and the nature of documentaries. And it's probably not what audiences are expecting. The director knows this and sits on the edge of a couch. Then, over the bloodcurdling shrieks coming from the screening room, he asks the big question:
"Did you like...no, no, wait," he corrects himself, pausing and waving his hands. "Do you think they will like it?"
click for larger image
END
May 7, 2004 - article courtesy of Entertainment Weekly and Gillian Flynn
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