By Bob Strauss, Staff Writer
The first feature-length film made specifically for Internet distribution, "Girl Walks Into a Bar," debuts Friday to a potential worldwide audience of millions on YouTube.
Directed by Sebastian Gutierrez - who, coincidentally, has another micro-budgeted film, "Elektra Luxx," opening Friday at West L.A.'s Nuart Theatre - "Girl" could establish a new path for increasingly under-exposed, small independent films to find substantial audiences.
"It's so hard for independent movies to get bought and put out," Gutierrez said. "And there's so many of them - 2,000, maybe, last year, and only one of them was `Winter's Bone.' And the ones that do get released only play in two theaters, five theaters."
"Girl" is a comic noir mystery, made up of 10, 10-minute, narratively interlocked scenes. This enabled natural commercial breaks, which have been filled on YouTube by presenting sponsor Lexus.
"It's not much different from the network TV model," said Gutierrez, adding that the same-day release of his two films was partially the result of the shaky current state of indie distribution.
"It's actually a funny coincidence that `Elektra Luxx' and `Girl Walks Into a Bar' are coming out at the same time," he said. "There was no coordination whatsoever. This is like a clerical error; the dates
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kept switching for both."
"Girl" is a collaboration between Gutierrez's Gato Negro Films and Shangri-La Entertainment, which produced such theatrical films as "The Polar Express" and "Beowulf." "Elektra Luxx" is distributed by the modest Samuel Goldwyn Company. "Luxx," the wacky story of an ex-porn star trying to figure out the next steps in her life, was shot in a mere 18 days. "Girl" was made in only 11.
Despite their obviously minuscule budgets, which Guttierez refuses to disclose, his projects attract pretty impressive casts. "Girl," for example, features Carla Gugino (who also plays the title role in "Luxx"), "Entourage's" Emmanuelle Chriqui (in "Luxx" too), "Star Trek" and "Heroes"' Zachary Quinto, Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson, Josh Hartnett, Alexis Bledel and Robert Forster, among many others.
The actors seem even more excited than the director is about the new distribution model "Girl" is testing.
"I think it's awesome," Chriqui said. "We could really open up things for ourselves if it works. We're in an unprecedented time in our industry right now. Good work is hard to come by. There's just a lot of angst, a lot of people with stifled creative energy, and we need to get it out.
"If this works and people actually tune in, it could really open things up for filmmakers and actors alike to just do stuff," Chriqui said.
Though emphasizing that he was not in a position to predict what the "Girl" experiment might lead to, YouTube's Jamie Byrne is pretty high on the project.
"It's really innovative in the way that they produced it for Internet distribution," said Byrne, who's on the popular video-posting site's partnerships for made-for-web content team.
"Having those natural breaks in the narrative creates an opportunity for an ad to be displayed without disrupting the user's flow of watching the film.
"And it allows for consumers to watch the film a few different ways," Byrne continued. "There's obviously the full-length version that they can watch with the ad breaks. But it also allows us to break the film into its 10 segments. A lot of YouTube clips are shorter form, and this allows consumers to watch or share individual segments however they want to."
Gutierrez also designed "Girl" to be marginally less raunchy than his usual fare. More of a mystery than a sex farce, the Web movie does include sequences in a strip joint and at a "nude ping-pong club" (each "Girl" segment unfolds at a different L.A. watering hole), but careful costuming and black censorship bars prevent the sight of anything naughty.
"We made the movie for the Internet, where everybody can see it," Gutierrez reasoned. "I didn't want to have a scandal based on showing inappropriate stuff to children."
There are enough risks with the Internet venture anyway. Will putting "Girl Walks Into a Bar" out there free for all the world to see, share and download roadblock future revenue streams, such as DVD and pay-per-view? Will enough sponsors like Lexus emerge to at least make the initial postings of low-budget indies cost effective?
And what happens when the big studios finally figure out how to safely monetize digital home delivery of first-run features; will the hype around those big productions banish eclectic indies to obscurity, as has pretty much happened in the theatrical realm?
"I don't know exactly how it will work," Gutierrez admitted. "I think conversations are being had - Netflix is streaming, iTunes is doing it - and it's simply a matter of figuring out what the amount of money to make new movies is that would make sense."
"You know what? It's the Wild West," Gugino (the "Spy Kids" movies, the upcoming "Sucker Punch") observed. "`Girl Walks Into a Bar' is the first one, and I'm really excited to be a part of it. I'm sure mistakes will be made; this is a really new venture for YouTube as well.
"Hopefully, though, this will become a new place where auteurs can make movies for less money and yet they can be seen by a lot of people," Gugino added. "It's hard to get small releases of independent films seen. This definitely has the potential for that."
Thanks Daily News!
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