Last night I watched the 2019 film BLACKBIRD. The movie - a remake of a Danish drama - is directed by Roger Michell (NOTTING HILL) and stars Susan Sarandon as a matriarch looking down the barrel of a terminal disease. Rather than let her body succumb to her illness, Sarandon’s character chooses to bring her family together for one last weekend before she commits euthanasia. The ensemble cast includes Kate Winslet, Mia Wasikowska, Sam Neill, and Rainn Wilson.
I thought the movie was very good - a touching look at pre-meditated grief - but I don’t really want to talk about the film itself. Instead, I’m much more interested in the fact that, statistically, you have not seen nor even heard of this film.
The movie premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019 before being acquired by Screen Media Films (a company that is a subsidiary of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment). It was released on VOD in September 2020 - when the country was still deep in the COVID-19 pandemic and folks were stuck at home with a surplus of movies and television shows to watch. A lot of hard work was put into making BLACKBIRD by a crew of very talented filmmakers and actors. Serious money was spent to make this deeply personal film. This wasn’t something that was phoned in - the actors and filmmakers plumed real pain and fears to conjure forth a movie that they hoped would touch audiences and connect with them on an emotional level. In a different world, BLACKBIRD might have been an awards contender - even if you found the movie maudlin or sappy, you’d be hard to deny that Susan Sarandon and Sam Neill give tremendous performances. Instead, BLACKBIRD hit VOD platforms before settling into life on SVOD (it’s streaming on Amazon Prime among the heaps and heaps of “content” available to consume).
What makes a piece of art “pop” with an audience? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as TOP GUN: MAVERICK proves to be a certified smash with the theatergoing public. On its fourth weekend, the movie still manages to sell out screenings full of eager audiences - some of who are seeing the movie for the third, fourth, or even fifth time. TOP GUN: MAVERICK is a great film - but what is it about that particular movie that people have connected with in such a profound way? The past year is littered with movies that are as good or better yet have failed to find any significant audience. Is it luck? A really good marketing campaign? Being the right story for the right time?
It takes so much time and money and resources to create a piece of art. Whether it’s a movie or a book or a song or a painting - these creative expressions don’t just fall out of the sky wholecloth. They are pulled - sometimes kicking and screaming - from the souls and craft of those who birth them. And I’m not talking about the auteur theory - where a single person is responsible for a piece of art. Behind every piece of creative expression is a team of folks who put their stamp on the art it one way or another. That’s a lot of folks all working together to put something out there into the world - and sometimes the world’s response is deafening silence.
Unless you’re Max Bialystock or Leo Bloom, nobody creates something intending for it to fail and yet so much art never finds its audience - or finds it too late. I think often about an interview with Fred Dekker in WOLFMAN’S GOT NARDS in which the MONSTER SQUAD director is brutally honest about his film’s cult status. It’s nice that the movie eventually found a legion of fans who worship it but THE MONSTER SQUAD’s failure meant that Dekker was unable to make the many movies he wanted to make during his stunted career.
In less than a month, I will release WHERE WOLF - a story I’ve spent over two years working on and, for the last few weeks, I’ve been consumed with stress and fears. Am I releasing the comic in the right manner? With the right people? At the right time? What if the book fails to find its audience? Will I have wasted all that time and money and resources for nothing? Will folks even like it? What will hurt more - if folks don’t like the comic or they just don’t bother to read it?
There is so much entertainment out there competing for people’s attention and time and eyeballs. I have spent over a decade as a film programmer and I know firsthand how hard it is to get somebody to watch a 90-minute movie. How the heck am I going to get people to read a 300-page black-and-white comic? Will I be OK if WHERE WOLF is released to an apathetic culture? Will my ego recover if nobody reads the book except my closest friends? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions but I am on pins and needles as I stand on the cusp of finding out.
I’m trying to keep myself sane by thinking about the stuff I love - the movies and books and comics out there that, while they never found an audience, impacted me in some meaningful way. Just because something wasn’t wildly popular doesn’t mean it didn’t make an impact on the world. FLUKE - a movie that bombed at the box office and will probably never get a critical reappraisal - made an impact on me as a kid in a significant, life-changing way. That’s nothing to sneeze at from where I’m standing.
Nobody can control how their art is experienced and who it’s experienced by. I made something I’m very proud of and all I can do is hope that others engage with it in a way similar to how I would if I had discovered WHERE WOLF in a comic book store or library.
“If you build it, they will come.”
Yeah, well, maybe they will or maybe they won’t. I did build WHERE WOLF, though, and now all I can do is hope that a few folks out there like it.