When Gary Hustwit took his latest documentary “Eno” to Sundance in January 2024, he wasn’t riddled with anxiety about whether or not the doc about musician Brian Eno would find distribution.
The odds were undeniably against him: Scoring a big studio deal as an independent filmmaker is, these days, like winning the lottery. And Hustwit’s decision to forgo a conventional chronological doc about Eno’s career in favor of creating generative software that creates a different version of the movie every time you see it, made it a particularly hard sell.
But despite factors, Hustwit and “Eno” producer Jessica Edwards fielded offers from several distributors in Park City.
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Still, the filmmaker wasn’t convinced they were ready to distribute it the way he intended. “I don’t think many of the distributors were ready to take on something like ‘Eno,'” he says. “I am also still innovating the software needed to dynamically stream a film that’s different every time it plays. So, there was a lot of interest in the movie, but I think basically they just wanted me to make a director’s cut and release it like a normal film and that wasn’t something that I was interested in doing at the stage.”
Saying no to a documentary distribution deal seems like a crazy notion these days, but, Hustwit, best known for his 2007 doc“Helvetica,” has been self distributing his films before self-distribution became a requisite among independent filmmakers.
For close to two decades, Hustwit has been cutting out the middleman and going direct to cinemas and streamers with his docus including “Helvetica,” “Objectified ” (2009) and “Rams” (2018). The director has also been gathering audience data, licensing his movies, and eventizing distribution before people knew what that phrase met. In 2018, Hustwit hosted some 40 events for his docu “Rams,” about German industrial designer Dieter Rams. That same year, in San Francisco, 2,200 people flooded the Castro Theater to watch “Rams,” which resulted in a $55,000 windfall. At London’s Barbican Hall, a one-night showing of the dou translated into $46,250 in ticket sales.
“It’s not like when you get a distribution deal, you are suddenly on vacation,” says Hustwit. “You are still working just as much, and a lot of that work is correcting (the distributor’s) mistakes. It sounds counterintuitive but it’s just easier to do it yourself, and the other thing is, you retain all of the rights to your film. So when new platforms, new technologies and new revenue streams emerge, we have a whole catalog of films we can license.”
As their own marketers and bookers, Hustwit and Edwards, who runs the production company Film First, have spent the summer screening “Eno” in theaters across the country and Europe following the film’s successful winter and spring festival run. Prior to the Film Forum run of “Eno” earlier this month, Film First rented out theaters including the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco and the SVA Theater in New York to do live screenings of “Eno” for $40 per ticket.
“When we are doing the live events we make the documentary on stage with Brain One, our generative computer system,” says Hustwit. Brain One — an anagram of Brian Eno — produces a new version of the film based on the “Eno” archive of 500 hours of footage plus the interviews Hustwit shot over several years. Brain One is hooked up to a theater’s projection system and a new version of “Eno” is created.
For runs at theaters such as Film Forum, Hustwit exports “Eno” from a computer system as a ProRes file to create a unique version of the docu and then makes a DCP (digital cinema package). It’s a standard process for any filmmaker, but for “Eno,” Hustwit has to create a unique DCP for each day that the film screens at a theater.
To generate unique files of a doc and then to turn that file into a DCP is a very time consuming process. Normally, a filmmaker will do that once, then download and distribute their docu to theaters and streamers at large.
To make “Eno” available to small, non-urban movie theaters across the country, would be timely and uneconomical. So, Hustwit and Edwards have teamed with Art House Convergence (AHC) — a coalition of approximately 400 independent cinemas — to connect directly with AHC audiences in smaller markets nationwide.
“Eno ” will screen at AHC theaters on Oct. 8 and Oct. 10.A different version of the film will play on each day at various theaters.
This marks the first time AHC has partnered with a documentary filmmaking team to help them connect directly with their audiences in markets all over the country.
“We are excited that our member cinemas have the opportunity to play a role in bringing the unique experience of ‘Eno’ to their art house audiences across the country,” said AHC managing director Kate Markham.
Partnering with art organizations, booking theaters, splitting ticket costs, marketing screenings and creating live shows seems like a lot of extra leg work for an independent doc filmmaking team to take on, but Hustwit says it’s all part of the job.
“This is filmmaking,” he says. “Being on the road in San Francisco, doing a private screening of the film and then traveling to Nashville just to show the film twice to a live audience — it’s all part of the filmmaking process. If you try to separate making the movie and then everything else, I just think that you are not going to be very successful these days.”
