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William H. Macy makes a new �Deal�

01/26/09

http://hollywoodandfine.com/interviews/?p=191

“Straight to video” used to be a badge of shame. William H. Macy is hoping he’s riding a wave that makes it seem like a smart business decision instead.

So his film “The Deal,” which made its debut a year ago at the Sundance Film Festival, was released last week – on DVD, not in theaters. Though it had played a string of festivals during 2008 – and had the possibility of a theatrical release – Macy and his producing partners finally decided that the video release made the most sense from a business standpoint.

“We could have released it – it was our call,” Macy says, sitting in a publicist’s conference room overlooking Times Square. “But the question becomes: How much do you want to spend on a theatrical release? Do you want to add to the movie’s debt load? It’s a bid for recognition and critical acclaim – and that Hail Mary that comes about once a year that you’ll end up with a ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ or ‘Juno.’

“The reality is that independent films like this one make their money in ancillary markets – theaters are a loss leader. There are more films – more quality films – than there are theaters willing to show them. And the audience is shrinking. With home theater set-ups, the audience wants to stay home and watch movies. Who can blame them? The sound is astounding and I can watch a movie in my underwear. I can’t watch a movie at a theater in Times Square in my underwear.”

“The Deal,” based on a novel by Peter Lefcourt, is a witty inside-Hollywood comedy that Macy adapted with his partner Steven Schachter (who directed). Macy plays Charlie Berns, a failed Hollywood producer in the midst of committing suicide when a script literally drops into his lap: a talky “Masterpiece Theater”-y tale of Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone. Making the kind of leaps only the desperate are capable of, he finds a way to enlist a black action star (who has converted to Judaism and is looking for scripts with Jewish content), rewrite the script and bully a studio into putting up $100 million to make it as “Ben Disraeli, Freedom Fighter.”

A year ago at Sundance, Macy was all smiles and optimism about the movie. He and Schachter had put it together with money from “civilians,” as Macy put it – investors that attracted through presentations in Florida, as well as funds of their own.

“We started in Sarasota because we knew people,” Macy said last year. “We did cocktail parties, a whole dog-and-pony show. We had a big chart where we played Follow the Buck. And we were clear: There was a chance they’d lose every dime. But there was a good chance they’d get their money back and a taste of profits. And there was a slim chance they’d make a bleeding fortune.”

Macy and Schachter kept their investors in the loop with a regular newsletter – “The Dealmaker” – and put together about $3 million for what Macy referred to as “a mature romantic comedy that’s got teeth,” in which he co-starred with Meg Ryan, as a studio executive who is initially skeptical of Charlie, then becomes an ally. Even when an unscrupulous production company bilked “The Deal” out of $250,000, the investors never lost heart and told Macy and Schachter to keep moving forward and make the movie.

Filmed in South Africa (“It was cheapest,” Macy says), “The Deal” made it to the finish line – then had what seemed like a stroke of luck: It was selected for the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Macy, who’s been to Sundance in the past as an actor (in films such as “The Cooler” and “Happy, Texas”), was excited a year ago to be at Sundance: “Our goal at the festival is to make sure they get their money back,” he said. “It’s more fun being a gadabout actor at a festival. But I’ve loved producing.”

In hindsight, he says, “Sundance burned us. The reception was cool. There was odd juju because of the writers’ strike that year. And it was that old thing, that Hollywood supposedly hates movies about Hollywood.”

Yet Macy didn’t lose faith. He took the film to other festivals where “it blew the roof off the theaters. I realized, This is a funny film – and a crowd-pleaser.”

So Macy is putting the film directly into consumers’ hands through its DVD release without ever playing a theatrical run. It is, he maintains, the wave of the future: “Five years from now, there’s be a whole new thing. You’ll probably go online and buy all your films there. The net result will be putting the power in the hands of consumers.

“Steve and I had done movies of the week for TV. We did about a dozen; it’s a great gig. And then we did this one. The reality is that you can do an independent film that hundreds of thousands of people may see – or you can do something for TV that millions will see. You’ve got the weigh the artistic freedom against the huge audience.”

And their investors? “I think they’re going to get healthy,” Macy says.

He and Schachter made a pilot for TNT called “Family Man” (“It’s ‘The Soprano’ with Lutherans,” he said a year ago) that went nowhere. Now they’ve created a comedy called “Buttox, California,” which they’re shopping.

“Felicity loves the work,” he says of TV and his wife, Felicity Huffman, one of the stars of “Desperate Housewives.” “I’d love not to have to travel so much. TV is the new frontier – if the FCC or MPAA would grow up a little.”

Meanwhile, he’s taken over the lead role of Bobby Gould in the Broadway revival of his long-time friend and mentor David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow.” He replaced fellow Chicagoan Jeremy Piven, who left the role complaining of mercury poisoning.

“Jeremy’s father ran a theater company and used to give me work,” says Macy, adding, “I’m so old, I used to baby-sit Jeremy. Jumping into that show was the scariest thing I’ve ever done. I had three weeks to learn the lines and those lines are tough. David Mamet is not for the faint of heart.”

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William H. Macy makes a new �Deal�

01/26/09

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