'The Blair Witch Project': Rhymes with Rich

On the sweltering summer streets of New York City, dozens of people pitched tents outside a theater, hoping to be among the first to snag the summer’s most coveted tickets. Across the country, millions of less adventurous fans stayed inside and logged onto their computers, hitting the movie’s website — 22 million times, at last count — for the latest scoop.

The Blair Witch Project has no stars or wars, and it hasn’t had a single TV spot to its name. But by the end of its July 16th opening weekend, the film, in just 27 theaters, had broken box office records across America, and the distributor behind it, Artisan Entertainment, had reinvented movie marketing. At one theater alone, Orange, Calif.’s AMC 30 at the Block, it grossed a staggering $164,354 over the weekend, making back its $100,000 budget on the spot. Not bad for a group of neophyte filmmakers and a two-year-old indie company.

The tale of three would-be documentary filmmakers who disappear while searching for the legendary Blair Witch in Maryland’s Black Hills, leaving only this ”footage” behind, The Blair Witch Project was conceived by two Florida filmmakers, Eduardo Sanchez, 30, and Daniel Myrick, 35. In the spring of 1998, the writing and directing partners sent actors Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard into the woods with cameras and an understanding of the film’s premise: The three were to spend a week hiking from spot to spot, where they could pick up food and film. After that, it was up to the actors to improvise their scenes, scare themselves silly, and record themselves doing it. The result is a largely black-and-white film shot on cheap 16mm and Hi8 video with two handheld cameras. ”It was supposed to look like a documentary,” explains Sanchez, ”because we had no money.”

Artisan changed that in January, when it purchased The Blair Witch Project for $1 million after a midnight screening at the Sundance Film Festival. Artisan, known as Live Entertainment before being sold in 1997 and rechristened by CEO Mark Curcio and copresidents Amir Malin and Bill Block, made its mark in the art-house community at Sundance the previous year; purchasing an obscure, mathematically themed, black-and-white film called [Pi] for $1 million, Artisan shepherded the seemingly unmarketable film to a $3.2 million box office take.

Hoping to do the same with Blair Witch, Artisan began its marketing campaign of the spook-fest ”Day One of Sundance,” says Malin. ”We met with the filmmakers and emphasized to them that the great conceit of Blair Witch is [that it looks like] a real documentary. People come in and they don’t know what’s going on.” Malin convinced the filmmakers to move the film’s opening credits to the end, adding to Blair‘s home-video-like realism, and funded work on the sound mix. While the filmmakers spiffed up the film, Artisan seized upon a brilliant — and virtually free — marketing tool.

In June 1998, before Blair Witch was even edited, the filmmakers had launched a website that gave basic information about the movie. Shortly after Sundance, Artisan took over the site, adding journal entries by one of the characters, faked police reports, and a history of the Blair Witch dating back to the 18th century. After a trailer was placed on Harry Knowles’ Ain’t It Cool News website in April, word of mouth spread across the Internet, fueled by the is-it-real-or-invented? debate. ”It’s all fiction,” Myrick says of the information offered on the site, ”but people are getting confused. We kind of count on that.”

So strong is the identity of the website — which is averaging 2 million hits a day — that the film’s official T-shirts are emblazoned with http://www.blairwitch.com across the back. “I think this is the first time that the Web has been the most basic and important tool in getting to a movie’s audience,” says Malin. “Our demographic is 16 to 24, which is exactly the demo that goes online.” And watches television: Further feeding the frenzy was Curse of the Blair Witch, a special co-funded by Artisan and the Sci-Fi Channel that aired four days before the film’s opening.

Artisan’s innovative release plan was the second half of the company’s shrewd strategy. Instead of opening the film in New York and L.A. and then expanding it across the country, Artisan determined that the best way to build buzz was to release the film in 24 markets on 27 screens. “We want to make it a hard ticket,” says Malin. “We want people to go to the theaters and have it be sold out. In this summer’s cluster of movies, we want to make our picture an event.” The plan worked. “It was a madhouse. Lots of crowds, lots of disgruntled people because they couldn’t get tickets,” says John Luis, an employee at L.A.’s Landmark Nuart Theatre, which even scrapped its routine midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show to add Blair screenings. As of July 19, Blair Witch had averaged an astonishing $56,002 per screen, grossing $1.6 million without the benefit of a single television advertisement.

The blockbuster numbers bode well not only for the film, which will be in about 800 theaters on July 30, and the filmmakers, whose next project is a comedy for Artisan entitled Heart of Love, but for Artisan itself. In the last two years, the company has earned a place alongside Sony Pictures Classics, Lions Gate, October (now USA Films), and Miramax as a home for eccentric and arty fare with breakout potential. This year alone, Artisan will release Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey and Atom Egoyan’s Felicia’s Journey, both of which played in Cannes, as well as a couple of self-financed productions: the reported $33 million thriller The Ninth Gate, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Johnny Depp, and David Koepp’s Stir of Echoes, starring Kevin Bacon.

While The Ninth Gate cost more than Artisan plans to spend on most projects, the budget was no hardship: Thanks to the performance of films like Jet Li’s import Black Mask, which has earned more than $12 million in 10 weeks and for which Artisan paid nothing up front, and a massive video library acquired from companies like Carolco and Hallmark, Artisan now has annual revenues of nearly $300 million. “When we bought it two years ago, the company was losing $9 million,” says Malin. “This year, we will have a cash flow of over $30 million. We wanted to hold out to filmmakers that we can market, distribute, and promote. That was our strategy, and now we’re executing it.”

Emphasize that promotion bit: Anticipating that Blair Witch the movie won’t sate fans’ appetites, Artisan has arranged for a comic book, released by Oni Press, and a trade paperback called The Blair Witch Dossier. Then there’s Artisan’s capability to launch the film massively on video through its distribution arm and the company’s exclusive deal with Showtime television. And that, the studio hopes, should be enough to hold audiences’ interest while it contemplates another project — Blair Witch Project: The Sequel.