Shooting Gallery

State of the Art

by Mike Miliard

There's been a lot of talk in the past few years about a renaissance in indie filmmaking. But that talk hasn't yet translated into a change at the local box office. Just ask the earnest young auteur who can't get his work shown outside of the rare regional film festival. Or ask Joe Q. Public, who can't afford a yearly jaunt to Cannes or Sundance and is forced to choose from, at best, a meager selection of art-house films or, at worst, the latest Hollywood blockbusters at a googolplex theater. The Shooting Gallery Film Series -- which is being launched at Loews Cineplexes nationally, and runs locally at the Loews Nickelodeon through early May -- suggests a practical solution.

"This is to prove a point," says Shooting Gallery CEO Larry Meistrich. "The American consumer likes choice, and the 20-plex need not only play five films. Anyone who's ever bitched about that should go to this series."

The Shooting Gallery aims to expose six films -- all audience favorites and critics' darlings at various indie festivals -- to a much wider audience. "We went to Loews," says Meistrich, "and asked them to give us one screen in the multiplex for really cool, award-winning movies that, unless you go to Park City, Utah, or to Cannes, you won't see. We want to bring these films to people in their hometowns."

It's an interesting proposition: using the delivery mechanism of an industry giant to propagate the work of those filmmakers furthest outside the Hollywood system. How come no one's thought of this before? "It's so expensive to launch films," says Meistrich, "that traditional distribution companies are more and more risk-averse and are taking less chances on things you should take chances on. But where will we get different kinds of filmmakers when they can't get their movies seen?"

It certainly helped that the Shooting Gallery is a distribution company with some mainstream fare under its belt (Henry Fool, Sling Blade), which has provided both the clout to get some powerful corporate backers (Yahoo, Heineken) and the film-festival expertise to know the really good movies. And as the series' line-up attests, they were also willing to take some risks. The opener, Eric Mendelsohn's Judy Berlin, a 1999 Sundance Directing Award winner, tells the story of an unlikely small-town romance. (It opens for a 10-day run at the Nickelodeon this Friday, February 25.) In the coming weeks theatergoers can look forward to samplings from around the globe: Scotland (Peter Mullan's Orphans), India (Sturla Gunnarsson's Such a Long Journey), Ireland (Liam McGrath's Southpaw), England (Mike Hodges's Croupier), and Japan (Shinobu Yaguchi's Adrenaline Drive).

Even better than the wide variety, however, is the manner in which the movies are shown. Every other Monday a new film will screen at the Nickelodeon, followed by a talk (moderated by Phoenix film editor Peter Keough) featuring someone associated with the film, providing a forum for discussion that's somewhat more stimulating than what you might overhear on the way out of Die Hard XIII. Then, the following Friday, each film will open for a 10-day run. And although you could count the series as a corporate tax write-off, Meistrich sees it as an audition of sorts for indie filmmaking at large. "We've committed to do this for two years," he says. "So my end goal is that this be successful -- to prove that there's a taste for this kind of movie not only on Houston Street in New York City. If we can do that then we'll be very happy."

To sign up for Shooting Gallery club-date screenings and discussion, visit http://movies.yahoo.com/sgfilmseries/club.html. For information on Shooting Gallery film schedules, call (877) 905-FILM.