Bujalski days

It was an interesting time to be Andrew Bujalksi. 

In 2013, the Austinite director was on tour to promote what is his masterpiece to date, Computer Chess. I’d just moved to Manhattan, and went down to the Film Forum on West Houston Street to see the New York premier. Andrew came out after the showing and introduced some of the producers and answered some questions and, since my wife won the door prize, which was a copy of the film’s poster — she wins more than any one’s share of door prizes, I have noticed, over time — we took it up to him and he signed it and then I said the sentence that set the whole of the following story in motion. 

I asked Andrew if he’d let me follow him on the rest of the film tour so that I could write an article about Computer Chess and the work it takes to make an independent film succeed in the 2010s. I imagined it as a business story; I figured I could take an angle that would highlight the difference between what Andrew experienced as a filmmaker back during the first days of his much lauded career and what it was like now that technology so significantly shaped the ways films found their audience and the other way around. Andrew said yes. I wrote to some editors, found one who liked the idea of the tale, and so I followed Andrew around. I crossed the country twice, during which time I saw what seemed to be a primitive man frozen in ice, missed most of my dear friend’s wedding trying to get to a tiny farm near Canada the day after Computer Chess’s Austin premier, and DJ-ed a dance floor for the first time in my life. Those would be stories for another time. In any case, the article I wrote never got published. The editor read it, said it was pretty good, but told me he had thought it was going be about some newfangled technology for distributing movies. 

It’s now 2018, and Andrew’s next film, Support the Girls, opens in August. I’ve been thinking about his work, as the release date approaches. His films have changed in some remarkable ways, since Computer Chess. I think he was being truthful when he told me, back in 2013, that his efforts had brought him to a certain point. My days of following Andrew from New York to Boston to Austin and back were a gift in that I got to talk to him during what I believe was a time of transformation. This is the story of that time, and what I saw and thought and still think about the words and ideas he was trying to convey.

*

There's a wall of praise from the press for Andrew Bujalski's new film Computer Chess, and it's displayed along the long side of the Film Forum's lobby on the movie's opening night in July 2013. A line has formed in front of the wall, in front of the blown-up copies of all the good reviews. "The funniest, headiest, most playfully eccentric American indie of the year," reads Aaron Hillis' piece in the Village Voice. The film has garnered two articles in The New York Times. 

This is, for the most, the way Andrew's career has unfolded; he is a director rich in accolades. "The kind of artfully artless, low-fi vibe that brings to mind the French New Wave of the late 1950s and East Village film scene of the late 1970s," wrote Manohla Dargis, in 2006. Name an important critic: they've likely treated Andrew's works to some admiration as well. 

It has been four years since Andrew's last picture, and Computer Chess is on a similar critical high, but what's also true is that Andrew is facing a kind of creeping certainty. "I've been very lucky," he says, talking to me in the weeks after the premier. "But at the moment, I'm screwed.”

*

Computer Chess seems as if it's a thing from some other time, and, in a way, that’s true.

Filmed with vintage tube video cameras — Sony AVC 3260s from the 1960s — its low-fi black-and-white images shiver on the screen. Lights and bright spots sizzle. Dark spaces tug for victory in the contrast. When the camera moves, thumb-wide tracers paint the air black around the actors.

At the center of Computer Chess is Peter Bishton, a Cal-Tech programming student attending a computer-chess competition under the tutelage of a brilliant professor. The chess-playing code that Peter's mentor writes won the previous year's tournament, but this time around something has gone wrong: the computer is throwing every match and the professor is mysteriously unconcerned. These anomalies draw Peter closer to the center of a surreal, possibly menacing, web of technology, money, power, politics, and also something else — a kind of secret world. On the surface lighthearted, Computer Chess postulates an ending that actually amounts to what happens if you look into the sun. The lens turns to the sun. The star overwhelms the old camera’s lens. Darkness smears the world.

The theater lights come up in Manhattan. Andrew is down at the front of the room at the Film Forum, standing just under the screen. No, he says, he doesn't think Computer Chess is all that different from Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation, or Beeswax — his first three features. Yes, he says, audiences may want to see it more than once to sort out all its weirdnesses. "And tickets are for sale in the lobby," he says, earning a laugh. 

Richard Lorber, co-founder of Kino Lorber — Andrew's US distributor — reiterates the point. Tell your friends about this movie, he says to the audience; if you love it, bring them to see it. Bodies in seats are the only way to convince other theater owners and managers to show Computer Chess. Later, out in the lobby, I stand nearby while Richard talks to the attendant at the box-office. He asks about numbers for the night. Middle double-digits for the first two screenings, the attendant says. Six tickets sold for the final time slot. 

"Six," says Richard. “OK. Six." 

*

Opening weekend depends upon a kind of alchemy. If the cast contains known names, and good reviews hit print and digital outlets just as the film starts showing, and people read about it, and they see it, then word of mouth might spread and the movie might earn some money. Otherwise, everyone's work becomes a lot more difficult. 

Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine has just opened in six theaters, July 2013. It’s already logged some $100,000 per location. The weekend after, it’s on fifty screens, bringing in nearly $3 million. That’s what happens when opening weekend works. And it helps to have Cate Blanchett and Alex Baldwin on your team. It also helps to be Woody Allen.

Computer Chess features a cast of unknowns. With the good buzz going for it, opening weekend generates about $17,000 in two theaters. The weekend after, it goes up on eight screens. Its gross tallies a little north of $40,000. Alex Lipschultz, one of the producers of the film, says New York was a decent start, but not exactly what he expected given the enthusiastic early reviews. Maybe it’s the weather. 

"I mean, it was a heatwave," he says. "People think that an audience will go out to a movie if it's hot, but not in New York. Nobody's leaving their air-conditioning when its ninety-plus degrees.” 

In any case, Computer Chess is scheduled to open in Boston, and Washington, D.C., and then, by the time it gets to Austin at the end of August, the outcome will be understood. "By then we'll know," Lipschultz says. "It'll be either a kind of victory lap . . . or, I don't know. It'll be something else.”

*

Andrew hasn't been to Boston, by himself, for a long time. 

Coming back to a place where he once lived, and where he shot Funny Ha Ha in the neighborhood of Allston on sixteen-millimeter in the early 2000s, there are still old roommates in the margins, old friends who tend to come around. Some of them were actors in those scenes, helping to tell the story of a young woman named Marnie, a college grad drifting through whatever is supposed to happen when classes are over and friends are pairing off, finding jobs, muddling through. 

At the time Andrew was very much among the kind of people about which he was writing — a clutch of kids sipping coffees and working on scripts in a college town. One of his haunts was an Asian bistro around the corner from the apartment in which he lived, and in which he eventually filmed parts of Funny Ha Ha as well. Except he mainly used the Asian place as a coffee shop; he says the staff at the restaurant would make him a pot of coffee, special, since no one else was going there to have a cup.

About a week after the Manhattan opening, the showing at the Kendall Square theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just outside Boston proper, draws a full house. Gerald Peary, who plays the tournament organizer in Computer Chess, and who first programmed Andrew's films at movie houses in Boston, has mustered a large contingent of  family. He hurries up the aisle, instructing the theater staff to adjust the volume as the first reel turns. It’s a good house. They love the film. 

Afterwards, everyone goes around the corner to a bar. I ask Andrew if it was a good night. Here he is again, back in Boston, packing the premier. It all feels a bit “ghosty,” he says. Later, we talk about how got Computer Chess up and running, and then in the can and sold at Sundance in less than one year. This is how you do it, as an independent. 

You have a treatment, not a script, just about eight pages or so, and you call everyone you know who has money and who might listen to your pitch. You call your old producers, and your longtime supporters, and your family. You call your friends. You apply for grants and you start a crowd-funding page — Computer Chess was partly sourced by one of those: United States Artists, a highly focused kind of Kickstarter, intended exclusively for the fine arts. With what you've raised — and at this point you might also have a sales agent on board, if you can get one, provided you can handle them giving input on what will help your movie sell — you shoot the film at last. You edit the picture and send it off to festivals. Sundance is the indie-movie king. It’s a one-in-a-million shot, and it’s the one you want the most, but every festival can count. 

Computer Chess not only gets into Sundance, but it wins the Alfred Sloan Feature Film Prize at the festival — and that’s the kind of development every sales agent can put to work. Andrew Herwitz is the sales agent handling the next steps. 

"There are many films I see that I am taken with, but I think, 'I have no idea how to sell this, and I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, so I'm not getting involved'," Herwitz says. "But this one, I had the hunch that, because it was so good, and because Andrew has such a following, and because the film was, in a way, the first film to be nostalgic about the time — the sort of prehistoric time before everyone had at least one computer is his or her pocket … when computers seemed to offer a lot of hope but ordinary people had no idea how to use them; I think that it really resonates." 

And so, you get a distribution deal. Once the deal is signed, it's the distributor's up-front money up front that gets your film released. Prints are made. Openings are arranged. You prepare for weeks of Q&As. Sometimes the airfare comes out of the deal money; sometimes it does not. Then, your movie is in the theaters, and the box office opens. Theaters typically keep about sixty percent of sales. The forty percent left over gets divided: your sales agent gets a cut — it differs for every film, but ten percent is one number people bat around — and your distributor starts to repay the money it spent at the beginning. It’s not until after the distribution cost is recouped that ticket money starts to reach your wallet. Unless you have investors. In that case, once you're getting paid it's time to start paying those folks back. Also, your cast and crew might have deferred their salaries. This is the point at which your receipts begin to pay those checks. 

The general rule of thumb, everyone else gets paid before you pay yourself. 

"Most independent films don't recoup," says Herwitz. "Because even though the film may be great and people would enjoy seeing it, the challenge is this: what is it that gets somebody to decide, in the case of a theatrical movie, to see that movie on a Saturday night rather than something else?”

Here’s the reality of waiting on that decision: regardless of which film audiences choose to see, the bank still wants its mortgage payment every month. And the landlord wants the rent. You have to eat. You’re going to have to travel to meet the audiences for your film.

"Waves of panic come and go," Andrew says, talking about all these moving parts, and about the distant prospect of a paycheck from Computer Chess. He mostly crashes with friends and family in the cities that he visits on tour. "Look, sustainability was always my last priority. I wouldn't have made my first movie the way I did if I had been focused on sustainability."

*

With the appearance of Funny Ha Ha, in 2005, Andrew was anointed as a godfather of the mumblecore film, not exactly according to his wishes. 

It's hard to say what mumblecore is, or, rather, where it begins and where it ends. The term describes a nominal collection of characteristics, of aesthetics — films focused on post-collegiate characters, semi-loners navigating mostly urban settings, un-careered young people working temporary and part-time jobs, waiting around for a future, or at least a present, that makes a better kind of sense. 

It was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek title, but for Andrew it stuck. Mumblecore also sucked into its gravity a number of young directors: Joe Swanberg gets lumped in; so does Bob Byington; Mark and Jay Duplass's The Puffy Chair is probably mumblecore; so is Tiny Furniture, which is Lena Dunham's first film, pre-Girls and the template for what her television show would become.

Andrew maintained that he was only following in the footsteps of the writers and directors whom he'd grown up watching — John Cassavetes,  Robert Altman, Chantal Akerman (his thesis advisor) among them. Those directors all made movies that showed characters living omnidirectional lives, often undefined lives, ambivalent lives, days and nights full of messy and unfinished conversations. 

In any case, it must have seemed as if the gods of film, or at least a demigod or two, had granted Andrew permission to keep going, to keep telling his brand of story. His second film, Mutual Appreciation, in 2006, dove even further into the murkiness of post-college life. It’s a gentle and slow-building exploration of a musician’s less-than-cutthroat attempts to catch fire in Williamsburg. The ambitious world of New York prompts him to make decisions, to act, but his ambitions for an active future are unclear. Mutual Appreciation opened to even larger numbers than Funny Ha Ha. 

In 2008, he released Beeswax. It flopped. 

I happen to believe that Beeswax is second only to Computer Chess, and even stronger than anything Andrew made before it, but the fact remains — not enough people went to see the film. A line graph would Funny Ha Ha bringing in about $77,000 in gross, and Mutual Appreciation grossing between $80,000 and about $100,000. Beeswax finished its theatrical run at under $50,000, and it cost more to make than Andrew's first two films combined.

"Wakeup call is too strong a phrase," he says. "It's not like I didn't know what I was doing, but I did feel like the model was never sustainable to begin with, and somehow it felt even less sustainable after that."

Andrew moved to Austin. He married a woman with whom he’d fallen in love during production and they had a boy. Something, for a time, really did change about his work. For a spell, between Beeswax and the start of Computer Chess, something like his memory of what he would normally create seemed to have been erased. Everything tilted toward what he’d later describe as career-focused writing and movie work. He penned a screenplay for Paramount based on a book — Indecision, by Benjamin Kunkel — but the project petered out. He worked on the script for a commercial romantic comedy, which never got made (he still got paid). In 2011, he came close to bringing in a big-name star on what would have been a big-budget film — a production in the ballpark of $2 million — but Hollywood's hidden currents carried that one out of reach as well. When he looked up, after all this happened, three years had passed. 

"A sensible thing to do would have been to keep trying to crack the commercial market," Andrew says. Instead, he reached for Computer Chess, a radical return to the independent forms with which he’d started. "Rather than continue with that careerist thing, I found myself anxious to make something . . . I had a kid, and I could too easily envision a future in which I never made a movie again. It felt important to do it now.”

*

In the thick of August, at The Ritz in Austin, a huge slice of the film's cast has come together to celebrate and promote Computer Chess, and to celebrate Andrew as well. One of the actors tells the audience that they joined the cast because she knew his work from Funny Ha Ha. She says she'd take a bullet for Andrew. 

Some of the questions from the audience are the same old questions that people ask everywhere on this tour: what's with the cats, was there a script, etc. Someone asks about editing and about the sense of menace and tension at the end. "Editing is where I feel I have the most authorship," Andrew says to that question. "It's the last chance to fix everything that you did before."

Later, Andrew and several other cast members sit down to eat Thai at a place a couple of streets away. Downtown Austin throbs. The sidewalks fill with kids from the University of Texas; what appears to be the entire population of every fraternity and sorority on the campus have crowded East Sixth Street. It's not a pretty scene. A dude in Old Navy shorts walks like a rubberized cartoon, legs literally bending like noodles as he disappears into the flow.

Inside the restaurant, Chris Doubek, who plays Dave, the film's swinging husband, tries to convince Patrick Riester that the notice he got for playing Peter Bishton should propel him to audition for other roles, other films. "Just take a meeting," Chris says. "You could sit down with just about anyone you wanted to, right now.” 

James Curray, who plays Les Carbray — a programmer in the film — talks about how deeply he enjoyed the opportunity to act in Computer Chess. He says it’ll probably be a one-time thing for him. He and Andrew talk about a recent trip to Houston; they went to see a hockey game together. 

"In some ways, I feel like I'm building these little families," Andrew says, at the table. "In each film there's one, and maybe what I want to do … maybe what I'm trying to do is to create something that will bring them all together." 

I ask the table if they ever feel like it's a family, and have they ever been in the same room all together since the filming. They still see each other here and there, around Austin or at a festival or showing, they tell me, but it's never been everybody all at once. The moment of the film, the hotel in which they shot it, the intensity of the effort put into Computer Chess, getting it up on screens — much of this moment has passed. Later, Andrew tells me that he doesn't remember saying anything about building families. I ask him if it’s true, anyway. "I guess so," he says. "It becomes a family … when there's just a bunch of people who are new to it, and fresh … it is certainly fun. It's more fun than any regular job." 

*

Richard Lorber runs the numbers. 

"Right now, the film has performed, frankly, disappointingly for us at the box office," he says. "But it's not a disaster. We haven't really blown a lot of money. We had thought that, because of its uniqueness, we might see this film hit half a million or even more — that it would catch on and be a kind of a cult success. As it turns out, it'll probably be a hundred-fifty or so." 

I ask him what happened, where the tech and computer-savvy audience that they'd hoped for might have gone.

"They're totally in line with the subject matter of the film,” he says. “They’ve lived it, they've breathed it, they're of the cloth of the subject of the film, but they just don't go to the movies anymore, except for, you know, some occasional junket to see some big Hollywood bullshit extravaganza. The real challenge, now, is to find new channels to the consumer, new direct channels to the customer not dependent upon the whims of gatekeepers and intermediaries."

Kino Lorber will keep holding out to catch a break. Perhaps the computer nerds will take a chance on the film from home. Meanwhile, Herwitz has made ancillary deals for distribution. Sundance Channel will carry Computer Chess in eastern Europe and the Netherlands, and Sundance will work to help with distribution in Latin America, too. Herwitz has closed agreements for the UK, for Netflix in some territories, and the film is scheduled to open in theaters in Germany and Australia. Negotiations are ongoing for France. 

I ask Richard why he took chance on Computer Chess in the first place. Why not simply focus on the assured revenue from Kino Lorber's deep catalogue of established classics, more films like its four recent Oscar winners? The answer is simple. He loves it.

“Yes, there are no stars in it," he says of Computer Chess. “Yes, there are no traditional narrative structures. It's a really unique work of intellectual engagement and creative envelope-pushing. That's the only way I can describe it. It's a film that's probably my favorite film in many years."

*

The New York Times has asked Andrew to create a one-minute video encapsulating his philosophy of filmmaking. It is due today.

“I’m ready to be done with questions about Computer Chess,” he says, as we start talking. “Promoting movies is a very different beast from making a movie.Now we're in the part where we talk about it — a lot — which is just less fun than doing it. I'm very anxious to get back to creative work."

I ask him questions anyway. I ask him if he thinks the character Peter is forced to deal with rules that aren't his own. I ask him if he thinks Peter’s world changes when he realizes that the other characters aren’t concerned with his future. I ask him if this is how he felt after Beeswax. Is the world of Computer Chess something like Andrew Bujalski’s world of making movies?

"All of those questions are in there,” Andrew says. "You know, I'm concerned. But I don't think the party's entirely over … I don't know that I'm disillusioned, yet. What I'm grappling with now is, is there a reckoning out there? Or, can I keep finding ways to be irresponsible? Should I keep finding ways to be irresponsible, from a social and financial perspective? I could go and I could be a film teacher. I could never make another film again and I could just teach film. Other than that, I don't know what else … I could go work at Whole Foods."

Joe Swanberg has just released Drinking Buddies, full of recognizable actors and reviewers are giving it strong notices. Andrew suggests he’s working on a script geared toward that kind of story, that kind of cast.

"I'm trying to build something now for pros," he says.“I want to build something that would hopefully use them to their best advantage, and to not try to get the same thing out of them that I would try to get out of somebody who's totally fresh to it. I want to see if I can pull off my version of that, which, because it's me, will still be weird and difficult, but hopefully a slightly more marketable version of weird and difficult.”

A couple weeks later, Andrew's one-minute video goes up. It's part of an article that highlights twenty directors the Times movie editors think audiences should follow. 

In the short film, a coffeemaker burbles. Andrew sits down at a Steenbeck editing bay, one that he told me he adopted from New York University when they didn't want it anymore. It’s the kind of equipment that helped him fall in love with making movies, and he said he sometimes feels guilty that he spends most of his working days with his back to the old machine in the office. In the short, Andrew loads a length of film into the Steenbeck. The image of a goose appears on the flatbed unit's screen. On the soundtrack, the goose speaks.

We're a self absorbed species that build these intricate, intricate devices to capture everything in the universe: sound and image, time and space. And mostly we just use them to take pictures of each other. 

Pause. 

I'm not tired of it. Are you tired?