Boxoffice-June.1989

^dependent Distribution: "It's Murdiferous!
eign films because they were the least
expensive ones to pick up.
"We've had our art picture history.
We know that sometimes they really
work, and you have 'My Life as a Dog' or
'Get Out Your Handkerchiefs' or 'Room
with a View' — there are those lucky
moments — but they happen so infrequently,
and there is a reasonable
amount of competition out there for art
films."
Is Shaye, who founded New Line after
college 20 years ago in order to distribute
his own student films to campus
film societies, at all sheepish about running
his company off the proceeds from
a teen horror movie? "h's very dangerous
to be an elitist in the movie business,"
he says. "I can have as much fun
with a hot dog and potato salad as I can
with foie gras and scallops. I like to
think that I may have good taste, and
like esoteric and finely wrought things.
It does prevent you from getting into
some of the reaUy stupid things that
have made a lot of money over the
years.
"Even though our birthright was nontheatrical,
about a year ago we made a
deal with Films Inc., who's handling our
non-theatrical rights on a subdistribution
basis." Shaye acknowledges, "It
was a painful separation."
Ask Robert Shaye where New Line
would be without Freddy, and you can
tell it's an alternate universe he doesn't
relish speculating about. "Maybe we
would have continued to be a distributor
of the smaller art films we still aspire to
producing. Maybe we would have gone
public anyhow through some smaller
underwriter, if we'd managed to hold on
for another year in that whole flurry of
entertainment companies going public.
"Almost all our capital raising has
been a bootstrapping operation. We've
had to first make the money and then
go to the capital market and say, 'Hey,
we're very successful, don't you think
we ought to have some more?' As
opposed to 'We need some, what do you
think?' and nobody being interested in
giving it to us. Let me put it this way. I'm
very glad that 'Elm Street' showed up
and we didn't pass on it."
Rules of thumb governing whether to
pass on a picture or grab it vary from
indie to indie, even from project to project.
Over at Hemdale, says Daly, "If you
put up S2 million as an advance, and
you're going to spend S3 million or S4
million on marketing, then obviously
you've got to do your homework to say
'Do I have a chance of getting six plus
interest?' If you can see that happening,
and you finish up with a residual interest
in the picture in perpetuity, then
that's a worthwhile exercise."
New Line's rubric is slightly more
supple. According to Shaye, "There really
isn't any number. The worst-case
scenario that makes it worth the trouble
is recouping all of the cost of the movie,
plus a prorated share of our overhead
for the year. Our overhead's about seven-and-a-half
million dollars, so if we
have seven pictures, they each have to
bear their individual costs, plus another
million dollars in overhead. If you need
to have some kind of touchstone, I sup-
(continued p 34)
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