UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS

Burnt Orange Productions stops making films

Radical venture falls victim to unstable indie industry.

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILM WRITER
Saturday, July 05, 2008

The University of Texas' bold experiment in entrepreneurial moviemaking has been upended by turbulent times in the independent film industry. The goal of raising UT's stature to the level of the America's top film schools — and turning a tidy profit along the way — is being redirected into the program's one success story: integrating students into actual film production.

When they were founded in fall 2003, Burnt Orange Productions, the venture's for-profit business, and the University of Texas Film Institute, the campus-based group that would make the films, announced they would mix non-paid student labor and professional Hollywood talent to produce three low-budget features a year, and turn a profit doing it.

Five years and four completed films later, Burnt Orange is still waiting to count profits and pay back investors. The production company has all but closed its doors and placed its operations on hiatus. Meanwhile, the nonprofit film institute will continue to make films with UT students and alumni in the institute's new Feature Film Lab, a two-year, five-semester program that focuses on hands-on education, which is considered the saving grace of the venture.

The for-profit model, which has worked for other university business incubators, didn't match market demand. The first movie made by Burnt Orange and the film institute, the thriller "The Quiet," released by Sony Pictures Classics in 2005, made a respectable profit for the team, despite dismal critical reception. But the other three movies — "The Cassidy Kids," "Homo Erectus" and "Elvis and Anabelle" — have yet to perform in the real world.

"As the films get out and enter their unique ancillary markets, we hope that one or two of them will do really well," said Caroyln Pfeiffer, a veteran Hollywood producer and former CEO of Burnt Orange. "Nothing would make us happier than to totally repay the investors. But I can't tell you if that's going to happen."

Even in Hollywood, movies can take years, if not decades, to turn a profit on investments, given the roll-out of domestic, foreign, video and new media distribution.

"Cassidy Kids" and "Homo Erectus" have landed modest deals. National Lampoon bought "Homo Erectus" last year, renamed it "National Lampoon's Homo Erectus" and will release the comedy in select cities Friday. An Austin opening is slated for September. Odds for theatrical profits appear low, but Tom Schatz, veteran UT film professor, former Radio-Television-Film department chairman and executive director of the film institute, said he hopes money will be made on cable and DVD sales.

"Elvis and Anabelle" is stuck in an "interminable negotiation" with a prominent distributor, Schatz said. Schatz and Pfeiffer declined to name the distributor.

"The terms are quite good if we close the deal and the film gets a theatrical release and performs well," Schatz said. "There will be some serious funds coming in when and if we close it."

That's when Burnt Orange can pay off its investors and officially close shop.

For now, "I am Burnt Orange," Schatz said with a laugh. "I'm the acting CEO," employing one person who is "helping on the books."

Looking back, the educational mission did not mesh with the notion of UT as a filmmaking factory.

"Without question it has not succeeded in the ways we hoped," Schatz said. "Any remaining hopes we might have are tied to 'Homo Erectus' and 'Elvis and Anabelle.' "

Raising school's profile

The University of Texas Film Institute and Burnt Orange were launched as a radical, risky experiment in mingling film education with the film industry. Its twin aims were to school UT students with a hands-on, professional-level moviemaking experience and create viable feature films that would both make money and catapult the UT film-school brand into the ranks of venerated film schools at the University of Southern California, University of California at Los Angeles, Columbia University and New York University.

"We are now mentioned in the same breath as USC and NYU, which is without question a function of the quality of the film school we had built and the exposure we earned with this project," Schatz said.

Ellen Wartella, dean of the UT College of Communication, allocated $144,000 to get the film institute on its feet, with $4,000 of that coming from the State of Texas academic excellence fund. The rest came from endowments Wartella could use at her discretion for new ventures.

With a group of about 20 silent partners, all but one from Texas — "friends of the university and friends of the Austin film community," Schatz said — Burnt Orange, a limited liability corporation, planned to raise $8 million before beginning production on its first film. It raised $3.5 million, "enough to get us started," said Pfeiffer, who moved last summer from Austin to Marfa, where she's an independent film producer.

Schatz and Pfeiffer won't discuss exact budgets of the films, but their objective was "to limit our investment in each film to about $1 million. If the budget went above that we'd look to (extra) partners," which they did on "Homo Erectus" and "Elvis and Anabelle," Schatz said.

The film institute also recruited a 30-member advisory board, an impressive battalion of Hollywood pros, from the late Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, and Austin-based producer Elizabeth Avellán ("Spy Kids," "Grindhouse"), to actor Matthew McConaughey and Mike Simpson of the William Morris Agency. Add to that brain trust Schatz's many years as a film scholar and Pfeiffer's 40 years in film production.

With so much experience behind it, why didn't the team anticipate how hard it would be to sell a small feature film in a notoriously erratic marketplace?

"That's a fair question," Schatz said. "Everyone thought the original concept was very ambitious but not totally out of the question."

Schatz blames not their vision, but tumult in the business. Between the film institute's conception on paper in 2001 and today, independent film has been walloped by financial crises, labor strife and a shift toward new media, namely online viewing and DVDs.

"The independent film scene when we began was hotter than hell," Schatz said. "Now it's become massively overcrowded. There's way too much product on the market. We are coming off by far the worst year in the history of independent film."

"There's a glut of films," said Mark Gill, former executive for Warner Independent and Miramax, during a Los Angeles Film Festival keynote address last month. About "5,000 movies got made last year. Of those, 603 got released theatrically here. And there's not room in the market — as there used to be — for even 400 of those."

Several major indie distributors, most notably Warner Independent Pictures and Picturehouse, have recently folded.

"One entertainment industry banker I know believes another 10 independent film financiers will exit the business in the next year," Gill said. "I think he's low."

Schatz said of Burnt Orange: "The climate has changed so radically that it would be unwise to continue the project."

A project's legacy

While Burnt Orange waits for profits, creative focus has turned to the UT institute's Feature Film Lab, which starts shooting its maiden feature, "Dance with the One," on July 14. It will use a crew of current and former UT students overseen by Schatz and film institute creative director Alex Smith.

The educators hope the legacy of the Burnt Orange-UT Film Institute experiment will be the film lab, because the academic aspect of the project — teaching students how to make a movie by actually making one — is considered an unalloyed success.

Schatz and Pfeiffer estimate that some 75 percent of the dozens of students who worked on films have found industry jobs in Los Angeles or on productions such as television's "Friday Night Lights" in Austin. Students who were once paid with college credit at the film institute are now making livings.

"From an educational standpoint, we accomplished what we set out to do with a vengeance," Schatz said. Because top jobs on the productions, such as camera operator, cinematographer and editor, were filled by Hollywood professionals, the writers and directors arrived without reservations about student participation.

"On any movie I've worked on the production assistants and interns are always film students or kids dying to get into the film industry, so it worked out fine," said Adam Rifkin, the "Homo Erectus" director.

"Elvis and Anabelle" writer-director Will Geiger said he enjoyed the "student-film energy" on the set.

"They were playing music and it was so devil-may-care, not this slick Los Angeles attitude," Geiger said. "It wasn't just another job for them. They cared so much about it. They got excited about doing stuff. If there was a problem we had to figure out on this very limited budget, they got excited about that. An L.A. crew would be so jaded, they'd say they couldn't do it, go get more money."

Yvonne Boudreaux was earning her master's of fine arts in theater at UT when she worked in the art and design departments of "The Cassidy Kids" and "Elvis and Anabelle." The films hooked her into a filmmaking network that helped land her jobs on more productions.

"I truly believe in the program. It's really guided me," Boudreaux said. "All it takes is hands-on experience, and you can't get that in the classroom. I probably would never have thought about film if I hadn't got the job and been on set and realized how much I enjoyed it. It's practical. We're making a feature film. This isn't a pretend thing, we're not making a pretend set. We're actually using it."

cgarcia@statesman.com; 445-3649