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Chris Moore: Budgeting Factors on "Stolen Summer"
Foreign Financing
In this week's episode foreign financing is raised as an issue in creating budgets and I wanted to clear it up a bit. Basically, foreign countries love to show American movies. Overseas audiences love to watch them so much that an industry standard ballpark number is 60% of all the money made on a movie comes from foreign markets. So when Ben and Jon Gordon were discussing "Stolen Summer" confidentially they were discussing if there was any foreign value. Basically, Miramax's foreign department felt there was very little, as I said in the episode, and so they felt that any chance of Miramax getting their money back would come from America.
If it was all coming from America, $1million was a lot to get back when you factor in the extra money for marketing the movie and the split that theater owners get from ticket purchases. So the reason Jon was fighting so hard was that he wanted to make sure Miramax could at least make their money back. Ben was saying, "Let's sell foreign now to someone," which is common to do. Then, we would know what we could get for it and use that money to increase the budget.
This practice is called "pre-selling" and it happens all the time. Different distributors in each country will estimate what they can make in their country and then buy the movie ahead of the actual shooting. This lowers the amount of the budget the American distributor has to pay and it gives the foreign distributor a little less cost because they are buying up front.
Once Harvey Weinstein decided he did not want to sell the film up front to a foreign buyer he set the budget and off we went to make our movie.
20 Days vs. 25 Days
So just for the sake of a little explanation, this big issue in the Aidan Quinn negotiation is really about making a good movie. Aidan does not get any more money; he does not get anything personally, but more time to deliver one hell of a performance. Basically, movie shoots are divided into days of shooting. Every day costs money. So as a studio or financier of films you want to shoot as few days as possible and have them all be next to each other. But union rules and human capacity to work make you shoot no more than 6 days in a row and no more than 12-16 hours a day. So originally Miramax was trying to get us to shoot the movie in 20 total days in what is called a 6-day week. This means only one day off in between weeks and a total shoot of three weeks and 2 days. Aidan was asking, and I supported him completely, for 25 total days and 5-day weeks. So there were 2 days off each weekend and the shoot lasted five weeks. These additional days are what cost the money. They are also made Pete's movie great.
Aidan fought for extra days so we could have enough time to make the movie and rest while doing it. This rest gives you time to check out dailies and prepare for the next week. All good things for the film.
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