Omaha (the movie) : Huskers Do by Marjorie Baumgarten

In March 1995, Omaha (the movie), which was written and directed by Dan Mirvish, premiered in Austin at the SXSW Film Festival. It was one of the most popular and well-attended movies in the festival. Now, 11 months later, it's finally opening in town for a theatrical run. Why the delay? Mirvish and the film haven't exactly been inactive during this period. It's just that they've been traveling the scenic route to the box office. That's the story told here.

A native Nebraskan, Mirvish now lives in Los Angeles, following his film-school stint at the University of Southern California (USC). Although Omaha (the movie) is his first feature-length film as a writer and director, Mirvish is no stranger to filmmaking. He has co-written two screenplays -- Blind Faith and Corps of Vengeance, spent a summer in the Philippines assistant-directing and doing additional writing on American Kickboxer II, and he has also produced and directed several music videos. Additionally, he is one of the co-founders of Slamdance, the brash guerrilla alternative to the Sundance Film Festival, begun in 1995 on Sundance's home turf of Park City, Utah. Mirvish has also become something of a maven on the art of film distribution, having opted to distribute Omaha (the movie) himself rather than signing with any of the established companies.

Omaha (the movie), which was filmed entirely in Nebraska, follows the seemingly random adventures of Simon, a young man who runs away to Nepal in order to escape his dysfunctional family in Omaha. Later, he returns to his still-dysfunctional family as a changed man and a practicing Buddhist. He hooks up with some of his old friends, as well as his nutty old flame Gina. Meanwhile he's stalked by the recent scourge of roving gangs of Iowa kickboxers and Colombian jewel thieves who believe Simon's sacred prayer stones are emeralds. The movie is a madcap melange of adventure, satire, love story, and introspection. And although Omaha (the movie) merrily tosses everything handy into the mix, one thing that Mirvish may have learned along with his fictional alter-ego is that "questing ain't cheap."

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Austin Chronicle: How did Omaha (the movie) come about?

Dan Mirvish: I was a grad student at USC and what usually happens there is most people do these 15-minute thesis films. Even though they were subsidized by the school, people would still wind up spending thousands of their own dollars and spend years making them. Then they'd go off to meetings with agents or producers who'd say, "Yeah, but can you do a feature?" and they'd have to start all over again. So I just figured (and I had just been reading about Robert Rodriguez -- that was sort of a big inspiration) for just about the same amount of time, money, and effort, why not just do a feature?

So, USC had this little-used option where you could do that. The good and bad thing about USC is that they subsidize most of the films there, but the flip side is that they also own the rights to them. This option stated that if you wanted to do something that you thought might essentially have some commercial value, or for whatever other reasons you want to own the rights to it yourself, you could do that and still call it a USC film but you couldn't use any equipment or facilities -- cameras, lights, insurance, anything, not even a pencil sharpener on campus -- and they really were pretty strict about this. Anyway, it seemed like the way to do a feature. So I decided to do that and wrote the script in May of '93 -- and actually the first draft took 10 days.

Then I immediately went to Omaha and started setting up meetings... first of all, with the Omaha Film Commission, which was incredibly helpful. The state actually didn't have a Film Commission at the time. They introduced me to investors and the mayor, and the next thing I knew, we raised enough money to get the ball rolling. On that same trip back to Omaha, the Film Commission introduced me to Dana Altman [filmmaker Robert Altman's grandson]. I hadn't lived in Omaha for eight years.

AC: You'd grown up there though?

DM: Yeah, but I certainly hadn't done any film work there. So I knew I would need a local producer to help me out on that end. It was great timing for Dana, 'cause he had been working in commercials and industrials for a while and wanted to get back into doing features. And he knew the DP and a lot of the other local crew. And I still had a lot of friends who were actors in town. So we were able to put together a pretty good cast and crew from all locals. And having the mayor involved early on was really a big help, too.

AC: How did you get them to be that goofy? [Throughout the movie, there are cutaways to various public officials reciting colorful state facts directly to the camera. The movie opens with Omaha's improbably named mayor, P.J. Morgan, who rides in on a motorcycle, dressed in full biker regalia.]

DM: He's always that goofy. All of them really are.

AC: But were they aware they were coming off that goofy?

DM: I think they were. I had one conversation with the governor's press secretary where she used the same word. She said, "Will he look too goofy in this?" I told her, "Yeah, he probably will." And she said, "Well, okay, as long as everyone else does, too."

AC: Yet it's not a mean goofy.

DM: The thing with the mayor, and the motorcycle, and the leather... I was having this meeting with the mayor and the Film Commission because I wanted to let him know that we were shooting this movie and I was hoping that he would have some investment ideas. The film commissioners had read the script and they really liked it and they said, "Oh, Mr. Mayor, you know there's a part in the movie for the mayor. You should be in it." Originally, I had written these parts thinking that I could give them to my highest investors or something. It didn't have to be the real people. But, you know, all politicians are real hams for the camera. And so he's like, "Well, yeah, I'd love to be in the movie." And right afterward, he said, "I bet I can get the city to give you $5,000, and the county to give you another $5,000. And I'm like, "I thought there were roads, and bridges, and schools to be funded... but if you say so." In the end, he found out that there were, in fact, schools, and bridges, and roads... that he couldn't just invest in me. But we got a number of other things in kind: office space, cherry pickers when we needed a crane. He agreed to be in the film, and then somebody said that the mayor has a Harley that he brings out at parades and such (because originally it was just going to be him sitting behind a desk). So we said, "You want to go on a Harley?" And he said, "Yeah." It wound up being a really cold day and he asked, "How should I dress?" We said, "Dress how you normally dress." He showed up in this leather thing with the Gestapo goggles.

Originally, there wasn't a part for the governor. But his office heard that the mayor was going to be in the movie. And one's a Republican and one's a Democrat, so he didn't want to be upstaged by the mayor. The governor's office actually called us and asked, "Can you write in a part for the governor?" "Sure." And using the state highway commissioner turned out to be a good move on our part. He gave us all these great suggestions on what roads to film on and we never had to worry about the highway patrol bothering us. The whole state was one giant backlot as far as we were concerned. I also used to work as a speechwriter for Senator Harkin in Washington, so writing these guys' little platitudes was pretty easy.

AC: The budget ends up being what: $50,000?

DM: It was $38,000 to get it in the can, to simply film the movie. With post-production, to get an answer print and everything, it was closer to $80,000. We had set up the partnership so that we would begin shooting if we had a minimum of $40,000 and when we finished shooting we had $2,000 left over, which got us through the beginning of post-production. That's pretty cheap for 35mm but we also had free cameras [from Panavision] which really helped.

AC: Why did you decide on a self-distribution plan for Omaha? The reviews I've seen generally seem good.

DM: Part of it has to do with the whole distribution scene, which has been changing for independents the last couple of years. The Miramaxes and the New Lines have gotten so big that they're not really buying too many, if any, films of this ilk anymore. Then you're left with the smaller distributors. And the problem with them is that they're not really in a position to pay advances. We got a couple of offers from some of these smaller companies. The other problem is that they're either based in New York or L.A. and have no idea of what's in the middle of the country. In order for us to get the film out there in the Midwest, which everyone agreed was a good market to start with, it was looking like we would have to do all the legwork anyway. Because we already had some connections with the exhibitor chains in Iowa and Omaha from when we were running dailies there, we figured: Why give half the money to distributors? Why not just do it ourselves? Also important in this decision was the strategy common to a lot of these companies -- that you have to open in New York or L.A. first, and then if you get good reviews, they might open your film in two other cities. If you get bad reviews, forget it.

AC: When you talk about "we," you're talking about the partnership?

DM: Yeah. Basically, me and Dana, and to a certain extent, Rick Endicott, who's now partners with Dana. But I talk to Dana every day. We had also heard about what Rick [Linklater] did with Slacker, opening it himself at the Dobie, and we thought that sounded like a good strategy. That was initially the idea; we were just going to open in Nebraska. Based on the thousands and thousands of dollars we would make there, someone would pick us up, right? So we did that last May. We opened in Omaha, Lincoln, and a few other places. And we did very well. At the state's largest multiplex, we were second only to While You Were Sleeping when that was the number-one film in the country. We sold a lot of T-shirts and soundtrack tapes, as well. Then we would call up distributors who'd say, "Well, yeah, but of course you're going to do well in Omaha, the movie's Omaha. Call us when you do well outside Nebraska." Then we opened in Iowa and we did well there and they said, "Yeah, but it's still in the Midwest, so of course you're going to do well there."

By this point last September, I had met Bruce Sinofsky from Brother's Keeper at the Florida Film Festival. There were a lot of filmmakers there who didn't have distribution and there was one moment at a pool party when we were all bobbing around as a group, espousing the joys of self-distribution. Sinofsky really gave me a lot of good information. [Sinofsky's successful self-distribution of Brother's Keeper has become an industry model.] He gave me his whole list of theatres to call and that was basically the starting-off point. By having opened already in Nebraska, we had gotten our feet wet, and we had posters already, and made a trailer. So we thought we may as well do it ourselves at this point. So that's what happened. And since then, we've literally been starting from the middle and expanding out. After Nebraska, we did four cities in Iowa, Rapid City, Kansas City, St. Louis, Carbondale, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Sandusky, Ohio... a few really random places. Recently, we played Atlanta and seven weeks in Phoenix. We've got dates coming up now in Seattle and Los Angeles. We are finally beginning to hit the coast.

At any given point, if some distributor had really wanted to buy us out or co-opt us, we would have been perfectly happy to do that; but that never happened. At every step along the way, people would say, "Yeah, you did well there, but that's your main market." Convincing people in L.A. that the movie has played in 30 cities is nearly impossible. They don't believe it unless it's played in L.A., unless they've seen an ad in the L.A. Times or the Reader or the Weekly. Out here, you don't exist. And the trades only list the "exclusive" theatres in New York and L.A. They don't list the rest of the country. So, if you play at arthouses in the rest of the country, you're non-existent.

AC: So, you're happy with the decision to self-distribute?

DM: Yeah. Frankly, I don't think any other distributor would have gotten us in this many theatres. To that extent, it's been the only option for us. What's nice is that the distributors always make a big deal about, "Oh, it's going to cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in prints and advertising money," and we've put that myth to rest. By having a long release, we'll take the money that we make in, say, Omaha, and we'll buy an extra print and use it in Des Moines. We've actually not had to raise a single dime for the distribution end of it. Our P&A [prints and advertising] budget is literally whatever's in the bank account at the time -- which is usually about $200 -- using credit cards only as a stop-gap measure. Basically, it's been paying for itself. The only down side is that it takes a lot of time.

AC: You've spent more than a year with this distribution.

DM: Yeah, and I'm not sick of the movie yet. I can still actually sit through the whole thing and not have to turn my eyes. My advice is: Make a movie that you're going to enjoy watching 500 times because you're going to be stuck with it for a long time.

It's funny. The paradigm in Hollywood for anyone giving you money keeps changing. When I started this whole process it was, "Well, okay, you've done a short film. If you do a feature, maybe we can talk." Now, everyone's doing a feature, so it's "Okay, you did a feature. How much did it gross?" You just can't win. It's very frustrating.

AC: How much other work have you been able to accomplish in this past year now that you've also taken on distribution as a full-time job?

DM: I've written another script, but it is tough because I don't really have the full-time energy to push that. But, on the other hand, if the film hadn't gotten out, I would have been just some other guy out there with a film that had never gotten released. Now, I'm a guy with a film that got released. That should help us, number one, on the video side. And in the long run, career-wise, what it should be doing is building an audience for me and for my next film, and also building credibility for me, for someone to give me money for the next film. You always have to take these long-view looks at these things and say, "Yeah, it's taking a lot of time, but would I be able to get to where I want to be next if I wasn't doing this?" So, it's definitely worth it. We're not really making money off it, but we're not losing money either. And it's setting the stage for another film. And it's fun.

What's interesting, now, is that I'm getting calls at least once a week from other filmmakers who are thinking of doing this. It's following the same wave that occurred when all these independent filmmakers figured out ways to produce their movies on credit cards, and donations, and whatever else. Now, that big wave of films is hitting the distribution bottleneck and people are forced to figure out other ways of doing it. If you can produce a movie on a credit card, well, why not distribution? I think you're going to see more people doing this.

AC: Let's get into Slamdance a little bit. The origins of Slamdance must come out of a lot of the same impulses as this self-distribution thing.

DM: Yeah, pretty much. The very first festival we went to was the IFFM [Independent Feature Film Market] in '94 and we met a lot of other filmmakers there. That was sort of the seed of Slamdance, just meeting other filmmakers and starting to talk about vaguely networking. Meanwhile, over the next couple of months, we were all waiting to hear who was going to get into Sundance. We had heard of a couple of films that did these renegade screenings the year before in hotel rooms in Park City. A lot of us were talking about doing that if we didn't get into Sundance... and we didn't. And there were a lot of us from the IFFM who didn't get into Sundance. We said, "Logically, if individual films are screening up in hotel rooms and what-not, wouldn't it make sense if we got a dozen of us together and stuck a name on it and made a big splash?"

We all had control of our own destinies when we made our films and then, when you get into the festival and the distribution side, people sort of give up control. You're at the whims of festival directors and distributors and what-not. The idea was: Why give up control then? You don't get into a festival, start your own. It's a very pragmatic decision, too, in that Sundance really is the one event where people from the East and West coasts go to look, and buy, and talk about independent films. To not be a part of that is really doing a disservice to one's investors. The paradigm up until then was if you didn't get into Sundance, you didn't get distribution. That was it. Not only that, but you also didn't get into other film festivals either, because a lot of the foreign film festivals and mid-level American festivals would just take the Sundance list and show the same films over and over again. I think what's nice about what happened with Slamdance -- and the same could be said about South by Southwest, and the Hamptons, the New York Underground and all these festivals that have cropped up in the last couple of years -- is that it has broken down that monolith and now, when you go to festivals, it's not just the same films showing over and over, which makes it a lot more interesting.

AC: Slamdance is just a great name.

DM: My original idea was Loser Fest '95. That was swiftly rejected. It wound up being a really good thing in the sense that while not everyone's heard of my movie, local reviewers in different towns by now have heard of Slamdance.

AC: What about the inevitable danger of Slamdance becoming another Sundance?

DM: I was half expecting that to happen this year. Even in the first year, we went from begging friends of ours to be in the festival and didn't because they were afraid of being "blacklisted" or other repercussions. Then after it got a little publicity, we did end up having to reject a few people, who took great umbrage that they didn't get into the official "reject" festival. This year when we did Slamdance again, we had 450 submissions. It was insane. There were a lot of films we wanted to take that we, literally, just didn't have room for. You saw how stuck together with duct tape and 2x4s our set-up was to begin with. To have squeezed any more screenings out of that would have been impossible.

AC: It's the kind of thing that will grow in geometric proportions.

DM: Yes, because these voids are out there. I'm starting to see it now on the video side too, because that's what we're starting to get into. It's the same kind of thing. There are a few monolithic companies and, then, there's nobody. I think the time is right for people to start moving in.

AC: Do you have an official title with Slamdance? The last time I saw you, you were operating the projectors.

DM: My official title is co-founder-at-large. The idea behind that is basically there are three of us who are the official co-founders: myself, Shane Kuhn, and Jon Fitzgerald. We're the ones who really got the ball rolling last year. Then, for this year's Slamdance, Jon was really the one who had the most time to devote to it and I was involved more on a peripheral basis during the year, largely as an emissary, because at each festival I would go to, I would pass out applications, and tell people about it, and spread the word. In the months before the festival started, I got involved again on a day-to-day basis. We were looking for a title to call me at the festival this year and I thought, if I'm co-founder-at-large, I can get all of the glory and have none of the responsibilities. And it turned out to be just the opposite, because I was the only one who knew anything about projectors and stuff. I shouldn't have gone to film school. I wound up this year basically coordinating the projectors, which turned out to be an incredible nightmare. But it was kind of neat also... like when we were showing The Daytrippers. There I was in the back of an incredibly crowded theatre showing this movie and there was Steven Soderbergh [the film's co-producer] on his hands and knees next to me helping me fix the projector. There's something really neat about that. You don't see Robert Redford doing that at his film festival.

AC: Have there been negative repercussions from the Slamdance experience?

DM: It's hard to say. I think, by and large, most people are very impressed that we did it. We got a lot of real quizzical looks the first year, but the bottom line is that people in L.A. really like it when you do things yourself. I don't think my next film is going to get into Sundance. But here's the most interesting irony: We just got a deal for our film to play on the Sundance Channel.

AC: Congratulations.

DM: I don't know if Robert Redford knows about that yet, or Geoff Gilmore [Sundance programming director]. So it'll be interesting to see what happens when they find out. Are they actually going to run the film or is it just going to play at four in the morning? Repercussions are hard to pin down, though. This year, we had all the top distributors and agents coming around. No one was holding it against us. If anything, it helped. I recently switched agents out here. By saying that I was a co-founder of Slamdance, I got calls returned in a way that never would have happened the year before. So, no, on the contrary; if anything, it's far and away helped me.

One nice thing about being partnered up with Dana [Altman] along the way, was that we were always able to run ideas past Robert Altman and he was one of the first people we talked to when we came up with the idea of doing Slamdance. He's sort of the grand, ornery, old man of cinema these days. He very much encouraged us to do it. Because the bottom line is, history remembers film directors; it doesn't remember festival directors. As long as someone will give me money to make the next movie, that's what counts.

AC: A point was made especially clear this year with The Daytrippers, which had such a fine pedigree yet still didn't get into Sundance. It made the need for more exhibition opportunities so evident.

DM: Exactly. I met Steven Soderbergh at SXSW last year and having his support behind it this year really went a long way.

AC: What's next for you?

DM: The next script is a modern-day postal Western called Stamp and Deliver. I'm trying to get that rolling now. But as far as Omaha goes, it's sort of the beast that will not die. Theoretically, we have it booked in about 30 more cities. Realistically, I don't quite have the energy to move it around all that much more. But we've got dates coming up in Seattle, and Santa Fe, and most importantly, Los Angeles.

AC: So you've abandoned the Midwest?

DM: No, no. The next script is set to be filmed in Nebraska as well. It's the second of my Nebraska trilogy, the third of which being a bestiality movie called Make Love, Not Steak, that I'm sure will get me kicked out of Nebraska for good.

AC: I've heard you use a term, the New Husker Cinema, which I just love, because I think there really is something unique going on right now in the Midwest and it's showing up most clearly in some of these low-budget, independent films.

DM: People are realizing that anyone can make a movie. It's demythologizing the idea that you have to be in L.A. or New York, or that you have to go to film school. That's part of it. There's the technology side, also. You can do post-production if you have a big enough Macintosh. You don't need big dubbing rooms and soundstages anymore. If need be, you can do post-production yourself.

With magazines like The Independent and Filmmaker and Film Threat and Moviemaker, every month there are four or five different articles out there about how to make an independent film. That was certainly how I learned how to do it -- through reading Filmmaker. I think it's made people in these different regions, particularly the Midwest, figure out they can do it themselves.

AC: But why the Midwest more than other regions? It's not happening in Mississippi, to my knowledge.

DM: I don't know. I was recently in Atlanta and you're starting to see films coming out of there. Minneapolis, too, but I guess Minneapolis is the Midwest. As Hollywood decides that it's too expensive to shoot in L.A. and as they move out to non-union states to do their location stuff, that helps to spread out the equipment and the infrastructure, and gives training to people. I see it in Nebraska, and I've talked to a lot of people in Austin where this is the case, where they would nicely transition between working as a PA or an extra on a Hollywood movie and then when the Hollywood movie goes away, they think, "Well, okay," and then decide to do their own stuff. That's nice. A lot of people who worked on my Omaha crew, who had never worked on a movie before, have now worked on far more movies than I have.

AC: Still, it's not just the homegrown stuff. Movies like Fargo and the upcoming Kansas City (by Robert Altman) are showing that people are choosing the Midwest as a setting. Is it just that it's a new location that hasn't been picked over?

DM: I think that's part of it, too. Everyone's always looking for new locations that haven't been seen before. For me, another reason why I chose Nebraska was that it was my only exploitable ethnicity. Other than that, I'm just another white, Jewish, skinny kid. But by virtue of the fact that no one else had ever done a film in Nebraska, I knew it was an untapped market as far as investors go. That's why it really made a lot of sense for me to go back there. It was a natural. The only way for me to make a movie was to make that movie. It was a very self-serving, but it worked. There are pockets of places where people are still excited about making films because they haven't been overloaned to death.

What's nice is that when we shot the movie in Omaha, it was really the first independent film that had been shot there with an all-local cast and crew. And since, there's been quite a number of other films that have been shot there. A nice one is Precious, the Laura Dern movie which showed at Sundance this year. That director used a lot of the same cast and crew as Omaha. What's nice is that there's a bit of a film infrastructure in place now. In fact, the state now has a film commission, or a film commissioner, and I've been told that one reason is because the governor was in our movie and that reinvigorated his thoughts about film. The film commissioner is very grateful to us because her job wouldn't have existed without us. It's neat that I can go back to Nebraska now and Dana's still there, and my DP is still there, and the crew is basically in place now. And we don't have to cobble things together like before. n

Omaha (the movie) opens Friday, April 12 at the Dobie Theatre. A clip of the movie appears on its Website; the address is http://www.pacificnet.net/~rochlin/omaha. Dobie's Web address is http://www.hyperweb.com/dobie.