Movies

On Location: Producing “Red Doors”

On Sept. 8, 2006, the indie film Red Doors had its theatrical debut in New York after spending a year on the festival circuit; it then opened in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Produced by Georgia Lee (who also wrote and directed the film), Mia Riverton (who also stars in the film) and Jane Chen, the film explores a dysfunctional Asian-American family, including a lesbian daughter.

In this article, Chen writes about the trials and tribulations of making a feature-length film.

Martin Scorsese once told Georgia Lee that she ought to write what she knows. With that gentle nudge, he directed her down a path that would culminate in the Sept. 8 theatrical opening of our first feature film, Red Doors.

I know that Scorsese’s mantra of personal filmmaking influenced Georgia to choose Red Doors as her first project because I happened to be privy to some of her earlier scripts – all of them surreal, and one where a psychotic madwoman blows up Bloomingdale’s.

The decision to make Red Doors our first feature film was further influenced by the reality of fundraising. We didn’t want to spend the next five years of our lives trying to make Hollywood notice us. We wanted to make a film and have it in the can by the end of the year. The only way we could do that was if we raised all the money ourselves.

I remember having a conversation with Georgia and Mia Riverton around Christmas 2003 where we figured out that between friends, family, and maxing out our credit cards, we could pull together $200,000 – about $19 million short for blowing up Bloomingdale’s on film but just about right to explore a dysfunctional Chinese-American family.

So in January of 2004, Georgia dropped out of Harvard Business School, I quit my job, and Mia sacrificed pilot season in Los Angeles to move to New York, in order to begin work on Red Doors. We had the first draft of a script, two “no pre-set spending limit” American Express cards, and lots of youthful optimism.

(By the way, the American Express “no pre-set spending limit” thing is a load of BS. It doesn’t mean “no spending limit”; it just means they’ll cut you off whenever they feel like it and when you least expect it – like in the middle of a 100-degree outdoor shoot when you’re standing in line at Food Emporium trying to buy 10 cases of water. But of course, I’m not bitter about that.)

Looking for Leads

When we started, two of the roles were already cast: Katie, the youngest of the Wong sisters, was going to be played by Georgia’s sister Kathy Lee; and Mia, the lesbian love interest of middle sister Julie, was going to be played by Mia (Georgia is creative, except when it comes to character names). We spread the casting net far and wide, concentrating in New York but eventually opening up to actors in Los Angeles who were willing to be treated as local hires (no compensation for travel, room or board).

We were tremendously lucky in the caliber of talent that showed up at our auditions. Our micro-budget dictated that every actor was going to get paid SAG minimum regardless of how many big TV shows or studio films they had already done.

What surprised us was that many of these veteran, accomplished actors sought us out and asked to be included in auditions. The sad truth behind this is that quality roles for Asian Americans are few and far between, with indies being the only films where they can be leads.

Everybody wanted to play Sam, the oldest Wong sister, whose journey mimicked Georgia’s personal story the closest. But we ended up asking several of the actresses who originally auditioned for Sam to come back and read for the role of the middle daughter, Julie, which is how we cast Elaine Kao as Julie.

In one Julie audition, Mia was present and reading lines with the actress. It was the scene immediately preceding the first kiss between Mia and Julie. When they got to the end of the scene, instead of stopping like all the other actresses did, this one dove right in and planted a wet one on a very surprised Mia.

We almost cast her just for her enthusiasm.

23 Days of Heaven and Hell

One of the necessities of low-budget, independent filmmaking is keeping shooting days down to a minimum. We shot over 16 locations in and around the tri-state area over 23 days in June of 2004. Moreover, we shot on Super 16 mm film, which required an entire truckload of camera equipment, lights and gels to follow us everywhere.

The first two weeks we shot in New York City during an early summer heat wave. It was brutal. We nearly got kicked out of two locations (my apartment building and Georgia’s), and we had a run-in with the local union at another.

We were very lucky that our crew was small and efficient. We were able to convince the union guy that came by our set that we were shooting a commercial for a local access TV channel. It was also raining that day so I don’t think he wanted to hang around to make sure.

We had two cast members drop out at the last minute.

I remember the day when we were shooting the bar scene at Milk and Honey. It was the first scene we shot that featured the burgeoning lesbian romance between Mia and Julie. It’s a very sexy, seductive and intimate scene. While many actors like to stay in character on shooting days such as this one, poor Mia spent all her time between takes on the phone strategizing with our casting director and yelling at agents trying to find replacements.

I think one of the reasons for why Julie and Mia’s chemistry worked is because the two of them spent so much time together during pre-production and production.

While in Los Angeles, they took tango lessons together for their dance scene, and while in New York, they lived together in the same apartment. Mia even took Elaine out to Milk and Honey a week before they shot their scene together so they could really experience the social aspects of a first date.

We spent the last two weeks of the shoot in Waterford, Conn., in Georgia’s childhood home. Her parents had given us permission to shoot in the house, but I don’t think they were expecting 50 cast and crew members to descend on them like locusts.

We kept displacing Georgia’s family (which included her mom, her dad and her elderly grandmother) from one room to the next. We painted their pristine white walls an assortment of colors, and we completely commandeered the refrigerator and kitchen for craft services. On top of that, Georgia, Mia and I slept on “hot sets” in the house so we could literally roll out of bed and into work every morning.

Film Festivals: Taking our Show on the Road

A funny thing happened on our way to Sundance: Another Chinese-American lesbian film called Saving Face beat us there. Well, that and the fact that we didn’t really finish our film until December 2004 – about three months after the Sundance deadline.

We watched the progress of Saving Face with great interest and trepidation, knowing that they were going to get into the market at least six months before we were, and that their performance was going to directly impact the prospects for our film. There was never competition between our films, but certainly we looked to Saving Face as a trailblazer and a harbinger for Red Doors.

We had our world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 22, 2005, in front of our hometown crowd. It was a horrifying and exhilarating experience to see our film on the big screen in front of a real audience – kind of like speaking to a large crowd while naked.

While we were frantically running around trying to drum up buzz about our film at Tribeca, I received a call from David Courier, the senior programmer at Outfest, who had heard about our film and wanted to see a screener. I hastily sent him a DVD and promptly forgot about his call. We ended up winning the Made in New York award for Best Narrative Feature at Tribeca.

(Be sure to watch the special featurette, Behind Red Doors, on the DVD to see Georgia giving her acceptance speech where she forgets to thank Mia and me. If you see Georgia around, be sure to give her grief about it.)

Two weeks into our Tribeca afterglow, I got another call from David Courier. This time he was inviting our film to screen at Outfest. At first I was thrilled. We were hoping for a big Los Angeles festival to showcase our film to the industry, and Outfest is not only one of the biggest, it is also a great marketplace for film buyers.

My second reaction was panic. I was worried that our film wasn’t “gay enough” for the Outfest crowd.

True, we had a main character who is a lesbian and embarks on a romantic relationship with another woman, but the film is really an ensemble story about a family. I explained my trepidation to David and instead of agreeing, he convinced me that not only should Red Doors play at Outfest, but that it should be the featured film on All Girl Friday.

David Courier is certainly a charming rogue, but the argument that he used to win me over was quite compelling. He explained that Outfest was interested in showcasing films that presented the queer experience in a variety of contexts. They liked Red Doors because it featured a lesbian character in the context of a family unit.

Queer films, he argued, don’t have to be just about romance or homophobia or coming-out. In addition, he felt that many of the other characters in the film would be relatable to a lesbian audience even if the characters themselves weren’t gay.

I am so glad we did it. The Outfest screening was by far our best. The 600-seat theater at the Directors Guild was sold out, and the crowd was vocal and enthusiastic. David was right:

During the Q&A afterward, there were just as many fans of Katie, the youngest daughter, as there were of Julie and Mia. We picked up two more awards at Outfest: the HBO Audience Award for Best First Feature and the Jury Prize for Screenwriting.

Selling our Souls

While our film was making its festival run, we were also busy meeting with distributors to try and sell our film. Flush with awards from Tribeca, CineVegas and Outfest, we were optimistic about our chances and reached out to all the usual indie distribution prospects: Miramax, Warner Independent, Fox Searchlight, Goldwyn, Focus. I’ll admit, visions of bidding wars did pass through my head on more than one occasion.

Then reality set in. We got a few nibbles, but mostly silence. We managed to get a few meetings, but what we heard turned our stomachs. Unanimously, the distributors were very complimentary about our film. They all “loved it,” but they didn’t want to buy it. When we asked them why, they very bluntly told us that “Asian-American films don’t sell.”

Apparently, unlike African-American and Hispanic-American films that have crossed over, Asian-American films remain an ethnic niche. According to the distributors we talked to, the problem lies in the fact that Asian-American audiences are too assimilated. They don’t go out of their way to support Asian-American content; they watch Pirates of the Caribbean just like everybody else. Without the base support of its native audience, Asian-American films usually don’t have the legs to last in theaters long enough for mainstream crowds to “discover” them.

It’s not really racism because at the end of the day, the only color that Hollywood sees is green. If Saving Face or Better Luck Tomorrow had made $50 million like Diary of a Mad Black Woman did, then there would be distributor interest.

Interestingly enough, the lesbian angle for Red Doors was a selling point.

For better or for worse, distributors can point to Kissing Jessica Stein (a modest success that grossed $7 million) and feel comfortable about investing in a film with lesbian themes. Feature film distributors are a myopic, risk-averse bunch. They have databases with every film ever released, and whenever they are considering whether or not to acquire a film, they run projections based on comparable films in their database. The result is a lot of the same-old, same-old, with the rare gay cowboy movie thrown in as a flash of brilliance.

Outfest ended up being great for us in a number of ways. In addition to the great screening and winning awards, we got our first distributor offers afterward. Most of those offers included a guaranteed theatrical run – something that was very important to us.

Many independent films fail to make it into theaters is because it is so expensive to distribute theatrically. Print and advertising costs often dwarf a film’s original budget. When you look at box office numbers, only half of that goes to the distributor because the exhibitor keeps half.

Most films are not profitable until DVD or foreign sales, meaning that theatrical release is a loss-leader and a very expensive way to market DVDs.

We chose to release with a small, new company called Polychrome Pictures that has a video output deal with Warner Home Video. We were Polychrome’s second theatrical release.

Screw the MPAA

We were ecstatically pushing ahead with our theatrical release preparations when we ran into our first roadblock: the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA is the organization behind the “voluntary” rating system, but it is well-known that films that choose to be “Not Rated” have a hard time getting into theaters.

So, dutifully we filled out the paperwork, submitted the documentation and paid our fee to get our MPAA rating, fully expecting a PG-13 verdict.

We were shocked and angry when the MPAA gave Red Doors an R rating. When we asked why, they vaguely referred to a scene where the teenage daughter holds up a sex toy while she unloads a duffle bag full of sex toys in the room of the boy she is playing a prank on. Yes, the sex toy is anatomically correct and quite large in size, but it wasn’t being used in a sexual manner at all, and the scene was onscreen time for about three seconds. Other than that, there is no profanity, no nudity, no drug use and no violence in our film.

Let me take a step back and explain why we were so intent on getting a PG-13. There is still a pretty big box office discrepancy favoring films rated PG-13 over R.

Our film is a dark comedy about a Chinese-American family. We knew that in order to maximize our ticket sales, we needed parents to feel comfortable about bringing their kids to see the film. We were also counting on a strong teenage contingent. Older Asian Americans are notoriously prissy, and we didn’t want to scare them off.

Finally, we wanted our film to get good shelf placement at Wal-Mart and Target when we come out on DVD. All of these things are correlated to the MPAA rating.

With a belly full of righteous indignation, Georgia and I flew out to Los Angeles on our own dime to defend our film in a one-shot appeals process. During the appeal, the MPAA convenes a panel consisting of theater owners and studio executives, who first watch the film and then sit through debate-style presentations from the filmmakers and a rep from the MPAA. There needs to be a quorum of 12 members present for the vote to count, and you need a two-thirds majority to overturn the MPAA’s original ruling.

After the screening was over, the MPAA representative made a quick presentation explaining the questionable sex toy scene. We were given five minutes for rebuttal, where we dissected the MPAA guidebook word for word to show that we did not deserve an R rating.

The MPAA rep had two minutes to respond, and she broke one of the rules of the debate process: She told the jurors that the MPAA had never condoned sex toys in a PG-13 film before and that it was an automatic R rating on that basis.

While we were preparing for the appeal, the MPAA had told us very firmly that we were not allowed to use other films or other MPAA rulings as precedent in our arguments because each film was supposed to be judged in its own context.

We took the woman’s transgression as a green light to spew out our research: A number of PG-13 films featured phalluses and sex toys including Parenthood, The Company and all of the Austin Powers movies (all studio films, by the way). We closed our argument by pointing out that no Asian-American film in recent memory has been released with less than an R rating and while we weren’t claiming discrimination, we did believe that our community deserved a film they could take their kids to.

In the end, we won a majority vote (eight to six), but not enough to overturn the ruling.

As we were leaving the theater, one juror stopped to talk with us. He said that typically he just votes on the side of the MPAA because he assumes that they know how to do their jobs, but this time he voted for us. He said that he assumed the lesbian content was what gave us the R rating, so he was surprised when they brought up the sex toy, which he didn’t even remember.

It was a terrible trip. Georgia and I were out $500 each for the plane tickets, and we were still stuck with the dreaded R rating. I managed to joke to Mia as we were leaving that if I knew they were going to give us an R rating, we should have put more tits and ass in the film.

(Almost) Ready for Primetime

One of the most fortuitous events to come out of our film festival run was the chance meeting and eventual partnership with TV producer Steve Tao. Steve saw our film at Tribeca and approached us about turning Red Doors into a one-hour television drama. While we were at Outfest, we met with CBS, and they bought our pitch.

We spent the next four months adapting Red Doors for television and writing a one-hour pilot script. Georgia, Mia and I got a crash course in TV writing – especially handling the tricky five-act structure that culminates in a mini-cliffhanger before each commercial break.

While we already had characters to work with, we found that the vast canvas of TV storytelling required us to think much more broadly about each of our characters. This gave us more room for development; for example, in the TV show we planned on exploring Julie’s coming-out process.

We had a great time working with CBS and Paramount while developing the show, but in the end, we didn’t get a greenlight to pilot. We were told that while they loved the script, corporately, CBS was going more high-concept for the 2006—2007 television season. Looking at their fall line-up, I have to admit that it would have been tough to try and squeeze in a quirky family drama between all their CSI-type procedurals.

But it would have been really cool to bring an Asian-American family with a lesbian main character to prime time.

The First Weekend

The most important number for limited-release, independent films is the per-screen box office average during opening weekend.

Absolute box office numbers are meaningless since most indies release on just a few screens at a time. Distributors look at these numbers to determine whether or not they want to expand to more cities. Retailers look at these numbers to determine whether they want to carry a title on DVD.

Because these numbers are so important, grassroots organizations such as The First Weekenders group work hard to rally audiences to see indie films in their first week of release.

A strong per-screen average is $10,000. A phenomenal per screen-average is above $20,000. According to Box Office Mojo, Saving Face averaged $12,517 per screen on opening weekend. Brokeback Mountain averaged $109,485.

Red Doors opened on two screens in New York on September 8, 2006: the 260-seat theater at the Angelika Film Center and the 285-seat theater at the ImaginAsian theater. In an otherwise lackluster box office weekend, Red Doors opened as the top grossing film, per screen, in the entire country.

We ended up grossing $35,050 over those two screens, yielding a strong per screen average of $17,525. Because we have a very limited advertising budget, we are dependent on grass-roots efforts, PR and word-of-mouth to spread awareness.

We took advantage of inexpensive online methods such as setting up a MySpace page and posting weekly podcasts on our website and at iTunes. We blogged frequently on our site too.

So that’s the good-parts recounting of the making of an independent film. I hope to see you in the theaters … and bring a friend.

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