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Straight to legitimacy
DAILY BRUIN SENIOR STAFF hho@media.ucla.edu Some movies live on, literally. Remember "Air Bud," the movie about the basketball-playing dog? The fourth installment in the series, "Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch," came out last June. Remember "Hellraiser," the movie with a mysterious box and the pinheaded guy? Its sixth incarnation is coming out in October. Perhaps you haven't heard of these films, because they bypassed the red-carpet premieres and late night show appearances and went directly to video. In fact, you probably saw them at your local video rental store but ignored their cheesy appeal. However, due to their unexpected profitability, direct-to-video releases are a growing trend. "I think of direct-to-videos as crap," said Vandra Kok, a third-year biology student. "If they don't come out in theaters, then they're not as noticeable. Who really watches them? That's the assumption anyway." Yet there is a growing contingency hoping to get direct-to-video releases their due. Scott Hettrick, a leading direct-to-video proponent, coined the phrase "video premiere" to provide them a more glamourous title and founded Video Premieres magazine. By next January, Hettrick hopes to have his Video Premiere Awards televised and validated like the Oscars and Emmys. "It occurred to me that all the same kinds of work that is required for a theatrical release is going into these productions, whether they wind up with as good a quality or not," Hettrick said. "I thought, since we already have 65 million awards for movies in theaters, why don't we have at least one awards show that recognizes the quality of work that's going into these things for video." Hettrick's Video Premieres Academy features 250 industry professionals, including Jason Alexander, Sylvester Stallone, William Shatner and documentarian Ken Burns. Only in its third year of existence, the awards are just one way to attack the direct-to-video connotations of low quality. Since the 1980s, the video boom meant that cheaply-made, poorly-acted erotic thrillers ("Night Eyes") that ended up on late-night cable networks or action movies that touted explosions, martial arts and cliched stories ("Bloodsport") would live on and on. Many soon became video franchises (see "Bloodsport 4," or "Night Eyes 4"). Universal ventured into the franchise craze with its "Land Before Time" hit children's series (the ninth one is due out in December). By 1998, Disney had legitimized the direct-to-video market with "The Lion King II: Simba's Pride," which grossed more on video than the original film's theatrical release. Following that, Disney began a campaign to crank out sequels to its classic films for enormous profits. For the first time, direct-to-video films are meeting or surpassing the expectations of their theatrical counterparts. "The trend over the last 10 or 20 years has been that fewer and fewer people are going into the movie theaters," Hettrick said. "The actual dollar figures go up because they charge more for admission, but the actual number of people is dwindling. You spend four bucks to rent a movie, and all your friends can watch it for the same four bucks, whereas you go to the movie theater and it's 10 bucks a piece." As a result of a more lucrative video market, video is seen by some as an appetizing new method of film distribution, especially for smaller independent films. Almost any film, such as UCLA alumna Ana Barredo's "A Real Job," can get distributed to rental stores and find some audience out there ready to give unknown filmmakers a chance. "There's a high percentage of drek out there, stuff that is subpar and below average," Hettrick said. "But like anything else, there are diamonds in the rough." |
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