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February 21, 2005

A very long engagement | Waterville's film-related businesses search for sustainability

By Sean Donahue
If Maine can be said to have a film industry, then Waterville is its center. And this month, the city is doing its best to prove it.

On Feb. 9, Waterville-based Shadow Distribution released its new documentary, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, in theaters across the country. Later this month, Maine International Film Festival will host the Maine Academy Awards at Colby College, a fundraising event highlighting Mainers' contributions to the film industry. And throughout February, Waterville's Railroad Square Cinema is showing several of the movies nominated for this year's Oscars, offering a rare chance for people outside of major cities to see some of the smaller films nominated.

That all of these events are happening in Waterville is no coincidence. Shadow Distribution, MIFF and Railroad Square Cinema are the work of a group of central Maine film buffs who turned a love of movies into an interconnected series of businesses. Like many Maine entrepreneurs, the group is attempting to overcome the limitations of Maine's small size and relative isolation ˆ— which can make it hard to run just a film distribution company, for example ˆ— by piecing together smaller ventures within an industry.

Still, designing a Maine film industry business model was never part of the group's plan, says Railroad Square co-founder and Shadow Distribution President Ken Eisen. "The grand idea was to make available films and other cultural things not normally available where we are," says Eisen. "That's always been the raison d'être for everything we've done, rather than making a fortune ˆ— or sometimes, it seems, even a living."

Eisen and his original partners, Alan Sanborn, Gail Chase, Stu Silverstein and Lea Girardin (now director of Maine Film Office), came together in 1978 to open Railroad Square Cinema, and new ventures grew gradually from there. Eisen and Girardin launched Shadow Distribution as a side project in the late 80s, while Railroad Square begat the Maine Film Festival in 1998. Today, the pieces work together: Railroad Square is one of the screening locations for MIFF, while Shadow Distribution uses the annual event to scout for new films to distribute. Shadow picked up the film Postmen in the Mountains, for example, after it won the audience award at the 2003 festival.

Last year, Shadow's film The Weather Underground received an Academy Award nomination for best documentary, bringing name recognition that's helped the company compile what Eisen calls a "full slate" of three releases through this time next year. Meanwhile, MIFF attendance has more than doubled from 3,500 its first year to more than 8,000 last year, along the way luring Hollywood notables like Ed Harris to the event.

But in the film industry, a 26-year track record and growing national interest doesn't automatically make for stable businesses. Whether it's worrying about ticket sales at Railroad Square, hoping that distributed movies recoup their marketing expenses or undertaking the annual search for MIFF sponsors, the group's challenge is to keep each of its ventures afloat year after year.

Take MIFF: While attendance has grown dramatically, its operating budget has stayed at $100,000, stretching its group of volunteers and one paid staffer to the limit. That's why festival Director Shannon Haines is working to attract more statewide and national sponsors. "We're more than a Waterville event," says Haines. "The challenge is making potential sponsors see that."

Three not-so-easy pieces
Founded as a single-screen theater showing foreign and art-house films, Railroad Square Cinema has grow into a three-screen facility that now focuses on first-run, independent films. (It finished 2004 in the black, thanks to the crowds who came to see Fahrenheit 9/11, according to Eisen.) With towns across Maine eyeing the role of arts and cultural activities in economic development, that independent niche makes Railroad Square an important piece of Waterville's cultural pitch. And by drawing moviegoers from across central and midcoast Maine, Railroad Square delivers a small but important economic jolt to the downtown area, according to George Gordon, owner of Maine Made & More, a local gift and housewares shop. "If you own a business in central Maine, you know that a dollar is a dollar ˆ— or maybe even a dollar and 50 cents," says Gordon. "Even if it's just a pizza and a movie every other Friday night, that's an important part of the downtown economy."

While running the theater during the 80s, Eisen and Lea Girardin created Shadow Distribution to release a Canadian canoeing documentary called Water Walker that the pair had seen at the Montreal Film Festival. The film was a success in Maine and other areas with a strong outdoors tradition, but Eisen says the company didn't really take off until 1994, when Shadow released a critically acclaimed documentary about Rom, or gypsy, culture, Latcho Drom.

Now, the businesses complement each other. As a cinema owner, Eisen says he has a network of fellow exhibitors to contact when Shadow has a new movie coming out. Shadow pays for the marketing and distribution of the films, then typically takes between 30% and 50% of the ticket sales at each theater ˆ— much less than the 70% or more that mainstream distributors take from commercial theaters.

Some Shadow films make money: Latcho Drom has grossed more than $1 million in ticket sales, while The Weather Underground has grossed about $600,000. Others, though, fail to break even ˆ— like Magic Hunter in 1997 ˆ— which means Shadow's finances are always uncertain. "The movie business is a funny thing," says Eisen. "If Weather Underground hadn't happened we might not be here right now. If Wild Parrots turns out to be failure we might be right back to where we started."

Eisen will no doubt be looking for more potential Shadow releases at this summer's Maine International Film Festival, which he and the Railroad Square partners launched seven years ago to showcase both Maine-made films and national and international independent features. With ticket sales accounting for just half of the event's $100,000 budget, though, festival director Haines is spending this winter lining up sponsors to make up the difference.

Those sponsors have included small businesses, such as Maine Made & More, which can sponsor individual films for $250, and larger local institutions such as Kennebec Federal Savings, MaineGeneral Hospital and Colby College. Now, though, Haines is working to convince non-locals to join the effort. Last year, the festival attracted Oakhurst Dairy and a few other sponsors from elsewhere in Maine, as well as one national sponsor, Stella Artois beer. This year, Haines plans to use two satellite theaters ˆ— one in Bangor and one in Portland ˆ— to attract more festivalgoers and help convince more businesses across the state to back the event.

But as Shadow and MIFF are growing, Eisen and his partners must focus on keeping up the theater that started it all. And even though the group is still doing what it loves, Eisen expects that the job is never going to be easy. "We're still not in very populous, media-saturated area," he says. "Drawing audiences has been a challenge for 26 years, and it will be until we close our doors."

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