Happy, Texas and The Art of Business

by Scott Tobias
October 6th, 1999

The most hotly contested item at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Mark Illsley's Happy, Texas—a featherweight comedy starring Steve Zahn, Jeremy Northam, Illeana Douglas, and William H. Macy—was pursued by all the mini-major studios before Illsley settled on Miramax for the reported sum of $2.5 million, plus a generous back-end deal. Though the figure more than recouped the $1.7 million investment fronted by the director and his family, at least one rival distributor charged that Miramax paid upwards of $10 million, the rationale being that the studio, embarrassed by the tepid returns for such expensive pick-ups as Next Stop Wonderland ($6 million) and The Spitfire Grill ($10 million), was better off announcing a less ostentatious sum.

All of which indicates that at Sundance, the numbers game often makes for far more compelling drama than the movies themselves. Powerful market forces and independently financed art have always tread the same snowbound streets in Park City, Utah, but never have the two made for such cozy bedfellows. It could be argued that Happy, Texas is every bit the unpretentious crowd-pleaser many have said it is, but it's virtually impossible to make a case for profound artistic merit. In many ways, the film marks the purest example yet of a trend sparked by 1995's The Brothers McMullen, staging a conventional feature on a small budget as a calling card to attract Hollywood millions.

"Actors are really the most efficient form of advertising," said Illsley, without irony, in a recent interview with The Onion. To be fair, he was referring to the importance of a good cast to secure financing and a healthy return on an investment, an assertion his film's success more than bears out. There's no question that seasoned performers like Zahn and Macy not only elevate the material, but were also crucial in getting Happy, Texas a high-profile platform at Sundance. Still, Illsley's statement points to a theme that surfaced throughout the film's controversial run at the festival: The art of business has superseded the business of art.

In what was widely considered a weak year for competition entries Happy, Texas stood out as the most mainstream, a fact Illsley and co-writer Ed Stone are not quick to deny.

"I was totally surprised to get into the festival," Illsley said. "I had so many people tell us we weren't going to get in. A lot of people, when they read the script, called us 'neither fish nor fowl,' meaning we were not commercial enough to be a mainstream studio film, but not edgy and unusual and controversial enough to be an independent movie. We were surprised when we got into Sundance."

"And even more surprised to be in competition," Stone added. "Not one lesbian ODs in our movie, and that's the surefire way to get into competition." "We thought we'd get into American Spectrum or one of the other venues," Illsley said. "We probably are very commercial, on purpose. That was the movie we wanted to make."

Whatever Illsley's shortcomings as a director, his business sense is clearly refined. The son of a wealthy entrepreneur, his unorthodox procedure for courting offers infuriated many unlucky distributors and may prove empowering for filmmakers in the future. Once he recognized that Happy, Texas was a hot commodity, Illsley and his broker, Cassian Elwes of the William Morris Agency, carefully auditioned the contenders, giving each an hour to describe how they planned to handle the film.

"It was the fairest bidding process probably ever done," Illsley said. "I owned the film, I was fully in charge of it, and the distributor I chose was going to be one of the most important decisions I was going to make for the movie, because they're the ones who are going to take care of it forever after this. They're going to own the movie. So I've got to choose the best distributor, and money is not necessarily the best way to choose somebody. That's kind of like choosing to marry somebody based on the size of the wedding ring they're going to give you. Isn't it better to try to choose someone based on whether you're going to have a successful marriage?"

But the process left a host of also-rans—Fox Searchlight's Tony Safford, Paramount Classics' Ruth Vitale, and Fine Line's Cary Woods—voicing their frustrations. "There were a couple of times when the distributors were uncomfortable," Illsley said, "and I'm sorry for that. They have a lot of business they have to get done up at Sundance, so when you do it as a money offer, you can do it very quickly, and the heads of the company don't need to be there. Sometimes we were running over from another meeting, so we'd have the entire corporate structure of a distribution company sitting out in one of our spare rooms waiting for us to be ready to talk to them. I apologize for that, but I was just trying to make the best decision I could for the first film I'd ever made that my family had financed."

More disturbing complaints accompanied a press screening of Happy, Texas, where critics and other filmmakers were reportedly muscled out to make room for studio acquisitions people. Rarely has the festival's growing reputation as a meat market been so baldly exposed. Though Illsley argued that the press was given plenty of opportunities to see the film, he conceded, "We did take probably one-quarter to a third of that screening up with distribution people. I would have done the same thing again if I had to, and any one of those press people, if they were in my situation, would have done the same thing I did: Get distribution people to see the movie so we could sell it. So I'm sorry. I really apologize."

Illsley makes a compelling argument for the manner in which Happy, Texas was shepherded through Sundance. While reports of the film's scrappy production have been greatly exaggerated, he and his family invested a huge sum of money that they fully expected to recoup, no matter how many feathers were ruffled. But in all the wheeling and dealing, moviegoers who care about independent film may feel left out. Certain rhetorical questions linger: Should Sundance admit entries as plainly commercial as Happy, Texas? Conversely, is the "Cannes West" environment still healthy for filmmakers with real artistic ambition? For Mark Illsley and Ed Stone, the Sundance experience has paid off beyond expectation, delivering them to a lucrative future in Hollywood. But, paradoxically, their opportunity may be the festival's crisis.