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American Beauty

The people behind the Best Picture winner of 1999, American Beauty, have mostly gone on to even further success: the film’s writer, Alan Ball, is the creator of Six Feet Under and True Blood, two wildly popular HBO dramas; the film’s director, Sam Mendes, has made a career of not living up to his potential but still making visually interesting films. Among the performers, Chris Cooper went on to win an Oscar, and Annette Bening could be receiving a nomination for her role in The Kids Are All Right. Nowadays, it seems like one of the surest Oscar winners ever. The wunderkind director, the quirky and original screenplay, the high-quality performances…how could this movie not win the Best Picture Oscar? There was a time, though, when it was just another movie. What set it on the fast track was its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

A recent example of a movie that seemed tailor-made to win Oscars by starting at the fall film festivals - but failed - is Up in the Air. Unlike American Beauty, Up in the Air premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and was immediately the talk of Hollywood. Unlike American Beauty, I have a feeling the film is going to hold up well (I like American Beauty, but at all times, it is waving its hands, shouting “Look at me! Don’t I look cool?”), but the films share similar traits. Both are high-quality, high-class affairs from wunderkind filmmakers. Hell, the latter film’s director is the son of a famous comedy director, but even that didn’t help the film out. Sure, Up in the Air got Oscar nominations, but it won nothing. Even the film’s screenplay lost to Precious (and think about that one for a second). American Beauty got lucky, a cinematic trailblazer from the moment it set foot at the Toronto film festival.

Happy, Texas

You know Happy, Texas, don’t you? Of course you do. It’s one of the best feel-good comedies to ever come out of a film festival. Why, every year, we all throw a Happy, Texas viewing party, right? And when it won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, parades were thrown in the street! Oh, wait, sorry, I was in the alternate universe where all of that happened according to Harvey Weinstein’s best wishes. I’m back. You probably have not seen Happy, Texas, but if you’re enough of a film buff, you’re likely familiar with the story of the film being acquired by Miramax Films for millions of dollars after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. On the one hand, it’s hard to blame Miramax: the film stars Steve Zahn, Jeremy Northam, and William H. Macy; it’s a crowd-pleasing yet quirky comedy and Sundance crowds loved it.

So what went wrong to make the movie only gross just under $2 million domestically? It’s not a lack of critical praise; the film has a 82% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. There’s no easy reason to pin the film’s lack of success on. The reason why I’ve put Happy, Texas on this list is because it’s one example of a common thread in most film festivals: a movie - genre doesn’t matter - is shown at a film festival, distributors go crazy because the festival crowds ate it up, the movie is released to mass audiences and it fails. This happens a lot less these days, since Happy, Texas was such a notable failure. A movie can be good, it can be great, or it can be terrible; sometimes, audiences just don’t give a rat’s ass, even if there’s no reason for them not to. Happy, Texas (a movie I haven’t seen, being fair) could be brilliant. The unwashed masses just didn’t care.

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