By Howard Ho
DAILY BRUIN SENIOR STAFF
[email protected]
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.”