UVa grad: It takes green to make it to silver screen

Temple Fennell didn’t spend his time name-dropping. He got right to the point: the business of producing a film, even a relatively low-cost independent one, is just that, business.

Fennell spoke on Thursday at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration about how, for producers to make money, they’ll need to know not just how to find good material to produce but how to corral and manage the money needed to get it to the big screen.

On top of the concerns about financing, producing and distributing, Fennell added that the number of films that make it from a scriptwriter’s head to market is relatively low.

“The consumer can only absorb so many new films every Friday,” Fennell said.

Fennell’s was speaking to roughly 150 people as part of the annual Darden Producers Forum held in conjunction with the Virginia Film Festival, which opened up its four-day run on Thursday.

An award-winning filmmaker and president of a private equity fund, Fennell produced the recently released “Choke” — the latest adaptation of a Chuck Palahniuk novel — and 2007s “Savage Grace.”

In describing the production of movies, Fennell broke the realm down into three categories, with the biggest being those that cost more than $80 million to make, then those that start at $50 million and those that are made for under $10 million. Fennell did not address those films that fall within the $10 million to $50 million range.

Fennell, a UVa graduate and Charlottesville-area resident, works with films that produce for $10 million and under. And he said the pool of companies producing films in the $50 million to $80 million range is drying up after having put too much money into box office disappointments over the years.

“The audience doesn’t care if a film is made for $5 million or $50 million,” he said.

He also cautioned that anyone interested in producing movies needs to be aware that there are a lot of people who get paid when a movie gets distributed and that producers are not at the top of that list.

On the upside, he said the smaller films are generally where Academy Award nominations originate and that he saw a lot of opportunity for independent films that could stay within a budget.

He added, however, that film revenues were not being helped by teens who used to see first-run movies in the theater several times are, in many cases, now seeing them only once. He said the film industry is increasingly competing for attention among teens who are spending more time with other media, such as social networking Web sites MySpace and Facebook. And adults who used to go to the theater are now often waiting until a film hits the DVD store shelf and watching the movie at home on their 52-inch plasma screens.

This year Fennell co-founded ATO Gotham, an independent film company established to finance and distribute low-cost films that target people over 30 years old who don’t necessarily crave blockbusters.

“I don’t have great anecdotal stories about how I was hanging out by the pool with Steven Spielberg,” he said. “Or how I was playing darts with Bill Gates last week.”