I can't really suggest that you run out and buy a copy of the 1972 fake documentary The Legend Of Boggy Creek, which is being reissued today on DVD, but it's an interesting movie, not for what it is but for what it represents.
Back in the seventies, it was possible for independant producers to make a killing by selling their wares to the masses in a variety of creative ways. The most notorious technique, impossible to do now, was four-walling: The producer or distributor would swoop into an area, buy a ton of ad time on all local media and rent local movie houses outright for a week, and keep all the profits. This was the technique used by the notorious Sunn Classics Pictures, responsible for the likes of In Search Of Noah's Ark and The Mysterious Monsters. (That last one was particularly popular; in the seventies, if a movie promised to tell "the truth" about Bigfoot, it was a must-see. Bigfoot was one of those seventies things, like Evel Knievel and Luke Skywalker's hair, that's impossible to explain to people who weren't there.)
Boggy Creek wasn't four-walled, but it was sold in a similar way: A regional release pattern, mostly in smaller markets, neighborhood theaters and drive-ins, always accompanied by the TV commercial, containing the key line "A True Story." The commercial ran everywhere, during local newscasts, during late-afternoon local kiddie programming, during the late movies, anytime short of prime-time.
This just wouldn't be possible now. In the seventies, VCRs weren't common, cable was more of a luxury, and not always available in small towns. So people watched TV, they watched local channels, whatever they might offer, and everybody, young and old, saw the ads for these things. Everybody had the same Pavlovian reaction to the endless barrage of hoopla, and everybody showed up at the theater.
And everybody enjoyed themselves. The Legend Of Boggy Creek is an awful, awful movie, but seen in a crowded theater with an audience made up of your friends and neighbors, the communal experience kicks in, and it works. Some movies, even good ones, only fully come to life under such circumstances. How often does this happen anymore? Is it even possible?
Even the big studios don't try to reach a mass audience with their advertising anymore. Time is bought on the channels the target audience watches, and the usual suspects arrive in the theaters--teenagers for horror movies, women for romantic comedies, idiots for Rob Schneider vehicles. Indie producers inevitably follow the same model--there's no such thing as a mass audience.
If you're an indie filmmaker, forget it. Charles B. Pierce, director of Boggy Creek, had a surprisingly varied career in the seventies, churning out period thrillers, westerns, even a Viking epic (Lee Majors IS The Norseman), because he could afford to self-finance these things, knowing he could control, to some extent, the distribution, and make a tidy profit himself. The film world these days is full of indie filmmakers who make a big killing with one freak hit (like The Blair Witch Project) and then are never heard of again.
True, young filmmakers can get their work seen on the internet, where more people will probably see it than would ever see it in a theater. But if you want to actually, you know, make money, that's a dead end. Somehow, you'll have to deal with a big corporation to get it seen.
And if you're an audience member longing to see a movie in a packed theater full of people who want to be entertained, who will laugh or cry or gasp on cue simply because it's fun to do, well, you'll just have to remember what that was like. And if you're too young to remember, you'll never know what you missed.
