The biggest horror movie at the time, and they saw none of the success.

June 14, 2024 5:22 AM

Instead, to commemorate the film breaking $100 million at the domestic box office, Artisan sent each actor a fruit basket.
posted by Kitteh (32 comments total)

For those of you who like a little more context, the article is about The Blair Witch Project.
posted by Silvery Fish at 5:41 AM on June 14 [10 favorites]

Iron Man's worth comparing [trungtphan.com]
posted by HearHere at 5:54 AM on June 14 [2 favorites]

Man, I had no idea they got treated so raw. This movie scared the crap out of my wife and me: we saw it at a midnight showing and were like fuuuck when we left the theatre. They deserve way better. Now I'm mad.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:55 AM on June 14 [5 favorites]

As Leonard Nimoy once said - Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 6:23 AM on June 14 [2 favorites]

As usual, don't read the comments.
posted by Zumbador at 6:32 AM on June 14 [3 favorites]

The article mentions the contract included a 1% profit participation, but not how they got fucked out of it, which I am sure they did. It might be just that the profits went to Artisan and not Haxan.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:32 AM on June 14 [4 favorites]

This is like when the author of the story for the Forest Gump movie got none of his profit percentage (3%) because the studio claimed the movie that grossed $600 million+ was in the red.
posted by srboisvert at 6:39 AM on June 14 [1 favorite]

I know this isn't the point at all but as someone slightly younger, it's always tickled me how completely on brand Gen X the trio looks. Back in the movie, back in the press, and even today. There's something very comforting about that, the kind of "you know these people, it's your friend's cool older sister" normalcy that it projects. It's one of the reasons Blair Witch was so effective. They're just people, right?

One of my favorite and best horror movies of all time. It's an absolute travesty they've been compensated so poorly. These three actors ARE that movie.
posted by phunniemee at 6:41 AM on June 14 [5 favorites]

This is one of the few movies, and by far the first movie, that I've seen pirated. (Someone downloaded a low bitrate version and burned it to a CD-R that I watched at a friend's house.) I'm glad to hear I didn't rip off the actors, however minutely.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 6:44 AM on June 14

They literally ARE that movie. They starred in it, they shot it, most of their dialogue was improvised. It's not actually clear to me what the ostensible directors of this film did other than cut it together. That's a significant feat, but it's an editing feat.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:44 AM on June 14 [8 favorites]

Writer Sean T. Collins sums it up thusly and nicely on BlueSky:

Watching everyone's memories of watching Blair Witch pour in is incredible. Person after person talking about dead silence in the theater, whole crowds flattened, people sobbing in the parking lot for 20 minutes, not being able to sleep. That's cinema, baby, and that's down to Heather Mike and Josh.
posted by Kitteh at 6:49 AM on June 14 [7 favorites]

That's cinema, baby, and that's down to Heather Mike and Josh.

Significantly amplified by the deception of presenting it as a documentary.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 6:54 AM on June 14 [3 favorites]

Should the project net Haxan over $1 million, the actors were entitled to “a one percent (1%) participation in profits in excess of $1,000,000.”

Thanks to the magic of Hollywood Accounting, a little spreadsheet magic turns a 100 million blockbuster into a stinker on paper that didn’t make any money.
posted by dr_dank at 6:58 AM on June 14 [8 favorites]

As usual, don't read the comments

Yeesh, you weren't kidding:

So the Blair Witch actors want “reparations”?

posted by star gentle uterus at 7:07 AM on June 14 [3 favorites]

I mean, I'm sure people don't mean to excuse it by saying “the magic of Hollywood Accounting”, but I wish we'd just call it fraud, given that it absolutely is fraud, and the actors were defrauded.
posted by ambrosen at 7:09 AM on June 14 [18 favorites]

Significantly amplified by the deception of presenting it as a documentary.

but in a good way? I'm not sure if your comment is meant to be critical of the subterfuge, like it was beyond the pale or something. I feel like the buzz around the movie was one of its most successful elements.. I really appreciated how far they took that and most people I know who saw the movie responded similarly

were people attending that film, wholeheartedly accepting the premise (i.e. "found footage") because I find that hard to believe
posted by elkevelvet at 7:14 AM on June 14

If you read the article, it says they were told they would be in the original vision of the film maybe ten minutes. But it appears after they agreed to that, their roles became enormously expanded. It went from "maybe ten minutes" to feature-length.

The filmmakers explained that the footage they were going to shoot would comprise roughly 10 minutes of a fictional documentary about their characters’ purported disappearance while seeking evidence of the fabled Blair Witch. Using their real names would make it feel that much more authentic.
posted by Kitteh at 7:18 AM on June 14 [1 favorite]

“Hollywood Accounting” is 100% a tongue-in-cheek euphemistic way to say “fraud”, ambrosen. If mere mortals tried that, you could practically count on a stopwatch when you’d be hauled off to jail.
posted by dr_dank at 7:26 AM on June 14 [1 favorite]

I feel like the buzz around the movie was one of its most successful elements..

I agree. The buzz was far more interesting than the actual movie. I saw it in a theater too, and far more people were motion sick than frightened. Lots were there for the 'I heard it's a true story' buzz before the movie, as you used to have to stand in a line for a 10 minutes to get into a movie theatre, so you'd hear a lot of pre-movie speculation from people, which was fun. I miss that.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:57 AM on June 14 [2 favorites]

I know Hollywood Accounting is a euphemism for fraud, because I know what fraud is. I just don't like to play cute little name games with felonies.
posted by ambrosen at 8:00 AM on June 14 [7 favorites]

I KNEW it was going to be the BWP when I saw the headline!
posted by bq at 9:04 AM on June 14 [2 favorites]

I have the barest memory of actually seeing that film in the theatre... Other than trying not to puke in my popcorn. It definitely soured my opinion of the whole thing.
I think it's one of only two times I've been motion sick in my life. The other being Cloverfield
posted by cirhosis at 9:06 AM on June 14

Holy heek and Zowie! do they deserve better than this.
posted by mazola at 9:07 AM on June 14

Writer-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez had trained the actors, all in their early 20s, to operate the cameras and sound equipment and then dropped them off into the woods with a series of story prompts from which they improvised the entire film.

I don't think I realized the directors really weren't present for any of the shoot.

I guess that's more plausible if it's true it was originally intended to be just a 10 minute doc insert in a larger feature -- but if that's the case, isn't the 1% the actors were each promised a little suspiciously high? There presumably would have been so many other people on that larger feature who they'd need to be promising more points to (though I guess maybe the plan could have been to use these 10 minutes to get real financing for the rest).
posted by nobody at 9:27 AM on June 14 [2 favorites]

Thanks, Kitteh.

For anyone with an interest in Hollywood Accounting, I like the Wikipedia article. It talks about the complexities of the practice (the word “scheme” appears several times). It also talks about the financial “failure” of a little-known film trilogy about rings and beer and elves and whatever.
posted by cupcakeninja at 9:43 AM on June 14 [3 favorites]

The article seems to be unclear.
The film was made in 1999.
In 2000 they sued and received a $300, 000 dollar settlement in 2004.
Not bad for unknown rookie actors in an 8 day shoot.

Additionally this article quotes one of the actors , Joshua Leonard;

Leonard said that the actors each made $300,000 (£242,000) from a buyout of their ownership points on the film.

So who knows.
posted by yyz at 10:32 AM on June 14 [2 favorites]

> "Not bad for unknown rookie actors in an 8 day shoot."

Why did they have to sue for it?

Why was it so much less than the $2,470,000 their contracts say they were owed?

"Not bad" seems to sidestep the point that the film these unknown rookie actors made on an 8-day shoot grossed a gajillion dollars.
posted by kyrademon at 11:04 AM on June 14 [11 favorites]

On the eve of the October 2000 release of “Blair Witch 2,” Donahue rallied Williams and Leonard to sue Artisan. Three years later, in February 2004, they arrived at a roughly $300,000 settlement that would be paid to each of them over several years. By comparison, The New York Times reported that year that Haxan and its investors earned “an estimated $35 million to $40 million” from “The Blair Witch Project.”

Worth noting that Artisan tried screwing over the director and producer of the film at Haxan, too, with more Hollywood accounting:

Haxan charged that Artisan was laying off as much as $75 million-$80 million on marketing costs that didn’t exist.

That said, I think the director, producers and investors bear some responsibility for not taking better care of the actors. One of the actors wrote in to Pajiba to correct this statement about how they lost that 1% of the revenue over a million:

The cast had a 1% stake in the film and they agreed to a buyout of their ownership rights for $300,000 each. A regrettable move on their part because it cut them out of all future royalties.*

In response, original actor Michael Williams sent this: We had a deal with Haxan Films. 1% of any Haxan profits over 1,000,000 dollars. A page-and-a-half contract. We never sold anything. Haxan sold the film entirely to Artisan and we had no seat at the table. No residuals because we weren’t SAG. So we didn’t actually sell any of our shares. Haxan sold everything.

There's a lot that's still confusing to me about what went down, but Artisan has clearly been a bunch of fuckers throughout this mess. I won't be supporting any Blair Witch output ever until the 3 actors get more cash for the crap Artisan has put them through. How much of that $300K went to their legal fees, for instance? I'd love to know.
posted by mediareport at 11:36 AM on June 14 [6 favorites]

This is like when the author of the story for the Forest Gump movie got none of his profit percentage (3%) because the studio claimed the movie that grossed $600 million+ was in the red

Story I heard was that a sequel was mooted, but that author Winston Groom refused permission because, he said, he could not in good conscience allow the studio to sink good money after bad, seeing how poorly the first movie did, profit-wise.

That's what I love about the south.

(The case is so iconic, it makes up an entire issue of the Journal of Accounting Education. Laymen's explanations abound as well.)
posted by BWA at 1:36 PM on June 14 [8 favorites]

Hollywood Accounting is a euphemism for fraud, because I know what fraud is. I just don't like to play cute little name games with felonies.

It's a term that denotes a specific type of fraud like cheque kiting.
posted by Mitheral at 4:18 PM on June 14 [2 favorites]

Mitheral: It's a term that denotes a specific type of fraud like cheque kiting.

I don’t like tying strings around felonies and flying them in the air on windy days in the park.
posted by dr_dank at 7:32 PM on June 14 [1 favorite]

Significantly amplified by the deception of presenting it as a documentary.

I don't know how it was elsewhere but it was the days when satellite tv wasn't mainstream and "same-day release" is unheard of, especially in the part of Asia that I'm in. But, pirated disks abound as well as being able to stay on top of pop culture stuff via the internet even if via secondhand reporting.

All of that to say that I spent an entire night soothing a college friend over the phone who was hyperventilating because her American online uh, friend, told her to watch some creepy film. Adding to the fact that in our culture, magical realism isn't just a literary genre but a fact of life, I'm only grateful for having read some random EW blurb or maybe even a film forum thread to repeatedly reassure her that it's fake.
posted by cendawanita at 5:56 AM on June 15 [2 favorites]