Variety Article, by Jerry Roberts
| BAD GIRLS: Ted Bonnitt's "Mau Mau Sex Sex" takes a look at the early days of sexploitation pictures in Hollywood and the colorful mavericks who made them. They played in sleazy theaters on the bad side of town before the video industry and then the Internet co-opted the sexploitation biz. They had titles such as "Thar She Blows," "Daughters of the Sun," "Gambling With Souls" and "The Headmistress." Sexploitation films were once a lucrative sideline in Hollywood, and writer, director and producer Ted Bonnitt's new documentary, "Mau Mau Sex Sex," looks back at the making and distribution of these pictures by telling the story of two pioneering outlaws of independent filmmaking, Dan Sonney and David Friedman. The film, which isn't rated, is rich in history about fringe cinema and details the step-by-step careers of both hucksters in filmmaking and distribution. Friedman, a former Paramount publicist, loves the underbelly of entertainment so much that he still operates a carnival out of Anniston, Ala. Using the tagline "What went on ... what came off!," Bonnitt also emulates his subjects by pioneering his own theater-by-theater distribution, complete with advice on how to exhibit the digitally shot 80-minute movie. In the process, Bonnitt is testing the feature-house future of digital movies and the moneymaking possibilities of self-distribution without selling to homevideo or other distributors, or going the festival circuit. "I made the movie to make the movie, and I had no particular market in mind," admits Bonnitt, who shot "Mau Mau Sex Sex" with prosumer digital video equipment and edited it on an Apple G3 with Final Cut Pro software. But word of mouth from the film's debut at the Santa Barbara Film Festival led to test-marketing this spring to a packed audience at the American Cinematheque's Hollywood Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles. (Variety reviewed it as a "love letter to a nearly forgotten corner of American pop culture's underground.") "Despite the good reviews, I had no offers from theatrical distributors," says Bonnitt, who also operates 7th Planet Prods., a company that creates radio campaigns for movies. "To the homevideo offer on the table, I said, 'You're going to lose my shirt for me.' I got on the phone and found four theaters in the San Francisco Bay Area that wanted to book the film." The enterprising filmmaker then found three theaters in New York with digital video capabilities. "No one was turning my movie down because of aesthetic reasons," notes Bonnitt. "The issue was formatting. If I could figure out how to play it, they'll run it." (He says he declined to transfer "Mau Mau" to 35 mm or 16 mm film, because it would have cost him $40,000.) He then convinced the theater books to convert their projectors. "A lot of people think it costs $100,000 to $150,000. You don't need to do that," Bonnitt swears. "I researched projector technology and opened in New York on a Proxima 9320 LCD projector the size of a bread box. The technology is all in the lens. Plus, the DVD I had made looks surprisingly good. I called a theater in Cleveland. I said, 'Bring a DVD player from home and hook it right into the projector," which is easy to do." The possibility for cheaply shot indie digital pictures to turn profits for filmmakers via a distribution network could also impact the festival circuit, where many indie auteurs go by rote and don't get paid. Bonnitt has booked the film for late summer and autumn playdates in Atlanta; Baltimore; Chicago; Cleveland; Washington; Seattle; Portland, Ore.; San Francisco; New Orleans; Providence, R.I.; and other cities. "My prediction is that his sort of distribution is a good way to get a film shown outside of festivals," says Clinton McClung, programming director of the independent Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, Mass., which has booked "Mau Mau Sex Sex" into its 45-seat digital theater. "It helps. It's still important to get a good distributor to get your film seen by larger audiences." July 25, 2001 |
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