Film‘Four-walling’ means paying to have your film play in a cinema in order to get a review – and until yesterday, the New York Times frequently obliged
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Six months into his job as film editor at New York weekly the Village Voice, Alan Scherstuhl sat down to watch a screening copy of a picture set to open at the nearby Quad Cinema. The movie was The Other Side of the Ice, a low-budget documentary about an American family’s passage by yacht through the perilous north-west passage, and Scherstuhl, an admirer of all things Arctic, was duly intrigued. But what he found was not what he expected – indeed, it was hardly a proper film.
“It was quite literally the home movies of a rich boating enthusiast,” Scherstuhl remembers, more like “a professionally edited keepsake” than a presentable feature. “You know when people used to take a bunch of old photographs into a shop and have them turn it into a little video with Wind Beneath My Wings over it? I felt like I was reviewing that.”
In a way Scherstuhl was right: The Other Side of the Ice was not quite a feature film in the traditional sense – and whatever right it had to be opening theatrically in New York City was paid for by the film-makers. A week on a single screen at a theatre like the Quad or Cinema Village can be bought by anybody with a few thousand dollars to spare. The practice is known in the industry as “four-walling”: film-makers or distributors pay theatre-owners anywhere between $2,000 and $18,000, depending on the venue and options, for the privilege of screening for the general public, retaining any ticket sales and reaping the benefits of any attendant coverage by the press. “I think of four-walling as kind of the self-publishing of the film world,” Scherstuhl says. It’s a way for artists with few other recourses to present their work to a paying audience – assuming any such audience can be persuaded to come.
In his capacity as film editor Scherstuhl spends a lot of time dealing with the glut this practice regularly yields. The Voice’s film section (to which I have contributed) is littered with reviews of four-walled features – so many that, over the last several months, Scherstuhl has been forced to scale the coverage down. The paper’s mandate has long been to cover every film that opens in New York and screens for at least one week. “We’ve backed off from that a little,” Scherstuhl says, “because four-walling has been so aggressive that it’s become common, especially in the spring and the early fall, to have 25 or more new films opening in the city each week.” Writing about them all, he feels, “is not a good use of our budget or of our writers’ time. There’s just too many.” And many, like The Other Side of the Ice, are dire.
It’s in order to secure a review in a major newspaper that film-makers and distributors pay for a venue in the first place. Nor is the Voice the only paper four-walled films are eager to court. Many publications closely follow the New York theatrical release schedule, and therefore review a great deal of four-walled pictures. Those publications include the Dissolve, Slant magazine and, most desirable of all, the New York Times. Elliott Kanbar, former owner of the Quad, used to charge clients a premium, above the hire of the cinema, for an invitation for the Times critics to see and review the film – and they very often did.
This week, according to Variety, the Times notified distributors that the paper would be scaling back their coverage of small New York-only releases. The announcement makes official a change in policy that has been looming for some time. Stephanie Goodman, film editor at the paper, told me before the announcement was made public that her critics “try to review everything that’s released but can’t guarantee it”, and that they decide what to review and what not to review “on a case-by-case basis”. Many people have wrongly assumed that the Times was obliged to review every film with a one-week theatrical run in the city. They aren’t, but they come astonishingly close: of the 1,008 feature films released in New York in 2014, the Times published reviews of 971. That’s hundreds of reviews of four-walled films alone.
Despite the prevalence of the business model, many people regard four-walling as something to be ashamed of – a sort of shortcut to theatrical distribution lacking the prestige of the real thing. Many of the film-makers contacted for this piece agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity, expressing concern that the association would have consequences for their reputations down the line. “There’s a perception that if a movie was four-walled,” one director told me, “it’s because it wasn’t good enough to get programmed at an ordinary movie theater. If a movie is four-walled, it’s just a vanity project.” In the eyes of the ordinary moviegoer or industry representative, some feel, paying to have a film screened is tantamount to cheating.
So why does anybody feel compelled to do it? “It’s all about the reviews,” one film-maker told me. “You’re basically paying for a review in the New York Times and a few other places.” That may sound like a lot of money and effort for a bit of ink, but “if you do the cost-benefit analysis” the whole thing “really makes sense”.
“When you’re trying to get a movie made,” a director tells me, “especially if you’re trying to get a bigger name actor, you want to be able to have positive reviews that you can show to that actor to say, look, I have some skill at this, I know what I’m doing and here is some evidence to prove it. So those reviews are very important.” And nobody needs to know that the review in question was only produced because a few thousand dollars went into getting it a week-long run on a solitary screen.
The only trouble is that the reviews are rarely good. Four-walled movies, as any critic assigned to the beat can tell you, are, with few exceptions, some of the worst around. Scherstuhl was surprised at how desperately the four-walling film-makers want to be reviewed, given that “the review would most likely be negative” and, indeed, almost always was. “But they don’t care about that. We’ve run reviews of these movies that say please do not go to this film. But the legitimacy of simply having the review is what matters. This movie was important enough to actually have critics go out and see it and write about it. That’s what matters to them.”
And anyway, the film-makers can read between the lines. From the scathing 250-word pan a critic delivers they can pluck out a few choice words — “an action drama”, say, or “a lively documentary”. Suddenly they’ve got a pull-quote from the Voice or the Times. “They can always mine something.” One director I spoke with had a simpler diagnosis: “People four-wall for the same reason people try to be actors, even though you have a better chance of winning the lottery. It’s because everyone thinks that they are the exception.” Every time a film-maker four-walls their labor of love and hands it off to the people at the Times, they’re saying the same thing – that this will be the one to wow them. “Nobody thinks that they’re not talented,” the director says.
Richard Brody, a staff critic with the New Yorker, says that the real problem with four-walling is the attention it leaches from more worthy titles. “For me,” he says, “the real issue is the submergence of good films in junk.” The good films, the few independent productions that are worth our attention, are drowned out by the “amiable mediocrities” on 15 screens out of 20 every weekend. “The only reason why that happens is that the Times might review it. The guy with the four-walled release is crossing his fingers now that he’s got lightning in a bottle: maybe someone will like it. Who knows? Weirder things have happened. You’ve got to find some way to distinguish your film from all the other films that are coming out.”
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