‘Basket’-Selling 101

FOR THE RECORD: May 31, 1999: Writer misidentified: Tessa Swoboda is a co-writer for an upcoming Spokane-made movie called “The Basket.” She was misidentified in a story Sunday.

Rich Cowan’s diary entry, May 9: Arrived at Nice Airport around 12:30 p.m., local time, after about 20 hours flying. … We have a nice apartment - two bedrooms, two bathrooms with a deck and a very tiny ocean view. We had dinner along La Croisette, the main street on the beach with all the fancy hotels. Tomorrow’s big job: Find a grocery story and stock up on food before I take the rental car back.

The first thing you need to know about Rich Cowan is that he’s not exactly Hollywood.

Hollywood guys are impossible to reach by phone. Hollywood guys never return calls. Hollywood guys don’t give personal tours of their office buildings.

Most of all, Hollywood guys don’t live in Spokane.

Cowan is … different.

He is a filmmaker. He produced, co-wrote, directed and edited a movie titled “The Basket,” which will have its world premiere on Saturday at the 25th Seattle International Film Festival.

In fact, Cowan and four other North By Northwest Productions staffers just finished a two-week trip to France’s Cannes Film Festival, where they did their best to market “The Basket” for foreign distribution.

And they had some success. While “The Basket” has yet to score a distribution deal in the United States, Cowan et al have managed to negotiate, so far, some nine or 10 international agreements - meaning that “The Basket” likely will be seen in such exotic locales as Turkey, Israel, Greece, Poland, etc.

So it’s clear: Cowan definitely knows how to be Hollywood. He just doesn’t act Hollywood.

Phone him. If he’s not in, he’ll call you back first thing. He’s happy, even enthusiastic, to pull a visitor through the virtual catacombs of North By Northwest’s local production facility.

Oh, and one other thing.

He very definitely lives in Spokane.

Rich Cowan’s diary entry, May 10: Danny (Heigh) and I drove all over to find a supermarket. Danny tried to ask directions from a gentleman at a small cafe. His response, in impeccable English, was, “This is France. We speak French here.”

Oh, sure, Cowan left Spokane when he was 5 and attended school in Seattle. But he went to college at Washington State, and he returned to Spokane upon graduation to take a production job at KHQ-TV in 1979.

His Spokane ties become particularly clear when you consider how North By Northwest came to be. Tired of being unable to do what they considered “network quality work,” Cowan and two friends - Dan Heigh and Dave Holcomb - decided to form their own company. They were joined within a month by Mark Dahlstrom.

By 1991, a year later, they had added two more partners - Greg Rathvon and Dave Tanner - and North By Northwest was on its way to being a going concern.

“The thing is, in a local TV station in a midsize market, it’s just not economically feasible for a station to be involved in that kind of (“network quality”) programming,” Cowan says. Professionals caught in that trap, he says, usually opt for leaving, hoping that a larger market - Seattle, Los Angeles, New York - will give them the resources they want.

But neither Cowan nor his partners wanted to leave Spokane. They had families, they had houses, they had lives here.

“So we thought the only viable option was to start our own deal,” Cowan says. “People thought we were absolutely crazy.”

Maybe they were. Even so, they began a campaign of video production - making advertisements, documentaries and other for-hire film and video work - that soon proved how thin a line there is between being crazy and clever.

By 1998, one business ranking placed North By Northwest among the top 100 industrial contract producers in the country.

“Not a single person told us it was a good idea,” Cowan says, looking back. “So we did it anyway. We just had to go for it. I think it’s sometimes better to try and fail than to never try at all.”

Rich Cowan’s diary entry, May 11: Our equipment arrived, and we set up our office at the Noga Hilton. We spent the rest of the day attaching labels to 3,000 stuffed animals that we’re giving away. It took five or six hours, but we got the job done.”

Here’s something else you need to know about Cowan: Compared to your standard Hollywood filmmaker, he projects minuscule ego.

Cowan explains it this way: He’s a team player.

He proved that about four years ago when he hatched an idea for an original film about the early years of basketball.

When he brought up the idea - which eventually would become “The Basket” - he got immediate offers of help. Over time, the idea evolved from concept to story to full script. Eventually, four people - Cowan, Don Caron, Frank Swoboda and Teresa Swoboda - would share screenplay credit.

And slightly more than a year ago, the partners together gave the project a green light.

Making a movie is never an easy project. But at least North By Northwest is experienced at it. In recent years, they’ve served as the production crew - cinematography, sound, etc. - on some half dozen feature films, most made in the Inland Northwest.

You may not have seen many of them. You may not even have heard of any of them.

“Navajo Blues,” which was directed by Joey Travolta and stars Steven Bauer and Irene Bedard, is one. “Roadblock,” which again was directed by John Travolta’s brother and stars Michael Madsen and James Russo, is another.

“Mel,” a third Travolta-directed movie - an as-yet unreleased family adventure about a giant turtle - is one of the films that North By Northwest is trying to market along with “The Basket.”

“It was really nice doing those because we learned an awful lot, and we got a really good team together,” Cowan says. “It would have been really hard to make one from scratch.”

Besides on-set expertise, though, the company has something else going for it: A good sense of business.

Rich’s Cowan’s diary entry, May 12: The first full day of the market. At 9 a.m., we’re ready. There are five hotels, all along La Croisette, full of people, some buying movies, some selling movies and some wanting to make movies. … I had a good talk with a Polish buyer. He bought “The Basket” and another one of our movies, “American Reel.” He said if we could maintain our quality, we could have a great business and he would buy every one of our movies.

“I was almost thinking backward a little bit, from a marketing perspective first,” Cowan says. “I figured that we need to make product that the whole world can enjoy. And not just do something that focuses on the U.S.”

Cowan is talking business, about how the “real money” in movies is in the foreign markets. And in doing so, he’s demonstrating what sets him - and North By Northwest as a whole - apart from the standard cliche of an independent filmmaker.

You know the type: an artiste who is willing to risk everything to make a movie because he/she SIMPLY HAS TO.

“You can do that,” Cowan says, “but that’s not prudent business practice. And we are a business. We have 42 employees, and we’re not gonna do this because it’s fun. Yeah, it’s fun, but it’s a business.”

Film as product then?

“It IS product,” Cowan insists. “I’m sorry, but it is. It’s like widgets or something.”

It was just this kind of pragmatism that led him to employ basketball as a topic. Not football. Not baseball. Not even soccer.

But basketball.

“The nice thing about basketball is that it’s a worldwide game,” Cowan says. “I think next to soccer, it’s probably the most popular game on the planet.”

“The Basket,” though, is more than concept. Sure, North By Northwest provided work for local talent: Area actors included Sarah Edlin, Patrick Treadway, Ellen Travolta, Jack Bannon and even Cowan’s own son, Casey; Ann Fennessey was among the singers, and Linda Sieverts among the musicians (the orchestra music was recorded in Hungary).

The film was even shot locally, mostly near the small town of Lamont, Wash. (which is south of Sprague). A schoolhouse that figures prominently is north of Pasco, and other sequences were shot in downtown Spokane - including the film’s climactic basketball game, which was played in the Masonic Temple.

But any film could have taken advantage of these same locations. And other filmmakers might have done so merely to follow the standard formula for making a first feature - by filming a shoot-‘em-up thriller or cut-‘em-up horror flick.

“The Basket,” in contrast, tackles actual themes.

Rich’s Cowan’s diary entry, May 13: “The Basket” screened today for the first time. … I hung out with our hostess outside collecting business cards. People came and went, which was quite normal as I soon found out. When the film was over, an English buyer said, “A lovely film,” and a Portuguese guy patted me on the back. ….

“The Basket” is set in 1918 in Waterville, Wash. Peter Coyote stars as Martin Conlon, a schoolteacher who has brought from back East a couple of passions - one for opera, the other for a strange new game called basketball.

His story is contrasted with that of the Emery family, whose eldest son has returned from World War I missing both a leg and the will to live. No wonder the family matriarch (Karen Allen of “Raiders of the Lost Arc” fame) is caught between her moody husband and the young German boy and girl (Seattle actors Robert Karl Burke and Amber Willenborg) who have emigrated and now live with the town pastor.

Conlon has trouble connecting with his new students, until he begins to tell them the story of an opera called “The Basket.” It is a mythical piece, and it boasts an anti-war subtext.

But all Mr. Emery can hear is the German language that the singers are using. It enrages him and other area residents.

To calm everyone down, and to help the town purchase a piece of farm machinery that it desperately needs, Martin proposes a basketball game - against the unbeaten Spokane Spartans.

Farm boys must learn the finer points of a two-handed set shot while mastering the mechanics of what may be the first zone defense in history. And then there’s the question: Will the German boy get his chance to play?

Based on the Cannes screening, Variety reviewer Deborah Young wrote this: “An edifying tale about tolerance set in rural America during WWI, `The Basket’ is carefully crafted family fare. Its anti-war sentiments are subtly conveyed in an idyllic portrait of small-town life, when kids did their chores in the fields, followed Pa’s orders and learned the new game of basketball. … Screenplay follows the straight and narrow, but producer-director Rich Cowan captures the flavor of the time with help from cinematographer Dan Heigh, obviously under the influence of `Days of Heaven.”’

Rich’s Cowan’s diary entry, May 16: Read the trades early. I was reading Variety and saw a review of “The Basket.” I couldn’t believe it! It was a positive review, so I was quite relieved. I went to a copy center and made 100 copies and then went out to deliver them to domestic buyers.

The final thing you need to know about Rich Cowan is this: He doesn’t care if “The Basket” ever plays theatrically in this country.

“It’s nice to hope for a theatrical release when you make movies at this budget level (Cowan estimates the film cost $3 million to date),” he says, “but I don’t think you should assume that. If you make five movies, I think one might pop and go theatrical. But you should always make the assumption that you’re gonna have a television deal, on HBO or Showtime or something.”

He says this with sincerity, and he backs it up - typically - with numbers. With 35mm prints costing as much as $2,000 apiece, he says, a 2,000-screen theatrical release would cost $4 million before the first frame is screened.

“Then you have to pay for advertising, television, other media, newspaper advertising,” he says. “You could be at $10 million, more than the cost of the movie, and you may not want to do that. Sometimes you may WANT to go for a television deal.”

The TV market is clearly there, which means that any company - even one located in Spokane - can make a go of it as long as you maintain a certain standard of quality and don’t ignore your budget.

If you’ve been reading carefully, you’re aware that Cowan and his North By Northwest partners aren’t likely to ignore anything involving money.

You aren’t likely to see Cowan throw an Otto Preminger-type on-set tirade, either.

“If you’ve ever been on a set with us, you know that it’s a very calm, quiet set,” he says. “There’s no one person who’s like the big director, outgoing and ranting. It’s just not our style. It’s all a team effort. It’s not a Rich Cowan movie.”

Nor, and this should come as no surprise, are you likely to see any of them head off for Hollywood anytime soon.

“We’re here,” Cowan says. “We’re not going anywhere.”

Rich’s Cowan’s diary entry, May 23: Last day. Goodbye to the nice lady at the bakery from whom I bought croissants every day. I gave her one of our promotional animals.

ON SCREEN `The Basket’ “The Basket,” a North By Northwest production directed by Rich Cowan, will screen at the 25th Seattle International Film Festival at 12:30 p.m. Saturday at the Pacific Place 11 Cinemas. All advance tickets have been sold out, but a limited number of tickets will be sold on Saturday. For further information, call (206) 325-6150.