Oscars boost
documentary
firm's prestige

ThinkFilm booked the documentary on one screen at Lower Manhattan’s Film Forum. “Born Into Brothels” hung out there for 10 long weeks. ThinkFilm stayed focused on selling the story behind the movie to newspapers like the New York Times -- and not spending money. No full-page ads. No star entourages. Just plenty of e-mail blasts from Amnesty International and opinionmaker screenings, all with an eye on Oscar. The film was named best documentary by the National Board of Review and the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

“I kept saying to everybody, let’s save the money for when we need it,” Urman recalls. “We didn’t open another market until after the Oscar nomination.”

Luckily, only those Academy members who see all five documentary nominees get to vote in the category, which meant that ThinkFilm didn’t have to spend as heavily as most Oscar campaigners, which are reaching out to the entire Academy. Only after the Jan. 25 Oscar announcement did Urman’s PR team push for such national press as CNN, the Associated Press, “The Charlie Rose Show” and People.

The movie’s behind-the-scenes humanitarian drama --transforming the lives of the Calcutta children through art --proved to be as irresistible a marketing hook as its real-life heroine Briski, a slim globe-trotting British photographer who responded to the nominations at 9 p.m. Calcutta time, surrounded by her kids.

“That’s what gets people to see a movie,” says Urman, who kept begging the peripatetic Briski and Kauffman, her ex-boyfriend, co-director and cinematographer, to “come back!”

Of the five documentary Oscar nominees, “Born Into Brothels” was the only one still in theaters in the month leading up to Oscar night. During that period, the film expanded from one screen to 40 in the top 12 markets. After the Oscar win, the film added 20 screens.

“We knew that if we won, we’d have no competition,” Urman says. By March 11, the film will be on 100 screens in 40 markets and should easily break the $2 million mark.

“It was a release plan about how to best orchestrate an Oscar win and benefit from it,” ThinkFilm Toronto-based president and CEO Jeff Sackman says. “When it works, it is a beautiful thing.”

As for Urman, he is already moving on to “Mondovino,” taking advantage of editorial interest in its subject matter as well as exploiting wine industry promos. While Urman expects “Mondovino” to do well, especially on home video, ThinkFilm’s two summer movies, “The Aristocrats” and “Murderball,” have real breakout potential. Urman is talking to MTV about possibly partnering on the wheelchair rugby documentary “Murderball,” which won the documentary audience award at Sundance. It was an MTV tie-in that gave Fox Searchlight’s “Napoleon Dynamite” an enormous awareness boost last summer.

“Docus are delightful,” says Sackman, who has no intention of abandoning fiction films altogether. “But I look at films as those that gross and those that don’t. And we want to buy as many films that gross as possible.”

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