Small budgets, big dreams at Spirit Awards

By Alex Ben Block

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - The Spirits have gone Hollywood.

That''s the oft-repeated cynic''s take on the Spirit Awards -- the arthouse world''s version of the Oscars -- which will on Saturday spotlight such studio specialty-division fare as "Milk," "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" and "Synecdoche, New York," each of which pushes the upper end of the $20 million budget limit set by Film Independent, the event''s organizer.

But tell that to Lance Hammer, the director of "Ballast," which has been nominated for six Spirits, including best feature. Hammer financed the film''s paltry $700,000 budget largely out of his own pocket. To him, the Spirits represent the culmination of a year spent following the film around the world from its Sundance premiere to festivals in Berlin, Cannes, Telluride and Toronto -- and finally to Saturday''s ceremony on the beach in Santa Monica.

"It''s just a comforting and reassuring way to put an end to a difficult year," Hammer says. "Your colleagues have said what you have done is OK. And it means I can keep pursuing this and it''s not a totally ridiculous pipe dream."

Indeed, despite the persistent criticism that the Spirits have sold out, the majority of films nominated this year cost less than $7 million, and in many cases well under that.

"Wendy and Lucy," nominated for best feature and best female lead for Michelle Williams, cost about $300,000. Courtney Hunt''s "Frozen River," nominated for six Spirits (as well as two Oscars the following day), was financed for about $1 million, much of it coming from business associates of Hunt''s husband.

These kind of dream projects have been the lifeblood of the Spirit Awards for more than two decades. In addition to putting a spotlight on unknown directors, producers, cinematographers and actors, the awards often provide a significant career boost.

Seven-time nominee Gus Van Sant, who picked up his first Spirit in 1990 for "Drugstore Cowboy," directed "Milk," which collected four nominations. Darren Aronofsky, nominated this year with Scott Franklin for best feature for "The Wrestler," received three previous nominations and won best first screenplay in 1999 for "Pi."

That kind of career trajectory is the goal for Hammer. As a USC architecture graduate, he did photographic renderings that caught the attention of Warner Bros., where he was hired to produce 3-D images. He rose to assistant art director on the Coen brothers'' "The Man Who Wasn''t There," but chafed under the tight controls of the studio system.

So he began to develop projects of his own. "We got very far with a lot of this, but it was just incredibly frustrating," he says. "Creative control is really yanked from you when these other people get involved ... and creative control is really important to me."

Hammer then teamed with producer Mark Johnson ("The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe"), but when a project fell through, "He said, ''The hell with it. I''m going to go off and do this other movie in Mississippi,''" Johnson says. "And damned if he didn''t."

That "other movie" became "Ballast," which features a cast of unknowns drawn from the Delta region.

"I decided to go for something very pure and simple," Hammer says, "and make it like a painting or a musical recording made in your house, where I could have great autonomy and isolation."

After "Ballast''s" success at Sundance, IFC offered to distribute the film but Hammer eventually decided the economics didn''t work for him. Instead, he put together his own ad hoc group to self-distribute. For help he turned to New York-based publicist and producers rep Stephen Raphael, who arranged publicity and oversaw distribution at art house venues in nearly two dozen markets. Each of the awards and honors became part of the marketing campaign.

"It''s a very good example to show you don''t need an entire studio with a marketing department," Raphael says. "Everybody worked below their usual rate because we all really believed in the movie."  Continued...