Anyone looking for the direction Robert Lantos and Jeff Sackman plan to take their new partnership at Thinkfilm need look no further than Sackman’s previous success at CFP and ultimately Lions Gate, which acquired CFP in 1997.

In fact, one need look no further than Sackman’s present venture at Thinkfilm even before Lantos acquired a 50% stake in the Toronto-based distributor. That’s because Thinkfilm, with an office in New York, was set up to play both sides of the Canada-U.S. border.

‘The most intriguing part of this little company is that it is equally in the U.S. as it is in Canada,’ says Lantos, the company’s new chairman. ‘There is tremendous, even greater opportunity in the U.S.’

It is a model that Sackman, president and CEO at Thinkfilm, first found success with while at CFP in the mid-1990s. Faced with the utter domination of Lantos’ Alliance Motion Picture Distribution in the Canadian market, the decision was made at CFP to face south and try distributing niche films in the U.S. as well as Canada.

‘That took four or five years, but we established ourselves as a viable North American player based out of Canada, which had never happened before,’ says Sackman. ‘That was the greatest source of pride in my career.’

From its inception in 2001, the plan for Thinkfilm, which holds the rights to 250 titles in its library, has always been to replicate that success. With no output deals on the table and none floating around waiting to be snatched up by an aggressive distributor, the company had to develop an alternate course of action.

Mark Urman, former head of Lions Gate’s U.S. theatrical releasing division, heads up the New York operation.

Despite rumors that Thinkfilm was struggling, Sackman says the company turned a profit in its first year, thanks to the library it picked up through now-defunct Blackwatch Releasing. Sackman and Lantos anticipate that the company will do likewise this year.

Lantos, the founder of Alliance Films, has been out of the distribution game since he merged his company with cross-town rival Atlantis Films in 1998, creating Canadian media behemoth Alliance Atlantis Communications. Under a separation agreement when he departed the company soon thereafter, AAC was to release the films produced by Lantos’s Serendipity Point Films and Lantos could not compete in the distribution business until the fall of 2002.

It did not take long for Lantos to get back into the driver’s seat. A dialogue began with Sackman almost immediately.

‘We’ve had a lot of discussions as to what we’re going to do and a lot of it has to do with the Canadian environment. And we think that we have value added bringing our American component into the equation,’ says Sackman. ‘We have an entree into the U.S. market that nobody else does because Lions Gate isn’t really working it that way anymore.’

Playback sat down with Lantos and Sackman at Serendipity’s midtown Toronto offices to talk about Thinkfilm’s plans and the distribution business in Canada and beyond:

What’s the plan going forward?

Lantos: We will pick up those films that we really believe in, one by one. We will be filmmaker-driven, single-film-driven. We’re not going to be in the franchise volume business. We have no intention of releasing 100 movies a year in the foreseeable future. We’re going to release a handful of films and we’re going to do them really well, pay individual attention to them and provide the kind of marketing support that each deserves and be creative and inventive and design the marketing ourselves.

Can you survive over the long term as a small company or is growth essential?

Sackman: I think it would be logical to presume, based on our respective histories, that there’ll be some growth involved. This is a brand new company. It’s too small to keep it where it is. I don’t think we should speculate as to how big we’ll become, but clearly we’re going to grow year on year.

At what point in the development process will Thinkfilm enter the equation?

Lantos: We’ll take part in the process from day one, we’ll put money into the development of not only films that I’m producing but into projects that we like before a single word is written on paper. We’ll risk development funds in order to be able to collaborate and help shape the films so that by the time they get to us as distributors we can do our job, which is to competitively market them in a very crowded market and make sure that they actually do reach the target audience. Our job as a distributor is to make sure that nobody ever forgets that ultimately films are made for an audience.

How big a slush fund do you need to play with the big boys in the U.S.?

Sackman: You’re not going to go out and spend $22 million on P&A, which they do, so clearly everything has to be niche marketed. That is how our U.S. operation is set up. It’s a boutique operation – a lot of grassroots, a lot of publicity. Obviously we can’t compete and we’re not trying to compete with the big boys in the States. That’s a nonstarter. You can’t win that game.

How are you putting this to practice at present?

Sackman: The film we premiered at Sundance is Thom Fitzgerald’s The Event. That’s a film we’ll release in the States and Canada. We assume Telefilm will be very supportive because it’s a really powerful movie that just blew people away at Sundance. It’s now going to Berlin. There’s a credible piece of product that’s Canadian-made that we think we can take to the world. We’re just in the process of figuring out who to sell the foreign distribution rights to. It fits the mandate perfectly.

What’s the budget on P&A?

Sackman: A lot of time when we’re acquiring films, people get so fixated ‘What’s your P&A commitment?’ The right answer should be ‘I don’t know.’ If the film shows promise, we’ll get right behind it and support it. If the film doesn’t show promise, the critics don’t embrace it, there’s no audience in the first week in New York, what’s the point of forcing us to spend money that’s not contributing to any form of success? But in terms of a film like The Event, I would suspect that at this point, based on that reaction, that there’s at least a $1-million P&A spend down in the U.S. and in Canada it could be the same or $500,000, $600,000 of marketing money.’

Canadian distribs generally don’t embrace testing. How does that fit in with your plans?

Sackman: We did that actually on The Event after the first rough cut about five months ago. We got comment cards and Thom looked at them and we looked at them and there were some things in the story that were uneven and that proved very helpful.

Lantos: The same thing doesn’t apply to all films. If you make Men With Brooms and you want to make a film that has to compete successfully in the mainstream for an audience that makes its decisions about which movies it goes to see largely based on television advertising, then you better test that film over and over again to make sure that people laugh when they’re supposed to. You make the film as pleasing an experience for your audience.

On the other hand, there are films where I think testing is a waste of time, where the results are a forgone conclusion. If you make a film where only 5% of the movie-going public would be interested in the first place, testing it will just tell you what you already know, which is 95% of people are not going to go see this movie.

Do you think the Canadian film business needs more testing as a part of the process?

Lantos: ‘That’s one of the things I think Canadian films have suffered from, they haven’t really been tested at all. So filmmakers are often delusional about how their films will play because ‘It played so great when I invited my 80 friends and they all loved it, plus the crew loved it.’ Those are not tests. In Canada they often have been confused for tests.

Real testing, I think, would do the Canadian film industry a lot of good, but not fanatically applied. If you were to take David Cronenberg’s Crash, which I produced, and test it, which the U.S. distributor desperately wanted at the time, the results are a forgone conclusion. You take an unsuspecting audience recruited from a crowded mall, most of whom would never go see this film, most are going to be terribly offended by the film.’

How critical in developing Thinkfilm’s strategy is Telefilm’s goal of creating a commercially viable Canadian film industry?

Lantos: That creates really a unique opportunity for a company such as ours to play a key role in helping make that come true and benefit from that in the process and share that benefit with everybody else who’s in the business of making Canadian films.

On the one hand, it’s a unique window of opportunity because there are more funds available to make this happen than ever before in Canada, which when matched with private-sector funding and our own funding, become leveraged and become much more significant. The other thing is it’s a short window.’

How so?

Lantos: It’s a short window because if it doesn’t work, if there isn’t a significant improvement in getting Canadians to make seeing Canadian movies part of their movie-going habits, then it’s going to be really hard to keep arguing that Telefilm should keep pumping more money into the film industry.