Movies You Made: “Play the Game”

Another in the ongoing series Movies You Made. This from filmmaker Marc Fienberg:

Hi Scott,

I’m a writer/director/producer, a longtime lurker on your site, and a big fan of what you do.

I wanted to tell you about the movie I made, “Play The Game”, starring Andy Griffith and Doris Roberts, about a young ladies’ man who teaches all his dating tricks to his lonely widowed grandfather.

Everybody we talked to at the studios said that “old people don’t go to movies”. Of course, that was before the success of Red, The Bucket List, and others, so they’re changing their tune now. Regardless, we decided to self-distribute our movie (on a tiny P&A budget), and were successful. The movie played for over six months in almost 300 theaters (mostly Regal, AMC and Landmark chains) and earned over $650,000 in box office, making it the #3 self-distributed domestic feature film of the year. It played on over 100 cruise ships, a few airlines, on VOD in over 65 million households, and lots of rec centers and retirement homes. It’s still available and doing very well on Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, Showtime and others. Most excitedly, for a romantic comedy which everybody claims “doesn’t travel internationally”, the movie is playing all over the world now, in Latin America, Malaysia, Mexico, and many other countries. And despite the fact that our primary theatrical audience was seniors citizens, on DVD and VOD, our primary audience is 12–24 year olds, who love the movie just as much. Just goes to show you that William Goldman was right: “Nobody knows anything.”

Here is the trailer for Play the Game:

Strong high concept. Big target demo. And casting Andy Griffith? Real smart.

Marc has got another project in the works:

I’m now busy raising money from Silicon Valley for my next movie, Facebook Revolution, about a remote village in Africa that gets the Internet (the script was a top 30 Nicholl Fellowship finalist).

I’m also hard at work writing a clever spy thriller, searching for a new agent, and procrastinating writing and searching. But when I AM procrastinating, I’m usually reading your blog. Keep up the good work!

-Marc

I invite you to visit comments and give Marc some feedback about his projects, especially what the combination of talent, persistence and drive can accomplish.

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