Elston Gunn interviews producer/actor Leo Grillo of the lowest all-time B.O. film ZYZZYX ROAD!!!

Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with Elston Gunn's interview with Leo Grillo. The talk of the internet is this flick, ZYZZYX ROAD. I think I even posted a review of this film a while back, the title jumping out to me because I'd driven past that very exit on my way to Vegas many times. Anyway, for more on the flick and why people are talking about it, here's Elston with the good word!

"Max Bialystock: Here's to failure Leo Bloom: To failure. Drunk: Why, thank you! You're very kind!" - Mel Brooks, THE PRODUCERS, 1968 Producer/actor Leo Grillo was out of town and away from the internet the day Devin Faraci at CHUD.com posted a piece about the fact Grillo's film ZYZZYX ROAD made only thirty bucks at the box office. The love triangle thriller, starring Grillo, Katherine Heigl (GREY'S ANATOMY) and Tom Sizemore (NATURAL BORN KILLERS), was released by Regent Releasing (GODS AND MONSTERS) in a theater in Dallas, TX for six days due to a Screen Actors Guild mandate regarding pay levels. The theater only sold six tickets. Variety then picked up the story, published their own article without giving credit to CHUD, which triggered an internet backlash accusing a large industry publication of stealing from a smaller internet movie news website and, thus, bringing much more attention to the story and film. In other words, what started out as a quest to find the answers to the lowest box office tally on record morphed within hours into a kind of an internet guy vs. big institution hubub for a moment, resulting in many more people than six now knowing the title ZYZZYX ROAD and the name "Leo Grillo." How this kind of PR will affect the future of the film remains to be seen. Though he was scheduled to have his own face-to-face meeting with CHUD's Faraci over the weekend, Grillo was also kind enough to take some time to answer a few questions for AICN.

[Elston Gunn]: When did you make the film and what is it about? What was your goal with the piece?

[Leo Grillo]: We shot the film a couple of years ago and in the middle of production, ABC asked us to borrow Katie Heigl to do a photo shoot for their upcoming series ZYZZYX. All we knew was that she was in a series and that is when we were shooting the film. Our goal with ZYZZYX was to sell the movie to foreign. 80% of our money would come in from foreign sales, and so we structured the film to sell in foreign markets. ZYZZYX is selling in foreign markets very very well, they're very happy. Sales are ahead of projections.

[EG]: Why was it released in only one theater and not simply sent straight-to-DVD? Do you mind explaining the SAG rule that necessitated it?

[LG]: The independent people make close to 1,000 movies a year hoping that there is a place to send them to, to "go straight to DVD", but there is no such place. What you do is get a sales rep to go around to studios, and then DVD distributors, and ask them if they're interested in the movie. But there's more supply than demand so there's no place to simply "send something straight to DVD". DVD sales, however, is an integral part of domestic sales: cable, paid cable, satellite, free television, DVD sales - these are all sales elements, parts of a sale. Most movies try to get a little bit of a theatrical release so they can say "as seen in theaters," then they go straight to DVD, cable, television. The SAG rule is that when you use SAG actors in a low budget movie, you get a special discounted rate from the normal SAG rates for big budget pictures. However, when you use SAG actors in a low budget movie, you have to sign an agreement with SAG that you have to screen the movie in a theater. If you do not, your budget goes up by tens of thousands of dollars because now you have to pay the higher SAG rate to the actors. Therefore, everybody making low budget movies for foreign markets, with SAG actors, screens the movie someplace, usually at an art house. They'll screen it once in the middle of the day, with very little advertising. There is no domestic sale on it yet and people don't want their movie to be perceived as being 4-walled. They screen it to satisfy the SAG rule and then eventually, hopefully, get an American distributor interested in taking it. Definitely the producers of the film don't want to give the impression that they tried to get a theatrical distribution out of the movie. All of us want to leave that up to the real distributors.

[EG]: How many times did it screen during the weekend?

[LG]: I rented the theater for a week. We got a great deal because our foreign sales people happen to own the theater. We got the most remote theater we could find - one in Dallas in the middle of the winter - we played it once a day at 11am, hoping that no one would come and see it, and there would be no ticket sales. So we had six ticket sales, two of which were crew members who saw it was playing and drove out to see it, and enjoyed it immensely by the way.

[EG]: Had you already made a profit with the foreign pre-sales?

[LG]: "Foreign pre-sales" means that you get money from foreign distributors in advance of making the film. It's a very tricky proposition. It takes a couple of years to arrange this for a movie and it's usually a much higher budget, like $15 million. So pre-sales doesn't exist on a movie less than $5 million, it won't happen. Foreign sales is where we are. That's why we made the movie,and a foreign sales agent, like Regent Entertainment, picks up the movie and takes the movie into the foreign markets and actually makes cash sales. Cash sale means that you may get $100,000 for a major country. One distributor in a country will buy the films rights. That's a promise to pay $100,000, they make a small deposit (maybe $10,000 - $20,000) and then at some landmark point, they'll pay the balance of that fee.

[EG]: Wouldn't a little marketing with Katharine Heigl's name a little prominent have helped to bring people to the theaters?

[LG]: Yes, we're hoping that will be the case, and Tom Sizemore's name as well. However, we have not yet approached distributors with the movie. We were not ready to approach them until Grey's Anatomy did well enough, and Katherine Heigl had a good season under her belt and had become the star that we knew she could become. So we waited a year,and a few more months now that Tom's reality TV show comes out, so executives at distribution companies would now know Katie Heigl and would now remember that Tom Sizemore is a terrific actor and has a bigger career ahead of him, and recognize that we have both of these great actors in our movie. So marketing-wise, we waited.

[EG]: What was your initial reaction with the CHUD piece came out? That has to compromise a filmmaker's pride just a little bit.

[LG]: I don't go on the internet too often, this whole thing is beyond me. I don't even know what a blog is, I just found out that a blog is not an animal! All I know is that people are telling me there is a buzz. When the CHUD piece came out, I just got a copy of it by fax, and frankly I laughed because the piece raised a lot of provocative questions. I thought that was good, because I knew that when they learn the truth of the situation I will be vindicated. Once they see the movie they will see that here's a filmmaker who's been acting over 30 years who's made a movie that he wanted to make. And there's a reason for it, it's a tragedy. It's DEATH OF A SALESMAN in a sense. At any rate, I was not upset at all, and now that it's going a little haywire, I still don't understand it, but I'm grateful for the buzz.

[EG]: Then Variety picked up the story without crediting CHUD and the backlash from that in itself has even brought more attention to the film. What kind of calls and emails have you been getting?

[LG]: I have had lots of publicity over the years with my animal organization and my documentary films. My real world experiences in PETS ON YOUR PLATE have given me LA Times feature articles and other articles and interviews, so frankly people who know me over the years are used to me being on the radio, on the TV, in the newspapers, in the public eye promoting or doing something, exposing an animal issue. PETS ON YOUR PLATE has been quite a controversy, because all of the dead animals in California (pets, road kill, etc) are being rendered into protein meal and fat, which we have discovered goes into the human food chain. People around the country and around the world are eating dead animals and dead pets from California. So we're making a documentary film with Curt Johnson called PETS ON YOUR PLATE and in the real world I am fighting the war to end the rendering practice of putting dead animals into the human food chain. When the CHUD article came out I got minimal phone calls about it, only people very close to me even mentioned it. However as I talk to people, they've mentioned that they saw it. They just didn't call me about it.

[EG]: Are there plans for any special screenings of the film?

[LG]: No there are no plans of screening the film, until a distributor takes it over.

[EG]: Do you think this story will be hard to get financing for future films?

[LG]: No, not at all. The professionals in movie land know exactly what the SAG rule is, and they know what I did was to keep the movie off the radar until we had a sale They know that I'm aging the film an extra year in order to take advantage of Katie Heigl's positioning as a star, and Tom Sizemore's positioning as a star, in order to get the best deal for ZYZZYX and the investors. So the professionals understand exactly what I'm doing. In fact the buzz ultimately has helped bring attention to the movie and maybe we'll get a distributor involved a little quicker than we anticipated, but not for more money. So ultimately nothing has hurt, if anything it has raised interest with the cross-over younger audience.

[EG]: What are the kinds of projects that you have in the pipeline? What can you tell us about them?

[LG]: PETS ON YOUR PLATE which I just explained that is a documentary that is going to shake up America. And we just finished shooting a film this summer, MAGIC which we are posting now. Magic the dog, is an angel sent to heal a broken family. It's a father (widower) and a 10-year-old daughter, and you can read about it on IMDB. That movie stars Christopher Lloyd as the voice of the dog, Robert Davi as my nemesis in the movie, then there's a whole list of actors: Greg Gruenberg from ALIAS and HEROES is the detective, Tanya Allen from the film FIRESTORM, Elaine Hendrix from PARENT TRAP and several other movies, Lori Heuring and Sami Hanratty who is going to be a big child star. Raynor Schein has a role in the movie and he had a major role in Michael Douglas's picture THE SENTINEL. So we have a lot of terrific actors in this movie and still it was a low budget picture. We're in post production now and expect it will be available in about 6 months. We have a very high foreign interest, but it was made for domestic audiences. So hopefully a distributor will be interested in MAGIC which is what I call "E.T. with a dog."

[EG]: And you're a fierce animal activist founding D.E.L.T.A. Rescue. What's the Supershelter? How do you manage to find time for film and spend 719 days rescuing a family of dogs in the woods?

[LG]: It's actually been re-named a Super-"Sanctuary" because we have 1500 animals, care-for-life, that reside there for life. We don't adopt them out. They've already been through too much and we want to be sure they're safe and happy for the rest of their lives. We have a staff to care for them, and our own animal hospital. I spent 719 days in a row in the woods when we were making a documentary. I filmed the latest rescue for the documentary. We expected it would take a few days, but it took 10 days short of two years! I rescued the mother and father dog and rescued several of their litters. That was 8 years ago, and ended 6 years ago. So we made a documentary called THE RESCUER. And we have that in the wings, but we haven't had time to work on that because we've been so busy with PETS ON YOUR PLATE.

[EG]: Did you and Regent split the $30 or spend it on pizza and beer? Pizza Hut has that deal of two large pizzas any way you want them for $19.99. Then you'd have enough left over for a tip and a 12-pack of Bud Light.

[LG]: For the record, let me clear this up. Regent had nothing to do with the screening of the movie. The domestic division of Regent is totally separate and apart from their foreign sales division. Their vice president of foreign sales simply introduced me to the domestic side, and domestic took over and satisfied my request for a remote theater, to satisfy my SAG requirement to screen the picture. Even though 6 tickets were sold, I reimbursed two people for their tickets, so we only sold 4 tickets so we only grossed $20! The two tickets I reimbursed were two members of the crew on ZYZZYX, who also worked on MAGIC. So when I saw them on MAGIC and they told me they went to the screening and I gave them back their ten bucks! The whole thing is there is an error in the way grosses are reported. They're reporting movies that are screened, but there are probably 300-400 pictures a year that go into the foreign pipeline that are also screened, and show up with only a few hundred dollars in grosses and people think since it only made a couple of hundred bucks it must be a terrible picture no, that's not it, it was simply screened for SAG and somebody bought a ticket because they didn't know what the movie was about. If you screened it at the Llaemle theater in Hollywood, you'll get hundreds of dollars in gross without any promotion whatsoever, because people are going to the Llaemle all the time to see new independent films they've never heard of. I went even further out, I went to the most remote theater in the country because I didn't even want those people to show up. I didn't want to give the impression that we were actually distributing our film.

[EG]: What's the bright side to this? Other than... at least the six people didn't ask for their money back.

[LG]: The bright side to this is that it is an unexpected turn of events to have such an obscure title have such a buzz on the internet. It can't hurt!