Before “Sing Sing” became a hit and garnered awards, it nearly failed to launch.
The film shows the positive impact of a real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program on a group of incarcerated men, and features Colman Domingo as a playwright imprisoned after being wrongfully convicted of murder. Domingo is one of only three professional actors in the cast, which otherwise consists of graduates of the RTA program.
It’s an ambitious project by any standards, but filmmakers Clint Bentley, Greg Koidar and Monique Walton realized – albeit a little too late – that it would be nearly impossible without industry support. “We realized this about a month before we started filming,” says Koedar, who directed the film. “I remember having a legitimate panic attack.”
With just weeks before filming was scheduled to begin in the summer of 2022, the team faced a race against time to find the right partners to help launch the project – and were unable to accept any financiers. They spent six years working on “Sing Sing,” so anyone who comes in at the eleventh hour needs to understand their vision.
With a set window of three weeks to shoot and not a single day to spare (Domingo had limited time for the project between “The Color Purple” and “Rustin”), director Kouidar delivered a Hail Mary, sharing the script with indie studio Black Bear, whose previous projects include “Mudbound” and “The Imitation Game”.
“There was three and a half weeks of shooting, and they said, ‘Coleman will be here in two weeks, and we really need to figure out how to do this.’ And I said, ‘Well, you’re in luck, because it’s the most beautiful script I’ve ever read.’ I don’t know.” how “You’ve allowed yourself to get to this point where you’re grounded without having your plan ready,” Black Bear founder, president and CEO Teddy Schwarzman recalls of their first Zoom call. He soon realized why some logistics were not yet closed. “They were very focused on the important things: finding the right stories to tell, the right RTA members to represent them, and creating community.”
But the film’s themes and unconventional cast weren’t the only things the filmmakers needed to impress on Black Bear. “They were involved in the creative work of the film, and then at the end of the conversation, we said, ‘Okay, we’re making this film in a very unique financial model where everyone will get the same price,'” Koidar recalls. “All of our cast and crew will own the film together.” , Good, this new.'”
“It’s hard to convince people to buy, because it requires your No. 1 call-list, your director, your producer, your writer, to say they could make less,” Schwarzman says, adding that Black Bear actually liked the structure. “Everyone feeling like an owner made this feel like something special… It was relatively easy to say yes – despite the administrative burden of having 92 profit participants in the film.”
The morning after that fateful Zoom call, Black Bear officially made an offer to fully finance the film. “We had to trust each other in a very short time,” Schwarzman says.
Teddy believed in the film immediately. “There was a lot of back and forth about how to accommodate this really innovative technology that we were trying to achieve in this movie, but there wasn’t any creative back and forth,” Bentley says. “The fact that he so clearly and immediately believed in it and saw the beating heart behind the project is something that spoke to all of us and gave us a lot of faith.”
What followed was a whirlwind two weeks during which Kuidar and Walton stayed at the cabin owned by Brent Boyle, the RTA theater manager portrayed by Paul Raci in the film.
“I was flopping down on the couch in the living room and Greg was downstairs in the basement, surrounded by costumes from the original Breakin the Mummy’s Code movie,” Walton says. “We found it to be a metaphor for where we were in the process.”
Koedar points out that he and the Waltons were not the only beneficiaries of Boyle’s hospitality over the years. “When men came home from prison and had nowhere to go, he and his wife, Janice, would open up the same cabin to allow those men to stay there with them until they could get back on their feet,” Koidar says. “So, while we were wandering around before the funding closed, they greeted us the same way!”
This unimaginable story behind the success of “Sing Sing” underscores Black Bear’s status as a one-stop-shop in the independent film scene: In addition to production and financing, the studio also acquired international rights to the project and distributed the film in Canada and the U.K. “Along the way,” says Schwarzman. We created a management department, and Greg and Clint became Black Bear clients.” “We worked as creative partners, financial partners, and then as actors.”
With buzzy projects like Gregg Araki’s thriller “I Want Your Sex” and Sidney Sweeney’s untitled Christy Martin biopic, “Sing Sing” is a compelling case study of Black Bear’s film production line. “We’re looking for writers and directors who have something to say, can say it in a new and bold way, and can reach audiences and really stand out within their genre,” Charzman says.
Kuidar and Bentley have re-teamed with the studio for their next project, anticipated at Sundance, “Train Dreams,” with Kuidar writing an adaptation of Dennis Johnson’s novella and Bentley directing. “We very much believe in them as the next great American filmmakers who have an interest in nuance and empathy in the work they do,” Schwarzman says.
Voters seem to approve of the awards — “Sing Sing” has taken home three Gotham Awards and is nominated for five more Critics’ Choice Awards; Domingo, who received a Golden Globe nomination for his performance, has emerged as one of the front-runners in the Oscar race.
“Somehow, Greg, Clint and Monique were able to pull it off after seven years of trying to develop the story and solve it,” Schwarzman says with a smile. “It kind of defies all the possibilities of movies that Hollywood traditionally tries to make, and yet… they’re there.”