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Shortly after waking up on the last day of a family vacation at Walt Disney World in Florida, Jim White (Roy Abramsohn) gets a call from his boss, informing him that he has been laid off. He keeps the news to himself in order not to spoil the family's remaining time at the resort. While lounging at the swimming pool, he sees two French girls in their early teens jump in, and starts to develop an interest in them. After his son intentionally locks him out of the family's hotel room, he takes his daughter to the rides of the Magic Kingdom to spend time away from his nagging wife.
Their paths frequently cross that of the two French girls, whom Jim tries to keep up with. His son, working with a wheelchair-bound man, makes attempts on his life. The Disney characters and paraphernalia start to seem sinister and surreal, and White starts to have disturbing visions, such as the animatronic characters' faces changing and the Disney Princesses doubling as escorts for wealthy Asian businessmen visiting the park. He is not sure if what he sees is real, or if he is just having a breakdown.Written and Directed by Randy Moore
Release Date - October 11, 2013 (+VOD)
From Wikipedia:
Escape from Tomorrow is a 2013 American fantasy-horror film, the debut film of writer-director Randy Moore. It stars Roy Abramsohn as a man having increasingly disturbing experiences and visions during the last day of a family vacation to the Walt Disney World theme park. It premiered in January at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and on April 20, 2013, is being shown at Roger Ebert's 15th annual film festival in Champaign, Illinois, where the film was hand selected by Ebert just weeks before his death. The festival's program claims the film is "ultimately about the terror of ubiquitous entertainment."
The film became one of the most talked-about films at Sundance, and then received some attention in the national media, because Moore had made most of it on location at both Disney World and Disneyland without permission from The Walt Disney Company, which owns and operates both parks. Since Disney has a reputation for being fiercely protective of its intellectual property, the cast and crew used guerrilla filmmaking techniques to avoid attracting attention, such as keeping their scripts on their iPhones and shooting on handheld video cameras similar to those used by park visitors. After principal photography was complete, Moore was so determined to keep the project a secret from Disney that he edited it in South Korea. Sundance similarly declined to discuss the film in detail before it was shown. It was called "the ultimate guerrilla film".Many links to articles about the movie's legal issues as well as the making of can be found at the bottom of its
Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Tomorrow)
Guerrilla Disney film 'Escape From Tomorrow' headed to theaters
Source: Los Angeles Times
EXCLUSIVE: "Escape From Tomorrow," the unauthorized independent film shot guerrilla-style at Disney theme parks, is headed to movie theaters and TV sets, resolving a long-running question about the commercial status of one of the year's most provocative movies.
Randy Moore's black-and-white Surrealist feature will be released commercially by PDA, the distribution offshoot of the sales and management company Cinetic Media, on Oct. 11, according to a PDA spokesman. It will play on movie-theater screens in many of the nation's top markets as well as be made available day-and-date on cable VOD, the spokesman said.
PDA has a history of releasing bold fare, previously bringing out the Banksy-themed art-world meditation "Exit Through the Gift Shop" in 2010 and the doc hit "Senna," about the late Brazilian Formula One driver Ayrton Senna, two summers ago. Cinetic, which previously represented the movie's distribution rights, had garnered interest from distributors but ultimately decided it would attempt to bring the movie to market via PDA.
Written and directed by first-timer Moore, the feature generated a storm of publicity when it premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival and also raised questions about whether any company would be willing to shoulder the risk of releasing it. The movie centers on an alienated man (Roy Abramsohn) taking a family vacation as he slowly begins to get caught up in a conspiracy -- or loses his mind. The version of the movie that will be released commercially has been re-cut and is about 15 minutes shorter than the edition that played Sundance, which some criticized as too long.
With its edgy tone, the movie is expected to appeal to a young audience and also could make one or more stops at a post-summer film festival. Though it is a narrative study of one character and contains a helping of genre elements, the film also was believed by some to be a political critique on, among other things, the forced sunniness of Disney theme parks.
Moore made the movie in a highly unorthodox way, using hidden cameras at Disney-owned parks in Anaheim and Orlando. A number of the shots luxuriate in and sometimes undermine Disney imagery -- in one scene, Epcot Center blows up -- but Moore shot it entirely without Disney permission, choosing to use a skeletal crew and often communicating with his cast from a phone across the park so as not to attract attention.
Disney has yet to respond publicly to the movie. The film has secured so-called E&O insurance, which protects distributors against liabilities, and legal experts have moreover said that Disney would have a weak case if it tried to stop it or collect damages--though the company could still decide to try to bog the release down in lawsuits, a move that no doubt would also fuel publicity for the film.
I'm genuinely surprised. When I first heard about this movie, I was convinced it would get the Karen Carpenter Story treatment and we'd never get a chance to see it.
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Poster of the year?
How are these filmmakers not being sued into oblivion right now? This is DISNEY we're talking about. That's kind of all they do.
I was about to say the same thing, but i just closed the browser instead like i normally do.
Has anyone written on what kind of a feat this crew has been able to pull off?
that poster is something i wouldn't get away with on a semi-popular blog. let alone the press for the film
maybe disney's in on it and they're letting it happen to make their brand cooler to the young people.
or first amendment or someshit.
Quote from: Neil on September 04, 2013, 10:09:11 PM
Has anyone written on what kind of a feat this crew has been able to pull off?
he knew he didn't have a permit, couldn't get a permit, and he pulled off what you gotta pull off in such a circumstance:
QuoteAvoiding detection by Disney security took "a lot of planning," he said. "We were careful and cautious and tried not to draw too much attention to ourselves. But planning was the main thing."
Abramsohn said shooting in such a stealthy fashion "was scary. ... It was exciting and fun."
In a "director's statement" included in press materials for the film, Moore describes the origins of his film:
"Heavily influenced by various strange outings I endured as a boy with my father -- who at the time lived in Orlando, Florida -- 'Escape From Tomorrow' is my personal attempt to make sense of what felt like a very artificial childhood, brought on by our cultural obsession with these fake, manufactured worlds of so-called fantasy."
He adds, "I think the film is really about defining the word 'escape' and how so many American households seek it out in a yearly pilgrimage to a materialistic Mecca."
It's a small, small dysfunctional world after all, in Moore's depiction.
The director said he succeeded in making his film without tipping off Disney largely because of advances in camera technology. It's now possible to shoot high-quality video with what looks like, to the uncritical eye, a digital SLR camera.
"(Digital) SLR's had just hit the market at that point," Moore said. "So we had the Canon 5D Mark II we could bring into the park and look like a tourist."
Moore shot for 10 days at the Disney parks in Orlando, and for two weeks at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. (He filmed additional scenes off Disney property on a soundstage in Los Angeles and at a hotel in the LA area.)
His crew and actors went unnoticed by Disney, until near the end of filming.
"We almost got caught once. ... We were shooting in the entrance of the park and we had to do a few takes and basically they thought our team was just paparazzi and we were shooting a famous family (entering the park)."
Moore said Disney security pulled his actors aside and demanded to know why they had entered and then re-entered the park within a seven-minute period.
He said his crew took advantage of a passing parade to scatter while Abramsohn and his co-star, Elena Schuber, struggled to explain themselves.
Abramsohn said he felt like he was "acting for his life." He said he told Disney security he and his "family" entered and then quickly left the park because they needed to reapply sunscreen.
While his interrogator was temporarily distracted, he hid his microphone and mini tape-recorder -- used to record dialogue -- in his sock. If that had been discovered, the game would have been up.
"It was very scary that day," Abramsohn admitted.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/24/showbiz/movies/escape-tomorrow-sundance-disney/index.html
God this looks amazing. This year is going to be twice as good as 2012.
Escape from Tomorrow - Behind the Scenes (http://www.vice.com/read/escape-from-tomorrow-behind-the-scenes)
pretty sure elvis mitchell remains around los angeles as a fixture of the critical scene (he hosts la radio interviews and makes program appearances), and i really like him, so between mitchell and mark olsen i've now listed my favorite los angeles critics. here's a video of olsen q&a'ing the lead actor of escape from tomorrow (roy abramsohn)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIwes13uSJY
Oh, I saw this at Fantastic Fest.
I loved it, but I feel like the majority of the people I talked to didn't.
It's more than just a gimmick for sure, but the whole time you're watching it, you just keep thinking "how the fuck did they get away with this?" (with the exception of the small handful of greenscreen scenes).
It reminded me of watching a Lynch movie in that I'm fully enjoying it, but there's clearly a level that I just haven't grasped on to yet so I'll definitely want to see it more than once.
The filmmakers said that they shot it in Black and White because Disneyland is so enticing in color, you just immediately feel like you're happy. Pretty brilliant.
Oh, and it's funny as shit.
I really enjoyed this. I feel like it didn't realize its full potential, though, perhaps because the potential was so massive. I don't think it went far enough.
I think a rewatch is in order to accept it on its own (somewhat limited) terms and absorb more of the subtext. It's like what RK said. There could be a Lynch-like substructure that's yet to be discovered, or certain things could simply be what they appear to be on the surface... random bits of semi-sinister weirdness. I am honestly not sure after one viewing.
The acting is kind of all over the place. The woman playing the witch is obscenely over the top, and not in a good or particularly entertaining way. Jim's wife oscillates between her charming "I feel like a kid again, I'm at Disneyland!" thing and her cliche shrill nagging wife thing.
But everyone else was good, and Roy Abramsohn (Jim) was great. He makes a strangely compelling protagonist, and his relationship with the French girls is fascinating and tense.
Side note, parts of the synopsis in the first post are quite wrong... that is either poorly translated from another language, or the person writing it is misremembering the movie. Two sentences are simply false, and some other bits are dubious. So ignore it.
SEVERE SPOILERS
The very night after I saw this, I had a dream that I coughed up two massive hairballs just like Jim, except it was in the shower instead of a toilet. So apparently that stuck with me.
SPOILERS
I enjoyed -- loved, even -- everything up to the Intermission. After that, felt things were hit and miss. I assume most of the stuff they shot elsewhere was shot after the location stuff at the parks and it was mostly these sequences that didn't work for me (though by no means all of them; the pool scene is great for example). Seems like they had gotten a sense of what shape the film was taking and either a) decided to go all in on the esoteric/bizarre stuff regardless of how well it fit, or b) couldn't get the vibes right in a controlled environment after so long in the wilderness. Still, ambitious and impressive. A good follow through on a great idea.
Also, extra-textually, I'm coming away with a memorable theater experience. Only about twenty people in attendance. With the exception of one awful couple (grumbling and loudly sighing, cell phones out), everybody's into it and willing to go wherever it takes us. Even after the Intermission, as things start to get REALLY weird, everybody's still on board, laughing, giving it the benefit of the doubt, trusting it will pull off whatever it's trying to pull off... Then -- BAM! -- the diarrhea. It was like a door opened on a midflight plane. All of us on the same wavelength. Not "what the fuck?" -- just "oh." Eighteen hearts dropping.
I looked at my girlfriend on my right. Then to my left at the stranger on the other end of the row. At this exact moment, he's turning to look at me. We look at each other for a while. Then return to the film. Two rows ahead of me, I see another two strangers, many seats apart, do the exact same thing.
http://www.deadline.com/2013/10/john-sloss-posts-escape-from-tomorrow-vod-revenues-dares-rivals-to-do-same/
John Sloss Posts 'Escape From Tomorrow' VOD Revenues; Dares Rivals To Do Same
By BRIAN BROOKS | Monday October 28, 2013 @ 9:15am PDT
EXCLUSIVE: John Sloss, whose Producers Distribution Agency is releasing the provocative unauthorized Disney World-shot Escape From Tomorrow, reports that in its first two weeks, the film grossed $139,334 in theatrical revenues — and $120,560 in VOD/digital grosses — for a total take of $259,894. VOD, he said, was $55,000 and broadband revenue was $65,000. Now, that's chump change for a studio release, but groundbreaking in that Sloss even volunteered it. Unless it's after the fact on a triumph like Margin Call or Arbitrage, it feels like most multi-platform distributors would sooner give out the numbers to their personal bank accounts than timely VOD grosses. It makes my job reporting specialty box office an incomplete exercise, because VOD/digital revenues play a bigger role on the specialty film release circuit every year. Distributors say their films clean up on cable and broadband, but there is no reliable mechanism for timely tally on VOD revenues the way there is on theatricals.
Sloss, who is on both sides of the coin in that his Cinetic Media brokers film distribution deals and PDA does multi-platform releasing on films like the Banksy documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop, has issued a challenge to his rivals: cough up the numbers as they get from cable companies, iTunes and other revenue providers, and create a level of transparency that shows what VOD really means to the bottom lines of prestige films.
This is on Netflix now.