A sweet, eerie film about teenagers adapting to adulthood also marked Best Video’s first adventure in streaming, as on Monday evening Hank Hoffman, Best Video’s executive director, announced that it was hosting the virtual theatrical release of Ham on Rye, which opened virtually in 22 different venues around the country on Oct. 23.
Directed by Tyler Taormina, Ham on Rye made the film festival circuit last year and was slated for a theatrical release until the pandemic intervened. For Kevin Anton, Ham on Rye’s film editor and one of its producers, the film team’s shifting strategies and adapting to the realities of Covid-19 found interesting parallels in the film itself. In telling a story about community and releasing it to the world, the people working on it reached back into their own communities as well.
Anton grew up in Hamden, “right down the street from Best Video,” he said. “When I was little, that’s where we would rent our movies from. I just grew up with it.” He left the New Haven area for college in 2008, but his parents still live in the neighborhood, so he returns for visits to family and friends. “I try and hit it up any time I’m back,” Anton said. “It’s such a cool place and I love that it’s still there.”
IMDB
Anton, Taormina, Berger in 2019.
He met Taormina — who, in addition to directing Ham on Rye, co-wrote the script with Eric Berger — in college. Afterward, both moved to Los Angeles and started working together. They filmed Ham on Rye three years ago. The movie was shot in the San Fernando Valley by cinematographer Carson Lund. “We shoot it, we edit it, and then we email 1,000 people and send it around to 1,000 film festivals and get rejected from 999 people,” Anton said with a laugh, “and then find the windows of opportunity — the people who like it.”
“It’s different when you’re making a big studio film. It gets made, it gets finished, and there’s a deadline, so it gets pumped out,” Anton continued. For an independent film, “it takes a long time to slowly get the word out. That’s a lot of the battle when you’re making a film of this size.”
But last year, the Ham on Rye team found several windows of opportunity. The film was screened at the Locarno Film Festival, Santa Barbara International Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival, Sydney Underground Film Festival, Sarasota Film Festival, and Oak Cliff Film Festival. At the Maryland Film Festival in May 2019, they connected with Matt Grady, founder of media company Factory 25, and worked out a deal for distribution with him. Meanwhile, New Yorker reporter Richard Brody, who covered the Maryland Film Festival, gave Ham on Rye a positive write-up, writing that the film had “the uncanny echo of a disturbing real-life dream.”
Carson Lund/Factory 25
“He was the first one to see the film and give us a nice writeup in his article,” Anton said. “That was the first really big thing we could include in promoting the film.”
It worked. A number of movie houses were interested in giving Ham on Rye a theatrical run, slated for the summer of 2020, and Factory 25 was building out the movie’s run from there. Then, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic began, and Factory 25 and the producers of Ham on Rye knew their plans were on hold.
As time passed, however, closed movie theaters began to figure out ways to bring in revenue. Some theaters have offered small groups the chance to privately screen movies for a flat rental fee. Other movie theaters have signed on to the idea of hosting virtual screenings. It would give films something like a theatrical run and bring in revenue for everyone (in the Ham on Rye release, Best Video will get half the proceeds that it brings in).
Among the producers of the film there was “a lot of discussion” about whether to do a virtual theatrical run or just wait until theaters could reopen. “At a certain point, it comes down to the decision of ‘do you want to wait? Or do you want to try this new thing of releasing it digitally?’” Anton said. “I think we just realized that we’d rather play sooner than later. We were just coming off of a festival run,” he added, and already looking toward the next movie they wanted to make. They had found people interested in helping them make it.
So the Ham on Rye team decided to go for it. Factory 25 found 22 venues across the country who were interested in hosting virtual screenings. Twenty of those were theaters. One was a video store turned nonprofit film archive in Seattle called Scarecrow Video. And another was Best Video.
The film was released on Oct. 23. In the same week, the film got positive reviews in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, and several other publications.
“We are very surprised,” Anton said. “Just to be getting effusive praise from these major publications — it’s kind of a shock.” Meanwhile, he said, theaters are still interested in a physical theatrical run, whenever they can reopen. About the virtual theatrical runs, he said, “It’s something” for the theaters — “it’s income where they would have had none otherwise.”
Like the theaters themselves, Anton said, “we wish we were playing in physical theaters. We’re all film buffs who go to the movies a couple times a week. Being in a physical theater is important to us.” But the virtual run is a way to begin to adapt to whatever the future may hold as the country tries to find its way forward in the new reality the pandemic has created. “Everyone’s learning at the same time,” Anton said.
Carson Lund/Factory 25
In a sense, the situation of the film’s distribution has echoes in the film itself. Ham on Rye tells a suburban story in two halves. In the first half, several groups of teenagers are drifted toward an event — something like a prom — that’s happening at a beloved local deli. In a ritual somewhere between spin the bottle and truth or dare, they split off into couples, party the night away, and make their way home. Or do they? The second half of the film finds this group that came together so naturally and easily suddenly fragmented, the kids alienated from one another. Something bad has happened, and it’s unclear what, but it also doesn’t matter. What matters is the social fallout from it, and how the people in the film pick themselves up and move from there.
Anton said that director Taormina “was very inspired by his own experiences with growing up in the town he grew up in — and going back to it, and everything feeling so different than when he was younger.” For both co-writers Taormina and Berger, the film was also “about cultural rituals — the social rituals that everyone was pushed through when they were younger. The pressure to pass those milestones and succeed just really haunts Tyler.” As the film developed, it also became “a critique of the way society treats people who didn’t achieve what it wanted them to achieve” as it focused in the second half on “the people who are left behind — the castaways.”
Like many films, Ham on Rye came together in the editing. The film’s pacing — deliberate, lingering, a little off kilter, to dramatic, comedic, and sometimes unsettling effect — “was momths and months of Tyler and I sitting down with it and cutting different versions,” Anton said. “It’s not strange for us to spend a couple minutes dwelling on a shot.” There were reasons for that, too. “There’s not a lot of dialogue in the film,” he said; the style was meant to allow the viewer to study the actors’ facial expressions, to pay attention to the way the characters spoke, “to evoke the feeling we were going for.”
But they wanted to balance that against the desire to keep the film’s energy moving, to build up the momentum and “then drop you off a cliff” in the second half, and “have you feel like you’re in a totally different world.”
They also took advantage of happy accidents. In the climactic ceremony scene, “a lot of that was using footage that was before or after cut was called,” Anton said. ”It was the cast looking at the camera in a certain way. It was finding those moments that were more evocative, and told the story that we wanted to tell.”
In that, Anton said, “our cast was incredible. A lot of them were not actors, and some actors were just getting their start, and a lot of them are younger. They put in tons and tons of hours,” and in the film’s positive reception, he said, “it’s really cool to give something back to them, since they gave us so much by being in the movie.”
Anton also connected with the movie in relation to where he grew up. “I really like looking at the movie as a coming-of-age story for the town — the kids have to reckon with this looming fear of adulthood, and the town has this looming fear of modernization. In both cases, they just have to learn how to adapt. Adapting to changing times is an overaching theme to the movie. But there’s something larger being said about communities, too.”
Which connected to something Anton had said earlier, about Best Video itself. “Growing up, it was the neighborhood movie rental place,” he said, “but now that it’s branched out, it’s there for the whole community.”
To purchase access to Ham on Rye through Best Video and watch the movie, visit the post on Best Video’s website about partnering with Factory 25.
