Press Release: “Four Eyed Monsters” Opens in Theaters

NEW YORK, NY – The independent feature film Four Eyed Monsters opens at the Cinema Village in New York on Friday, December 1, 2006, following an innovative DIY grassroots effort to build an audience for the film. Pic will be released in additional cities starting in February.

NYC based artists Susan Buice & Arin Crumley met online in late 2002 and began an artistically collaborative and sexually intimate relationship. As an experiment, they decided to not speak when in person, and the result was a collection of notes, drawings and short videos they made for each other that ended up becoming the inspiration for their feature film, Four Eyed Monsters.

Funded with credit cards, shot digitally and edited on home computers, the film received critical acclaim on the film festival circuit but failed to receive a major distribution deal. “At festivals there was a major disconnect between how well audiences were reacting and how industry was reacting, and it just didn’t make sense to let the film waste away on our hard drives,” said Crumley. “We wanted to cultivate our own audience that might be interested in our film, so we decided to create new material to post on the web,” explained Buice.

Buice & Crumley compiled footage they filmed of their experiences together, from the time they met through their festival travels, into a made-for-web documentary series. Now a major second component of the project, the Four Eyed Monsters Video Podcast portrays the process behind creating their film, ego-battles with their actors, financial struggles and the toll all of this has taken on their relationship.

Eight episodes and one million downloads later, Buice & Crumley have built a solid fan base, and their film is now in high demand. With an army of supporters they are able to display on their website using a customized Google map, the filmmakers convinced movie theaters in 6 major cities to host pre-release screenings of the film. The audience’s rave reviews from these screenings prompted the official opening in NYC on December 1st. Committed to bringing their art to an audience against any odds, the filmmakers will be releasing the film in additional cities starting in February, and a DVD release is on the way.

Buice and Crumley, named the “New Media Moguls” by the Wall Street Journal, are recognized as digital pioneers for the ways they develop content, cultivate audiences, create interactive experiences and distribute their content. They were recently featured on Apple’s Hot news and AOL’s start up page.

Links

Four Eyed Monsters (main): www.foureyedmonsters.com
Four Eyed Monsters (MySpace): http://www.myspace.com/foureyedmonsters
Feature Film Trailer: http://www.foureyedmonsters.com/feature_film/
Video Podcast: http://foureyedmonsters.com/e1

Download a copy of this press release: .pdf .doc
Download press kit: .pdf .doc