‘Right place, right time’

LOS ANGELES — Twenty years ago, The Blair Witch Project debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, creating an impact that’s still felt today.

The movie’s “found footage” format inspired multiple imitations and was a reminder to Hollywood of the huge audience potential for micro-budget storytelling. The movie’s biggest impact: It was a triumph of marketing, mixing old media with the newly booming internet.

Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez filmed for six days and nights in Maryland on a budget pegged at $35,000. In a key move in 1998, before anyone had screened the film, they hired respected Los Angeles PR firm Clein + White. Then Haxan Films created a website to answer questions about the film’s “missing” students.

The film screened in the Midnight section at Sundance on Jan. 25, 1999. By morning, Artisan Entertainment had acquired it for $1.1 million and added more post-production work, boosting the cost to a still modest $500,000.

Artisan began screening at colleges to generate word of mouth, and “leaked” trailers to the Ain’t It Cool News website, then to MTV News. The film’s own website received 160 million hits in the first three months, an astonishing amount in those days.

The movie opened on July 14 on 27 screens, averaging $56,002 per screen. It widened to 1,101 theatres on July 30, then doubled that number on Aug. 6. The film ended up earning $140 million in the U.S., with an additional $108 million overseas.

Variety’s Charles Lyons on Sept. 8, 1999, wrote, “The filmmakers’ and Artisan’s true genius came in their prescience to treat the internet as another vehicle for storytelling.”

Variety quoted Myrick’s assessment of their phenomenal success: “We were at the right place at the right time.”