'Visitor' just won't leave

When I first saw "The Visitor" in the weeks leading up to the Toronto Film Festival last fall, I was moved by filmmaker Tom McCarthy's soulful account of a widowed college professor (played by character actor Richard Jenkins) who is spiritually reawakened by a chance encounter with an immigrant couple in New York City. But when you see movies as a reporter, your reaction is always complicated. It's one thing to love a film as a fan. But, I thought, in an era where every specialty company is desperately hunting for the next "Little Miss Sunshine" jackpot, who will possibly buy a movie that doesn't have a name actor or any crowd-pleasing fervor?

Michael London, the film's producer, had similar doubts. Maybe that's why he's so astounded to see the film, now in its 13th week of release, still hanging around the Top 20 box-office leaders, long after the big studio releases that were in theaters when "The Visitor" made its early-April debut are long gone.

It's true, those early April films -- "Prom Night," "Street Kings," "Leatherheads" and "The Ruins" -- have made more money. But in the gloom-and-doom-filled world of specialty movies, where film after film has disappeared without a trace, "The Visitor" is a small ray of sunlight. Spurned by every established specialty division in town, never having grossed more than $1.1 million in any week of its release, it has quietly turned a sizable profit, nearing the $10-million box-office mark this last weekend, when it had the highest percentage upswing of any film on more than 100 screens in the country.

A veteran producer of such films as "Sideways" and "Thirteen," London remembers the film's low ebb all too well. Buoyed by early reactions to the film, he went to Toronto thinking his new company, Groundswell, and its partner, Participant Productions, would have an easy sale. Even before "The Visitor's" credits had finished rolling after its Friday-night debut, London got e-mail and text messages from specialty division executives, all saying how much they loved the film. But as the weekend rolled along, the e-mails stopped coming. The phone never rang.

"By Monday, after all the specialty production guys had spent the weekend talking to their marketing and distribution people, they were paralyzed," London recalls. "I was totally depressed by the wall of cynicism the specialty companies had about the marketplace. By chance, I ran into [Overture Films chief] Chris McGurk, who'd heard so many people say how much they liked the film that he congratulated me on having sold the picture. I told him he was wrong -- we hadn't even gotten an offer."