Bleecker Street executives Kent Sanderson and Myles Bender vividly remember first seeing “Eye in the Sky,” a drone war thriller starring Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman that premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2015. Festival hoping to find distribution. Not long after the Canadian screening, they were fascinated by the film, but quickly realized that their contemporaries in the audience did not feel the same way.

“Within 15 minutes I saw many other buyers get up and leave. I think they found the film too challenging,” said Sanderson, president of Bleecker Street. He and Bender, head of marketing and creative advertising, urged their boss, the film company’s co-founder and CEO Andrew Karpen, to watch the film so they could bid for the distribution rights. Bender recalls, “We looked at each other and said, ‘What do we see that they don’t see?'”

Karpen shared the enthusiasm of his colleagues, none of whom were afraid to turn off audiences with a story that favors substance over flash. Bleecker Street beat out buyers like Fox Searchlight and the Orchard to land the film. Their instincts proved correct: “Eye in the Sky” became one of the highest-grossing independent releases of 2016, earning $18.7 million domestically and $35 million worldwide.

“We had some successes in our first year,” says Karpen. Bleecker Street scored early wins in 2015 with Blythe Danner and Sam Elliott’s comedy-drama “I’ll See You in My Dreams” ($7.4 million worldwide); “Trumbo,” a biopic of Jay Roach that scored an Oscar nomination for Bryan Cranston’s portrayal of blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo ($11.4 million worldwide); and the music world redemption drama “Danny Collins” starring Al Pacino, Annette Bening and Jennifer Garner ($10.8 million worldwide). But ‘Eye in the Sky’ felt different for Karpen. “That’s when I really started to believe that we could really go the distance,” he says.

In the time since, Bleecker Street has released approximately 70 films and hasn’t wavered from its mission to make “smart, socially conscious” films. The company is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, a milestone that Variety will commemorate on October 5 at the New York Film Festival and where Karpen will be honored with the Variety Vanguard Award for his consummate leadership and tremendous contributions to the indie film community.

This anniversary is especially meaningful during these tumultuous times for the film industry, as other players in the indie scene, such as Open Road Films and Solstice Studios, have gone out of business, declared bankruptcy or been sold for parts. Employees believe Bleecker Street has endured because their leader is level-headed, responsible and thoughtful, especially when it comes to spending habits.

“Andrew has a tremendous sense of discipline, and sometimes that means moving from splashy film festival acquisitions to continuing to nurture and build relationships with filmmakers and producers,” says Sanderson. “He’s not putting all our chips in one movie where we’re all done if it flops. He feels like every decision we make is not just about that movie, but about the company and the dozens of people who work there.”

Of course, not every release has scored with moviegoers. Films like 2020’s “Military Wives,” a dramatic comedy about British women whose partners serve in Afghanistan, and 2021’s “Mass,” a somber story about a school shooting, were praised but failed to achieve mainstream success .

“I wish some of our COVID-era releases would find a wider audience, but the challenges were inherent to the market at the time,” says Karpen. With “Military Wives,” starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Sharon Horgan and Jason Flemyng, Bleecker Street planned to open in March 2020 but changed plans to a mostly digital release. “Mass” hit the big screen in the fall of 2021, at a time when movie theaters had largely reopened but patrons were still hesitant to return to theaters. “’Military Wives’ was a real theatrical crowd pleaser. ‘Mass’ (was) a powerful film that was perhaps more embraced during a less tumultuous time in history,” says Karpen.

Before founding Bleecker Street, Karpen was co-CEO of Focus Features, Universal’s specialty division. In 2013, the company behind arthouse favorites like Wes Anderson’s ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ and director Lisa Cholodenko’s ‘The Kids Are All Right’ moved from its New York headquarters to Los Angeles and was given a mandate to release films with a more global appeal. Karpen was offered to stay with the company, but he did not want to move his family, including his three children, to the West Coast. So he decided to part ways and later founded Bleecker Street, with several Focus colleagues such as Sanderson and Bender making the jump with him as the first employees. His vision, he says, was to solve “a problem in the marketplace”; there just weren’t many places for films aimed at an audience over 35.

Major studios tend to target teenage boys, whose favorite genre of comic book movies are the four-quadrant blockbusters that sustain the box office. So focusing on the subset of older moviegoers “gave us a niche and a way to talk to CAA, WME or other entities to say, ‘This is our country,’” says Tyler DiNapoli, the company’s president of marketing . “We wanted to build a track and eventually, successfully, widen and grow it.”

Over the years, executives at Bleecker Street have learned to trust their gut when it comes to knowing what resonates with people. Not that it ever gets easier or less stressful to play that particular guessing game.

“There was a six-month gap between when we bought ‘Eye in the Sky’ and it came out in theaters. It’s hard not to wonder, ‘Are we crazy?’” Sanderson says. “There’s no way to make that go away. This is a subjective matter.”

Yet it is the preference for art over science that produces unexpected favorites and winners, such as the crime comedy ‘Logan Lucky’ with Daniel Craig, Adam Driver and Channing Tatum, the absurdist dialogue-free ‘Sasquatch Sunset’, the platonic friendship drama ‘Together Together’ with Ed in the leading role. Helms and Patti Harrison, or the Toni Collette-led crime comedy “Mafia Mamma.” Sanderson continues, “Even as we all get better at analyzing patterns and histories and every conceivable data set for releases, that gut feeling remains the most important facet of creativity.”

Karpen acknowledges that there is a trade-off that comes with avoiding corporate overlords. He says that while they operated under a major studio like Universal, while at Focus Features the constraints of “a certain amount of oversight and restrictions” were imposed, they were also given the comfort of “tremendous financial resources and worldwide distribution.”

“Bleecker has the luxury of being truly independent and as such enjoys all the creative freedom that that entails,” says Karpen. “But that comes with inherent risks, and the uncertainty of not having a century-old studio and its vast library and infrastructure to help a label like ours navigate not only the ups, but the downs as well .”

While this doesn’t necessarily provide carte blanche, executives view these restrictions as a license to get creative.

“There is more room to do things that come out of your own pocket. Certainly, the poster for ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ is not something I could have gotten away with in a bigger studio,” says Bender. That film shows Bigfeet engaging in sex, masturbation, vomiting and flatulence. “At the same time, you have to work smarter, because you simply don’t have the budget to make mistakes. I can’t cut five trailers, pay five suppliers to cut five trailers and hope one of them works.”

In the decade since Bleecker Street’s founding, movie theater habits have changed dramatically, and films aimed at “adults” have suffered most from these box-office shifts. While it may be more difficult to get those customers off the couch and into their local movie theater, Karpen remains undeterred in the appeal and relevance of the big screen.

“Nowadays we use the word ‘urgency’ to describe the most important quality in theater marketing,” says Karpen. “YouTube is now the most watched app on connected televisions, not just desktops, phones and tablets, and I think that statistic speaks very directly to the challenges of getting someone to leave the house and interact with other people.” to sit in a dark room. watch a movie. But it’s also clear that when people are motivated, they really embrace that shared experience.”

These changes in audience behavior have also meant that Bleecker Street executives have had to adapt to new ways of promoting their films. First, TikTok is no longer just a fun marketing tool, but a necessity for any movie’s advertising campaign.

“The ground is constantly shifting beneath our feet, which makes marketing exciting and challenging,” says DiNapoli, who is tasked with coming up with creative new ways to convey why the latest Bleecker Street film is worth a trip to the theater. “In the past, you could rely on reviews and rave reviews to get people to see the film. I think that’s part of it, but it’s not the whole piece of the puzzle anymore. Now we have to create a secondary factor that makes the film feel special or current.”

As Karpen looks ahead to the next decade, he emphasizes the need for “companies like ours to get behind independent cinema in a big way.” That’s because “fewer theatrical indie breakouts like ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ are popping up as viewers’ habits change,” Karpen adds. “Finding ways to reach target groups through any form of distribution has never been more important.”

On the horizon, Bleecker Street will look to deliver the next arthouse hit with the likes of director Mike Leigh’s ‘Rumours’ and ‘Hard Truths’, which premiered to raves at this year’s Toronto Film Festival and a seasonal release with received the Prime Awards. date December 6.

“Bleecker Street has managed to evolve with the times, and all I can hope for is that we continue to do so,” Karpen said. “The last decade in film may have been the most tumultuous since the Lumière brothers, but I have the utmost confidence in my incredible team to continue finding and sharing indelible stories with audiences no matter how much the world of film continues to shift.”

One thing is certain: Although Bleecker Street has a small office in Los Angeles, the company – named after the address of Karpen’s previous workplace, Focus Features – will always be based in New York City.

“There’s an intangible quality to operating out of town – an independent, indomitable spirit that can only come from being 5,000 kilometers away from the big studios,” says Karpen. “The pizza is also much better.”