THE SUMMER OF 1998
"We've finally decided to go back to our original vision and make it more of a documentary." -- Eduardo Sanchez, HAXAN NEWS #4, July 21, 1998
"After planning and shooting all of the Phase II footage (the footage with the filmmakers in the woods was Phase I) material for over three months now, we decided late last week to shelf [sic] all of it." -- Eduardo Sanchez, HAXAN NEWS #12, September 30, 1998
On March 9, 1998, The Last Broadcast premiered in Avalos' hometown of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and went on to play at several film festivals and select venues across the nation. Among those venues was Orlando's Enzian, the theater where Mike Monello worked and where Pierson had originally met Myrick. It was during this summer that the Haxan team first saw the completed Broadcast. "They all saw our movie at that point," states Avalos. "They told us that." Avalos is referring to the first meeting between the two sets of directors at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. "When I met them, I had no problems with the guys, actually, as people," Avalos recalls. "Dan's a very nice guy and all that. They came up to us at Sundance, they said they liked our movie, they were looking forward to us seeing their movie, and we wished them the best of luck with the midnight screening." The screening resulted in Artisan Entertainment picking up the film for $1.1 million.
By June of 1998, The Blair Witch Project was still far from complete; a second segment airing on Split Screen had aired early that April, but the movie was still at two and a half hours long. By July, Myrick and Sanchez had it down to a reasonable 100 minutes; however, audience reaction was not exactly what they had hoped for. "Too long. Makes my guts hurt." "Made me motion sick." "Vile, drek, too long." These were among the comments made after a test screening at a Florida University; while several of the students had more positive things to say, the overall results were decidedly mixed. Only 50% percent polled said they would recommend the film to others. Something had to be done. "The plan now is to introduce some of the back story into the film without ruining the narrative structure that exists now," Sanchez wrote in the Haxan newsletter, available on the Haxan site, on July 13, 1998. Meanwhile, media interest in the traditionally structured mockumentary Broadcast had increased, landing the filmmakers in the digital section of TIME magazine, among other places.
With Blair now six -- or five -- years in the making, Sanchez decided to revert back to their "original" idea for the film as a mock documentary. "I am happy to announce that Haxan Films is now in production of PHASE II of The Blair Witch Project," wrote Sanchez on July 30. "Though I can't really discuss what we're shooting, I can say we shot what we think will be the beginning of the film last Friday morning in the downtown Orlando library." That beginning, needless to say, was changed by the time Haxan had completed the final cut. The shooting continued over the summer throughout the Orlando area, with some additional footage shot in the primary Maryland woods location as well. Work on the website began that June and by early August, Sanchez had "just finished the first pass on the TIMELINE page on the website."
By September 16, however, Sanchez had become wary of the film's restructuring as a documentary. "A big decision coming up this weekend is which version of the film we're going to continue with," he wrote in HAXAN NEWS #10. "Dan has taken a more traditional documentary approach with his cut while I've tried to be a little more experimental and non-conventional. It was a strategy we came up with a few weeks ago when we started to realize how many different directions we could take this film in with the footage we've amassed. Both versions have strong points so we might end up taking the best parts of both." Ultimately, that did not turn out to be the case.
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Sanchez went on to proclaim Blair as "a unique film that stands on it's own without some of the elements the general viewing audience demands from the Hollywood standard."
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On September 23, 1998, Haxan magazine favorite indieWIRE announced that the previously little-seen Broadcast would not only be beamed to arthouses across the country via satellite, but would be shown on the Independent Film Channel's broadband website on November 15, reaching 250,000 homes. September 23 was also the day Sanchez and Myrick had nearly finished what was to be the final version of the film. "The cut ended up being as much of an amalgam of both versions as we could muster," wrote Sanchez that day. But between the publication of the indieWIRE story and September 30, a drastic change was made to The Blair Witch Project. All of the Phase II footage -- in short, everything Haxan had shot between late than July and September -- was shelved, ultimately turning up on the website and in the Curse of the Blair Witch special that bears such a resemblance to Broadcast.
"At the time, there was plenty of tension in the air with the [Sundance] deadline approaching and the uneasy feeling all of us had about the integration of Phase I and Phase 2," wrote Sanchez on September 30. "So we all felt a lot better after the decision was made to cut it." Sanchez went on to proclaim Blair as "a unique film that stands on it's own without some of the elements the general viewing audience demands from the Hollywood standard. The Blair Witch Project is not that kind of film, no matter what we do to it."
