Makers of the Lost Film

In 1993, Clerks, which jumpstarted the career of director Kevin Smith screened at the Independent Feature Film Market in New York. Down the hall, a work-in-progress called Looking for Miami Beach also screened. Miami Beach is a comedy/drama about an amnesiac drifter who alters the lives of a young couple who take him in. In one of those dream come true moments that fuel the independent business, the filmmakers, Paul Haddad and Donald Hewitt, were invited to debut Looking for Miami Beach at the Toronto Film Festival once their film was completed. Don and Paul were thrilled. Toronto is one of the few career launching festivals in the world. All that remained to do was post production (sound effects, music and final prints). After all the hard work they had done, they were sure this last step would be a breeze. They had no idea how wrong they were.

After securing funds to finish the film, Paul and Don drove to the lab that was storing their film. There was one problem. The lab no longer existed. There was just an empty building with the words “This Space for Lease” out front. The filmmakers were devastated.

So instead of going to a major film festival, they got jobs. The Toronto film festival came and went. And the door of opportunity slammed shut. Don recalls, “This was a really dark time for me. I had a string of awful jobs. What little money I was making was going to pay off a film that was gone.” The filmmakers contemplated hiring a private detective to track down the lab owner but couldn’t afford one. What they needed was a little luck and a lot of perseverance.

After a year of dead-end phone calls and letters, the lab owner finally resurfaced. He told Don and Paul that the film was stored in a warehouse north of LA and he was willing to open the warehouse for an hour or two so that the filmmakers could look for their reels.

Don and Paul were ecstatic, but upon entering the warehouse they realized the nightmare was far from over. Inside were rows and rows of unmarked boxes piled eight feet high and sixty feet deep. “Imagine the last scene with all the crates in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ and you get the picture,” says Paul. They frantically searched for their film but it was fruitless. In fact, it would be another full year before the lab owner discovered the boxes containing their film. Finally, with their film back in hand, Don and Paul went about finishing Looking for Miami Beach. “Fate had given us one more chance,” says Don, “and nothing was going to stop us now.”

And this time, nothing did. Looking for Miami Beach was completed and went on to screen at several international film festivals. Don and Paul recently inked a foreign distribution deal. And while domestic theatrical distribution has eluded them, the filmmakers were pleased to sign an agreement with Sightsound.com, a leading online distributor. “We’re thrilled to have our film at Sightsound.com. They’re light-years ahead of the competition,” say the filmmakers. More importantly, Sightsound, which sold the first movie on the Internet (the critically acclaimed Pi), is the leading distributor of movies among colleges, where more and more students are downloading movies off the Net. “The protagonists in ‘Looking for Miami Beach’ are college graduates making some hard choices about their lives,” says Paul. “The college crowd has always responded well to our film, so it’s the perfect way for them to see it.” And after years of looking for Looking for Miami Beach themselves, Paul Haddad and Donald Hewitt are happy anyone can see it at all.