EXCLUSIVE: Filmmaker Eric Aronson spent 22 years in Hollywood as a screenwriter before moving back to his native Boston and deciding to take a new approach to movies. His feature directing debut, heist pic Any Day Now, recently had a limited run in cinemas and releases online domestically today. Check out an exclusive clip above, and scroll down for more below.
The comedy-thriller, which stars Paul Guilfoyle, won the Audience Favorite Feature at the Boston Film Festival in September and has continued to drum up awareness through what Aronson calls a “Madison Avenue meets indie filmmaking” method. That included staging an FBI raid at an art gallery in New York City’s Chelsea, as well as online ads and videos that have gone viral.
Billed as a “true-ish” story, Any Day Now is inspired by the real events of March 18, 1990, when $500 million worth of art was stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The heist, the largest theft of private property in recorded history, remains unsolved.
In the film, Marty (Guilfoyle) ropes night watchman Steve (Taylor Gray) into a criminal world of oddballs, misfits and lost souls. Recently kicked out of school for selling drugs in an effort to help his friends, Steve is clever yet wayward and drowning in debt. Marty presents him with a life-altering choice: rob the museum he guards or lose everything.
Aronson, who has previously worked closely with Johnny Depp and Sacha Baron Cohen, says he became somewhat disillusioned with Hollywood, “The system is not designed for individuality.” So he decided to save up for a project to direct on his own, “that I could control, that would be small enough,” but also “expansive enough. … I wanted to tell the full story that I could tell but tell it in a creative way.”
He explains further: “I enjoyed my career, and I still do as a screenwriter, but it’s just a different genre. It’s like a special kind of theater. … When you drive home from an independent film, you ask yourself, ‘Was it good?’ And I came home every day thinking: ‘Yes. Can we try something different? Can we fail?’ It’s just a different experience. That’s what I wanted, and that’s what the spirit of the movie was. And now that’s become the spirit of the selling of the movie as well.”
Aronson reinvested the tax credit he got for shooting in Massachusetts into the marketing, rather than relying on investors, and focused on teasing the audience, enticing them to see the film with tailored videos to pique interest. “Essentially, in advertising, you don’t walk around handing people a Snickers bar and getting them to taste it. You’re not even selling the wrapper. You’re selling the idea of the Snickers bar.” The idea for the film was to get people to think: “Well, that’s an interesting way to present a movie to me, which I haven’t seen before. I’m willing to take a bite. I’m willing to try it,” he says.
Last fall, he created a campaign releasing the museum’s “missing security tape,” which has topped 5 million views. In the next phase, he arranged a pop-up gallery in Chelsea to display the “13 Masterpieces.” Open for free to the public, the place was packed on a gallery crawl evening, but none of the guests knew whether the paintings were real or not, and then actors dressed as FBI agents raided the gallery and hauled away a “Rembrandt.” Influencers in attendance posted videos that have reached more than 20 million views.
The third phase included an ad campaign that released over several weeks and reimagines Rembrandt, Manet, Vermeer and Degas gathering in the museum to debate who stole their paintings.
Says Aronson: “Our job is to raise the awareness. And how meaningful can that be? Can we move that into seats? Can we push that into a theater? Can we push that into people watching it online? That’s the beauty. That’s what feels so good, is we’re experimenting, and we’re gonna fail, and I get to try again and keep trying different things. I’m just gonna keep going. There’s no one over my shoulder telling me, ‘Alright, let’s just take as much as we can and dump it on Netflix and cross our fingers.’ I don’t have to do that.”
The film played in select cinemas in New York, Boston and Rhode Island as well as on Kinema for a limited run. It’s now being self-released via Blue Harbor Entertainment and will be available widely on digital platforms to buy from today, then to rent from May 20.
Following the online release of the film in the U.S., Aronson says he’s “seriously exploring the idea of internationally opening our ‘Art Gallery’ and showing the movie in a theater nearby city to city, starting with Mexico City as a test case.”
The ads and the Art Gallery takeover will be entered into the Cannes Lion Awards that are held next month.
Any Day Now also stars Alexandra Templer, Thomas Kee, Armando Rivera and Thomas Philip O’Neill. Producers are Aronson, Mark Donadio, Dana Scott and Emily Sheehan with Jan Egelson and Guilfoyle as exec producers.
Here’s a look at another exclusive clip and some of the content Aronson and his team created: