The Difficult Journey of ‘Holy Frit’

More content is being produced through streaming platforms now than at any other point in history, and this includes documentary films. But despite the market seeming like a huge gift for independent filmmakers, there’s a dark subtext to what can be pitched in this environment and how that lets some more ambitious projects about the truly obscure slip through the cracks. Holy Frit by Justin Monroe is one such film, documenting the years long process that went into the construction of the world’s largest stained-glass mural, currently standing at the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas–a massive 100-by-40 foot work of art. Despite winning awards all over the American documentary film festival circuit from 2021 to 2022, Holy Frit struggled to find a streaming service to host it. Justin Monroe took time discuss Holy Frit, and the state of documentary film production in general, with us.

Many of our readers probably aren’t that familiar with how the independent film documentary production process goes. Would you care to walk us through how you typically do it? Please use Holy Frit as a specific example.

This is actually my first feature documentary. My first two features were scripted narrative projects. In a project with a script, it takes a lot of front-end work to get things started… You have to work on many drafts of the script before it’s ready to film, which can take a year or more. From there, you have to create the budget, raise the money, cast the actors, find locations, hire the crew, etc. All of these things together can take potentially years to pull together before you can start filming. However, once you get started, you have your blueprint to follow. You know the story you are telling and what scenes you have to film.

The cool thing about a documentary is you can just grab a camera, some microphones, and start filming. You don’t necessarily even have to have a crew or a budget. However, with no script, you’re working without a clear roadmap to follow, so you end up filming a lot of footage that may or may not make the final cut. Once you have all of your footage in the can, then you have to really find your story in the editing room… which can take a long time (in our case 3.5 years) and most likely require a some real money. Typically, the majority of the money for a documentary goes into the post-production process.

So… instead of putting in a lot of front-end work to get started, you will most likely end up devoting a ton of time on the backend in order to pull the actual film together.

This documentary happened because my family and I moved to South Pasadena, CA and randomly rented a place right next door to a guy named Tim Carey. I never knew Tim before. As neighbors do, we got to know each other over the next few months, sipping beers together in his front yard. During these chats, he discovered I was a filmmaker, and I found out he was a stained glass artist working at Judson Studios.

One day Tim got an idea. His company was bidding on a project that would become the biggest stained glass window in the world. He asked me if I’d be willing to film a promo video to help support their pitch. They needed a way to stand out among the 60 companies from around the world they were bidding against on the project. When I got to Judson Studios, I was stunned. The place was so beautiful and interesting… it was like stepping back in time. As I interviewed Tim, his boss David Judson, and the many other artisans for the promo, I became incredibly intrigued by the project.

Tim was submitting a design that was impossible to make in traditional stained glass methods, and that is all he and Judson knew how to do. The window would have to be completed within an intense 3-year timeline.  And there was this famous glass maestro named Narcissus Quagliata out there somewhere who might be Judson’s only hope. As I heard all of this, I knew it could make for an incredible story if they landed the project. I begged Tim and David to let me start filming right away. I knew if Judson ended up winning the bid for the project, the story would be strengthened by filming everything that happened before they landed it.

So this is how it all came to be… I just happened to be at the right place at the right time, which was living next door to the guy who was going to perhaps make history with a once-in-a-lifetime, monumental art project.

 Something that’s immediately noticeable about Holy Frit is just the sheer scale of time that the documentary covers, and you had cameras on-hand from the pitching phase to the unveiling of the full mosaic. Did you even have any idea what the documentary was going to be about from those earliest moments?

I started filming Holy Frit on November, 11, 2014. So where we sit right now, I am more than nine years into this project. The filming took three and a half years and the post-production took three and a half years. Once completed, the film spent nearly two years in the festival circuit. And most recently, we just wrapped a 40-plus city theatrical run. Like an idiot, over the course of production, I filmed about 1150 hours of footage which my editor and I almost went crazy whittling it down into a movie that is just shy of two hours. It has been a long and wild journey to say the least.

One of the biggest challenges I knew I would face with this film was convincing anyone to watch it. I thought, “Who the heck is going to want to watch a movie about a stained glass window?” The funny thing is, I knew absolutely nothing about stained glass when I began this project. That’s not what drew me to the project at all… Not the size of the window or the beautiful design. It was all of the story elements forming around the project that were the most compelling to me.

Of course, as the director, I am biased. However, I felt from the beginning that this film could be much more universal than you might imagine when you first heard about the subject matter. As beautiful and interesting as the stained glass making process is, this couldn’t really be a story about a stained glass window. Yes, I knew the window would always be there, looming and forming with the characters throughout the film. But to me, the story felt like it would be more of a character drama between an old and a young master, struggling to give birth to something much bigger than themselves.

Whether you’re a person trying for your doctorate, building a house for the first time, or training for a marathon, I feel like we can all relate to the stress, drive and fear of attempting something that feels nearly unattainable.

Another very important ingredient the movie needed was to show all aspects of Tim’s personality. Tim Carey is very talented, very funny, and a bit of a contrarian.  I knew Tim’s humor and natural charisma would engage anyone who was watching, and therefore transform an old stuffy art form into a dynamic, fun ride that everyone could relate to.

Lastly, I have to come back to characters and conflict. Good movies can’t work without these two elements. And I was extremely intrigued by the inevitable character clash that would emerge between Tim as the young novice and Narcissus as the old master. It was kind of an Obi Won/Luke Skywalker dynamic. Surrounding these main characters were a multitude of other colorful characters at Judson Studios, Bullseye Glass and the Kansas City church, which I knew would add a vast array of personalities to the world of the film. I also knew there would be a great tension to explore between religion, business, science and art.

And all of these elements would be swirling and interacting with each other in the background, all while Tim and Narcissus were on an intense three-year race against time to finish the window.

I didn’t feel that this movie would work as a traditional talking heads documentary, where the characters had already completed their project and were looking back to describe how they got there. For me, the only way the movie could work was if we were experiencing the stresses, failures and victories in real time. In order to do this in the most natural way possible, I knew I needed to be fully embedded in the process with the all of the people involved. I needed to become like a piece of furniture, where everyone became so used to me being around and filming, that I disappeared into the background. Once they stopped thinking about me, they would become the most natural versions of themselves, and their choices and reactions would be authentic.

You’ve been outspoken about how the major streaming services are producing their own documentaries in-house rather than licensing them from independent documentary filmmakers such as yourself. Do you think a streaming service could produce a documentary like Holy Frit in-house, and if not, why not?

Technically, I’m sure they could. But would they? I find it very unlikely that a streaming service would take on the same kind of “being embedded” approach I took to make Holy Frit. I’m not trying to pat myself on the back, but I feel this approach is the reason why Holy Frit worked at a greater level and had more universal appeal. This approach allowed us to go on the wild roller coaster ride with Tim and Narcissus as they struggled to do the seemingly impossible. As opposed to the characters telling you after the fact what they already did. I believe this ride made the audience experience much more entertaining.

Holy Frit is available to watch digitally via the Apple Store and Amazon Prime for an individual fee. Why do you consider it important that streaming services just have it as a part of their regular subscriber catalog?

The deal Holy Frit has with the platforms is a TVOD deal (Transactional Video On Demand). Yes, you can rent or own the film through Apple TV+, Amazon Prime, and a few other places, which on the surface sounds pretty good. However, in a TVOD deal, it’s completely up to the filmmaker to pay for marketing campaign and spread the word about the film, in order for people to know where to search for it on these platforms. And there are very little indie filmmakers who have the kind of resources and reach necessary to market the film in any real way. Due to this lack of resources and reach, an overwhelming majority of indie films will never make their money back, let alone make a profit.

If Holy Frit was picked up by a platform for their subscription service (SVOD), the platform would have first paid us a decent licensing fee up front, or they would have purchased the film outright. Either of these scenarios would have most likely provided far more than we will ever be able to make through TVOD. Additionally, the platform would also have taken on the entire marketing campaign themselves. The film would be included among the platform’s personal films, which would make it so much easier for audiences to find, and therefore, give the movie way more exposure in the world.

Why are you having trouble getting a streaming deal for Holy Frit, when it’s been so lauded on the documentary circuit? What sort of explanation do you get from the streaming companies why they aren’t interested? 

Our sales agent, ROCO Films, has been our champion from the very beginning. They believed the film had real universal appeal that could draw strong viewership from a wide demographic of people across the US and abroad. When they added to this belief all of the accolades and great reviews the film had received during its festival run, they felt pretty strongly that Holy Frit would find a home on a major platform.

Unfortunately, the film was pitched three different times to all of the major platforms, and each time the platforms gave different reasons for why they were passing.

The first time we got into an exciting situation, where we thought two of the major platforms were going to engage in a bidding war to secure the film. But after three weeks of very positive responses, both platforms backed out on the same day. This was soul crushing. The reason they gave was somewhat vague, but it seemed to have something to do with their belief that the film had a lack of diversity in its characters. I’m absolutely for diversity, but this being a documentary, I had very little control over who the main characters were going to be. They had to be the people directly engaged in creating the project.

The second time we were passed on, we were told the platforms didn’t feel there was enough data to prove the film could draw any real viewership. They felt it was too niche, but we felt they were wrong. In an effort to prove the film had universal appeal, we raised money through an Indiegogo campaign to fund a limited theatrical tour. We wanted to see if people from different cities would come to the theater to see film. We were told not to get our hopes up, and that the movie would probably only play in 7-10 cities. It ended up getting booked by theaters in more than 40 cities across the US.

We brought this data back to the platforms for the third pitch, and again they passed. One messages we received from a major platforms was… We LOVED the film (their exact words)… but the film didn’t fit within their current strategy for documentaries. A film like HOLY FRIT would need to include a high-profile person that is already known to guarantee the broad audience they’re looking for. So, it didn’t really matter what data we had gathered to prove our case, the documentary film didn’t have a star attached.

So… that pretty much sums it up.

Are other documentary filmmakers having similar problems like what you’re having, in terms of struggling to get any interest from streaming services no matter how well their films do on the festival circuit? Are you at liberty to give any specific examples?

In my experience, which I understand is a limited, I would say absolutely yes. It’s happening to many independent filmmakers everywhere. I have a number of good filmmaker friends who I’ve known for years, and they are all struggling with the same issues. A large a handful of these friends have seen great success with the major platforms in years past. However, despite the fact that their recent films  have played at the best festivals in the world, have received many awards and great reviews, have been represented by the best sales agents, and the filmmakers have longstanding relationships with top executives at the major platforms where they have sold their previous films for large amounts… despite all of that, they have struggled to get their new films picked up by the major platforms.

In theory, it seems like these should be great times for independent documentary filmmaking, since we’re always told that streaming services are desperate for content, and you can go to any documentary film festival and see dozens of titles just sitting there, waiting for a buyer. Why do you think this isn’t what’s happened over the last decade or so of streaming?

It’s not a theory, there are way more outlets and platforms available now for film distribution than there has ever been, which sounds like a good thing. And in theory, it is. But here’s the problem… at the beginning, when Netflix was pretty much the only “streaming service” in town, and they were still having to prove themselves to the major Hollywood studios and their own subscriber base, they had to work very hard to land big movies with big stars. This meant that they had to supplement their catalog with a lot of outside content and independent films. It used to be that if your film performed well in the festival circuit and garnered good reviews, the chances were pretty high that Netflix would pick up your film.

And then all of these other platforms came along, giving indie films even more opportunities, right?

Wrong… Now all of these platforms are in competition for the same amount of eyeballs that Netflix used to have on their own. This competition drove the streamers inward to develop their own unique content, which they hoped would stand out among all the other show options out there.

How does a Netflix original distinguish itself from a Hulu, Starz or Amazon original? They only way they can set themselves apart is to develop a show that is unique and special enough to draw subscribers away from the other platforms, or at least have folks subscribe to both platforms. And creating shows that good costs a ton of money. We have all heard of the immense budgets it took to create a single episode of Game of Thrones. And every platform has multiple big budget shows to pay for. This leaves very little money in their budgets to buy independent films. What’s drawing people to subscribe to these platforms is original content, not independent films. They simply can’t afford to spend much on outside content. There is too much at stake.

And honestly… the platform competition is really only half of the problem facing the film industry as a whole. Look at the current state of mainstream movies… it is an endless torrent of superhero movies and prequels, sequels and reboots of film brands we’ve heard about forever. And these movies require humongous budgets.

So… not only is the independent film industry in major trouble, so are the small and medium budget mainstream movies.

 What would happen today to Bottle Rocket, Wes Anderson’s first feature? Or Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, or Christopher Nolan’s Memento, or Napolean Dynamite? Heck, even films like The Big Lebowski, No Country For Old Men, or Nacho Libre.

Would they stand a chance if they were being pitched to studios today?

If the studios of the past hadn’t fostered those films and those young filmmaker’s voices, where would we be? The world would be at a huge loss. And I believe the equivalent of those incredible, unique films and filmmakers are in real danger of not being discovered today.

How in the heck does the indie filmmaker stand a chance today? Where do we go from here? It honestly feels near impossible.

The only chance we have right now is through the TVOD or small platform deals. This means we have to continue paying out of our own pockets, for who knows how long, to run our own marketing campaigns and hire publicists to help us pitch to all of the journalists, review sites and news organizations we can, so that we might be able to find someone out there willing to listen to our story – like yourself – who might help us spread the word. And hopefully, we can draw some kind of decent viewership.

Given the immense challenges currently facing the independent film industry, why do you keep going?

 At the end of the day, although I am quite concerned, I’m actually not bitter. I can’t afford to be…. I have to find a way through.

At its core, overcoming every obstacle, has always been the plight of the independent filmmaker. I am overwhelmingly humbled and grateful by the warm response Holy Frit has been given. The film garnered 6 audience awards and 4 jury awards for best documentary during its festival run, starting with the Audience Award at the 2021 Slamdance Film Festival. The film currently holds a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 9.1 out of 10 rating on IMDB, and was voted the #3 best documentary of 2023 by Movieweb.

Even though these achievements didn’t lead to us landing a subscription platform deal, I must hold onto hope that they will somehow boost the film’s chances of being seen by a wide audience.

And honestly, it’s pretty cool to be able to say that Holy Frit is now available on Apple TV+, Amazon, Google Play and Vimeo to rent or purchase.

For more information and links please visit holyfrit.com.