Escape from Tomorrow Information

Escape from Tomorrow is a 2013 American fantasy-horror film, the debut film of writer-director Randy Moore. It stars Roy Abramsohn as a man having increasingly disturbing experiences and visions during the last day of a family vacation to the Walt Disney World theme park. It premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival

It soon became one of the most talked-about films at the festival, and then received some attention in the national media, because Moore had made most of it on location at both Disney World and Disneyland without permission from The Walt Disney Company, which owns and operates both parks. Since Disney has a reputation for being fiercely protective of its intellectual property, the cast and crew used guerrilla filmmaking techniques to avoid attracting attention, such as keeping their scripts on their iPhones and shooting on handheld video cameras similar to those used by park visitors. After principal photography was complete, Moore was so determined to keep the project a secret from Disney that he edited it in South Korea. Sundance similarly declined to discuss the film in detail before it was shown. It was called "the ultimate guerrilla film"

Critics who saw it at the festival were astonished by Moore's audacity but mostly praised the film artistically for its use of monochrome and surrealism to create a neo-noir effect. It has been compared to the work of Roman Polanski and David Lynch. However, many who saw it have expressed strong doubts that the film will be shown to a wider audience due to the legal issues involved and the negative depiction of the parks. Disney has said only that it is "aware" of the film.

Plot

Shortly after waking up on the last day of a family vacation at Walt Disney World in Florida, Jim White (Roy Abramsohn) gets a call from his boss, informing him that he has been laid off. He keeps the news to himself in order not to spoil the family's remaining time at the resort. While lounging at the swimming pool, he sees two French girls in their early teens jump in, and starts to develop an interest in them. After his son intentionally locks him out of the family's hotel room, he takes his daughters to the rides of the Magic Kingdom to spend time away from his nagging wife.

Their paths frequently cross that of the two French girls, whom Jim tries to keep up with. White's son, working with a wheelchair-bound man, make attempts on his life. The Disney characters and paraphernalia start to seem sinister and surreal, and White starts to have disturbing visions, such as the animatronic characters' faces changing and the Disney Princesses doubling as escorts for wealthy Asian businessmen visiting the park. He is not sure if what he sees is real, or if he is just having a breakdown.

Eventually he is apprehended by park security, who seem inordinately concerned about a "cat flu" sweeping the park. He is taken to a secret detention facility under Spaceship Earth at EPCOT Center and interrogated about this. After being brainwashed, he is released, and watches as Spaceship Earth is blown up. At the end of the film he dies at the Contemporary Resort Hotel, apparently of cat flu.

Cast

• Roy Abramsohn as Jim White, a middle-aged father of two
• Elena Schuber as his wife, Emily
• Katelynn Rodriguez as his daughter, Sarah
• Jack Dalton as his son, Elliott
• Alison Lees-Taylor as Other Woman
• Annet Mahendru and Danielle Safady as the two French girls

Background

Moore, a native of Lake Bluff, Illinois, frequently visited his father in Orlando following his parents' divorce. The two often spent time together at Walt Disney World nearby. "It was a special, physical place, and it became an emotional space," he told Filmmaker. "Obviously, I have a lot of father issues that I can't separate from that place." Later their relationship deteriorated.

He decided to pursue a career in film. After attending two other film schools, he graduated from Full Sail University in another Central Florida town, Winter Park, as the class valedictorian. He moved to Southern California and began working as a story editor, primarily doing uncredited rewrites.

In Hollywood, he married and started a family. Much like his own father, he frequently took his own children to Disneyland. "It wasn't until our first family trip together that this very visceral emotional landscape of my past, that I had by now nearly all but forgotten, hit me again like [a] bullet." On the family's first trip to Walt Disney World, the emotions grew stronger. "[I]t was like he was there as a ghost. We were going on the same rides I used to go on with him, but now we're no longer talking anymore."

His wife, a native of the former Soviet Union who had no memories or expectations like his, saw things with fresh eyes. "She's a nurse and goes between floors at hospitals. At one point she turned to me at some princess fair or something and said, 'This is worse than working the psych [ward] at the hospital.'"

He read Neal Gabler's biography of Walt Disney and took the children to Disneyland more frequently. "I became obsessed with finding a connection," he recalled later. He wrote the screenplay for Escape from Tomorrow in a month along with two others. An inheritance from his grandparents provided the bulk of the film's budget, which he put at around $650,000, triple what he had originally planned.

Production

"There was nowhere else to do it," Moore says of his decision to use Disney World as a setting and shoot at the parks. Disney, which has a reputation for aggressively protecting its intellectual property, has been tolerant of visitors uploading videos of their visits to YouTube and elsewhere since most of those user-created videos project a positive image of the parks. But Moore did not expect to get permission from Disney to shoot there given his negative, surrealistic portrayal of the park.

Instead he used guerrilla filmmaking techniques, which sometimes call for using locations without getting permission. Escape from Tomorrow is not the first film made in whole, or part, this way at the Disney parks. In 2010, the British street artist Banksy shot a scene for Exit Through the Gift Shop in one of the parks with his collaborator Mr. Brainwash. They managed to smuggle the footage out after being detained and questioned by park security. The following year, a viral found footage short, Missing in the Mansion, filmed in the Haunted Mansion, was distributed online without interference from Disney.

Extensive pre-production was necessary. The unique nature of the film shoot dictated steps not normally taken in filmmaking, such as charting the position of the sun weeks in advance since they could not use lighting equipment. Scenes were rehearsed and blocked in hotel rooms, rather than the actual locations. "We must have walked through the entire movie at least eight or nine times during multiple scouting trips before we ever rolled camera," Moore says.

Before principal photography, the cast and crew bought season passes to both Disneyland and Disney World. They spent ten days in Florida, then returned to California for two weeks at Disneyland, making the Disney World depicted in the film a combination of both parks. Actors and crew entered the parks in small groups to avoid attracting attention. "At one point, I even made the camera department shave off their facial hair and dress in tourist attire, which almost provoked a mutiny," says Moore. Despite the actors wearing the same clothes for days on end, Moore told The Los Angeles Times, no one at the gates seemed to suspect anything, save for one day near the end when Disneyland security thought they were paparazzi harassing a celebrity family.

The film was shot using the video mode of two Canon EOS 5D Mark II and one Canon EOS 1D Mark IV digital single-lens reflex cameras, which helped the filmmakers look more like typical park visitors. To compensate for their inability to control the lighting, the film was shot in monochrome mode. "[W]e were shooting with really fast lenses wide open, so our depth of field was razor thin. Black and white helped us enormously with focus and composition, since we were doing almost everything in camera and didn't use a focus puller," Moore recalls. It was an irreversible choice. "[B]ecause the 5D doesn't shoot RAW, we customized settings in its monochromatic mode and couldn't go back to color, even if we had wanted to." Moore was comfortable with the result because of the surreal, dreamlike quality it created, forcing viewers to see the familiar sights of the Disney parks in a new way.

Actors and crew used their iPhones to communicate and store information such as the script"?that way, when they looked at them it seemed as if they were merely checking their messages. The phones were also used to record sound, in addition to digital recorders taped to each actor's body that were left running all day. For day scenes, Moore felt comfortable risking only three or four takes of each scene, but found he could do more at night. Scenes involved riding on eight recognizable attractions in the parks. One required waiting on a long line for the Buzz Lightyear ride at Disneyland, and the actors rode It's a Small World at least 12 times to get the scene right. "I was surprised the ride operators weren't a little more savvy," Moore told The New York Times. For a scene where two characters pass on the monorail, Moore had the actors ride it for hours while he worked out the timing.

After the location filming, production went back to soundstages for interiors. Some scenes were shot against a green screen background for second unit footage of other locations to be substituted, allowing the use of crane shots. With the photography done, Moore took the film to South Korea to edit to prevent Disney from finding out; he also refused to tell most of his close friends what he was doing. Visual effects were done by the same company there that had done them for the upcoming adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's The Host.

The postproduction tasks were as challenging as the production itself. Sound editors had to listen to the entire uncut tracks from the recorders taped to the actors' bodies in order to find the dialogue. Content proprietary to Disney, such as the lyrics to "It's a Small World" and footage from Soarin', was removed from the film to avoid copyright infringement. Composer Abel Korzeniowski contributed a light, airy score similar to those used in Hollywood's Golden Age.

Sundance

Moore submitted the completed film to the Sundance Film Festival, where many independent films seek distributors. He had little hope that it would be accepted due to the festival's corporate sponsors. But Trevor Groth, the festival's new director of programming, was "blown away" by Escape from Tomorrow, and accepted it for the festival's non-competitive "Next" category, for films that transcend the limitations of the low budgets common to most independent films.

When the 2013 festival began in Park City, Utah, the secrecy about the movie continued. The festival's website only identified the setting as a theme park. Nan Chalat-Noaker, critic for the Park Record, recalls that the festival and even the film's publicist were unwilling to share further details about the film, but strongly urged critics to see it. In her review, she declined to identify the setting of the film by name, although she dropped broad hints, out of fear it would alert Disney's lawyers. The premiere, on the festival's first night, was not fully attended; when word got out to the attendees, all the other shows were effectively sold out.

Reception

Before the Martin Luther King Day weekend was over it was being widely discussed by festival attendees. The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times both ran articles about the film and Moore. Much of the attention focused on the sheer audacity of the filmmaking. Movies.com reported that people were already calling it "the ultimate guerrilla film." On the night of the premiere, Drew McWeeny wrote: </ref>}} He allowed that it was "undisciplined at times, rough around the edges in places, technically uneven, and there's no sense of pacing to it at all. Even so," he concluded, "there is a sort of naive charm that makes it impossible to look away."

Other critics concurred that the film had artistic merit. "[W]atching Moore's noir tale is like being super-glued to your seat while getting poked in the eye," Chalat-Noaker wrote. "It's both fascinating and repelling." Stephen Zeitchik of the LA Times called it "one of the strangest and most provocative movies this reporter has seen in eight years attending the Sundance Film Festival." At IndieWire, Eric Kohn wrote that "Moore portrays Disney World as the ultimate horror show"?and gets the point across in nearly every scene." While they conceded the film's audacious production made it worth their time to watch, other critics found flaws. "[It']s not a great film. The story has some good ideas, but the execution is uneven," wrote Peter Sciretta at /Film, while still recommending it as "unlike anything you've seen before [or will] see again." Similarly, CraveOnline's William Bibbiani "wouldn't have missed it for the world" but qualified it by noting that that film often lacked "cohesion and clarity."

Kyle Smith of the New York Post had the most negative assessment. He called it "more fun to discuss than to sit through." While he found the guerilla-filmmaking aspect of it "intriguing," all it amounted to for him was "a couple of amusingly surreal moments" that could have taken place at any sufficiently large amusement park. "Even Disney-hating hipsters are going to be disappointed; the film is a pure festival play that is more or less unreleasable unless theater owners start selling weed along with popcorn."

Legal issues

Every reviewer at Sundance who saw the film speculated that it was likely that Disney would take legal action to prevent the film from being shown outside the festival, or perhaps even during it. "Disney's lawyers are probably climbing onto helicopters and planning a raid on Park City right now," wrote McWeeny. They urged others present to see it before it was too late, and expressed regret that their readers elsewhere would likely be denied a chance to see the film for themselves.

However, it was unclear what the basis of such a legal claim on Disney's part could be. Moore took care to avoid direct copyright infringement of songs or films played as part of attractions, and intellectual property law is less clear on the other aspects of the film. Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, who distributed his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, set in a 22nd-century Disney World, under a Creative Commons license, believes there's at most "a possible trademark claim, and I suppose that Disney could conceivabl[y] bring suit for violating the park's terms of use, but these are much harder cases to make than copyright."

Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu does not think Disney would have any defensible intellectual property claim. "Though the filmmakers may have committed trespass when they broke Disney World's rules and if it violated the terms of entry on their tickets, the film itself is a different matter," he wrote on The New Yorker's blog. "As commentary on the social ideals of Disney World, it seems to clearly fall within a well-recognized category of fair use, and therefore probably will not be stopped by a court using copyright or trademark laws."

Despite the film's repeated use of Disney's characters and iconography, Wu explained, trademark law was not sufficient. "Disney does not have some kind of general intellectual-property right in Disney World itself." To make a trademark-infringement case against Moore, he continued, Disney would have to convince a court that the use of its protected imagery in the movie could reasonably lead viewers to believe that it had a role in the film's production, and he did not think that was a plausible argument. "The scene where a Disney Princess attempts to crush a child seems to eliminate that possibility."

As for copyright, Wu sees Moore's use of the Disney parks as transformative:

As such, he sees the film as offering artistic commentary on the cultural impact of Disney, and thus clearly falling under fair use. Wu likens it to a 1990s case brought by Mattel against artist Thomas Forsythe, after he sold some of his photographs depicting another American icon, Barbie, being eaten by vintage appliances as a way of calling attention to the toy doll's role in promoting the objectification of women in American culture. Not only did the court dismiss Mattel's complaint, "[t]he judges were so annoyed by the lawsuits that they awarded attorney's fees of nearly two million dollars to the artist ... A judge has to think of the First Amendment when asked to ban art work."

In his /Film review, Sciretta raised another issue:

At Slate, Aisha Harris admitted this was a possibility, especially if children were filmed without their parents' consent, but noted "the law on that issue is not black and white either."

Possible response by Disney

Disney did not return reporters' calls or emails for comment, nor take any legal action during the festival, although it confirmed to CNN that it was "aware" of the movie. Despite critical apprehension that the film would never be shown outside the festival, some observers saw the situation as more complex. Were Disney to attempt to forcefully suppress the film, that effort could serve to draw even more attention to it, a phenomenon known as the Streisand effect. Even if it were to successfully prevent official distribution, the film could easily be pirated and distributed over the Internet. In his Post review, Smith suggested that Disney prevent this by taking the opposite course, simply ignoring Escape from Tomorrow and letting the attention dissipate by itself.

Michael Ryan, director of The YoungCuts Film Festival, noted that there was a precedent for Escape for Tomorrow in the Air Pirates lawsuit, in which Disney spent eight years in court with some underground cartoonists who had published an underground comix parody in which Mickey Mouse and the other Disney characters engaged in explicit sex and used illegal drugs, among other behavior they avoided in Disney's own narratives. He suggested that Disney actually buy the rights and release the film itself, which it could easily do as its announced interest would guarantee it a monopsony on the film since no other distributor would want to match Disney's deep pockets or its feared legal response. As a Disney release, it would have a large potential audience of both Disney enthusiasts and antagonists, Disney would be making money from property it already owns instead of someone else, and the company's apparent willingness to go in the joke would take some of the satiric edge off. "But if Disney really doesn't want anyone to see the film," he concluded, "they have the perfect in-house strategy to achieve that. Just hand the film over to the John Carter marketing team. The film will open in 3,000 theatres and no one will see it."

Moore expressed hope that the film could be shown and released, even if it meant a legal battle.