The Blair Witch Project was a small independent film project that used the innovative technique of "found footage" and allowed audiences to believe it was a documentary for some time. It was made for less than a million dollars and went on to gross $248.6 million at the box office.
The movie starred Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard, who spent eight days in 1997 not only acting, but shooting the footage themselves with camcorders and improving dialogue after being given prompts. Writer-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez told them the footage would end up being only about ten minutes of the resulting feature film, so the three actors thought little of signing away the rights to use their real names, a decision they have regretted ever since. When The Blair Witch Project was released, the conceit of it being a documentary meant that none of them could admit to being in the film, or even being alive.
The Blair Witch Project was a hit at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, and Artisan Entertainment bought it from Haxan Films. At that point, the actors' original contract, which gave them a 1% cut in the event the film made more than a million dollars, seemed to be forgotten. In 2000, they sued, and it took three more years to receive any money at all. Meanwhile, the use of their real names made any further film roles difficult, if not impossible. Twenty-five years after The Blair Witch Project, Donahue, Williams, and Leonard talked to Variety about the saga of the production and their struggle with being paid in notoriety instead of cash. -via Metafilter
(Cropped image credit: treybunn2)
