Animated movie finds a theatrical life
Houston Business Journal - by Christine Hall Reporter 12/11/08

    Marc Adler is seeing a five-year dream become reality as his full-length animated movie opens in theaters across the country this week. Delgo is being released in more than 2,000 theaters nationwide, including about 30 in the Houston area, on Dec. 12. Delgo is the first animated feature-length film from Atlanta-based Fathom Studios, a division of Macquarium Intelligent Communications, an interactive agency Adler started in 1991 in his dorm room while attending Emory College in Atlanta. The film is about a carefree teenager who forms a forbidden friendship with a spunky princess. Hostilities between their two peoples escalate, setting the stage for an exiled empress to exact her revenge and reclaim her rule.
    Getting the Dec. 12 date was pure luck. “Delgo” originally was slated to open on the same date as “Twilight,” but the Dec. 12 slot came open when Warner Bros. pulled back “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” for a summer release. The switch saved “Delgo” going up against the highly hyped vampire film. “We are the only family film opening this weekend, so we are hoping to still be here during Christmas and through New Year’s,” says Adler. Adler was bitten by the animation bug as a young boy growing up in Houston. “My mother was one of the founders of the Children’s Museum, and it ended up having a profound impact on my life,” he says. He credits classes on filmmaking at the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston and a sculpting class at Glassell School of Art for helping him animate clay characters. “I might not have made the film if it weren’t for that,” says Adler. An internship at KTRK Channel 13 taught him how to move graphics across the screen.
    After graduating from college, Adler and some friends spent a couple of years throwing around story concepts. The death of a family member in 2000 led him to develop his passion for animation from a pastime into a profession. For the next three years he took courses on film production and scoped out Blockbuster Inc. retail locations for movies of the actors he wanted to lend their voices to his characters. In 2003, Adler began the process of securing the talent, which wasn’t easy due to the caliber of actors and actresses he wanted. It took a year and a half to put the cast together “because you are not sure who you are going to get, and people are always wanting to know who else has signed on,” Adler says. “We probably got the majority of actors signed on in the last nine months,” he adds.
    The casting coup alone impresses Rick Ferguson, director of the Houston Film Commission. “If the quality of the voice-over cast is any indication, he will have no problem finding an audience,” says Ferguson. He says the fact that Adler has been able to produce the film entirely independently is a major accomplishment considering all of the various types of processes a company has to go through to get a project to theater audiences. The distribution alone is “Not an easy task. I’ve heard from independent productions that were not able to secure a theatrical release, and just having to deal with DVDs or making deals with cable markets is not easy either,” Ferguson says. Adler, who splits his time among Houston, Atlanta and Hollywood, is attending the premier of his movie at the Edwards Greenway Palace 24 in Houston. “I’ve basically spent the better part of five years working on the production of the film, from getting it put together to distributing and marketing it,” Adler says. Although he would not comment on the cost of “Delgo,” Adler says an average animation studio film can cost between $110 million and $200 million. “Independent does not mean inexpensive,” he adds.
    Tax credits offered by the State of Georgia accounted for 30 percent of the film’s budget, while the rest was from private funding by “people who believed in the project,” Adler says. Bringing Delgo to the big screen has been a unique experience. Says Adler: “It has been interesting learning the ‘biz’ of show business and the ‘show’ of show business.”

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