How long does it take to make a feature-length film in northern Michigan with no studio support and no Hollywood infrastructure? JohnPaul Morris and the team at Practical Films are finding out.

Though Morris and his company made their name producing TV commercials, promotional video content, and short films, they’ve always harbored the dream of making full-length movies in Traverse City. In the fall of 2019, they did just that when Practical assembled a cast and crew of local talent to film Quicksand – a narrative film described as “a timely coming of age ‘bromantic comedy’ [about] two friends perilously navigating life post-college.” But three years after that film wrapped production, it has yet to make its way to most audiences.

For his part, Morris is hopeful that 2023 is the year that everyone will finally be able to see Quicksand. While a sizable handful of locals got to experience the film this past summer as part of the Traverse City Film Festival (TCFF), Quicksand hasn’t yet been widely released and still can’t be streamed, rented, found online, or seen in theaters. That’s because, according to Morris, getting a film made, edited, finalized and in front of audiences is a whole lot like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill in Greek myth.

“Making the film was an impossible feat that we actually succeeded in,” Morris says. “Truly, making movies should be impossible, but we did it and right now we're looking at how to get that film to audiences. And that's starting to feel nearly as difficult. But we're proving that we can do difficult things, so we're staying optimistic for sure.”

The people involved with Quicksand – including producers Nick and Chris Loud, co-writers Jake Burgess and Broderick Steele, and leads Tanner Presswood and Simon Eliás – have good reason to be optimistic after a strong film festival season in 2022. While a rough cut of the film was initially rejected from many of the festivals on Morris’s wish list – the movie has 400 visual effects shot, many of which were missing or unfinished in the rough cut – a fateful call from TCFF ultimately got the movie a poetic hometown premiere.

While Morris says TCFF is typically more of a "victory lap" festival in the film world than it is a premiere festival, Practical decided to grab the opportunity since it didn’t have any other festivals lined up for Quicksand at the time.

“They gave us a screening, and it didn't fit very many people, so we didn't do any promotion,” Morris says of the TCFF premiere. “We figured it was just going to be cast and crew.”

A quick sell-out of that screening led TCFF to add a second showing – for which Practical still didn't do any promotion because Morris says they figured, "Well, I guess we can have cast and crew and family see it.” Quicksand ultimately sold out four TCFF showings, with audiences well exceeding the film’s inner creative circle. That level of interest – plus strong responses from all four audiences – helped give Morris some faith in the film after the initial film festival rejections had dampened his hopes.

A successful post-TCFF festival run in the summer and fall of 2022 only did more to boost Morris’s spirits. First, Quicksand screened at two other Michigan festivals in late September – the Grand Rapids Film Festival and the Hell’s Half Mile Film & Music Festival in Bay City – and earned awards at both, clinching the best screenplay prize at the former and the audience choice award for best feature film at the latter. The film also won the jury award for best narrative feature at the Eau Claire Film Festival in Wisconsin, and even got accepted into the Austin Film Festival.

“That one definitely had us jumping up and down,” Morris says of the Austin slot. “The Austin Film Festival was one of the big ones that we'd wanted to premiere at, and they had said no to us the year before. By my measuring, it's one of the top film festivals in the United States. And they receive something like 10,000 submissions a year, so just to be selected by them at all was a big deal. We started getting emails from people and studios that we didn't even know who were curious about the film just because it was in Austin.”

Now that studios have come calling, what does that mean for Quicksand and for Practical’s hopes of scoring a major distribution deal in 2023? Right now, Morris says that he and the Practical Films team are considering all options for how to handle the next stage of the film’s journey. In many cases, he notes, independent films will make the rounds on the film festival circuit for 1-2 years.

“And at this point, we’re less than six months in,” he says – which could mean 2023 is another year of festival screenings for Quicksand.

“The festival circuit basically acts as a resume builder,” Morris explains. “And you want to have that resume so that you’re eventually able to walk into a studio, or a streaming service like Netflix or Hulu, and say, ‘Hey, look at the actual analytics of how our film is being received.’ That’s the next step that we need to take to actually get the film either into theaters or on a notable streaming service.”

With that resume-building potential in mind, Practical is still waiting to hear from half a dozen winter or spring 2023 festivals to firm up its plans for the coming year. In the meantime, Morris says he is also in talks with several distributors – and even has some contracts that could be signed in short order – to get the film out in the world for all to enjoy.

“We would like to make a deal soon, because I think the film has a lot of momentum right now,” he tells The Ticker. “With such a positive reception at the festivals we’ve done, and at such an unexpected level, I think there's a lot of value in getting the film out there, and maybe even in doing a limited theatrical run in Michigan, potentially in the spring.”

For now, Practical Films will continue playing the waiting game for a little longer – even though Morris acknowledges that some locals are starting to get impatient with him when he tells them the film still isn’t out yet.

“I know there's a lot of people who want to see it,” he laughs. “I just want to note that it is on its way to broader distribution and people who want to see the film will finally be able to watch it soon.”