The story behind the final release of writer/director Mike Binder’s charming corporate culture clash comedy The Search for John Gissing seven years after its production is nearly as entertaining, surprising, amusing, and filled with enough dubious events to rival the plot of the film itself.
After using the benefit of a British tax break to shoot overseas and scraping up enough money between his own savings and that of supportive family and friends, Binder filmed Gissing in early 2001 entirely “on the cheap,” as he told Cinematical’s James Rocchi. Yet, despite drawing raves from audience members and inclusions into several film festivals around the globe, he was never able to find a fair studio offer, admitting that, “the only deals we could get were from people who wanted to own it. Forever. For doing nothing.”
Understandably finding it unacceptable, Binder promptly moved on to other projects, including HBO’s The Mind of the Married Man, his critical breakout Joan Allen and Kevin Costner vehicle The Upside of Anger, the straight-to-DVD, Preston Sturges meets Jerry Maguire Ben Affleck comedy Man About Town, and the little-seen, entirely underrated Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler post 9/11 buddy film Reign Over Me.
However, while Gissing remained on the back burner for Binder who even at one point “re-wrote the whole script… called… The Multinationals,” with the intention of filming it again, the search for the original John Gissing film remained a constant obsession for its fiercely loyal, determined, and unwavering fans. While Binder grants that the devotees consisted of “primarily absolute Rickman fans” (among which he includes himself), an online petition was begun to force the film’s release, ultimately gathering 3,630 signatures and fans flew from across not only the U.S. but England as well to see the film and Binder’s Q&A when Gissing was included “as a last minute thing” at the Westwood International Film Festival. Touched by their passion, Binder took down the mailing information of forty attendees and sent them each a burned copy of the DVD, as Cinematical reports.
Inspired, finally he decided to follow through on his goal “to put together a site to sell my movies,” which he admits was “more work than I thought it was going to be… there’s a new obstacle every day.” However, via his experiment to eventually create “a big-ass pipeline going right through the ground to people that want to buy my movies,” he found an unlikely DVD maker through an adult entertainment DVD company “looking to go letimate.” Eventually the disc earned its release, with no studio input — a Binder film (made by Mike and produced by his brother Jack) on a Binder website to a Binder audience. After stumbling on the DVD at a local video store, I found myself becoming quite the Gissing fan in my own right.
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