In 1999 and with a ridiculous budget of only $35,000, the horror film The Blair Witch Project It became one of the most relevant works of the genre and one of the most unexpected box office phenomena in the history of cinema. Its protagonists were three non-professional actors, Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard, which played three young people who venture into a Maryland forest to document a local legend. The film pretended to reproduce the found footage that the protagonists themselves recorded with a camera before their disappearance.
The film directed by Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick generated fear in viewers, amassed millions at the box office and enormous profits for Artisan, the production company that bought the film made by the independent Haxan. Mirick and Sánchez trained the three young people to operate the cameras and left them in the forest with a series of minimal instructions to follow the script. The rest, improvisation. At the time, the amateur nature of the project led the actors to consent to the use of their real names – to make the result more realistic – because they believed that only ten minutes of footage were going to be used, as the filmmakers promised. What was filmed by the protagonists of the mockumentary ended up being the entire film.
The success of the film was unexpected, and Heather Donahue found herself in the circumstance of seeing her face on promotional posters while she slept in her Toyota and subsisted on the bare minimum. Everyone was silent due to the success of the film and thinking that they would be rewarded, but Artisan barely sent them a basket of fruit when the film broke the barrier of one hundred million. None of the actors were adequately compensated then nor have they been now, and they have spoken about it openly in an extensive report published by Variety.
To maintain the illusion of the real disappearance of the three young people, the production company that acquired the film prohibited the actors from giving interviews or accepting any subsequent work. Leonard was cast in another film but was warned that he should not reveal that he was an actor. Donahue revealed the circumstances of the filming and was harshly reprimanded. At that time, none of them could benefit financially from the great sensation of cinema at the end of the century, nor could they accept subsequent jobs despite having been so intimately involved in the film, and even shoot it themselves. Their real faces and names would be used over the years without consultation or compensation.
After 25 years of lawsuits, stress and humiliation, the trio has come to the fore due to the announcement of a new version of the film, from which at this point they do not expect to receive any benefit. That is why the “disappeared” of the Blair Witch asked on April 20 for “significant consultations” on any future project related to the franchise and asking for the payment of retroactive and future residuals. The open letter has not received a response.
In 2004, with the release of the first sequel to the initial success, the trio managed to reach an agreement with Artisan for the payment of $300,000 over several years, a far cry from the profits of tens of millions of dollars generated by the film. That was the only contact of the company that acquired the rights with the protagonists over decades. At that time only one of the three, Leonard, has continued in some way linked to the film industry.
Williams says in the publication that he feels “ashamed for having let this happen to me,” while Leonard says through angry tears that he sees himself as a “damn loser” despite being in the “most successful independent film of all time.” All of them have gone through serious financial difficulties during these years and some have even lost their home and property in a flood. For 25 years they have been missing, like their characters.
