Investing in movies is a nightmare, so I give kudos to them for trying.
I got to watch the movie "Take" go through the process from the producer's point of view.
I know two of the producers and it was a cool thing to get to watch come together from the sidelines, but it was a very long and seemingly painful process.
Good actors- Minnie Driver and Jeremy Renner, good story line, kind of iffy editing and some overly obvious symbolism IMO (lol, they will kill me for that), but seemed to have all the elements to make a successful indie film. I can't swear to the timeline but it felt like maybe a good 6 months or more of private screenings and a few name changes after everything was complete before it premiered at Tibeca in 07.
The theatrical pick up seemed extremely sparse and it kind of fell off the map and disappeared until it got a new life on cable I want to say maybe 4 or 5 months ago, sometime in 2010.
I'm not taking a wild guess when I say pretty much everyone involved lost their ass on it, but I guess you can chalk it up to contribution to the arts. It's a pretty interesting film if you ever get a chance to watch it. The first time I saw it was a rough cut w/ no music, it was kind of cool to see how much a score really ads to a film. It was a very interesting thing to sneak peek from the inside, but I think I would have pulled out every last hair in my head had it been my money on the line.