By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Niche bitch: Foundas on foundering films
In a dauntingly articulate entry in Slate’s year-end Movie Club, Scott Foundas (in conversation with David Edelstein, Scott Foundas, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and A.O. Scott) addresses a number of pics and stats (especially Munich), and makes these painful points about the current state of audiences for independent film: “As David Ehrenstein pointed out in an excellent and scrupulously researched LA Weekly article earlier this year, champagne corks now pop in distributors’ offices if a foreign-language picture crosses the $500,000 mark at the U.S. box office, while most foreign titles don’t manage to gross even one-tenth of that amount. I wish I could say the depressing news stopped there, but it doesn’t. Independent American films—by which I mean the real thing and not the pseudo-independents produced by the studio-owned subsidiary divisions—are hardly faring any better… Debra Granik’s superb Down to the Bone (with its award-winning lead performance by Vera Farmiga) took nearly two years to find a distributor and has earned all of $25,000 since opening in limited release one month ago, while Lodge Kerrigan’s equally excellent Keane (backed by a relatively larger marketing campaign) has barely squeaked past $33,000. And what we critics say scarcely seems to matter. Both Down to the Bone and Keane had stellar reviews (as, for that matter, did The Intruder; Good Morning, Night; and The Weeping Meadow), yet taken together, all five films didn’t attract as many moviegoers over the entire courses of their runs as flocked to Brokeback Mountain in its first week on a single Los Angeles screen…
“When Happy Here and Now—a Michael Almereyda film [pictured] I like even more than his William Eggleston documentary—finally opened in Los Angeles after three years on its distributor’s shelf (and after repeated extolling of its virtues in print by myself and other critics), it grossed $700 in its first (and only) weekend, which sort of gives a whole new meaning to the term “niche audience.”