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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

From Wellspring to Weinstein: It Is Hard Out There For a Foreign Film


IndieWIRE editor Eugene Hernandez this morning offered the official Wellspring theatrical division post-mortem, featuring plenty of comment from around New York. Declaring The Weinstein Company to be the official cause of death, Hernandez explores a vibrant, risk-taking family whose steady diet of underachiving art house and foreign titles contributed to an untimely demise:

“For the majority of the time I have been here, we have been a small core group of people who are incredibly loyal to each other,” said (Wellspring distribution head Marie-Therese) Guirgis, who worked with the rest of the team to maintain a steady release schedule amidst the many changes in ownership over the past few years. “More than I think most companies.” She continued, “We feel really lucky to be doing what we do and feel really strongly about what we do. We sustained each other, more or less running the company on our own.”

After being acquired by Genius Products last year, Wellspring continued to acquire art house fare, including The Beat That My Heart Skipped, The Intruder, Dear Wendy, Gabrielle, and Unknown White Male. The group also worked with Ira Sachs on his Sundance grand jury prize-winning film, 40 Shades of Blue.

Preceding those films were Wellspring releases ranging from invisible (Reel Paradise) to radar blips (Palindromes) to sleepers (Tarnation)–a checkered theatrical slate in general, but one that nevertheless boosted the value of a DVD library comprising more than 700 films and some foreign names (Godard, Almodovar, Truffaut) you may have heard of. Genius Products will retain the Wellspring name and a single acquisitions guy–Rob Williams–to watch over the video side of things, where insiders worry foreign films that would have earned theatrical release a year ago will now die a marginalized, televised death via DVD and VOD.
The general consensus blames new Genius partners Harvey and Bob Weinstein for engineering Wellspring’s realignment, which is kind of stating the obvious in several ways. I mean, it is the perfect deal for these guys: The Weinsteins replace the library they lost in the Disney/Miramax divorce as well as clear up new avenues (and cash) for video distribution of their new company’s titles. And the resultant outrage brimming around the Web and especially here in town insists that the move signals a far more irresponsible and insidious trend.
To wit, writes Sarasota Film Festival programmer and IW blogger Tom Hall:

Anyone in their right mind looking at the Weinstein Company slate for 2006/2007 can see that there is not a single title on there that reflects the kind of film that Wellspring would have brought to places like The Film Forum, The Cinema Village, Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, etc. … There is now a void, and while wonderful companies like Magnolia, Tartan and THINKFilm have all of my support in the hopes that they will continue to provide challenging, engaging titles, I can’t say I’m overly optimistic about the future of challenging and foreign film in America.


Indeed and then some, an incensed critic Amy Taubin tells Hernandez:

“Of course distribution is in a big transition, and Wellspring has been struggling, as have all small distributors of great foreign-language films. … This, however, is another example of the pernicious Weinstein approach to competition: just don’t let those pesky great art films (the kind that the Weinsteins would never distribute unless their directors allowed them to be mutilated, and these days, probably not even then) get released in any theaters whatsoever.”

Whoa, Amy, hold it a second: That sounds kind of “all-or-nothing,” does it not? Yes, the Weinsteins have a “pernicious” streak and yes, they trimmed a lot of their foreign titles at Miramax. But how “pernicious” were they while riding Disney’s money to Oscars for Denys Arcand or Roberto Benigni or Jan Sverák? I know the $1.2 billion TWC funding has a lot of zeroes on paper (and that, naturally, Harvey likes talking up his support and IPO and anything else Vanity Fair and New York Magazine will print), but the cash that the Weinsteins have to roll the dice on foreign films right now is virtually nil. And not because they cannot afford to buy them or “mutilate” them (witness The Promise)–the bottom line is that these guys no longer have the resources to spend a lot to make a little.
The Weinsteins and Wellspring actually have this is common. With the exception of Sony Classics (and Warners, if you count March of the Penguins), nobody can actually market a foreign film anymore–especially outside major cities, where Miramax was able to score hits like Life is Beautiful and even pre-Disney fare such as Like Water For Chocolate, but also where video has been the primary foreign-film distribution outlet for, like, ever. Indeed, the Weinsteins exacerbated that “problem” for the last two decades as well, muscling their ways into four or five thousand Blockbuster locations with Il Postino, Kieslowski’s Three Colors films, Malena, etc.
But I digress. In Wellspring’s case, I am interested to see how even a domestic film like Unknown White Male does outside New York. The controversial amnesiac doc is absolutely interesting, possessing plenty of box-office promise if the outgoing regime can spin the film’s authenticity issues into its premise’s central mystery–kind of a “judge-for-yourself” campaign that big media like even Good Morning America have already given them a head start on. Would Unknown‘s subject, Doug Bruce, hate it? Without a doubt, but he intimates in a recent GQ interview that he is already more than a little dissatisfied with the experience as a whole. Regardless, should Wellspring care? Is there a better alternative to marketing an Oscar short-lister than to go out with guns blazing and/or inciting a national dialogue? Does that impugn its legitimacy? Or is it all just a little too Harveyesque a tactic for us to withstand?
Do not get me wrong–none of this carnage thrills me. But if you look beyond the kind of moralistic and aesthetic idealism evinced in the post-Wellspring outcry, ask yourself: What are distributors really doing to prevent the obsolescence of the foreign-language film in America? How adherent are they to the conventional theater-to-DVD-to-cable model, and how inflexible can they afford to be for how long? Is it enough to attribute the foreign-film “death knell” (in Hall’s words) to some abstract systemic crisis or specific personal malfeasance? From the outside, it looks as though the distributors’ missions are confused; preserving the theatrical experience (or at least the revenue source) is as essential as finding their films an audience. Even Guirgis follows her acknowledgement of distribution’s shifting paradigm with the (paraphrased) insistence that “such releases are fueled by a theatrical component as well.”
Maybe. Maybe not. It is a tough question to ask and an even tougher question to answer, but you would not love the cinema if it did not wield the potential to break your heart every now and then. And anyway, by this point, if you do not think it is necessary work, you are not likely paying attention and could use the career change anyhow. The rest of us will try to soldier on without you.

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3 Responses to “From Wellspring to Weinstein: It Is Hard Out There For a Foreign Film”

  1. prideray says:

    Abstract systemic crisis or specific personal malfeasance. Damn. Damn. Tough choice. Can I feel equally strongly both ways?

  2. Jason Okamoto says:

    It was good while it lasted. I guess you really don’t know what you have til its gone.

  3. toby says:

    This is a serious loss. Who will release films by Claire Denis and Bruno Dumont? My guess is no one, save maybe IFC First Take.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon