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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 - Comments Off on Fuckin' Genius: Weinsteinco withers Wellspring
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Fuckin' Genius: Weinsteinco withers Wellspring

wp_logo17807-87.jpg It was too good to be true: Eugene Hernandez reports at indieWIRE that the Weinsteinco acquisition of Genius Products for their rack-jobbing expertise does not extend to keeping Wellspring alive as a distribution entity. “The Weinstein Company confirmed that it would be the exclusive domestic distributor for any future Wellspring theatrical releases… Wellspring staff are expected to leave the company by the end of April and the Wellspring Home Entertainment division will move to Santa Monica… In early December, the Weinsteins announced a deal with Wellspring’s corporate parent, taking a 70% stake in the newly named Genius Products LLC, a company comprised of Wellspring’s large library of some 750 feature[s]…. including the work of Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Rohmer, Fassbinder, Greenaway, Almodovar, Antonioni and many others… About 10 people are expected to lose their jobs at Wellspring as a result of the decision to curtail Wellspring’s theatrical arm. The company indicated today that it would save nearly $1 million in overhead… “This realignment supports an aggressive acquisition campaign to build on the Wellspring brand with critically acclaimed films that celebrate intelligent cinema, while at the same time, supporting our strategy of leveraging our core competency by focusing on the sales and distribution of higher margin, packaged entertainment products at retail,” Genius Products CEO Trevor Drinkwater is quoted as typing… “Genius remains committed to the independent film industry and we are moving forward with indie releases. We’re just going to handle them in a different manner than we did before.” …


…Ownership of Wellspring has been anything but stable in recent years,” Hernandez notes, with More history, names and titles at the link. Most notable is this irony: “While the Weinsteins made their name buying and releasing small art house movies — mostly foreign language and American indie titles in the ’80s and early ’90s — today a look at the new The Weinstein Company slate reveals a company—backed by $1.2 billion in funding — that is more focused on genre and star-driven projects… The state of the specialty film business is shaky, leading many companies to abandon smaller movies. In this case, the Wellspring Home Entertainment div[i]sion is expected pursue those films for exclusive DVD release. The concern among stalwarts is that it is becoming harder and harder to get art films on art house theater screens… The news comes at a time of transition for the film business, with fewer buyers giving well-funded releases to art house fare, particularly foreign language films that are not genre movies… Only Sony Pictures Classics maintains a consistent commitment to foreign films, while many smaller boutique buyers seem to be less focused on international cinema, in favor of docs which have performed better in recent years… With theatrical outlets dwindling, audiences will increasingly have to rely on film festivals, or DVD, to get their fix. “Imagine never seeing an Antonioni movie on the big screen,” Wellspring’s Marie Therese Guirgis said in [a] NY Times article. “There are so many filmmakers you wouldn’t like if you just rented them on video.” Apparently, Wellspring’s final release is the Oscar-nom’d Unknown White Male, with the telling tagline, “Imagine if your entire memory were suddenly wiped away.”

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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