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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Intelligence Agency: ICM Rep Packages New Lumet Film For Studios That Cannot Be Bothered


A loyal reader well-acquainted with my eyelash-fluttering history with director Sidney Lumet alerts me to the latest about his new project, the New York-based crime drama Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. And although Hollywood Reporter stalwart Martin Grove does not really have the details you may be seeking vis a vis the plot (hand clap for IMDB), he does provide a fairly engrossing account of how A) Lumet maneuvered his interagency contacts to assemble a dynamite ensemble cast including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Albert Finney, Ethan Hawke and Marisa Tomei and B) such packages comprise farm teams for studios too overextended with tentpoles to develop their own projects:

With Dead, for instance, none of the film’s principal stars is an ICM client, but director Sidney Lumet … is represented by ICM. “Jeff Berg has represented Sidney Lumet for many, many years,” (ICM exec Hal) Sadoff said. “Sidney wanted to do this project. (Co-producer) Michael Cerenzie developed the film for several years and came to us to help put it together and find a financier for it. We were able to help close all the actor deals. We were able to bringing in financing and it’s going to shoot in about four weeks in New York.” …

Looking ahead, Sadoff is encouraged about the prospects for packaging: “The industry is in a state of change and it’s more common to have these independent movies financed outside of the studio system. I think you will (see more of this in the future). We don’t have a set number (of films to package annually), but we’re continuing to build a team and it’s a very important part of the agency going forward and I think it’s an important part of the industry. You know, the studios are co-financing movies (with various funds and private equity investors). Almost every film on their slate is co-financed today.

I guess the overriding question is how much more exclusive this makes the independent film market in the long run. If Fox Searchlight or Paramount Vantage or Picturehouse can drop $7 or $8 million on the next Lumet or P.T. Anderson or Sofia Coppola picture (among God knows how many others) without getting its hands dirty with actual development or even P&A in some cases, how long before the mini-major industry outsources the bulk of its content this way? How long before it trickles down to the festival circuit, where independently financed (and crafted) work with A-list stars budgeted at $10-$15 million vie for premieres and dominate transactions everywhere from Toronto to Tribeca? Will a distributor like Focus take a chance on something like Brick if it can wait and see how it likes advance footage of John Waters’s new film?
Of course, the directors have to want to play ball, but it’s an obvious win-win if they can work without studio meddling while distributors can just shop for finished projects year-round. The losers are potentially the little guys who will still land Sundance berths–Stephanie Daley, Writscutters: A Love Story, The Talent Given Us–but face a messy self-distribution climate spearheaded by Netflix, Truly Indie and, before you know it, iTunes. At any rate, wherever Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead lands, rest assured that Yari Film Group will not be beating Lumet’s work within an inch of its life this time around.

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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