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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Sony's Screen Gems picks a Culpepper until 2012

S_From_Heaven.jpgWhile the crunching of New Line Cinema into a smaller company, a genre arm of Warners, has yet to produce public results, Sony seems satisfied with the low-profile head of their Screen Gems, extending their contract with topper Clint Culpepper for four more years. Sayeth the PR: “Culpepper has extended his contract with Sony Pictures Entertainment and will continue to oversee the studio’s highly prosperous Screen Gems label through 2012, it was announced today by Michael Lynton, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer for Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Amy Pascal, Co-Chairman of the studio. Under Culpepper’s leadership as President of the division, Screen Gems has emerged as one of the most consistent and successful studio-operated specialty film labels in the industry. Culpepper has run the division since 1998 delivering a diverse slate of motion pictures that includes films for horror fans, African American and urban audiences, thrillers, comedies and action movies. Since Screen Gems’ inception as a film label, Culpepper and his team have achieved solid returns with moderately budgeted hits such as Stomp the Yard, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Vacancy, Mothman Prophecies, Arlington Road, When a Stranger Calls, and You Got Served, among others. The label has also successfully launched two thriving franchises with the Resident Evil and Underworld series of films. [More below.]


“From Day One, Clint’s vision for Screen Gems was to offer opportunities to emerging filmmakers and creative voices with very distinctive stories to tell,” said Pascal. “There are very few executives in our industry who truly understand the genre and niche market as thoroughly. Clint’s grasp of this business and how these movies play in communities large and small has been vital to our continued success. He is masterful at developing great concepts and compelling stories. No one does it better than Clint and his entire team at Screen Gems.”
“Screen Gems has flourished and grown under Clint’s leadership and we couldn’t ask for a better executive to run this label,” said Lynton. “Over the years, Screen Gems has been consistently successful and they are an important part of the studio’s multi-label strategy which seeks to offer a diverse range of filmed entertainment programming to audiences all around the world. We are all proud of what Screen Gems has achieved and I am thrilled that Clint will continue to lead this label for many years to come.”
Upcoming Screen Gems films include the teen thriller Prom Night, directed by Nelson McCormick, Overbrook Entertainment’s Lakeview Terrace, a dramatic thriller directed by Neil LaBute and starring Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington. The label recently wrapped production on a third installment of the Underworld franchise, titled Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, and production also recently concluded on the action movie Armored, starring Matt Dillon, Jean Reno and Laurence Fishburn. Screen Gems is about to wrap production on the teen comedy Fired up, and the first installment of a planned trilogy re-imagining the suspense thriller The Stepfather, starring Dylan Walsh and Sela Ward.
Screen Gems will soon initiate principal photography on Legion, a science fiction action thriller starring Paul Bettany, the teen comedy Mardi Gras, a suspense thriller titled Obsessed starring Beyonce and Ali Larter, and Phenom, a sports drama directed by David Anspaugh and starring Chris Brown
The name Screen Gems has a long and valued history with the studio. It was first incorporated in 1948 to serve as the television subsidiary of Columbia Pictures. While the company initially produced commercials, it quickly established itself as an innovator in creating, packaging and syndicating television shows and specials. Later Screen Gems branched out into broadcasting, recording, music publishing, audience testing and large scale merchandising, and eventually in 1974, Screen Gems became Columbia Pictures Television.
The dormant label was rekindled by Culpepper in 1998 and has since provided Sony an outlet to extend and expand its motion picture distribution business beyond the traditional slate considered by SPE. Screen Gems has provided a haven for films that fall between those currently released by the studio’s highly valued Sony Pictures Classics label, and the wide release movies that are more traditionally developed and released by Columbia Pictures.
About Sony Pictures Entertainment
Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) is a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America (SCA), a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Sony Corporation. SPE’s global operations encompass motion picture production and distribution; television production and distribution; digital content creation and distribution; worldwide channel investments; home entertainment acquisition and distribution, operation of studio facilities; development of new entertainment products, services and technologies; and distribution of filmed entertainment in more than 100 countries. Sony Pictures Entertainment can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.sonypictures.com.

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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