By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

IFC MIDNIGHT TAKES NORTH AMERICAN AND UK RIGHTS TO CHRIS JAMES THOMPSON’S DOCUMENTARY THE JEFFREY DAHMER FILES

Posted Wednesday, August 8th, 2012 - Comments Off on IFC MIDNIGHT TAKES NORTH AMERICAN AND UK RIGHTS TO CHRIS JAMES THOMPSON’S DOCUMENTARY THE JEFFREY DAHMER FILES
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New York, NY (August 8, 2012) – IFC Midnight announced today that the company is acquiring all North American and UK rights to director Chris James Thompson’s documentary THE JEFFREY DAHMER FILES. Thompson also produced the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Andrew Swant and Joe Riepenhoff. Chris Smith and Barry Poltermann executive produced the project, which world premiered in competition at the 2012 SXSW Film Festival and also played the 2012 Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto. IFC Midnight is planning an early 2013 release for the documentary.

In 1991 Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in Milwaukee and sentenced to 957 years in prison for killing 17 people and dismembering their bodies. THE JEFFREY DAHMER FILES is a documentary that explores the city of Milwaukee by meeting those surrounding Dahmer during and after his hidden spree. Recollections from Milwaukee Medical Examiner Jeffrey Jentzen, Police Detective Patrick Kennedy, and neighbor Pamela Bass are interwoven with archival footage and everyday scenes from Dahmer’s life, working collectively to disassemble the facade of an ordinary man leading an ordinary existence.

Jonathan Sehring, President of Sundance Selects/IFC Films, said: “Chris James Thompson has made one of the creepiest documentaries of the year that lingers in the mind long after the film has ended.  He’s approached the well-known subject of Jeffrey Dahmer in a new and inventive way that managed to completely unnerve us.  It also promises you will never eat a sandwich quite the same way.  We look forward to working with Chris as well as the entire team that made this film.”

Thompson commented: “Having grown up on watching IFC films – for them to pick up my first feature feels like a dream come true.  I couldn’t be more proud of this film and everyone from Milwaukee to Bombay that helped mold it from a 4-year meandering experiment into the fresh cinematic oddity it is today – the world needs to see it!”

The deal for the film was negotiated by Arianna Bocco, Senior Vice President of Acquisitions & Productions for Sundance Selects/IFC Films with Josh Braun of Submarine Entertainment on behalf of the filmmakers.

IFC Midnight is a sister label of IFC Films and Sundance Selects, and is owned and operated by AMC Networks Inc.

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About IFC MIDNIGHT

Established in 2010 and based in New York City, IFC Midnight is a leading U.S. distributor of genre entertainment including horror, science-fiction, thrillers, erotic art house, action and more.  Its unique distribution model makes independent genre films available to a national audience by releasing them in theaters as well as on cable’s Video On Demand (VOD) platform, reaching nearly 50 million homes. Some of the company’s successes have included Tom Six’s controversial horror film The Human Centipede (First Sequence), Johnnie To’s Hong Kong revenge thriller Vengeance, and James Gunn’sSuper starring Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page and Kevin Bacon. Upcoming IFC Midnight releases include Brandon Cronenberg’s ANTIVIRAL. IFC Midnight is a sister label to Sundance Selects and IFC Films, and is owned and operated by AMC Networks Inc.

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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