By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

ANNAPURNA PICTURES ACQUIRE U.S RIGHTS TO HARMONY KORINE’S “SPRING BREAKERS”

Posted Tuesday, September 4th, 2012 - Comments Off on ANNAPURNA PICTURES ACQUIRE U.S RIGHTS TO HARMONY KORINE’S “SPRING BREAKERS”
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                          

AHEAD OF FESTIVALS, THE ACQUISITION MARKS A FIRST COLLABORATION BETWEEN CHRIS HANLEY’S MUSE PRODUCTIONS AND MEGAN ELLISON’S ANNAPURNA PICTURES

LOS ANGELES (September 4, 2012) – Annapurna Pictures announced today that they have purchased the U.S distribution rights to Harmony Korine’s new film, SPRING BREAKERS, the American college pop-culture and music-fueled story following the adventure of four young girls gone wild on spring break. Additional distribution information will be revealed at a later date. Annapurna’s Megan Ellison is also included as an Executive Producer on the film.

Written and directed by Harmony Korine, the film stars James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, Heather Morris, and Gucci Mane, and is produced by Chris Hanley, Jordan Gertner, David Zander and Charles-Marie Anthonioz. Music talent involved with scoring the film includes Cliff Martinez and Skrillex, with Randall Poster serving as music supervisor.

As part of the main competition, the film will receive its worldwide premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, September 5 followed by a North American premiere set for Friday, September 7 at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Presented by Annapurna Pictures and HERO, who developed and financed the film in collaboration with MUSE Productions, SPRING BREAKERS tells the story of four sexy college girls as they plan to fund their spring break getaway by burglarizing a fast food shack. But that’s only the beginning… At a motel room rager, fun reaches its legal limit and the girls are arrested and taken to jail. Hungover and clad only in bikinis, the girls appear before a judge but are bailed out unexpectedly by Alien (James Franco), an infamous local thug who takes them under his wing and leads them on the wildest Spring Break trip in history. Rough on the outside but with a soft spot inside, Alien wins over the hearts of the young Spring Breakers, and leads them on a Spring Break they never could have imagined.

Other credits include: Director of Photography Benoît Debie; Editor Douglas Crise; Production Designer Elliot Hostetter; Costume Designer Heidi Bivens.

The deal was brokered by CAA and Ted Field of Radar Pictures.

ABOUT ANNAPURNA PICTURES

Annapurna Pictures is a film production and finance company founded with the goal of creating sophisticated, high-quality films that might otherwise be considered risky by traditional Hollywood studios.

The company, which many consider to be a one-stop shop for filmmakers, has provided the industry with a critical boost of mature, adult dramas in recent years. Annapurna will world premiere Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master at the 2012 Venice Film Festival, with a North American premiere at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, and recently premiered Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly, a modern crime drama starring Brad Pitt, at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. In addition, they recently released John Hillcoat’s Lawless, the Prohibition-era gangster drama starring Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, and Jessica Chastain, which also premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. The company’s upcoming releases include Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, a dramatization of the Navy SEALs hunt for Osama Bin Laden, set for a December 2012 release, and Wong Kar-Wai’s The Grandmasters, the story of martial arts master and Bruce Lee’s trainer Ip Man.

Current projects include the new Untitled Spike Jonze Project starring Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams and Rooney Mara, which recently wrapped production; Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, which is currently in pre-production; and the Untitled David O. Russell Project starring Bradley Cooper and Jeremy Renner, currently in development. Annapurna also recently acquired the rights to the highly successful Terminator franchise. This past spring, the company made a deal to back Panorama Media, which launched at Cannes 2012 and will serve as the international sales agent on select Annapurna projects.

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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