By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

ALCHEMY PLEDGES ITS LOVE TO THE TRUE-LIFE ROMANTIC COMEDY MEET THE PATELS

Posted Thursday, February 19th, 2015 - Comments Off on ALCHEMY PLEDGES ITS LOVE TO THE TRUE-LIFE ROMANTIC COMEDY MEET THE PATELS
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LOS ANGELES, February 19, 2015 – The newly minted Alchemy announced today that it has acquired all North American rights to the film festival favorite MEET THE PATELS. The “true-life romantic comedy” is directed by the sibling team of Geeta V. Patel and Ravi V. Patel and produced by Janet Eckholm and Geeta V. Patel. The announcement was made today by Alchemy CEO Bill Lee. MEET THE PATELS will receive a theatrical release later this year.
“MEET THE PATELS is a hilarious and universal story about family, cultural identity and the search for love,” said Lee. “We’re thrilled to collaborate with the Patel family to help this gem cross over to the wide audience it deserves. It’s a true crowd pleaser, and we expect tremendous word of mouth.”
“Festival screenings had been selling out with lines around the block, and we couldn’t keep up with the demand,” added Geeta and Ravi Patel. “Thanks to UTA and Alchemy, MEET THE PATELS will hit theaters across the country this year. This is going to be fun!”
MEET THE PATELS premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival where it won the Audience Award and went on to win that same award at Hot Docs and Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival where it also won the Best Film Award. The laugh out loud, true-life romantic comedy centers on the romantically inexperienced, first generation Indian-American Ravi Patel, who’s suddenly thrown into the deep end of the dating pool when he reluctantly consents to letting his parents find him a soulmate through traditional cultural means.
Alchemy VP of Acquisitions Jeff Deutchman negotiated the deal with UTA Independent Film Group on behalf of the filmmakers. Geeta V. Patel and Ravi V. Patel are also represented by UTA.
Today’s acquisition follows the recent rebrand of Millennium Entertainment as Alchemy, a name that embodies the company’s goals of uniting storytellers and their audiences in one dynamic community as well as the belief that conventional distribution strategies must evolve to represent the future of screen-based storytelling—wherever that screen may be.
Independent Television Service (ITVS) co-produced and co-financed the project.  ITVS is known for supporting films that enrich the cultural landscape with the voices and visions in communities seldom heard through mainstream media.
Additional funding for the film was provided by Impact Partners, Center for Asian American Media, Tribeca Film Institute, Whitewater Films, Hartley Film Foundation and Chicken & Egg Pictures.
ABOUT ALCHEMY
Alchemy is a leading independent distributor of film and television content across all platforms and windows in North America. Alchemy develops tailored distribution strategies across all platforms, from theatrical release to home video, VOD, and television.  Under CEO Bill Lee’s direction, the company has distributed the work of some of the world’s finest filmmakers including Richard Linklater, Werner Herzog, Gregg Araki, Dito Montiel, John Hillcoat, John Turturro, Lee Daniels, Oren Moverman and James Cameron.  Recent successes include ELSA & FRED, FADING GIGOLO, WHAT MAISIE KNEW, RAMPART, and BERNIE.
Alchemy boasts the independent industry’s pre-eminent end-to-end supply chain solution for physical and digital distribution of content to major retailers. The company has the largest footprint of any independent supplier to bricks and mortar businesses, and is one of only two independent aggregators for Target, where Alchemy represents 75% of all independent titles sold. It is also the leading supplier to digital platforms including iTunes, Netflix and VOD.
The company owns a catalog of 665 film titles and has deals for the ongoing distribution of film titles and programming for clients including PBS Distribution, Classic Media, nCircle, eOne, Magnolia, MPI Home Media, FUNimation, Well Go, Music Box Films, Inception, Gravitas Ventures, and Hammer Horror, among many others.
INDEPENDENT TELEVISION SERVICE
Independent Television Service (ITVS) funds, presents, and promotes award-winning documentaries on public television, innovative new media projects on the Web, and the Emmy® Award-winning weekly series Independent Lens on Monday nights at 10 p.m. on PBS. Mandated by Congress in 1988 and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, ITVS has brought thousands of independently produced programs to American audiences. For more visit itvs.org
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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