Movie City Indie Archive for April, 2005
Seamless doc-making: You lie as much as possible
The two-week-old New York Times Thursday Styles section continues to make a name for itself, esteeming the work of director Douglas Keeve (“Unzipped” from 10 years ago), who disingenuously brags on many misrepresentations. “Keeve took some dramatic license in his storytelling. He included scenes in which the designers are being judged for their runway collections, but the scenes come from the fall 2005 season, which was shown in February, 4 months after the competition… [One designer] is depicted reacting with horror… that a fire has gutted her parents’ business, although she said that the fire, while serious, occurred in November. As for [Sarah Jessica] Parker, who shows up to order a tuxedo from [another designer]—”after seeing his designs in Vogue,” viewers are told—Mr. Keeve acknowledged that the scene was staged at his request to demonstrate the designer at work on a custom order. “When you make a film like this, your responsibility is to the audience, which means you lie as much as possible to make the story clear,’ he said.”
Chinese to me: Kung Fu Hustle kicks out
While The Interpreter will be on 2,758 screens this weekend, Variety reports that Kung Fu Hustle will come close… with 2,500 playdates. “Sony Pictures Classics is highly optimistic, noting the release is the widest ever for a Chinese-lingo film. “It’s going to do very well,” said co-prexy Michael Barker. “It’s a film that has a great word-of-mouth.” Label’s strategy is to get the core aud of young males into theaters this week and then expand the aud over time. “We’re the niche marketers,” said co-prexy Tom Bernard. “We look at it as a three-month marathon. We’ve got the 18-25 guys first, then we’ve got to get the older guys with jobs. The trick will be to get the 25-40 guys to bring their wives and girlfriends.” There’s a few bucks at stake, Bernard tells Variety. “We spent $20 million to get $127 million on ‘Crouching Tiger.’ We spent more on this one.”
Planting Two Boots in Connecticut
Phil and Jesse Hartman, the brothers behind the Two Boots emporia in Manhattan, including the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, venture a Bijou in Bridgeport, a 1908 edifice reportedly the “oldest cinema house in the nation.” “I love old theaters,” Phil Hartman explained, “and the oldest theater in America is very sexy to me. I knew it needed a restaurant concept, and saw a performance space as well. And we’re already doing something similar in Manhattan.” … “The traditional demographic for art cinemas grew up with the golden age of film, [directors like Frederico] Fellini and [Ingmar] Bergman. Then there’s the whole second golden age in the ’70s, [Francis Ford] Coppola, [Martin] Scorsese, and that generation is older, too. We’re trying to create something exciting for the younger generation, people not used to seeing movies with subtitles.”
Pushing the merch: plans for Landmark Theatres
Gary Dretzka checks in with the many media plans of the post-broadcast.com Mark Cuban-Todd Wagner 2929 conglom, “the vertically integrated media holding company, which also owns the Landmark Theaters chain, Magnolia Pictures Distribution, a stake in Lions Gate Entertainment” and HDNet Movies. Wagner “emphasized that Landmark would continue to showcase… indie, documentary and foreign titles… and which already fit the digital-projection model. 2929 will, however, endeavor to find new ways to take advantage of the arthouse culture, by experimenting with direct sales of DVDs and soundtrack albums, upgrading concessions and adding bars and restaurants to venues. “We want to maximize the revenue stream that already exists…” Wagner tells Dretzka.
Seeing something and being moved by it: Sydney Pollack
Sydney Pollack talks to LA Weekly’s Scott Foundas about how money and independence don’t mix: During “the 20 years when I was most productive as a director. you could make more eclectic films… a lot of that was economics. The cost of… movies is out of control, at least for movies with big stars… That’s why I’ve turned to independent films as a producer, and I’m eventually going to find my way [there] as a director. I want very much to make a $15-million to $20-million movie where I don’t have this daunting, and inhibiting, pressure to reach everyone in the world or the picture’s not considered a success… It makes you worry when… you want to have two characters sit down for 7 pages of dialogue—which they do in this movie, frequently.” For his phalanx of screenwriters, Pollack tells Foundas he drew from Tom Stoppard: “It comes from the speech in ‘The Real Thing,’ where the playwright admonishes this girl because of her faith in a lousy writer, and talks about how the butchering of words by someone who isn’t able to make adequate use of them is a crime. I took that speech and dictated it to every one of the writers on this project. It’s one of my favorite speeches in all of literature, because it speaks to the reason why your hair raises in a certain moment in a film or a piece of theater, or why you laugh, or why you cry. It’s all done with writing, by people who can really write and create that kind of response in you… Seeing something and being moved by it — that’s a powerful weapon.”
Drinkwater on Wellspring and Genius
On the eve of a wider release of Todd Solondz‘s Palindromes, a deal is sealed: Trevor Drinkwater, CEO of Genius Products, announces finalizing its acquisition of American Vantage Media and Wellspring Films, asserting that the deal “complements the Genius Products Branded Distribution Network.” “We see this acquisition as an important means of leveraging the efficient infrastructure Genius Products has built over the past year,…With a broadened base of high quality, diverse, proprietary content,” the P.R. sez, “we believe Genius Products isstrategically positioned to work even closer with retailers to develop customized programs that meet their sales, gross margin and targeted demographic objectives…” [Other product partners in the growing combine include The Sundance Channel, IFILM, TV Guide, AMC, Bazooka, Baby Genius and National Lampoon.]
DVD day-and-date releases? They're heeeeeeeere
The Reporter checks into a marketing conference in BevHills: “The day you have a public performance of a movie anywhere in the world, you can count on the fact there will be a physical product on the streets in Asia, Eastern Europe, Russia within a few days,” [Warner Bros. Entertainment chairman and CEO Barry] Meyer said… “Right now… theatrical is the main way we set value in these movies, and video is the first aftermarket. It might well be in the certain territories, it should be exactly the reverse —that theatrical is the added value.”
Dining out with Rex Reed: Strange food
Over at Pride, Unprejudiced, there’s a survey of Rex Reed’s peculiar culinary fixations in the wake of his review of Oldboy, which the veteran snip disdained as “sewage in a cocktail shaker,” from “a nation weaned on kimchi, a mixture of raw garlic and cabbage buried underground until it rots, dug up from the grave and then served in earthenware pots sold at the Seoul airport as souvenirs.” More tasteless tidbits at the link.
Buenos Aires by the bay: Argentinian films in SF
On the eve of the San Francisco International, Johnny Ray Huston looks at the fest’s strong Argentinian sidebar: “One could easily argue that Argentina is home to the most exciting filmmaking in the world at the moment—and certainly, with the possible exception of South Korea, it is the core site of fresh work by women directors—if the country itself and the new voices emerging from it weren’t so disparate, drawing from European and American influences as well as the history of a Latin American country second only to Brazil in terms of film production. This achievement is amazing, considering the country’s new wave has risen from — and crashed against — economic ruin.”
Post-Oscar Born into schools
In Lisboa, Born into Brothels co-director Ross Kauffman announces a school in India he and Zana Briski are starting. “Kauffman, who directed the documentary along with fellow New Yorker Briski, said that the two filmmakers hope to have the school up and running by the start of 2007.”
Giving The Interpreter a Hand: Matt Zoller Seitz
New York Press’ Matt Zoller Seitz digs the quiet visual assurance of The Interpreter: “Pollack and director of photography Darius Khondji conceive the tale via simple but powerful compositions, symmetrical in appearance but asymmetrical in meaning. Extreme wide shots (lateral and God’s-eye) achieve formal balance via implied center lines that cut the CinemaScope frame into perfect halves and transform U.N. and Manhattan architecture into Rorshach blots whose symmetry is gummed up by roving, ant-sized humans. Pollack’s regular editor, William Steinkamp, crosscuts between events occurring in different locations so deftly that you may not realize until later that the events were rhymed not just by plot function, but by gesture, emotion and theme. In some close-up conversations, the movie frames shots and reverse-shots so characters experiencing similar emotions appear to be divided by a mirror or joined like puzzle pieces. (This movie’s visual intelligence equals Wong Kar-Wai’s The Hand. Yeah, I said it.)”
1 Comment »Pulitzer-prize winning attention spans
Post-Pulitzer, the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern shares a few words with the paper at his alma mater (Lehigh University, ’53): “I am an essayist… I try to write interesting pieces that challenge the reader. If newspapers are going to survive, they can’t dumb down their writing to the level of people who have the attention span of a firefly.”
Working Title: It's all in the cats
The Guardian catches up with the duo behind Working Title Films, the producers Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan. Fellner: Making movies is like herding cats. Just when you’ve got 19 or 20 in a room— Bevan: —Suddenly you turn round and the whole lot of them is gone!
Talking the "urban": Damon Dash
Damon Dash allows there’s a difference, to the Reporter: When I watch an urban movie, I’m not satisfied with it, and I think it’s degrading and offensive. I feel like the urban experience has to be shown so people can understand the repercussions and understand my culture a little better, instead of just exploiting it. I think just because we’re urban doesn’t mean that the urban experience should just be for urban people. On the other hand, I think that an urban individual can affiliate themselves with quality and recognizing art. I think I have an eye for recognizing art, and that’s what I wanted to do in the movie business—and make money, too.
Montana: more filmmaker tax incentives
Film industry tax credits near final approval, the Billings Gazette reports, but they’re not universally beloved (or understood). “This is an example of special interests legislation,” Sen. Joe Balyeat, R-Bozeman, said. “The taxpayers of Montana will be paying for a group of people who are not even Montana residents.”
