On the L.A.-to-Salt Lake City plane today, a critic passed along a starting-to-sound-familiar observation, which is that Sundance ’07 is looking more and more like an off year. A friend of the critic has seen 20 of the films being shown here and so far he’s saying “naaah”….flat, so-so, nothing to write home about material…a couple of almost-but-not-quite- as-good-as-Half Nelson flicks, and apparently nothing even close to a Little Miss Sunshine-type breakout waiting to happen. “Apparently,” I say.
On top of which I talked to a guy who said he’d seen and didn’t care for Tommy O’Haver‘s An American Crime…just that kind of year, they all seem to be saying. (I heard the same damn thing from two big-time buyers in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago.)
That said, USA’s Today‘s Anthony Breznican has come up with six possibly hot Sundance films showing over the next few days, blah, blah.
A fairly old building (i.e., an old commercial garage) near downtown Park City — Wednesday, 1.17.07, 9:55 pm; blurry Egyptian marquee guy; no-frills room at the Star Hotel; super-homey Star Hotel dining room
Less than an hour after pulling into Park City I ran into Chicago 10 director Brett Morgen outside the Riverhorse Cafe. The partly animated, new-style, heavily-hyped doc about the trial of the Chicago 8 (i.e., Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, et. al. — all prosecuted for allegedly inciting violent demonstrations against the government during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago), will screen tomorrow night at the Eccles twice, at 6 pm and 9 pm. I asked Morgen why it”s called Chicago 10 when there were eight defendants — he said it’s because the defendants’ two attorneys, William Kuntsler and Leonard Weinglass, were spiritual pro-movement guerillas who wound up getting prison sentences along with everyone else and were just as much “in the dock” as the defendants.
ThinkFilm honcho Mark Urman resented last night’s post about Zoo and wrote the following: “Zoo, if you really want to know, is extremely artsy, totally un-sensationalistic, and 100% ‘specialty.’ Alas — writers insist upon calling it ‘the horse-fucking movie‘ and talking about it in tabloid terms, and flinging it at a broad-based audience that is not equipped to meet it on its own terms.”
I wrote back straight away and said “the only touchstone I have in the naked male-stimulated-by-horse genre of drama is Equus. Does Zoo touch upon any of the themes and/or musings in Peter Shaffer’s play?
“When people spoke of Equus in shorthand in the ’70s, they said (a) it was about an unstable stable boy who blinds three or four horses, and (b) it has great performances and (c) it has a nude scene in the stable between the boy and a girl. People think and relate in shorthand. You’re far too savvy and perceptive not to have understood from the get-go that this movie would be processed as a thing about horse sex. A guy dying from anal intercourse with a horse is a tabloid subject — it’s a story that’s straight out of Weekly World News.”
To which Urman replied, “Zoo has larger themes, but not quite the same as Shaffer’s. Equus explores the passion of Alan Strang (who was in fact mad) and compares it , somewhat romantically, to the dry, rationalism of the shrink. Zoo is the sad, strange-but-true story of someone who explores his dark side and gets lost in the darkness. But the film does not romanticize the passion in question, nor does it imply that it’s comparable to, superior to, or even related to normal adult male urges.
“And while I fully expect people to refer to this — and any — film in somewhat reductive terms, I think that ‘the horse-fucking’ movie is a phrase that not even the Weekly World News would use!”
Find Me Guilty producer-co-screenwriter T.J Mancini is doggedly sticking with attempts to explain to anyone who’ll listen that the Yari Film Releasing Group (i.e., Bob Yari’s outfit) screwed up badly on the distribution and marketing of this esteemed moral fable/courtrom drama, which is one of Sidney Lumet‘s very best films and easily one of the best of ’06.
It’s old news and water under the bridge, but Mancini sent me a Find Me Guilty road-to-implosion timeline this morning, with commentary. He points out that Find Me Guilty was the first major film released by the new Yari Film Releasing Group (YFRG), and that
YFRG hired outside consultants to execute all marketing and distribution strategy ad basically “did what it wanted to do” — i.e., wore blinders, didn’t listen to anyone.
Mancini says that in the fall 2005, One Race Films (the producers) “asked YFRG to have the poster/one-sheet and trailer into theatres by Holiday/Xmas 2005…which didn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t happen until mid-February 2006. Around the same time One Race Films asked YFRG to have multiple-market screenings as word-of-mouth would [most likely] drive the film — but YFRG had only one screening per market.”
He says that because YFRG “did not have anyone specifically working for it (aside from Isabel White, vp publicity), all decisions were made by people who had other jobs — which slowed down the decision-making process. And he says that “as FMG was the YFRG√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s first release and all execution was being done by outside consultants, Yari and all of his executives were unaware of the timeliness of all marketing strategy decisions and how those decisions impacted awareness, interest and first choice for opening weekend.”
He concludes that “the three Iimportant line items above would have made a difference to the entire campaign for Find Me Guilty and ultimately its opening weekend andoverall box office. These things were stressed to YFRG numerous times over numerous months by myself and the entire One Race Films group.” Alas, to little avail.
Perhaps, at the very least, this will inspired some to at least buy or rent the DVD and catch this very fine film.
Dreamgirls, a movie musical based on the ’60s and early ’70s career tribulations of the Supremes and Diana Ross (as well as Berry Gordy, Flo Ballard, etc.) has been playing fairly broadly since Christmas, and yet Ross, who went on Late Night with David Letterman Tuesday night with an absolutely massive ’70s ‘fro, says she (a) hasn’t had time to see it, (b) has “heard a lot about it,” (c) plans “to see it with my lawyers” and (d) “I would like to do is to be able to see it.”
Those are lies, no? Ross hasn’t seen Dreamgirls because she’s afraid to, or because she doesn’t want people to think she cares about how Beyonce portrays her because that would somehow mess with the above-the-fray diva image that she feels is important to project…right? Certainly not because she’s been busy. Phony, disingenuous, over.
