Sony’s opening-night Cinemacon presentation runs from 6:45 pm to 8:30 pm, and then comes a Sony/Dolby dinner reception at Omnia, a Caesar’s Palace nightclub that will undoubtedly be overstimulating and overly noisy.
Jeff Grace‘s Folk Hero & Funny Guy (Gravitas, 5.12) had its big debut at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival — that in itself scares me a bit. But the word was mostly positive last spring so maybe.
From 4.18.166 Hollywood Reporter review by John DeFore: “A stand-up comic who may not be cut out for showbiz gets a break of questionable value in Grace’s feature debut. The kind of road movie that relies less on incident than on the chemistry between the guys in the car, it pairs Girls costar Alex Karpovsky with Wyatt Russell, who played one of the odder baseballers in Richard Linklater‘s new Everybody Wants Some — then complicates its best-buddies dynamic by throwing an attractive woman (Meredith Hagner) into the mix. The result is an amiable if hardly unusual buddy pic whose most important lesson is that aspiring comedians in 2016 should avoid Evite jokes.”
Just about a year ago Variety‘s Brent Lang reported that the National Association of Theatre Owners had flatly ixnayed Sean Parker‘s Screening Room start-up — early home-video access to brand-new movies. “The exclusive theatrical release window makes new movies events,” a NATO statement read. “Success there establishes brand value and bolsters revenue in downstream markets.” The group added that any new distribution models should be created in consultation between studios and theater owners, and not with the help of a “third party.”
The use of the term “third Party” was “a clear dig” at Screening Room, Lang noted.
But now, at the start of Cinemacon 2017, Lang is reporting that studios and exhibitors “do seem closer to signing that grand bargain which would enable films to get early home entertainment releases for a higher price. As an enticement, distributors are willing to cut theaters in on a percentage of their digital sales. Six of the seven biggest studios — a group that includes Fox, Paramount, Lionsgate, Sony, Warner Bros., and Universal — are having unilateral discussions with major theater chains like Regal and AMC.”
Presumably this willingness to “cut theatres in” on digital revenues is what paved the way for the current constructive dialogue.
The Bally’s room is high (23rd floor), the wifi is excellent, iron + ironing board, MSNBC on channel 14…good to go.
The four-and-a-half-day Cinemacon experience starts today. My flight to Las Vegas (a suffocating plastic nightmare realm that I hate with every fibre of my being) leaves at 10:30 am from Burbank. Hollywood journos go for the product reels — for a clearer, more specific notion of what the coming movie year will amount to. I trust it’ll be worth the trouble. Two years ago I gave up the first day when my suitcase was stolen by an idiot who mistook their bag for mine. I finally got it back but God, what an ordeal. My story was titled “Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Bag.”
I plan to attend all the distributor presentations and tech shows that seem to matter, and otherwise just hunker down and file from my room at Bally’s hotel & casino. No tables, no drinks, no heaping piles of food…a spartan approach.
The problem is that Cinemacon product reels are almost always about megaplex idiot fare. Sony’s 2012 Cinemacon presentation, for example, didn’t even mention Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty, which was easily the most exciting and praise-worthy Sony film of that year. (Here’s my piece about their presentation.)
But that’s Cinemacon and the distributor mindset for you — i.e., previewing ultra-primitive, power-slam, bass-thump CG stuff for the core theatrical audience these days — under-educated simians, schmoes, donkeys, ESPNers, teenagers, what-the-fuckers, the family trade, gamers and others whose taste buds have been systematically coarsened and lowered over the last 25 years, which is roughly when theme-park movies began to be embraced big-time by the major studios.
As the crow flies Bally’s would be a five-minute walk from Caesar’s Palace if it weren’t for the crowds, staircases, elevated walkways, escalators and all the other obstructions. I’m a simple man, a New Yorker, a European. I just like to walk somewhere without all the bullshit. But bullshit is what you get when you come to Vegas.