A smart, strongly worded piece by the Hollywood Reporter‘s Anne Thompson about how the big-studio marketing departments only know how to sell fat tentpole movies these days, and why they should let their indie “dependent” divisions make and market the smaller-budgeted, character-driven quality level stuff. Probably true, but Thompson comes to her conclusion because of the failure of six character-driven films releases by the majors: 20th Century Fox’s In Her Shoes and Stay, North Country and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang from Warner Bros. and Paramount’s Elizabethtown and The Weather Man. The truth is that only one out of the six — In Her Shoes — was half-screwed by bad marketing (i.e., a trailer that made it look too chick-flicky). The other five totally shot themselves in the foot. Stay because it wasn’t much good. The Weather Man by being one of the worst soul-suffocating downers in movie history. Elizabethtown because it wasn’t good enough. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang because it was too glib by half and basically about its own cleverness. And North Country because a court case about sexual harassment is fodder for a 1985 TV movie.