So I’m running Tyrannosaur ads to help the film, and Olivia Colman‘s husband and I have arranged for me to do a phoner with her sometime tomorrow. But Strand Releasing is still refusing to screen it for LA movers, shakers & bloggers in a timely manner. The only screening I know about will happen at West L.A.’s Royal Theatre at 10 am or thereabouts on Tuesday, November 8th — three weeks from now, and 10 days before the film opens on 11.18 .
No other screenings have been set, and I double-checked with Strand and its New York pr rep, Falco Ink, just before writing this.
Through my own efforts several noteworthy journalists with the ability to keep the conversation going about Tyrannosaur and Colman’s performance in particular are ready to see it right now, which is a relatively dead time in the calendar and a little more a month before it opens, and Strand has decided to delay showing it until November 8th?
If Strand’s Marcus Hu had been flown down to Mexico and subjected to Manchurian Candidate-type conditioning so that he would return to Los Angeles with the explicit intention of destroying any chance of launching a word-of-mouth campaign for Colman’s shattering performance, he would be playing his cards exactly as he is now.
A morning screening at the Royal Theatre is the pits. Showing your film there at 10 am is a way of saying to critics, “Ladies and gentleman, we are complete losers and so is our film.” I realize that evening screenings at places like the Wilshire Screening Room are on the pricey side — $1500 to $2000, depending on which night, etc. Afternoon screenings can run around $1000 or $1200 or a bit more, depending. So it’s not cheap to hire a room — I get it — but there’s penny-wise and there’s pound- foolish.
Let’s start a Hollywood Elsewhere Tyrannosaur screening room funding campaign right now. All we have to do is raise $2000 for a single evening’s rental. Let’s set a do-or-die deadline of Sunday, 10.23. If you believe in fairies and people power and you feel that exceptional performances like Colman’s deserve their day in the sun, send your Pay Pal dollars to Jeffrey Wells (gruver1@gmail.com). $2000 isn’t that much to raise among 30,000 or so unique readers. I promise I will pass along every nickel to Marcus Hu.
Who cares about this film more, me or Strand?
Has Strand given any thought to passing around a charity bowl at parties? Or asking for modest online donations? Or maybe a little panhandling inside the Westside Pavilion on weekends? Every extra dollar helps.
