Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg is reporting that because Magnolia Pictures wouldn’t pay $13K for screeners to support the Best Supporting Actress campaign of Compliance‘s Ann Dowd, Dowd and her husband have coughed up the cash themselves. Senior Magnolia marketing guy Matt Cowal says the company has already taken a bath on the release of the film (Compliance only made $319,285 before being yanked) and “so we just are trying to be as responsible as we can.”


Compliance cstar Ann Dowd.

Dowd, who got paid a pathetic $1600 for acting in Compliance over a 16-day period, is basically doing a Melissa Leo. If there’s a SAG God she’ll get more quality work out of the acclaim for her Compliance performance, but this sucks all the same. Save Ann Dowd’s bank balance! She won Best Supporting Actress from the National Board of Review, and has been nominated in this category by the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Independent Spirit Awards.

The reason Compliance didn’t make more money is because too many people refused to believe that the fast-food employees (principally Dowd’s manager character) in the film were too gullible in not challenging the pervy guy on the phone who claimed he was a cop…even though this scam happened several times in the mid-to-late ’90s and early aughts, and it worked particularly well in the Kentucky case that the film is based upon.