“Do you take advantage of the new freedoms?” purrs sexy next-door neighbor Mrs. Samsky in the Coen brothers’ 1967-set “A Serious Man.” The question looms large over a number of this year’s award-season films, many of them set either on the cusp of that moment of revolutionary change in the ‘60s (“An Education,” “A Single Man”), during its heyday (“A Serious Man,” “Nine,” “Pirate Radio”) or as its gleam began to wear off and turn darker (“The Damned United,” “The Lovely Bones”). Read more in this Variety story...
Focus Features exec James Schamus once again proves he may be the most learned man in the film business with this observation:
“I don’t think the American culture has honestly absorbed the potential of what was happening in the 1960s,” he says. “Late capitalism shut it down as a stylistic detour, and there’s very little understanding or acceptance of how deep were the structural changes—everything from male-female relations to gay liberation to what happened last November at the ballot box. These are things we all owe to the ‘60s.” And as this recent cycle of films suggest, adds Schamus, “We’re still working it out.”
The closing of Miramax—because that’s what has effectively happened by shutting its New York office and letting Daniel Battsek go—is appalling, sad, practically devastating from a historical view of American independent cinema, and not entirely surprising. As corporate powers see more profit in the culture of tentpoles, they’ve been fleeing from smaller-budget films across the board. But what about the brand? Speaking from a purely base commercial perspective, Miramax was one of the most recognizable film companies in the land. And if any entity should have been able to survive the current dip—because that’s what it is, a temporary shift, one that all entertainment companies, big and small, will eventually be able to adapt to—Miramax was probably it.
I don’t know much about Disney and the new mucky-muck atop the “Mouse House,” but what I do know is all of this panic surrounding indie cinema appears to be particularly short-sighted. There are still hundreds of Landmarks and similar art-houses across the country and there are still people going to those movies. And remember, they also cross over into the mainstream. Don’t the corporate elite remember little movies like “Twilight,” “Juno,” “Slumdog Millioniare,” “The Blair Witch Project,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Traffic”—movies that never would have been made within the studios and yet far outgrossed most of the crap they put out. I’m not a business analyst, but isn’t a little risk worth taking when the profit margin can be so potentially large? Maybe releasing movies is just too costly nowadays. Maybe audiences don’t want to go to theaters anymore. I don’t know.
But what I do know is that New York has lost a part of its film history. Love the brand or hate it—and I wrote many critical stories about the company over the years when it was run by the Weinsteins—the community has lost one of its giants, and the fall will have repercussions for all of us.
For Variety’s Oscar preview edition, I’ve penned a look at how industry changes may effect this year’s race, “Will downturn dim indies’ award hopes?”. The collapse of Indiewood has made room in the Oscar derby for players such as Summit and Apparition. But can they afford to compete with the majors? And do they have enough box-office and broad appeal to get the Academy’s attention?
As publicist Tony Angelotti me, this year’s smaller contenders may ultimately encounter the same sort of resistance they’ve always faced. “In order to get their due with Oscar voters, these kinds of films need to strike a chord with the public as well,” he says. In other words, the specialty divisions have always successfully wooed Oscar because they had the crossover box office appeal to show for it.
Without the money to back them up, then, indies could find themselves right back where they started at the 1992 awards—before Disney owned Miramax, before Sony Pictures Classics’ “Howards End” and the rise of Fine Line—and when Oscar’s top paramours (“Bugsy,” “The Prince of Tides,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” “JFK”) all came from Hollywood.
Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist” is the year’s most provocative movie—with its sadomasochistic sex, penis smashing and spontaneous clitorectomy, it rivals Nagisa Oshima’s 1976 cinema scandal “In the Realm of the Senses” in its efforts to shock and offend. But do such depictions of outré sex still sell challenging foreign cinema today? Check out my IFC.com article “Can Sexual Provocation Still Sell” for more on the box-office prospects of “Antichrist” and the current landscape for risque material.
As recently as the ‘80s and ‘90s, “you could sell a lot of tickets if you were selling sex,” as distribution veteran Mark Urman told me, pointing to Miramax releases like “Sirens” and Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.” “Back then, we were selling sex, scandal and an X rating, cloaked in something that was intellectually high-tone, which made it all the better,” recalls Urman, who worked on the marketing of the films. “But it was naughty and that’s why everyone went. Now, nobody cares.”
If you’re a filmmaker looking for an edge in today’s new digital distribution universe, it can’t hurt to come up with a title for your movie that begins with the letter “A” or “B.” It may sound facile or crass, but with Video-On-Demand an increasingly important segment of the business, recent indie movies like “The Answer Man,” “A Quiet Little Marriage” or “Bart Got a Room” will advantageously sit atop the catalogue of cable operator’s On-Demand listings, while movies like “World’s Greatest Dad” and “What Goes Up” will sit at the bottom… So goes my latest Industry Beat column for Filmmaker Magazine.
Money going back to the filmmakers—a.k.a. “overages”—continues to be slow to report and probably insufficient to recoup the costs of a larger-budget film, but it’s still something. As sales agent Andrew Herwitz says in the piece, regarding the small returns on one of his films, “It’s not a totally insignificant amount of revenue.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but it’s better than nothing.
And yet, for the bulk of independent filmmakers, the whole discussion may be moot. After reading my article, filmmaker Ryan Gielen wrote this response which essentially says the IFC model is not only irrevelant, but inappropriate. “The average indie doesn’t get into Sundance, doesn’t get attention form IFC,” he writes, “and focusing on these models can distract from preparing a competent or hopefully sophisticated strategy for release, using all the available tools.” Gielen says Hulu provides far higher percentages than the VOD distribs, but I still wonder how much money we’re ultimately talking about. Is it enough for Gielen and other filmmakers like him to make more movies?
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