MORE SUNDANCE ACQUISITIONS
Warner Independent Pictures made its first feature film acquisition yesterday at the Sundance Film Festival, purchasing all rights in North America and the UK to We Don’t Live Here Anymore for $2 million. The film is directed by John Curran from a screenplay by Larry Gross, based on two short stories by Andre Dubus (who also wrote the story that inspired In the Bedroom).
Front Street Productions‘s Harvey Kahn and Jonas Goodman reportedly hammered out deal points with William Morris agent Cassian Elwes and Mark Gill of Warner Independent, while cast members Naomi Watts, Mark Ruffalo and Laura Dern sequestered themselves in a stairway of the Wireimage Portal Studio for more than six hours at last night’s premiere party for the film, which debuted in Competition.
The film tells the story of two couples in a New England college town whose lives become inextricably intertwined and turned upside-down in a tide of passion, suspicion, humor, anger and stunning revelations.
“We are really pleased to be the first [finished] film to be acquired by Warner Independent,” said John Curran. “Their passion was clear after the first screening, and is evident in their plans for its release [later this year].”
Warner Independent Pictures, founded in August 2003, finances, produces, acquires and will theatrically distribute up to 10 feature films per year largely budgeted under $20 million. It is a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company based on the Studio lot in Burbank.
In 2004, Warner Independent Pictures will also release Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset which debuts in Competition in Berlin; first-time director Gregory Jacobs’s Criminal starring John C. Reilly, Diego Luna and Maggie Gyllenhaal; Michael Mayer’s A Home at the End of the World with Colin Farrell, Robin Wright Penn, Dallas Roberts and Sissy Spacek; first-time director Jordan Roberts’s Around the Bend starring Michael Caine, Christopher Walken and Josh Lucas; and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement, which is currently in production.
Warner Independent Pictures’s The Jacket, directed by John Maybury and starring Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kelly Lynch, Daniel Craig and Kris Kristofferson started production on January 19 in Glasgow.
In other breaking news: CSA: The Confederate States of America, written and directed by Kevin Willmott, was been picked up by IFC Films for North American distribution. The announcement was made by Jonathan Sehring, President of IFC Entertainment, from the Sundance Film Festival where CSA screened to sold out audiences in the American Spectrum section.
Bold, satirical and wildly funny, the film poses the question: What would have happened if the South had won the Civil War? Played as a straight-faced Ken Burns-style documentary with uncanny parallels to our current society, CSA presents an alternative modern day America as a land in which slavery is alive and well throughout the 50 states, other non-whites and non-Christians are relegated to reservations, the country is in an ongoing Cold War with Canada and a Slave Shopping Network plays on TV. In the words of Spike Lee, an executive producer, the film is “eye opening and jaw dropping.”
Sony Pictures Classics also announced the acquisition of North American rights to Ondrej Trojan‘s Zelary, which is the Czech entry for Best Foreign Language Film.
Set against the backdrop of Nazi occupation in the Czechoslovakia during World War II, Zelary is the story of a unique love brought together by two clashing cultures — a free-spirited man of the mountains and a scholarly nurse devoted to the resistance. After he is brought into her hospital with fatal injuries, she saves his life by sacrificing part of her own. Set on the very edge of civilization, Zelary is a love story born of the common will to survive.
First Look Media acquired worldwide rights to Persistent Entertainment and Complex Media’s American Spectrum entry September Tapes.
Peter Lawson, VP, Acquisitions, and Bill Lischak, President of First Look Media negotiated the deal on behalf of First Look. ICM’s Shaun Redick and Linda Lichter of Lichter/Grossman negotiated on behalf of Persistent Entertainment’s Matthew Rhodes and Judd Payne and Complex Media’s Christian Johnston and Brent Henry.
First Look Pictures will distribute September Tapes theatrically in North America. The film debuted in Sundance in the American Spectrum program.
A blend of factual activities in post 9/11 Afghanistan with dramatic overlays throughout, September Tapes, the debut feature of director Christian Johnston, fashions an authentic and powerful look at a single man’s quest for answers to the current state of the world.
