WELCOME BACK, RAY

By Scott Macaulay

Our colleague Ray Pride got hit with a particularly lengthy bout of server outage over at this blog at Movie City News. After almost two months, though, he’s back with his typically exhaustive and thought-provoking series of links and postings. Welcome him back by busting his bandwith and clicking above.
.… Read the rest

ONLINE MARKETING

By Admin

If you haven’t checked out the Web site for Dana Brown’s Baja motorcross documentary Dust to Glory, then you’re missing one of the best marketing campaigns for a film we’ve seen to date. Among the site’s many cool features is the Make Your Own Movie page where you can assemble sound and picture from a range of scene selects to create your own trailer for the film. If the film is half as cool as its Web site, IFC Films has a hit on its hands.
.… Read the rest

CUBAN SHOOTS AND SCORES

By Scott Macaulay

Listen closely and you’ll hear cheers echoing the corridors of cyberspace.

Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, owner of 2929, HDNet, Magnolia Pictures and the Dallas Mavericks, has announced on his blog that following a request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation he’ll be financing Grokster’s legal bills in MGM vs. Grokster, a case that winds up at the Supreme Court this Tuesday.

The case revolves around the question of whether or not file-sharing services and peer-to-peer networks can be sued if their technology allows users to download or trade copywritten content. The entertainment industry is hoping to overturn a 1984 verdict in a pre-internet version of this debate involving the Sony Betamax recorder.

Read Cuban’s entire post, which is a cogent and measured discussion of the case and his “little content company.” Here’s an excerpt:

“We are a digital company that is platform agnostic. Bits are bits. We don’t care how they are distributed, just that they are. We want our content to get to the customer in the way the customer wants to receive it, when they want to receive it, at a price that is of value to them. Simple business.

Unless Grokster loses to MGM in front of the Supreme Court. If Grokster loses, technological innovation might not die, but it will have such a significant price tag associated with it, it will be the domain of the big corporations only.

It won’t be a good day when high school entrepreneurs have to get a fairness opinion from a technology-oriented law firm to confirm that big music or movie studios won’t sue you because they can come up with an angle that makes a judge believe the technology might impact the music business. It will be a sad day when American corporations start to hold their U.S. digital innovations and inventions overseas to protect them from the RIAA, moving important jobs overseas with them…

This isn’t the big content companies against the technology companies. This is the big content companies, against me, Mark Cuban and my little content company. It’s about our ability to use future innovations to compete … Read the rest

REACTION TO NEW LINE/HBO’S ACQUISTION OF NEWMARKET

By Admin

Over at IndieWIRE, Eugene Hernandez polls indie distributors to get their reaction to the announcement on Tuesday of HBO and New Line’s acquistion of Newmarket’s theatrical fim division.
.… Read the rest

THE RETURN OF EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING

By Admin

Via Wiley Wiggins comes the following item from the Fox News channel:

“Last week… Paul Schrader took a gamble. He showed his version [of Exorcist: The Beginning] at the [Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film]. He and the cast, [which includes Stellan Skarsgard, Billy Crawford, Clara Bellar, and Gabriel Mann], all showed up — on their own dime, since no studio now identifies itself with the movie.

The bet worked. Critics wrote admiring reviews. Variety, in particular, sang Schrader’s praises: ‘Schrader’s intelligent, quietly subversive pic emphasizes spiritual agony over horror ecstasy, while paying occasional lip service to the need for scares … Schrader has delivered a 100-percent Paul Schrader film, drenched in the spiritual and moral angst that’s watermarked his career.’

The payoff is that Morgan Creek and Warner Brothers are going to release Paul Schrader’s Exorcist: The Original Prequel in the next two months.
.… Read the rest

NEW LINE AND HBO ACQUIRE NEWMARKET

By Admin

“New Line and HBO have acquired Newmarket’s theatrical distribution unit from co-founders William Tyler and Chris Ball,” reports Variety today. “The deal effectively shutters Fine Line, which served as New Line’s indie arm.”

Newmarket’s Bob Berney will run the new entity, which will operate out of New York

“The deal marks a major foray by Time Warner into the indie arena,” according to Variety, “and effectively shuts the door on Paramount’s efforts to reinvent its presence in the same indie space.” (Paramount reportedly had its eye on Newmarket prior to New Line and HBO’s acquisition of the company.)
.… Read the rest

ALL THE CINEMAS OF THE WORLD

By Admin

According to Variety, the Cannes Film Festival will launch a new section this year for smaller films “that may have done well in their own country of origin but have never been seen elsewhere, or films that are almost finished and that illustrate the creativity of local filmmaking”:

“Fest organizers on Tuesday announced the launch of Tous les Cinemas du Monde, giving six countries a day the chance to screen recent or even unfinished movies [in a 170-seat temporary theater that will be constructed next to the city's Old Port]…Countries taking part [this year] include Morocco, Sri Lanka and Austria… New fest appointee Serge Sobczynsi, a former culture adviser for the Provence-Alpes-Cotes D’Azur region, is organizing the event.”
.… Read the rest

WEBISODIC

By Admin

The Strand, directed by Dan Myrick (The Blair Witch Project), “is an uncensored look at the lives of several off-beat characters that inhabit the unique world of Venice Beach, California, and how they are all interrelated. Utilizing many of the method-film techniques that were incorporated into Blair Witch, The Strand maintains a sense of authenticity that cannot be found in large-scale productions. Real people and actors populate a fictional world in which spontaneous as well as scripted dialogue bring a sense of unpredictability and realism to the characters and situations.”

Produced by Myrick’s company Gearhead Pictures, The Strand is one of the first full-length, live-action, independently produced episodic narratives intended specifically for the Web utilizing a micro-payment system — hence the term “webisodic.”

The flagship show premiered online March 15 free-of-charge. Audiences will be asked to pay $0.99 for each subsequent webisode using BitPass digital payments technology.

“While the entertainment industry continually grows more risk-averse, the Internet still beckons with its promise of becoming the great equalizer,” says Myrick (seen above right directing Peter Pasco in an episode of The Strand). “BitPass enables independent production companies like [ours] to make a show ‘for the people, by the people,’ where production is sponsored by people who watch it, leaving its destiny in the hands of those who care most about its future.”
.… Read the rest

SEX IS COMEDY

By Scott Macaulay

Interesting article by Anne Thompson in today’s Hollywood Reporter. Her lead: “You can laugh about it. Fantasize about it. Be punished or killed for it. But what you can’t do is take sex seriously at the movies.”

She goes on to examine the box-office fate of a number of sexually provocative serious-minded films and gathers some thoughts by industry types on why eroticism seems to fail in the theatrical marketplace.

From producer Peter Guber:

“If you spell fun, it sells. Sex inside a comedy candy-coats sex and allows the audience to feel comfortable. Laughter covers up insecurity. Sex sells, but not serious sex. Films can be sexy, but they can’t portray the sexual intimacy most people crave. In the movies, you have to have safe sex palatable to a younger audience. The portrayal has to be violent or funny.”
.… Read the rest

ISRAELI SCI-FI

By Admin

As reported by Wired.com: “Israeli troops are now wearing gear that Dick Tracy would be proud of: tiny video screens, worn on the wrist, that display video shot by unmanned airplanes.

“Similar screens have been in use for close to a year in the Israeli military’s attack helicopters, helping pilots identify and strike Palestinian targets within seconds. The technology, also used in tanks and armored vehicles, was a closely guarded secret until the company that developed it offered reporters a rare glimpse at the system this week.

“‘We are fulfilling the science fiction movies that we see,’” said Itzhak Beni, chief executive of the Elisra Group’s Tadiran Electronic Systems and Tadiran Spectralink companies….

“The company also showed off a system resembling a video game that allows soldiers to control unmanned ground vehicles. The green console has a small flat screen and two joysticks, one on each side. One joystick controls the vehicle, while the other controls the items on the vehicle, such as its cameras. The computer screen shows other information, including video footage from drones and detailed maps of the battlefield.”
.… Read the rest