June
4
Paramount Vantage Fallout
The folks at Paramount Vantage had a rough day yesterday as they sifted through the rumors and buzz surrounding the fate of their two-year-old specialty film label. After a day of follow-up calls, here's the real dope:
TRUE: There were three key lay-offs: distribution chief Rob Schulze, physical production head Mark Bakshi, and marketing co-prexy Guy Endore-Kaiser.
TRUE: More lay-offs will follow, but no one is sure who they will be. Paramount Vantage prexy Nick Meyer is trying to hang onto as many people as he can. And Paramount Film Group prexy John Lesher plans to continue to supervise. "Since I'm running both its easier for me to be involved in both," he says. "We're going to stay in this business. We're committed to it and love it but in a disciplined way."
FALSE: Meyer is leaving or has left. No, he's going to make a go if it. He would have left already if he wanted to go. Will he be happy a year from now? That's another question.
TRUE: Meyer will continue to develop, produce and acquire movies and has a staff and budget to do so--but it won't be the originally planned 12 movies a year. It will be more like six, and they will be more likely to be commercially accessible, less arty films. Brad Grey, Rob Moore and John Lesher want to keep the label alive while saving several million dollars a year. They insist they want to stay in the specialty space and will not pursue Draconian cuts like Warner Bros.
TRUE: John Lesher started a specialty division and then left it behind in January to take a bigger job as president of the Paramount Film Group. But did he throw Vantage under a bus, as some suggest? There are plenty of people, especially at Vantage, who feel betrayed. "A lot of people here were hired personally by him and wanted to be with him, he's dynamic," says one Vantage staffer.
TRUE: Lesher had one set of marching orders when he fulfilled Tom Freston's demand to build a vibrant specialty label on a larger scale than Paramount Classics, and another after the new folks who took charge at Viacom looked at Paramount's numbers. In other words, the spirit of ex-Viacom exec Jonathan Dolgen has returned to the studio.
TRUE: So far, only three Paramount Vantage films have made any money: An Inconvenient Truth, which cost nothing to acquire, which was released in partnership with Participant Productions and won the doc Oscar; this year's best picture Oscar winner, No Country for Old Men, a 50/50 worldwide co-production with Miramax Films, which took over its domestic release, and Son of Rambow, a worldwide acquisition which earned $8 million in the UK and $2 million here, for which Vantage did not wind up paying $7 million. Moore and Lesher insist that the other films, at the end of the accounting process, will either make a little, or lose a little. "The movie business is tough," says Lesher.
FALSE: There Will Be Blood lost tons of money. Let's call it, after a lengthy Oscar campaign, breakeven.
TRUE: Producer Scott Rudin, who was once tight with Lesher, is favoring the Miramax side of the ledger these days. He has only one pic coming up with Vantage, DreamWorks' Revolutionary Road, which Lesher insists will stay at Vantage. "It's a specialty film," he says.
TRUE: Paramount marketing chief Gerry Rich once worked at Miramax Films and has expertise in handling specialized distribution.
TRUE: Meyer put through the deal with Overture to release three pics a year throught the Vantage foreign distribution operation, and clinched a partnership with Overture on Michael Moore's follow-up to Fahrenheit 9/11, which sold many territories at Cannes. But Overture also has the option to put some of its pics through big Paramount Pictures International.
FALSE: Other specialty labels also share distribution, marketing and physical production with their parent studio. Focus Features, Miramax Films Sony Pictures Classics and Fox Seachlight do not share these functions with their parent. Producing high-quality lower-budget specialty films is a specialized art unto itself and you're better off NOT using the big-studio people for that function. Autonomous distribution and marketing goes hand-in-hand with choosing the right product. Focus did move to have the big studio distribute its Rogue pics, and when Fox Searchlight takes a film really wide, it gets backroom help from the bigger studio.
TRUE: As of this minute, Vantage is in jeopardy. If Grey, Lesher, Moore and Meyer operate in good faith to make a go of it, there's a slim chance it will survive in some form. But I wouldn't bet the farm on it.
[Cannes photo of Overture's Danny Rosett, Chris McGurk, director Michael Moore and Paramount vantage's Nick Meyer by Getty Images]
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TRUE: All thrown under the bus except for a small group.
TRUE: Most of the staff found out about the "news" through blogs.
Posted by: Insider | June 05, 2008 at 10:35 AM
actually vantage did not have the uk it was already pre-sold to optimum before sundance
Posted by: Check your facts | June 05, 2008 at 04:26 PM
But Optimum Releasing bought this movie's UK rights from Paramount Vantage. It means that Paramount Vantage will still get some share of this movie's UK revenue.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117980018.html?categoryid=1246&cs=1
Posted by: marychan | June 06, 2008 at 04:56 AM
exactly--vantage bought world rights and shares in upside
Posted by: Anne thompson | June 06, 2008 at 09:04 AM
Interesting that the various articles about Par. Vantage haven't referred to The Weinstein Company, obviously still a work in progress. They are using MGM for their distribution who, in my mind, have done a terrible job. If an arthouse tries to book a film their sales people treat the films like most commercial divisions do. They either get that a film goes wide or don't really want to book it if it is small. This will be the problem that will face films handled by Paramount and Warners with their more sensitive specialized sales people gone.
Posted by: Gary | June 06, 2008 at 09:11 AM
I find it mildly depressing that the heads of Paramount feel confident that someone hired to kick-start a reimagined specialty division, who made some very questionable hiring choices for his staff, who threw money at everything for two years to no avail...should then be promoted to help run the studio itself.
But hey, what do I know?
Posted by: A few steps back from inside | June 06, 2008 at 12:16 PM