June
21
LAFF: Paper Man So-So, Indie Financing, Stoning of Soraya M.
The LAFF barely got away with opener Paper Man on Thursday night. It had a highly regarded script, respected producer Richard Gladstein, the potential discovery of new directors Michele and Kieran Mulroney, and in the context of everything the fest was looking at (most of the films had screened somewhere else), it must have looked like their best and freshest option.
Paper Man played better for the audience than the critics. My daughter and her pal didn't care for it. I responded to the needy teen girl (Emma Stone) in the Hamptons and the needy neurotic writer father (Jeff Daniels). It's where I come from. But there was something ham-fisted about the super-hero fantasy friend played by Ryan Reynolds, who's so much better in The Proposal, which I'm happy to say opened great. (He looks starved, for one thing).
The LAT's indie columnist Mark Olsen covers the opening night festivities. Mingling at the after-party at the Napa Valley Grill were Melissa Leo, Dermot Mulroney and Chaz Bono; I talked to Groundswell's Michael London, Sidney Kimmel's Bingham Ray, The Gold Co's Joe Pichirallo and new Film Society of Lincoln Center chief Mara Manus, who's rooting for chum, new LAFF director Rebecca Yeldham. Here's a photo gallery.
I wish I had gone to Friday night's showing of Davis Guggenheim's ode to three blues guitarists, It Might Get Loud (which debuted at Sundance Toronto), because Jack White and Jimmy Page showed up. Here's an LAFF blue carpet video interview. Instead I went to a screening of the must-to-avoid French male fantasy The Girl from Monoco. No one warned me. Jeff Wells covered Saturday's screening and Q & A for the timely Iranian true story, The Stoning of Soraya M.
Saturday morning, I moderated a financing conference panel on the future of the indie biz, with producers Laura Bickford (Soderbergh's Che and Traffic) and Robert Teitel (Soul Food, Barbershop), Landmark Theatres CEO Ted Mundorff, Christian Gaines of Amazon/IMDb's Without a Box, and Oscilloscope owner Adam Yauch (Wendy and Lucy). They admitted being as much at sea as everyone else these days, although the producers were more downbeat than exhibitor Mundorff, who says business is good--up double digits this year from 2008. He said, it's not because there's less product (my theory)-- he still sees too many pics in the market--"People do want and will support the theatrical experience."
Mundorff is very worried about the trend of disappearing critics, because newspaper critics drive people to go to theaters in their local markets. "I have never seen a spike in box office because of an online critic," he said. (Scott Kirsner tweets: maybe it's hard to track impact of web reviews?)
Yauch said he was being presented with more product than he could ever manage to handle. He likes docs, but not because they're doing great business. It's more that he really wants to bring their messages to the world. He's hoping that people will start to bring more sanity to dealmaking and make films more affordable for everyone.
Bickford says the decrease in business on DVDs is a problem and means all costs have to come down--also foreign sales aren't what they once were, even when they were raising money for Che. Where the boxoffice to DVD sales ratio used to be approximately one dollar for one dollar, now for every five dollars of box office, you get one dollar from DVDs, Bickford said.
Bickford is high on the theatrical/VOD experience she had with IFC on Che. But that micro release was not what they had envisioned, and was partly the result of a slash in the number of indie specialty houses with even fewer Oscar slots. But everyone agreed VOD is where indie film distribution is going. And that film fests are playing an increasingly important role in getting the word out. And yes, movie distribution will wind up online. But nobody knows who's going to make money that way. Here's the LAFF podcast; IndieWire pulled out Ten Insights on Film Financing.
[Photo: Christian Gaines, Robert Teitel, Laura Bickford, Adam Yauch, Ted Mundorff]
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Is VOD truly the future of indie film distribution? Not all kinds of films would do well on VOD.
For example, according to LA Times, IFC Films' "Gomorrah" has grossed $1.5 million in US theatrical release, but this film's VOD revenue is only about $250,000.
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/12/entertainment/et-cannesvod12?pg=2
Posted by: marychan | June 22, 2009 at 06:54 AM