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Sharon Swart and Mike Jones in Variety are reporting that Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River, a character-based thriller starring Melissa Leo which was the first film I saw at Sundance and one of the best, has sold to Sony PIctures Classics for a low-to-mid six-figure sum. I’ll try to get some further thoughts about this film up on the blog before the end of the festival.
It happened maybe a day later than last year, but the acquisitions floodgates have opened a bit at the Sundance Film Festival. But it wasn’t the typical first-weekend films that enthused distributors. In Variety, Ann Thompson is reporting that Focus Features has bought Andrew Fleming’s Hamlet 2, which debuted at the unsexy time of Monday at 5:30 in a deal she pegs at over $10 million for worldwide rights. The film stars Steve Coogan as an English teacher who writes a sequel to Shakespeare’s play in other to rescue the school’s theater department. Perhaps more significantly, the film is directed […]
Sean McGinly’s debut feature The Great Buck Howard is a curious, small-scale relationship comedy/drama about an over-the-hill entertainer and his young, directionless-in-life assistant. Colin Hanks stars as the assistant, Troy, who signs up for the gig after impulsively bolting law school and the career track his dad, played by Hanks’s real-life dad Tom, is pushing him towards. A wiggy John Malkovich is the entertainer – specifically, a mentalist, whose claim to fame is having appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson 61 times (but never in the last ten years of the show, he ruefully admits as one point). […]
At a lunch here at the Kimball Art Center at the base of Main Street, the Sundance Institute announced their new “Creative Producing Initiative” today. “To work effectively with filmmakers, producers need an opportunity to develop their own skills and voices. The Creative Producing Initiative is designed to develop a producer’s creative instincts in the scripting and editing stages and to evolve their communication and problem-solving skills at all stages of realizing a project,” said Michelle Satter, Director, Sundance Institute Feature Film Program. Producer Paul Mezey (Sugar, Maria Full of Grace) gave the keynote speech, and he pledged his support […]
Over at the Film in Focus site, filmmaker Craig Zobel gives us five tips for making it through Sundance alive. I’m going to meditate on his tip number three — “Don’t Get All Stress Out Over the Parties” — rather than stewing over the invites I didn’t get. From Zobel: If you haven’t heard, the nightly parties at Sundance are real hard to get into. Even the fancy/rich/important have to stand in line sometimes. (For, like, two minutes. But still.) Let me go ahead and tell you what you are missing. A chocolate fondue fountain that has white chocolate on […]
was seen at last night’s black-out on Main Street. Over at Movie City Indie, Ray Pride has photographic documentation, like the picture of his I am posting here.
Ten percent more money wouldn’t have made that big a difference, but 10 percent more preproduction time would have helped. Our funding showed up so late in the game that nothing could be nailed down until two weeks before we started shooting. Casting and location scouting was last minute. Luckily my producers and crew were intrepid so we just marched on. Rehearsal with actors was minimal. I met most of the people in the smaller roles for the first time on the day they arrived on the set. The only thing that saved us was the script. The time spent […]
After 13 months of shooting in four states, a broken arm, lightning strikes, a once-in-a-generation power failure at our power-plant location (“stay here, you’re slightly more likely to survive if it explodes”), I should want at least 11 percent more money to make the movie, to deal with these contingencies, or else I’d be wise to force myself to write 99 percent less insanity into my script so I could make something simple. But since all that’s past, I’d say if I wished I had 10 percent more of something, it would be peace of mind. I wasted a huge […]
It’s very tempting to go for the obvious answer and say money, since most of the elements that one would kill to have 10 percent more of could be had with a little more money. Money would be the universal gift card with which one could purchase delicious items like more shooting days or film stock or editing time. I’m still in post so even thinking of a card that could buy me more mix time or music licensing is getting me a little worked up. But money seems like an easy answer, so I’ll try to think outside the […]
The question isn’t fair as it relates to my production. I don’t wish I had 10 percent more of anything. I deliberately set out to make a film without expectations. Expectations are what thwarted any creative impulse I’d had in the past. Instead I relied on whatever I found before me. It is no accident that our production company’s name is Found Films. From the get-go we knew we had severe limitations: intellectual, financial, technological and with regards to professional talent; so instead, we embraced those limitations, almost with glee. No interchangeable lenses? No problem. Let’s embrace the aesthetic and […]