“Dear David, the important thing is you told me the truth.” — Ingmar Bergman Early 1964 “It’s Paul Kohner. Do you want to talk to him?” asked my assistant Peggy. Why not? Paul, who was born in Germany and worked for several American studios in Europe in the ’30s, was a highly respected agent in Hollywood representing mostly talent born or based in Europe. The good news with Paul was that you never knew what he might have up his sleeve, since his representation was reasonably unpredictable. The other good news was that he was on the phone from Los […]
by David Picker on Apr 23, 2013Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright was a hit at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, but as the film made its way across the Atlantic, its stateside distributor decided to do a bit of rebranding. Against Kotcheff’s will, his intense fish-out-of-water tale was released in New York the following winter as Outback, a perfectly bland title for a movie that’s anything but. If the new name threw some film-goers off the trail, United Artists’ failure, as Kotcheff recalls it, to “spend 25 cents on publicity” made certain that the rest of its potential audience never heard about it in the […]
by Kevin Canfield on Oct 1, 2012