Longtime Hollywood employee/columnist Anne Thompson (with the aid of Tom Brueggemann prints Harvey Weinstein's rationale for the release of Bong Joon-Ho's SNOWPIERCER (probably the best movie you haven't seen or made time to see this summer) as Gospel:
http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/exclusive-harvey-weinstein-explains-how-snowpiercer-became-a-gamechanger-we-crunch-theater-vs-vod-numbers-20140721
SNOWPIERCER isn't quirky/cute like Wes Anderson's GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, but it had enough commercial potential (even in its current Harvey-disdained version)--plus the currently-hot Chris Evans playing the lead--to warrant a maximum1000-screen theatrical release a la Fox Searchlight.
Instead, SNOWPIERCER director Bong Joon-Ho was punished by The Weinstein Company for not delivering a shorter cut of the film. Thus, a limited theatrical release followed two weeks later by a "leaked" Video On Demand release from the TWC-Radius partnership.
Contrast this with something that occurred a year ago: Wong Kar-Wai's martial-arts epic THE GRANDMASTER was trimmed down from its original version and received a fairly wide TWC theatrical release without being dumped or going directly to VOD.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome (again) to Hollywood.
[UPDATE: The above blog entry was inspired by reading THOMPSON ON HOLLYWOOD on Facebook. I made the following comment there: I don't think this should be spun as a positive. Essentially, Harvey dumped a movie to show up its director who didn't want it cut.
Anne Thompson's reply:
I'd put it another way--obviously Harvey is putting his best spin on things-- but he took the chance of sacrificing potential theatrical upside and market share bragging rights--in order to experiment on this commercial VOD model. And he lacked confidence in the theatrical potential based on real market factors. He may have underestimated the theatrical potential of the movie, but the differential isn't that great, given the marketing spend for theatrical.
Showing posts with label Anne Thompson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anne Thompson. Show all posts
Monday, July 21, 2014
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney's contradictory statements on Bradley Manning sentence.
Here's Alex Gibney's (who recently directed a documentary on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks titled WE STEAL SECRETS) interview with veteran Hollywood columnist Anne Thompson (contradictory statements highlighted by me):
Anne Thompson: Is this heavy sentence a miscarriage of justice?
Alex Gibney: "Yes, he's been scapegoated. In a way that's the equivalent of the British army hanging someone from the yardarm. The Obama administration wanted to set an example, and have done it in a brutal way with forms of torture beginning with his confinement. They charged him with aiding the enemy, which thankfully he was found not guilty of, but also of many counts in the Espionage Act. This is the great crime of the Obama administration, trying to turn leaks into treason when they're really not the same thing."
Is the Obama administration, in its fight against terrorism, continuing the practices of the Bush era?
"In this way they're behaving worse. It's the Obama administration going overboard, using the Espionage Act to prosecute leakers. In this way they've gone beyond what the Bush administration has done. You have to look at the overall spectrum of what the Obama administration was willing to do in the larger sense of justice. The Obama administration refused to prosecute anyone for torture. Jose Rodriguez of the CIA intentionally destroyed videotaped enhanced interrogations which were evidence of crimes. Nothing happened; he wasn't even prosecuted. While Manning gets 35 years for leaking material, not to a foreign government, and he didn't get any money. He may have been naive, but he leaked it to the world and the press because he thought it was important information that people should know. Much of the information he leaked was important."
I'm glad that I saw that drone video.
"The video is shocking and frankly should never have been classified. The Army claims it wasn't, but they play games all the time with classification. Documents show that both the Bush and Obama administrations grossly underrated war crimes in a context of mendacity. Revealing their criminality was important for public debate in a democracy. I want to hold them to account, but I don't want a world where every private leaks everything on his computer. He pled guilty on a number of charges. They're charging him as a spy. He did not damage U.S. national security. He did cause embarrassment. But to send someone away for the rest of his life for causing embarrassment seems a perversion of justice."
Here's a link to the Thompson On Hollywood column with the interview:
http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/wikileaks-director-alex-gibney-reacts-to-bradley-mannings-35-year-sentence-a-perversion-of-justice
Anne Thompson: Is this heavy sentence a miscarriage of justice?
Alex Gibney: "Yes, he's been scapegoated. In a way that's the equivalent of the British army hanging someone from the yardarm. The Obama administration wanted to set an example, and have done it in a brutal way with forms of torture beginning with his confinement. They charged him with aiding the enemy, which thankfully he was found not guilty of, but also of many counts in the Espionage Act. This is the great crime of the Obama administration, trying to turn leaks into treason when they're really not the same thing."
Is the Obama administration, in its fight against terrorism, continuing the practices of the Bush era?
"In this way they're behaving worse. It's the Obama administration going overboard, using the Espionage Act to prosecute leakers. In this way they've gone beyond what the Bush administration has done. You have to look at the overall spectrum of what the Obama administration was willing to do in the larger sense of justice. The Obama administration refused to prosecute anyone for torture. Jose Rodriguez of the CIA intentionally destroyed videotaped enhanced interrogations which were evidence of crimes. Nothing happened; he wasn't even prosecuted. While Manning gets 35 years for leaking material, not to a foreign government, and he didn't get any money. He may have been naive, but he leaked it to the world and the press because he thought it was important information that people should know. Much of the information he leaked was important."
I'm glad that I saw that drone video.
"The video is shocking and frankly should never have been classified. The Army claims it wasn't, but they play games all the time with classification. Documents show that both the Bush and Obama administrations grossly underrated war crimes in a context of mendacity. Revealing their criminality was important for public debate in a democracy. I want to hold them to account, but I don't want a world where every private leaks everything on his computer. He pled guilty on a number of charges. They're charging him as a spy. He did not damage U.S. national security. He did cause embarrassment. But to send someone away for the rest of his life for causing embarrassment seems a perversion of justice."
Here's a link to the Thompson On Hollywood column with the interview:
http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/wikileaks-director-alex-gibney-reacts-to-bradley-mannings-35-year-sentence-a-perversion-of-justice
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