Oh no...

The Irish Film Board is in Jeopardy
by Monika Bartyzel

There's a rather surprising and worrisome piece of news that's popped up over at The Hollywood Reporter (here and here). It seems that Ireland's department of finance is looking to save some cash and have recommended shaving €37 million (or $52.6 million) from arts and culture funding, which includes ending the Irish Film Board.

IFB chief Simon Perry has noted that the Irish media sector has boomed over the last couple decades, creating thousands of jobs. He says: "Closure of the Irish Film Board would mean that the production of Irish films will stop completely," which will not only end the industry, but hurt tourism as he claims nearly 50% of tourists visit Ireland after seeing it in a film -- a pretty fair estimate I'd say, given the number of people who drool when they see the country on the big screen.

The IFB was closed before, in 1987, but was re-established after a number of big-buzz Irish films found funding outside the country -- My Left Foot, The Crying Game, The Commitments. In recent years, however, you might remember the endearing and unforgettable Once, which was funded by the board.

LOOK!

I have nothing to say about the above picture from "Where the Wild Things Are" other than LOOK AT IT. Even if the movie is horrible, its sure as shit going to be gorgeous.

Fios and the Social Media

from Open The Dialogue

"During a recent move, I bit the bullet and switched my cable and Internet provider over to Verizon’s FiOS. And while the 3 inch hole in my bedroom wall isn’t trendy, the cool new features that my TV gives me certainly is worth it. See I turned on my TV this last weekend and saw Twitter. And it wasn’t a story on the News about Chad Ochocinco’s latest tweet. Instead real tweets were appearing on my screen!

This is the type of social media interaction that I love to see pop up in the home. Not only could I see what was trending but I could see what other people were saying about the show I was watching. Plus I could log into Facebook, look at pictures and update my status for that my particular TV show. And while I cannot manually update anything or see my friends on Twitter, the foundation has been laid for great things to come.

What you may ask? Well if one of the goals of social media is to share views quickly and efficiently; bringing them into another screen is only going to expedite that process. This provides an excellent place for fans (and brands) to form a community around their favorite shows much in the same way that hashtags do already. If sense of community and interaction is a basic element in social media, then adding interaction to another screen shouldy increase social media’s usage away from the computer. We are already seeing how the mobile web is growing, could TV be another element?"

Would you use Twitter or Facebook if it was on your TV?

This is how you do it!

500 Days of Summer Release Schedule

If you read the SLASHfilm Blog regularly, than you know that they fell in love with this film at Sundance called 500 Days of Summer. It’s a wonderful indie comedy about falling in love and breaking up. It’s a Fox Searchlight release, which means they are doing their patented platform roll-out, which means that it may not hit your neck of the woods the same time that it hits some of the larger cities.


Friday, July 17th

• Boston
• Chicago
• Dallas/Ft. Worth
• Los Angeles
• San Diego
• New York
• San Francisco
• Seattle
• Toronto
• Washington, D.C.

Friday, July 24th

• Atlanta
• Austin
• Baltimore
• Cleveland
• Denver
• Detroit
• Houston
• Indianapolis
• Madison
• Milwaukee
• Minneapolis
• Montreal
• Philadelphia
• Phoenix
• Portland
• St. Louis
• Vancouver

Friday, July 31st

• Albany
• Albuquerque
• Ann Arbor
• Boca Raton/West Palm Beach
• Buffalo
• Calgary
• Charlotte
• Cincinnati
• Columbus
• Edmonton
• Fresno
• Halifax
• Hartford/New Haven
• Honolulu
• Kansas City
• Kitchener
• Miami/Fort Lauderdale
• Nashville
• New Orleans
• Orlando
• Ottowa
• Pittsburgh
• Richmond
• Rochester
• Sacramento
• Salt Lake
• San Antonio
• St. John
• Tampa/St. Petersburg
• Tucson
• Victoria
• Winnipeg

Friday, August 7th

• Anchorage
• Asheville
• Baton Rouge
• Birmingham
• Boise
• Champaign/Decatur/Springfield
• Charlottesville
• Colorado Springs
• Corpus Christi
• Dayton
• Des Moines
• El Paso
• Fort Myers
• Gainesville
• Grand Rapids
• Harrisburg, PA
• Ithaca
• Jacksonville
• Knoxville
• Lansing
• Las Vegas
• Lexington
• Louisville
• Memphis
• Norfolk/Newport News
• Northampton/Springfield
• Oklahoma City
• Omaha
• Portland, ME
• Providence
• Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill
• Reno
• Sarasota
• Santa Fe
• Spokane
• Syracuse
• Tallahassee
• Tulsa

Bits & Pieces: Why The Studio System only fails BIG.

If you made a good film for 100-150k (we know its possible, we have SEVERAL examples) and give it moderate advertising for a modest limited release, say 5 to 10 major cities, then, based on statistics from IMDb, THR, Variety and indieWire you're most likely going to make your money back, including distribution costs, which vary.

If you make a film for over 10 million, say "The Ugly Truth" or "The Accidental Husband" and others of that nature, and you only make 5 million in wide release, then yes, you have failed. And because your cost is so darn high, you fail BIG. (we are not including DVD and Cable distribution) The lower your production cost (quality contingent) the better your chances for high profit on a wide release.

Most studios don't make films for under 10 million.

The reason I bring this up is because just recently, as in TODAY, the studio film "Moneyball", starring Brad Pitt, was re-greenlit. It was previously shelved just a day before principal photography began. THR is reporting that the studio hopes to recoup the 10 to 14 million they have already spent. What can we gather from this? Only one thing; Moneyball's preproduction costs were at least 10 million dollars. This is certainly not the FIRST time that's happened. And this is not to knock the film, which I'm sure will be decent now that Aaron Sorkin is writing the script. This question is for all of us who have worked in production: What do you think could cost so much before shooting?

Indiewire's Mid-Year Report: Specialty Box Office Winners & Losers

Since it’s hard to give a run down of everything good and bad in six months worth of box office, here’s a chart of 2009’s twenty highest grossing films tracked by the iW BOT (including films that screened only as an Academy-qualifier in 2008), as of July 5. Hopefully it will help fill in any blanks this article might have missed, and to make more clear just how scarce the “winners” really are:

1. Sunshine Cleaning (Overture Films) - $12,055,108
2. Away We Go (Focus Features) - $6,077,303
3. The Class (Sony Pictures Classics) - $3,766,810
4. The Brothers Bloom (Summit Entertainment) - $3,270,242
5. Two Lovers (Magnolia Pictures) - $3,149,034
6. Sin Nombre (Focus Features) - $2,527,470
7. Easy Virtue (Sony Pictures Classics) - $2,272,691
8. Is Anybody There? (Story Island) - $2,010,237
9. Whatever Works (Sony Pictures Classics) - $1,911,001
10. Rudo y Cursi (Sony Pictures Classics) - $1,781,243
11. Gomorrah (IFC) - $1,579,146
12. Valentino: The Last Emperor (Truly Indie) - $1,533,077
13. Every Little Step (Sony Pictures Classics) - $1,313,372
14. Summer Hours (IFC) - $1,313,372
15. Food, Inc (Magnolia Pictures) - $1,286,693
16. Sugar (Sony Pictures Classics) - $1,063,833
17. Cheri (Miramax) - $1,023,909
18. Moon (Sony Pictures Classics) - $945,279
19. Management (Samuel Goldwyn) - $910,955
20. Tyson (Sony Pictures Classics) - $857,488

It is important to note that these are not ALL the speciality films released out there right now and the unmentioned ones are by no means any less successful, but remember that these are in very limited releases. Some are growing. The marketing for just about all of them has been small, and quite out of the mainstream.

Could Fox's Reincarnation Detective Show Signal The Death Of Scifi?

from io9: A pair of detectives tackle old unsolved crimes by talking to the reincarnated victims. It sounds like a totally off-kilter premise for a TV show, but Fox's Past Life actually made me question the future of genre television. Spoilers ahead.

Past Life, airing spring 2010 on Fox, seems to be trying to piggyback on the success of Medium, a show I haven't actually seen. You have a kind of procedural crime-solving aspect to each episode, but there's also a spooky supernatural aspect. And it's all sprinkled with a dash of personal growth. It's very loosely based on an M.J. Rose novel called The Reincarnationist, but I don't think much beyond the idea of reincarnation got carried over.

Fox kindly sent us a DVD of this pilot, and it's got the same rough edges as a lot of other pilots. It's also saddled with the task of selling you on one of the oddest premises I've seen in quite some time. In a nutshell, Dr. Kate McGinn is a psychologist who works at New York City's Talmadge Center For Behavior Health, which is dedicated to studying "the human soul." McGinn specializes in "regression therapy," helping people to confront the stuff that happened in their previous lives which may be affecting them today. McGinn is almost paranormally sunny and cheery, except when she's comforting someone who's grappling with having been murdered.

And because (I guess) these cases often involve ferreting out the details of exactly what happened the last time around, the Talmadge Center hires a detective, Price Whatley, to help McGinn out. Whatley is the Scully to her Mulder — he doesn't believe in all this past life nonsense, but he needs the money since he lost his job at the NYPD. But Whatley harbors a secret pain having to do with his dead wife — and you won't be too shocked to hear that he's secretly hoping all this reincarnation nonsense will lead to some sort of reunion. (I'm picturing Whatley eventually having a very serious relationship processing conversation with a one-year-old, which is how old his reincarnated wife would be now.)

The Talmadge Center, incidentally, is quite swanky, and seems to be able to afford to keep Kate McGinn in classy therapist outfits. The clients we meet in the pilot, whose 14-year-old son is having weird murder-esque flashbacks, seem extremely well heeled. So I'm guessing we're mostly going to be concerning ourselves with the previous lives of the wealthy and troubled here. Besides Kate and Whatley, the Talmadge Center is also home to Dr. Malachi Talmadge, who stands around looking worried and occasionally butts heads with Whatley. And then there's Rishi Karna, the hard-working research assistant who barely pops up in the pilot.

I'm just going to pause here and wonder whose idea it was to call our tough-guy detective character "Price Whatley."

So I'm guessing that not every episode of this show will involve murder, per se. You could have a character who got mugged during the 1920s, and never got over it, and now is still pissed about it thirty years into a new incarnation. Presumably, there has to be some kind of crime every week, though, or Price Whatley won't have much to do.

Judging from the pilot, there'll be two tracks to every episode: the therapeutic track, in which the reincarnated person works through all of their issues under the sympathetic, tight-lipped smile of Kate McGinn. And then the mystery track, where Price Whatley searches through old case files and says things like, "I know it sounds crazy, but I really think we're on to something here." (That's not a quote from the pilot. That's just the sort of thing I can imagine Price Whatley saying.) Price Whatley, of course, is on the outs with his former superiors, but there are still some cops who owe favors to him and will let him research old unsolved crimes on the sly.

And then, at the end of every episode, the two tracks will converge somehow, as the tormented reincarnatee finally discovers the truth of what happened and gets some closure. And Whatley gets his man, or woman, or whatever. A crime is solved, a soul is healed, and the cycle of suffering turns a bit slower. Or something.

If you're thinking "This doesn't sound like my cup of tea," then it's probably not. I went into the pilot feeling somewhat apprehensive, and nothing about it was quite able to change my mind — although there was nothing wrong with any of it. The main thing that jumped out at me, honestly, was that Price Whatley should be a laughing stock. He's a former cop who now runs around chasing leads that come out of vague past-life visions from people who seem a bit mental. Nobody should be taking Whatley seriously at all, and yet somehow he manages to fulfill the same role as every detective on every procedural show ever. And the show invests a lot of energy in showing how professional and serious Kate McGinn and the rest of the Talmadge team are, with their jargon about regression therapy and their great resources.

So why do I feel as though this is some kind of watershed for genre television? Maybe because it feels like an uneasy fusion of a few different genres, into something that I'm not sure is ever going to be as thought-provoking as other Fox shows like Fringe or Dollhouse (or the late lamented Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.) Rather than boldly venturing into speculative territory, this show reflects the gathering consensus that any speculative themes must be subtle, vague, and swaddled in formula.

So you have the "team of experts" model of detective show, not unlike Bones or CSI. (Except that instead of having a laboratory, these people have a therapist's office.) You have the therapeutic, personal-growth type show, where every week someone is going to get past his/her trauma. And then you have the one strand of actual speculative fiction, the past life regression, which doesn't look like it's ever going to evolve into a mythos or ask deeper questions. It's just going to be the McGuffin — and it's going to allow us to have spooky J-horror-esque blurry flashbacks to something vague and terrifying happening in the 1960s or 1970s, which get slightly more detailed every time we see them throughout the episode.

It's a perfectly solid show, and a nice enough cast, but the genre element feels like weak tea. And I'm really not sure how the reincarnation-of-the-week format will pan out week in, week out. It seems like it could suffer from the same problems as Tru Calling, only worse. Still, I have a feeling this show could be a humongous mega-hit, and further drive genre television in the direction of being somewhat apologetic, and vaguely detective-oriented.