Village Smackdown: The Pioneer vs. The Voice
9/19/2006 4:00:00 PM
The folks at the Pioneer Theater in New York’s East Village are not very pleased with a recent article by Jessica Winter in the Village Voice, and frankly, I can’t blame them. In an article talking about the sudden cancellation of the Howl Festival, and of the general disarray of the Federation of East Village Artists (FEVA), which was founded by Two Boots founder Phil Hartman, who also owns The Pioneer, Winter spent a couple of paragraphs attacking The Pioneer as “a veritable assembly line of disgruntled ex-employees and associates since it opened in 2000” and quoting from several people associated with the theater. Among them, Winter noted “one local filmmaker and curator who has shown her work at the Pioneer jokes about her $6.20 cut of a well-attended screening.”
Now, I have no idea who this local filmmaker is, and what her idea of a “well-attended screening” is, but I have to speak up here. I have had some dealings with the Pioneer over the last couple of years: My feature film New Guy screened there for a few weeks in 2004. I also organized a two-day tribute to the late Mississippi filmmaker and Magnolia Festival founder Ron Tibbett in 2005. And I also helped arrange for a screening of the films of experimental documentarian Bill Brown in late 2005.
Furthermore, I know a number of other filmmakers who have screened films at the Pioneer – among them, my own wife. And throughout, the Pioneer has proven itself to be a scrupulously organized and responsible group of people with which to do business. At the end of New Guy’s run, I was given an absurdly detailed spreadsheet giving me the audience breakdowns for each show, plus the calculations of the split of the proceeds with the Pioneer. Heck, they even promptly re-issued my check after I (stupidly) threw the first one away by mistake. Everything was done in a very timely, incredibly professional, responsible fashion. I was given nightly updates on how each screening went. Every question I asked was responded to promptly.
These may sound like petty details: After all, wouldn’t all responsible businesses do such things? Well, sure. But welcome to the world of independent filmmaking. I saw more money from my dinky one-show-a-night run at the 99-seat Pioneer than plenty of other filmmakers I know who signed 5-figure distribution deals with independent film companies. Many of them have yet to be paid a dime.
All along the way, Pioneer programmer Ray Privett and his staff were incredibly generous and co-operative. The Pioneer does take a set amount from the proceeds before the split – but they are very upfront about it. I’m sure they’d love to pay more. I’m also sure they’d love to be able to take out full-page ads in The New York Times advertising their films, and blow money on junkets. But the financial reality of their situation precludes that. Sometimes, they’ll even throw beer-and-pizza premiere parties for filmmakers in the next door Den of Cin. Okay, it isn’t exactly free-flowing Veuve at the Chateau Marmont, but you’ll have to look elsewhere for that.
 | | Rob Corddry and his Blackballed crew (from left: Producer Darren Goldberg, Corddry, director Srant Sersen, and actor Brendan Burke) at a recent screening of their film at The Pioneer. |
More pertinently, Privett, himself an intense workaholic whose obsessive nature is a breath of fresh air in the chaotic world of East Village creative types, has shown an admirable degree of risk-taking with regards to programming. He recently approached an online film newsgroup and asked them to pick a film for him to screen. There were no financial demands or anything like that. Basically, he thought they had good taste, and that a film they picked would be worth screening. When was the last time the Angelika did something like that? When was the last time anyone, anywhere, did something like that?
Here’s the real problem with Winter’s article: By dissing the theater in passing, she refuses to acknowledge that The Pioneer of today is very different from The Pioneer that opened in 2000. “The article does not differentiate between the Pioneer Theater before the current administration and the Pioneer Theater of the last two and a half years,” says Privett, who started in mid-2004. “My time has been a time of reform, response, clarity, paid bills, and good care for prints, at severe odds with the preceding administrations. I got bills paid that were incurred before my time… Sometimes everyone is disappointed by how much money comes in, but no one misrepresents anything, and we pay out according to the deals made beforehand even when it is clear we have not cleared our own overhead. Sometimes, even in my era, we've paid out a little late. Guilty. But we pay out according to the deals cut beforehand. I've probably booked films from 800 sources in the time I've been here. Ask any of those sources whether we've paid out according to the deals made beforehand. Any of them. If anybody has a problem, tell them to call me.”
 | | A full house at The Pioneer |
Indeed, even though Winter has apparently not done due diligence on her article, the distinction is apparent in some of her sources. She quotes the filmmaker Todd Verow, a former manager at the Pioneer, as saying that “It was rough going the first few years…I think it was an organizational problem—they had a really hard time getting all their paperwork together. They didn't really know what they were doing. Their hearts were in the right place." Verow’s comments suggest that he’s talking about The Pioneer of the past. More significantly, Verow himself, as a filmmaker of some repute, recently screened his film Vacationland at the theater. “The theater has shown a number of films he has made,” says Privett. “No other theater in New York would have opened Vacationland, and the film was mutilated by the press…But Vacationland remains a booking of which I am proud…I am glad that the Pioneer served as a platform for Mr. Verow to achieve some more well-deserved attention as a filmmaker.”
I think Privett sums it up best in this way: “My era at The Pioneer has been an era of reformation…Anyone who has paid any attention to The Pioneer over its entire history knows that. I am in some ways guilty of Calvinist clarity and fire and brimstone. So be it; for such criticisms I am ready to answer. But [Winter’s] piece is like an attack on a profoundly reformed church for being guilty of medieval Catholic excess. She completely overlooks the historical transition.”
This may seem like a lot of hullabaloo over a few small grafs in a much larger article about much bigger matters. But when we’re talking about small businesses like The Pioneer, ones that don’t have big marketing budgets and rely on customer loyalty and community to thrive, this sort of thing really hurts, and can irreparably damage reputations. More importantly, she is just plain wrong. I’d say her facts were wrong, except that she doesn’t actually present any facts against The Pioneer.
Here’s one fact I can present: Tomorrow night at 7 pm The Pioneer is screening a 35mm print of Fritz Lang’s awesome, and awesomely-unseen Human Desire. It will probably be your only chance to see it for a long, long time. Do yourself a favor and check it out.
-- Bilge Ebiri
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Awesome Casting News, Plus Filler
9/19/2006 1:00:00 PM
- First, the good news: The supremely beautiful and talented Zooey Deschanel has reportedly replaced Pink in Penelope Spheeris’s Janis Joplin biopic, The World According to Janis. I like Pink and all, but why go for Dolores Del Rio when you can get Vivien Leigh? Or something.
- On the slightly more mundane side, Brad Pitt is being rumored as Tom Cruise’s replacement in the next Mission: Impossible film. If it’s true, I’ll tell you why: Damage control. It’s because $135 million for a Brad Pitt movie is considered good box office, whereas the same amount for a Tom Cruise movie is considered a flop.
- Also, Will Ferrell will not do Elf 2. This can only be a good thing, much as I liked the original.
- Also also, LL Cool J will star in a new TV series, called The Man, “as an undercover LAPD cop who spends the nights running sting operations to break criminal rings and the days raising his three adopted kids…The cop's cover is being ‘the man’ - he is the go-to guy in the upper echelon of Los Angeles, a high-octane hustler who can do anything, from getting into the hottest nightclub in town to scoring tickets for a Lakers game.” Is it possible this won’t suck?
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Non-Controversy of the Week: Movie City News versus The New York Times
9/19/2006 12:01:00 PM
When MCN columnist Len Klady wrapped up his Toronto fest coverage, he ended his piece by noting that, “The New York Times has decided it won't print reviews of selections playing at the upcoming New York Film Festival. Though the exact reasons behind the decision are a bit sketchy, it appears the publications was persuaded by a film industry emissary that the potential blot on a movie was neither good for it or them.”
Well, the Times’ Manohla Dargis took exception to that, saying not only that the Times “wanted to cover the festival the way we cover other festivals -- to look at the programming, and the ideas that come out of the programming, not just the individual titles,” but also that film industry emissaries had nothing to do – and will have nothing to do – with how they cover the films at the NYFF.
Movie City News then posted a clarification, noting that “the group of NYT film critics have shown, if [a film is] so compelling as to demand more coverage, they will give it more coverage. Because if there is one thing that is undeniable about the group there now, it's that they love film and will do all they can to support the great and easily overlooked films that don't have enough support, even if it means paying less attention to commercial product.” And everyone made nice.
There’s only one thing I would add. It’s not so much the potential of the Times trashing a movie during the festival that’s the problem. (After all, most of the films that screen at the NYFF come with a certain amount of critical approval from places like Cannes, Berlin, and Venice) It’s the review itself. There are some arthouse theaters in New York that often try not to screen films that have shown at the NYFF – not only because these films will have already been exposed to a large chunk of their potential audience at the festival, but also because their primary review will have appeared in the Times during the festival. (Often, the paper just prints excerpts of the festival review when a film is eventually released.) In other words, the festival coverage winds up precluding major coverage during a film’s release (except with the bigger titles, obviously). I can’t help but think that that’s part of the reason as well.
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Video of the Day: An Upbeat Guide to Getting Your Idea on TV
9/19/2006 11:00:00 AM
Not exactly film-related per se, but this hilarious clip from the British show Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe, about the process of getting your idea on to TV, applies to the film world as well. Bitter, to say the least.
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Morning Deal Report: Sam Jackson Gets His Own Company, Perfume Trumped, Scarlett Curvy and Proud
9/19/2006 10:00:00 AM
- Samuel L. Jackson has formed a production company (no name as of yet) and has signed a “two-year, first-look production deal” with New Line Cinema. Apparently, the “success” of Snakes on a Plane was what clinched the deal, which is quite shocking, given that the film is going to wind up making less money than Lady in the Water. Spin spin spin…
- Although Tom Tykwer’s adaptation of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is burning up the box-office in Germany, the critically mixed film will not be that country’s official entry for the Foreign Language Film Academy Award. Instead, as Green Cine Daily notes, that honor will go to The Lives of Others, by director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (great name, btw), which has already won a whole bunch of awards, including seven Lolas (Germany’s equivalent of the Academy Award).
- Okay, I’ll admit it. I tend to miss certain types of news items. I have a blind spot for Star Trek news, and other Sci-Fi channel type tidbits. (I consider this a good thing, btw.) But still, not realizing that there are plans afoot for a freaking Star Wars TV series, man? That’s just inexcusable. For that I apologize. Although, given that Edward Furlong is apparently being considered for a lead, maybe I shouldn’t.
- The makers of an indie movie called Rune will be “giving away iPod downloads of the entire 90-minute feature,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. The download version will become available Oct. 10, simultaneously with the DVD going on sale for $10 on RuneThe-Movie.com.” Good for them, but I have to take director Arayna Thomas to task for saying that iPods are “the new movie theater for independent filmmakers." Um. No. That would suck.
- Scarlett Johansson is “happy with her curvy figure.” In other breaking news: Grace Kelly Still Dead.
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More Sex Please, We're British
9/18/2006 3:00:00 PM
While the MPAA in the US remains perpetually stuck in the Middle Ages, it looks like John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus has gotten off easy with the British censors. The Guardian puts it best:
"It is a feel-good romantic comedy in the traditional sense, with break-ups and reconciliations alongside laughs and tears. But it also has more real and graphic sex than any other film to be given a certificate for the mainstream cinema.
"Shortbus begins with a startling scene of self-fellatio and has three ejaculations before you have made a mark on your popcorn. There are unsimulated scenes of straight sex, gay sex, orgy sex, onanistic sex, lesbian sex, voyeuristic sex and probably other categories besides.
"Yet Shortbus has received a standard 18 certificate, and will get a gala performance at the 50th annual London film festival. The festival's artistic director, Sandra Hebron, praised the censors' decision. 'It says a lot about the [British Board of Film Classification] that they have started to credit people with the ability to make choices,' she said."
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Forgotten Films: LUNA (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1979)
9/18/2006 1:00:00 PM
Bernardo Bertolucci isn’t exactly a filmmaker who needs an introduction. One of the more resilient of the European directors who emerged in the 1960s, the man has signed his name to at least one acknowledged uber-masterpiece of world cinema (The Conformist, an influence to practically every major filmmaker of the 70s), one bona-fide filmic watershed (the scandalous Last Tango in Paris), one genuine film maudit (the star-studded, Hollywood-financed, five-hour Marxist epic 1900), and one acclaimed Oscar juggernaut (The Last Emperor, which marked his return to the international spotlight in 1987).
Along the way, he also made a number of smaller, lesser-known films. Luna has always seemed to be an oddly overlooked work in his career. (Even though it’s a Twentieth Century Fox production, it’s never been available on any home video format.) Following on the heels of the director’s very public fight with the producers of 1900, it was an attempt to make a smaller English-language film for an American studio. What emerged was a film perhaps even more sexually daring than Last Tango, and in its own way even more controversial than 1900. It was also, perhaps, one of the most personal, raw films Bertolucci ever made.
The film begins with a typically Bertolucci-esque scene of Oedipal symbolism, and it’s probably a good indication of what to expect from the rest of the film. A young baby is fed honey by his beautiful mother (Jill Clayburgh) in a seaside villa somewhere in Italy. The baby starts to cough, and cries. A man comes by with a crate of fish and begins gutting them. In the background, an elderly woman plays a piano. The mother, seemingly in defiance, puts on a pop record by Peppino di Capri, comes up to the man, and begins to do the twist with him. (The man holds a knife in one hand, and a fish in the other, giving their dance an oddly suspenseful edge.) The baby begins to walk away from this scene, but he gets stuck on some twine, so that as he walks the twine stretches back to the mother, a symbolic umbilical cord. The film then cuts to a twilight bicycle ride between baby and mother in which the baby looks up and sees her face framed with the full moon behind them. The moon (aka, Luna) thus becomes a symbol of the mother -- more specifically, of the child’s connection to the mother.
 | | Jill Clayburgh in the opening scene of Luna |
After this intro, the film jumps ahead a number of years. The mother, Catherine, is a world-famous soprano living in Brooklyn with her businessman husband and her teenage son Joe (Matthew Barry, making quite an impression in his film debut). After the husband dies suddenly, Catherine takes Joe to Italy, where her neglect and self-absorption help lead him into heroin addiction. When Catherine realizes that her son is spinning out of control, she tries to intervene and to help him. Unfortunately, one of her ideas is to actually buy him heroin and to try to help him administer it. The desperation of this relationship between mother and son, which has always hovered on the edge of taboo, eventually leads to incestuous longings.
The scandalous nature of the interaction between Catherine and Joe tends to color most viewers’ reactions to the film. But look closer and you’ll see that Bertolucci creates a very subtle back-and-forth here, where the son’s adolescent desperation helps unravel Catherine’s own feelings of inadequacy and loneliness. Bertolucci’s previous films had focused on father figures; in Luna we see how the absence of a father figure sends the respective parts of this family spinning off in their own directions. The man that died in Brooklyn is eventually revealed not to be Joe’s real father; his real dad is that shadowy figure dancing with Catherine on the opening scene. Luna thus turns into a search for a father figure, an attempt to complete this broken nuclear family.
 | | Matthew Barry |
Luna is no masterpiece. Bertolucci’s films have always juggled his fondness for remarkably sensuous visuals with more mundane story demands, and Luna tends to drift in the middle, when it becomes basically a chamber piece between mother and son, adrift in their ramshackle Italian villa. I suspect that Bertolucci is taking a page from Ingmar Bergman’s book here, but he doesn’t quite have Bergman’s dramaturgical rigor. Perhaps, though, he possesses something just as valuable: A remarkable visual sense of mood and space that infuses even the simplest gesture or pan with meaning. As the camera tracks around this shadowy, stage-like space, Bertolucci maintains a palpable atmosphere of Freudian dread; we get the sense that anything is possible. It also helps that he has two very fine actors to carry much of the load.
The final act of Luna, in which Catherine and Joe visit the Parma area, where Catherine spent her youth and which is full of nostalgic meaning for her, gives the film extra resonance. For it is in these scenes that the film becomes clearly a journey into the director’s own past. (He too is from Parma.) Catherine’s visit to her old teacher, who doesn’t remember her, recalls a similar scene in The Conformist. A character from The Spider’s Stratagem, notable for his obsessive discussion of ham, pops up again as an innkeeper discoursing on salami. At one point, Catherine and Joe visit the same farm that was the setting for 1900; the bicycle used by Gerard Depardieu’s character from that film is still leaning against one corner. There are echoes in earlier parts of the film as well: Joe leaves his gum under the railing of a balcony, just like Marlon Brando did at the end of Last Tango. There’s even a nod to Bertolucci’s mentor Pier Paolo Pasolini, who wrote the director’s first film, in a scene where a homosexual (played by Pasolini regular Franco Citti) tries to pick Joe up in a dive bar. Thus, we begin to sense that Catherine’s journey into her past also serves that same function for Bertolucci.
Which raises a tantalizing question: Is Bertolucci indulging in a bit of self-criticism by depicting a character whose singular dedication to her art has alienated her from the rest of her world? Perhaps the director, reeling from the brutal battles (and resultant financial failure) of 1900 found himself doing some soul searching in its wake. Is Luna as much an act of exorcism for its director as it is a movie about a troubled soprano and her junkie son? The film, which ends on a powerful, optimistic note, suggests that art and the world are mutually dependent. Catherine needs her family to be together in order to sing again; but once she sings, she can help hold it all together. The film’s final shot of Catherine, reaching towards the camera, her mouth wide open in song, might just be the most insistently personal image in all of Bertolucci’s cinema.
 | | Bernardo Bertolucci |
Of course, it didn’t quite work out. While opening to some positive reviews, and despite Clayburgh’s very strong performance, Luna didn’t exactly repair Bertolucci’s reputation. He returned to Italy and made another film in the early 80s, Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, which also went nowhere. It wouldn’t be until The Last Emperor that the director would become a brand name again. Luna is now rarely mentioned, and rarely ever screened. There are, however, legit-release German and Finnish DVDs of it out there, and crappy VHS copies pop up on eBay now and again. A film this beguiling certainly deserves better, and you’d think that Fox would at least have tried to capitalize on Bertolucci’s later successes by releasing the film. This December will bring us Paramount’s long overdue DVD releases of The Conformist and 1900. It seems like a pretty good time to bring awareness to this underseen gem.
--Bilge Ebiri
Previous Forgotten Films Columns:
-August 28, 2006 -- OUR MOTHER’S HOUSE (dir. Jack Clayton, 1967)
- August 14, 2006 -- THE CHOCOLATE WAR (dir. Keith Gordon, 1988)
- July 31, 2006 -- THE STRANGER (dir. Luchino Visconti, 1967)
- July 17, 2006 -- WALKER (dir. Alex Cox, 1987)
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Mindbender of the Week: Tombstone, Un Film de Snake Plissken?
9/18/2006 12:01:00 PM
"[George Pan] Cosmatos, no offense, was never anything but an amiable hack -- a guy who did the shots, got the lighting right, etc. This is more or less acknowledged in the article by [Kurt] Russell, who swore to Cosmatos he would never tell the truth about their deal behind the making of Tombstone while he was alive... [I]t was he, Russell, who went out and raised the production dough through biking pal Andy Vajna, [and] after Tombstone's original director Kevin Jarre was canned Russell decided to "ghost" direct Tombstone by hiring Cosmatos to shoot it like he was told to and nothing beyond that."
- Holy shit. Did Kurt Russell secretly direct Tombstone?
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Video of the Day: Ocean Symphony with Jack Black
9/18/2006 11:00:00 AM
Hey, check it out. Here’s a hilarious PSA starring Jack Black as a symphony conductor, and the likes of Henry Winkler, Madeleine Stowe, Dave Foley, and Tom Arnold as musicians – not only is it for a good cause, but it’s also fuckin’ hilarious.
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Morning Deal Report: Clooney Goes For the Pigskin, Plus Toronto Winners, Toronto Deals, and More
9/18/2006 10:00:00 AM
- The recent success of football pics has evidently made its impression on George Clooney. “Repping what could be his most commercial film to date as a director, Universal has set George Clooney to helm and star in football pic Leatherheads, which U has labored to get made for a decade. Renee Zellweger is in negotiations to co-star in the romantic comedy set against the backdrop of pro football's formation in the 1920s.”
- The People’s Choice prize at the Toronto Film Festival went to the “New York-set redemption tale” Bella, from Mexican-born Alejandro Gomez Monteverde. Second place went to Patrice Leconte's Mon meilleur ami, and Third Place went to the documentary Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, from Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck. And Death of a President, the Dubya assassination movie, received the juried Fipresci Prize. My homeboy Ozer Kiziltan’s Takva -- A Man's Fear of God, a Turkish/German co-production, received “the inaugural Swarovski Cultural Innovation Award, selected from the fest's Visions program slate.” Full list o’ winners here.
- The big deal at the Toronto Fest turned out to be El Cantante, the “salsa music-filled biopic” of salsa legend Hector Lavoe, starring Jennifer Lopez and her husband, Marc Anthony as an onscreen husband and wife. After much negotiation, Picturehouse bought the $18 million film for $6 million, which sounds like a bargain until you realize what happened the last time J-Lo starred in a romance with one of her real-life paramours.
- Bryan Singer will produce Superman Returns and X2 writer Mike Dougherty’s directorial feature debut, Trick 'r Treat, “four interwoven stories that take place on Halloween with such characters as a staid high school principal who is a Halloween serial killer, a college-age virgin seeking that special guy, a woman who hates dressing up for Halloween and whose husband is obsession [sic] with the holiday and a group of young teens who pull a cruel prank.” Hey, why pay for one cliché when you can get four?
- The ping-ponging James Mangold-Russell Crowe-Christian Bale Western remake 3:10 to Yuma has finally found a US distributor in Lionsgate.
- Some prospective photos of what a live action Iron Man might look like have emerged. Do they make you happy or sad?
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