It's one of the oddities of this industry that journalists end up having more than one voice.
At festivals, many of us are in the odd position of offering our opinions, not pull quotes, for movies before we even get a chance to write.
And so it was on a sunny late morning when I walked out of Push, at its end, and encountered John Sloss in his rental car, asking for my thoughts.
Part of what I said is what I would end up writing. The movie could make real money, but only in the “urban” market.
But what I told him, in addition, was that even with the reviews that were already accumulating, Oprah would be the key to the film’s future… not just because she is influential… there are plenty of movies that have failed with her imprimatur… but because if her mid-range tastes were engaged in a big way, as they were for the book, that taste would represent a lot of the potential audience for this film. Get that Oprah endorsement and the movie becomes marketable, within limits.
I did not suggest that it should be a “Tyler Perry Presents” film, which is, I would guess, is where it will end up eventually. Smart.
Writing about these chats is not a part of my modus operendi. But itt was a funny feeling to read The New York Times reaffirming my first response to the film’s commercial potential… even if they are delusionally connecting studio marketing averages to the marketing budgets of Lionsgate and/or TWC. (Try half… $15 million and under… with very few exceptions.)
Further amusing me to no end is that Harvey Weinstein is now chasing this puppy, perhaps even screwed out of the movie by a suffering Cinetic that saw another million or two opening up at Lionsgate with that T.P. Connection. (It was William Morris that screwed Paramount Classics out of Thank You For Smoking in Toronto in a similar situation a few years ago.)
Unlike Lionsgate, TWC is NOT a company with a strong history of releasing films for black audiences. On the other hand, they now have Tom Ortenberg, who was probably drooling at the opportunity to top Lionsgate with TWC’s first real urban film.
Anyway...
"We" are all right and wrong about these things, looking back over the years. I guess we often try to remember the rights and forget those wrongs, though I am still frustrated that Black Dynamite hasn’t been more intensely embraced by some division of Sony. And though I thought the price was a bit too high, I thought that Hamlet 2 could be modestly commercial too.
As a voice coming in from the outside, we journalists do not control the mechanics of how a movie is sold or distributed. And as one plays the game of what could have been and what is, the truth is, we will never really know. The best laid plans sometimes fail and the worst ideas often become cash cows.
The same is true of Oscar, by the way. Things do change along the road. And when you are wrong about a film in a group of five, you will never know with Oscar whether you were pushing the #2 film, so close to a win, or the #5, voted on by less than 10%. In a media atmosphere of endless, harsh, snap, and often unqualified judgment, the kind of leaps that lead to great success and great failure are often muted by fear of public finger pointing. And we, who often talk about wishing that this industry would reach for more, become one major cause of the industry reaching for the warm, boring, relatively safe middle that makes writers whine, whine, whine.
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2009/02/tooting_my_own.html