March 29, 2024

Media Decoder: Movie About a Severed Leg Seeks Backers via Crowdsourcing

Mr. Cunningham, an ESPN sports analyst who has produced documentaries like “Undefeated” and “The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters,” on Sunday turned to the crowdfunding service Kickstarter. He is trying to raise money to finish what has been a nearly six-year labor of love: a film about the peregrinations of a severed leg that turned up in a smoker grill that was sold at a North Carolina storage unit auction in 2007.

For those who missed all the drama, the leg had been removed from one John Wood, who lost it in a 2004 plane crash and had been storing it, mummified, in the smoker. Shannon Whisnant, on finding the limb in his newly purchased grill, wanted to keep it, and maybe charge people for a look. Judge Greg Mathis, on his reality television show, gave Mr. Wood custody of the leg in November of 2007, but awarded Mr. Whisnant $5,000.

Mr. Cunningham said he had since been trying to capture this bit of what he called “true Americana” on film, and, not incidentally, to learn “what ultimately became of the leg.”

Speaking by telephone last week, Mr. Cunningham said the answer lay in spoiler territory. All will be revealed in a feature documentary, called “Finders Keepers,” that is being directed by Bryan Carberry.

With his Kickstarter campaign, Mr. Cunningham is seeking $80,000 to prepare the film for submission to festivals, including next year’s Sundance Film Festival. If he can raise $307,000, said Mr. Cunningham, he will use it to finish a final version for commercial distribution.

Much of the movie, he explained, is built around the interplay between Mr. Wood and Mr. Whisnant. But the underlying story, he said, also involves Mr. Wood’s path to sobriety.

“This isn’t a spoiler — he’s clean, and sober, and working in eastern North Carolina,” Mr. Cunningham said of Mr. Wood.

“And, he has a shaman.” MICHAEL CIEPLY

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/business/media/movie-about-a-severed-leg-seeks-backers-via-crowdsourcing.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Media Decoder Blog: Daily Variety, No Longer a Top Star, to Be Closed

LOS ANGELES — Daily Variety is dead. Long live Variety?

The failing entertainment trade publication on Tuesday said that it would discontinue its five-day-a-week newspaper after March 19. Weekly Variety, a magazine published on Sundays, will also disappear. One print magazine, published on Tuesdays, will replace them starting on March 26.

Variety.com will also officially drop its four-year-old pay wall and become free online.

“We look forward to welcoming back longtime Variety readers,” Jay Penske, chairman and chief executive of Penske Media Corporation, which bought the news outlet for $25 million in October, announced in Tuesday’s issue of Variety.

Variety’s editor, Tim Gray, will remain on the staff, although his role will be diminished. Three new editors will take over.

Variety’s changes on the surface replicate the playbook successfully adopted in 2010 by a rival, The Hollywood Reporter. Once the dominant source of entertainment trade news, Variety has suffered from mismanagement, vanishing advertisers and faster and more aggressive blog competitors.

Deadline.com, an entertainment trade news Web site that Penske Media also owns, had 2.3 million unique visitors in January, a 32 percent surge compared with the same month a year earlier, according to comScore. Variety.com plunged 28 percent, attracting 472,000 unique visitors.

January is a crucial advertising month for the Hollywood trade publications because of the start of the winter TV season, Oscar nominations, the Golden Globe awards and the Sundance Film Festival. (The Reporter had 4.9 million unique visitors in January, a 10 percent increase; TheWrap.com, another entertainment news site, had 841,000, a 15 percent decline.)

Variety reporters like Rachel Abrams and Marc Graser still break news, and Hollywood readers continue to seek out columns by Brian Lowry, the publication’s television critic. But Variety, once valued at more than $350 million, has for years been bleeding from defections and layoffs; some of its freelance reporters say they have not been paid since November. A Variety spokesman said the company was caught up.

More layoffs are coming in the weeks ahead, according to two people with knowledge of Mr. Penske’s plans. Mr. Penske and Michelle Sobrino, who took over as Variety’s publisher in the fall, had no comment.

A Variety spokesman said the new weekly magazine would be the a larger size, 13 1/2 inches by 10 1/2 inches. It will also be a bound publication. Variety, which is 108 years old, has an estimated 25,000 daily subscribers, according to analysts.

Three journalists, each holding the title editor in chief, will be charged with Variety’s turnaround. Claudia Eller will leave The Los Angeles Times to oversee film coverage. Cynthia Littleton, most recently Variety’s deputy editor, will lead TV reporting, and Andrew Wallenstein, most recently a TV editor, will oversee digital content, according to Variety’s announcement.

Publishing a weekly was considered Variety’s only option, aside from moving entirely online, and The Reporter has shown that it can work. Variety’s challenge is that it is losing its competitive edge — a daily print presence — while also arriving late at the retooled magazine party. The weekly Reporter, run by Janice Min and Lynne Segall, already has a solid foothold there. Underscoring how competitive the world of entertainment trade news has become, Deadline.com did not go easy on its corporate sibling. Its headline covering Variety’s news: “Can This Failing Trade Be Saved?”

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/variety-goes-weekly-names-three-top-editors/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Media Decoder Blog: Picturehouse, Small Film Distributor, Is Returning

LOS ANGELES — Picturehouse is back.

The small, feisty distributor of some daring indie films, including “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus,” is being rebuilt — independently of its former owner, Time Warner — by the film entrepreneurs Bob and Jeanne Berney and fellow investors.

Mr. Berney said in an interview Tuesday that he will be chief executive of the new company, while Ms. Berney will be its president. “We’ve acquired the Picturehouse brand and logo from Warner Brothers,” Mr. Berney said on Tuesday.

An initial deal is in place to distribute the films through Netflix in lieu of a traditional pay television agreement, after the movies’ release in theaters and in home entertainment formats like DVDs. And there is a first film on deck: A 3-D action movie titled “Metallica Through the Never,” that stars the band Metallica and has a concert in the middle of it.

Formed by Mr. Berney in 2005 as a joint venture between New Line Cinema and HBO, both units of Time Warner, the original Picturehouse briefly flourished as a distributor of independent film. But it was closed in 2008, as Warner pulled back from the small film business. The reconstituted company will be based in New York.

Mr. Berney, who had previously been associated with Newmarket Films, was briefly the chief executive officer of Apparition, and then became the distribution president of FilmDistrict, before leaving in 2011. Ms. Berney, who had been the director of public relations and marketing for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, held marketing posts at both Apparition and FilmDistrict.

On Tuesday, Mr. Berney said he is seeking additional financing for Picturehouse in its new incarnation. But he has set a release date of Aug. 9 for the Metallica film, and expects to be in business at the Sundance Film Festival that starts this week, looking to fill out a slate that he believes will include two or three films in 2013, and as many as six annually in the following years.

“We’ll do an aggressive platform release” of those films, he said. Mr. Berney described a strategy that begins with the release of films in a small number of theaters and then, with the successful pictures, may build to theater counts of a thousand or more.

Warner Brothers, he said, has contractual first-look at the foreign theatrical distribution of any film for which the new company acquires international rights.

As for the old Picturehouse logo with its brightly lit block letters over New York, it will now be seen on the new films. “The Picturehouse logo is just really close to my heart,” said Mr. Berney.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/picturehouse-small-film-distributor-is-returning/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Media Decoder Blog: G.E. and Cinelan to Produce Short Films About Innovation

LOS ANGELES — General Electric just can’t stay away from the movies. Barely eight months after ceding control of NBC Universal and its Universal Studios to Comcast, G.E. is diving into the documentary world as the financial backer of 30 three-minute films by directors including Morgan Spurlock (“POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold”), Joe Berlinger (“Crude”), Barbara Kopple (“Shut Up and Sing”) and Alex Gibney (“Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place”).

The idea is to join Cinelan, a publisher of videos that tell stories within three minutes or less, in generating very short movies about world-changing innovation, through a project that has yet to be titled, according to both Mr. Spurlock and Karol Martesko-Fenster, a Cinelan founding director.

“We’re really putting a call out to filmmakers, to see what they can come up with,” said Mr. Martesko-Fenster, who joined Mr. Spurlock in discussing the project by telephone last week. Mr. Spurlock suggested that a film about, say, the invention of microfinancing techniques might fill the bill, though no subjects have yet been set.

Mr. Spurlock, Mr. Berlinger, Jessica Yu (“Ping Pong Playa”) and others are expected to join Mr. Martesko-Fenster in introducing the project next month at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Cinelan and G.E. will be sponsoring get-togethers at a filmmakers’ lounge.

The first films should be ready to show at the Sundance Film Festival early next year. The minimovies, whatever their subjects may be, will also appear at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and elsewhere, and will simultaneously be circulated on the Web, both through a planned site and through syndication.

In a statement, Judy Hu, a G.E. executive who oversees advertising and branding matters, said her company hoped to “inspire people to continue to work to change the world for the better.”

The filmmakers, said Mr. Spurlock and Mr. Martesko-Fenster, will be paid a license fee for initial use of the films, but will ultimately own the rights. As for the festivals, they said, the project is a breakthrough for those who have long been trying to get G. E. on board.

“They’ve been talking to G.E. ad infinitum, to get them involved with the festivals” Mr. Martesko-Fenster said.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=243ee3f37e644ffd14e1a660ca5c7576