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Thursday, September 06, 2007

The ups and downs of movie distribution

This article from today's NYTimes details how a movie that was made over three years ago is just now being released. A behind-the-scenes look at the challenges of movie distribution: Anton Yelchin’s voice was still changing when, at barely 15 years old, he starred alongside Diane Lane and Donald Sutherland in “Fierce People,” an offbeat, surprisingly dark coming-of-age movie that Griffin Dunne directed in the spring of 2004... That a film with such a pedigree could sit on the shelf for so long (it’s already available on DVD in Argentina, Finland, Greece and Hungary) is one of the vagaries of a business in which too many movies from too many distributors are vying for too few weekends, good ones that are released theatrically often fail to attract an audience, and countless others go straight to video.

That “Fierce People” did not ultimately get tossed in the celluloid waste bin is a testament both to the persistence of its backers — among them the No. 2 executive at Lionsgate — and to the importance to a film’s marketing of not just money but attention. Read the whole article HERE.

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