Karina on SpoutBlog

• Skype sponsored a panel at Cannes today called “Buzz Builders,” and it featured a number of Friends of SpoutBlog: Alison Willmore, Michael Jones, Eugene Hernandez and, via the sponsor’s internet based calling system, David Poland.  Poland used the panel to announce that he’ll “be very surprised is still [around] three years from now.” Jeff Wells’ commenters used the opportunity to make cracks at Poland’s track record with predictions.
• Girish calls Robert B. Ray’s The ABCs of Classic Hollywood ” the best new film book I’ve encountered in a long while.” It sounds fascinating: “Ray’s starting point is this quote from Vincente Minnelli: “I feel that a picture that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They’re things that the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate.” Ray proposes a fascinating and unorthodox method for discovering these hidden things. For each film, he puts together a collection of ‘entries’, one or more for every letter of the alphabet.”
• Andy Horbal’s going all Web 0.5, using his blog to advertise his email list. I’ll let him explain: “…by the time my friends realized [a movie] had opened, I’d already seen it and was on to the next film.In response to this problem I started a mailing list for everyone I knew who was interested that discussed what was new, what looked good, and when I was planning on seeing everything….[A]fter about two months I believe I have a handle on what I’d like these e-mails to look like and I’m going public: you (yes, you!) can now subscribe to ‘The Movie E-Mail.’” Details at Mirror/Stage.

Above is a screencap of a ScreenDaily headline as seen in my Google Reader yesterday. I don’t actually subscribe to ScreenDaily, so I couldn’t read the story, but it appears to indicate that troubled distributor ThinkFilm’s international sales division has taken on the job of repping the troubling Down and Dirty Pictures, as well as the latest film from the guy who made Il Postino, for sale in Cannes.

This *could* be part of the answer to the question posed at the top of AJ Schnack’s second post today on THINK’s troubles: “What is Mark Urman doing in Cannes when the company has no money to pay anyone?” But it seems like the situation has become a little too dire for THINKFilm to bail themselves out on a couple of commissions.

AJ says that question was in turn posed to him by “one person who is owed tens of thousands of dollars by THINKFilm, debts that date back to last fall.” According to another of AJ’s sources, this person is not the only one who has been left in the lurch by the company’s money troubles:

One indie film veteran told me this morning that they were given a shifting series of excuses for months, somewhat recently told that the decision to shift operations from Toronto was to blame for the lack of payments. These excuses came to a halt recently when they were told by Mark Urman that they should not expect to see any payments.

If things are that bad, than the question become not “Why is Mark Urman in Cannes?”, but “Is Mark Urman’s trip to Cannes part of a last-ditch effort to get the company back on its feet––or is it a last hurrah?”

I don’t have enough information right now to begin speculating, and it seems like nobody else does, either. In my hunt for info on what kind of business THINK might be conducting in Cannes, I’ve found that most of the media has pretty much left this story alone since that single Variety story, which buried real dirt about the company’s troubles (ie: Alex Gibney not getting his Oscar bonus) under a headline that translated to “crisis averted.” AJ is certainly the only one out there trying to tell this story from the point of view of the filmmakers who have recently been in business with THINK, and it’s their stories that should matter most to an indie film (and especially, documentary) community that might soon have to suffer the loss of one of the few companies left in the business of giving truly independent films national release.

It’s interesting that such reporting falls to a blogger…but, of course, it’s Cannes. There are fois gras lolipops to eat.

Under discussion:

Bad Lieutenant  (1992)

• You know how sometimes, things happen and you can’t really believe they’re happening, and you wonder if maybe you’re in a dream, or if maybe the universe folded in on itself and you got caught in some kind of warp in space and time that allows things to happen that wouldn’t be allowed on an ordinary plane? Um. Werner Herzog is remaking Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant. With Nicolas Cage in the Harvey Keitel role.
• Tommy Lee Jones will “adapt, direct, produce and star” in a feature based on Ernest Hemmingway’s Islands in the Stream.
• James Garner, who is 80, is said to be recovering from a stroke. He had surgery on Sunday and his publicist says it went “great.”