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I think it’s time to revisit this morning’s news on IFC’s future as a distributor, for as the day has progressed, there’s been some interesting discussion. Here’s a sampling of what the kids are saying on the webz.

Both the indieWIRE and the Variety pieces took IFC’s version of the story at pretty much face value. A common refrain in today’s reaction pieces has been, “Just because they’ve got the movies on the cable boxes, doesn’t mean anyone’s buying them. Have you seen download data? I haven’t. Someone should really get some.” Or, as Brian Newman puts it,

Excuse me, but “available” to 40 million subscribers is a worthless figure. IFC keeps spinning, as if their life depended on it (hint hint) … All this means is that four cable systems wanted to offer VOD, and IFC needed to suck up to them all in order to remain being carried on these services. IFC needs the cable operators more than they need IFC, and while a kid renting a film in Des Moines via VOD is great for Des Moines, its not ground breaking news. If Frankel was so happy with the numbers, perhaps he would have shared a few of them with us!

In response to that, Sujewa Ekanayake dug up this article, which contains a breakdown of box office grosses for a number of 2006/2007 IFC FirstTake releases. The article displays the figures to demonstrate that VOD is hurting theater business, and they’re certainly low enough to impress — of 15 films, only four grossed over $100,000, and most made less than $50,000.

But Newman says he’s “still not buying it” as evidence that FirstTake is making money, either in homes or in theaters. And even if IFC is breaking even, chances are filmmakers aren’t. “Net to producer - I don’t know, but rumor has it that IFC pays 50/50 after expenses. And after expenses can mean a lot of things.”

I maintain that IFC’s VOD distribution (of which, unlike Newman, I am a regular paying customer) is extremely good for the audience, and I think it must help films that would otherwise maybe play on two screens in New York and LA (if that) finder a wider audience. But to me the question is, what’s the end product? Already, I think most indie filmmakers on this level think of theatrical exhibition as an advertisement for a future DVD release. If we can safely say that no one’s getting rich off of VOD, is it at least functioning as a decent commercial for DVD sales? Or is it just eating into those potential profits, as this story suggests?

Under discussion:

Blade Runner  (1982)

Romance  (1999)

The Cat's Meow  (2001)

indieWIRE has the full lineup for the 2007 New York Film Festival, which is about six weeks away. Pretty much everything I expected to see on this lineup made it, including the highly anticipated latest works by Noah Baumbach, Julian Schnabel, Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant. But there are also some surprises — who could have foreseen a doc about Don Rickles made by the guy who directed “Thriller”?

You can click here to read the whole thing, but here are what stand out to me as highlights:

Blade Runner: The Definitive Cut 

Ridley Scott promises this is the last time he or anyone else is going to tinker with his now-considered-classic 1982 slice of dystopia. NYFF will screen this new version in advance of its upcoming release on DVD, in honor of the film’s 25th year anniversary.

The Axe in the Attic

An ultra-selective festival with no separate program for documentaries, NYFF is usually fairly light on non-fiction films. Of the handful of docs on this year’s slate, I’m most interested in this collaboration from Lucia Small and Ed Pincus delves into “the hardships and sorrows of the Gulf Coast Diaspora two years after Hurricane Katrina.”

The Last Mistress

Catherine Breillat’s adaptation of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s An Old Mistress is the Romance director’s most expensive film to date, and by some reports, her most conventional. It’s also one of two films on the NYFF lineup to star divisive sexpot Asia Argento, after Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Running Down a Dream

“Rarely, if ever, has the history and development of a major rock band been explored with the care and the depth with which Peter Bogdanovich approaches Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers,” promises the press release. I’m just interested to see what Bogdanovich has been doing since his last comeback, 2001’s The Cat’s Meow.

Under discussion:

The Bad and the Beautiful  (1952)

Some Came Running  (1958)

Sunset Boulevard  (1950)

With a five-day tribute to director Vincente Minnelli’s melodramas starting tonight at Anthology Film Archives, I stayed up late last night to watch The Bad and the Beautiful on TCM On Demand.

The Bad and the Beautiful marked Minnelli’s first real success as a director of “serious”, non-musical pictures. It’s less self-assured than Some Came Running (to my mind, the masterpiece of Minnelli’s melodramas), but seemingly a hell of a lot more personal. Released in 1952, it was the director’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning An American in Paris, and it landed smack dab in the middle of a series of Hollywood elegies to Hollywood.

In both tone and function, The Bad and the Beautiful can be seen as a bridge between Sunset Boulevard (1950) and A Star is Born (1954). If Billy Wilder’s Sunset represented Golden Era Hollywood at the height of its self-loathing, and George Cukor’s Star both satirized and condemned Hollywood’s ability to mobilize that self-loathing into reification of its founding myths, Minnelli’s almost naive faith in the sheer value of film as art allowed him to deconstruct that myth-making with sympathy for all involved. It’s industrial critique-as-soap opera, which makes it potentially the most accessible film to come out of this wave of highest Hollywood narcissism.

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