Good Monday everyone. I hope you survived the weekend...
THE DISTRIBUTORS 2018: A24
I continue my breakdown of film distribution companies and their films with a look toward what seems the most likely players for TFF #45. Today we turn to relative newcomer A24. A24 Appeared on the Telluride scene just a few years ago but has made a substantial splash in a short time. Here's their TFF run:
2017: Lean on Pete, First Reformed, Lady Bird
2016: Moonlight
2015: Room
2014: No film
2013: Under the Skin
2012: Ginger and Rosa
Seven films in six years with three Best Picture Oscar nominations and the win in 2016 for Moonlight. So you have to think that A24 is a player for 2018 but it feels like their cupboard is a bit bare. Two films that we might take a look at, Native Son and The Lighthouse are dated, at least currently, for 2019.
Maybe the biggest shot for A24 this year is the Jonah Hill directed and written Mid 90's. The film purportedly went into post production in late July of last year and has had relatively good buzz.
I, however, am a tad leery about thinking a Jonah Hill debut is necessarily a likely event for T-ride. Still, this film seems like A24's best shot at the fall fests including Telluride. Maybe their only one. Or, perhaps this year is like 2014 and A24 doesn't play this year.
Mid 90's chances to make TFF #45: 30%.
Tomorrow Sundance Selects and IFC Films.
GUEST DIRECTOR NAMED
We found out who will guest direct the 2018 edition of the Telluride Film Festival. It's author Jonathan Lethem.
Here's the press release from the Fest:
BERKELEY, CA – Telluride Film Festival, presented by National Film Preserve LTD., is proud to announce its 2018 Guest Director, Jonathan Lethem. The award-winning novelist, essayist and short story writer is set to select a series of films to present at the 45th Telluride Film Festival running over Labor Day Weekend, August 31 - September 3, 2018.
Festival organizers annually select one of the world’s groundbreaking artists to join them in the creation of the Festival’s program lineup. The Guest Director serves as a key collaborator in the Festival’s programming decisions, bringing new ideas and overlooked films to Telluride. In keeping with Telluride Film Festival tradition, Lethem’s film selections, along with the rest of the Telluride lineup, will be kept secret until Opening Day.
“Tom and I first met Jonathan through Criterion Collection,” said Telluride Film Festival executive director Julie Huntsinger. “Since then, we have forever been impressed with his knowledge of and enthusiasm for cinema. We are thrilled to have him join us for the 2018 Festival!”
One of America’s greatest contemporary writers, Jonathan Lethem was born in 1964 in Brooklyn, NYC to artist Richard Lethem and late political activist Judith Lethem. His impressive body of work spans 10 novels, five short story collections, a novella, two books of essays, a comic series and writings in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and Mc Sweeny’s. Lethem’s first genre-defying novel, Gun with Occasional Music (1994) experimented with science fiction and crime and gained him a strong cult following. In 1999, Lethem’s fifth novel Motherless Brooklyn met with significant commercial and critical success winning the National Book Critics Circle Award, Macallan Gold Dagger for Crime Fiction, Salon Book Award and was named Esquire’s book of the year. The film adaptation of Motherless Brooklyn, directed by Edward Norton and starring Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Willem Dafoe and Leslie Mann is currently in production and slated for a 2019 release. Lethem’s more recent novels include New York Times Bestseller The Fortress of Solitude (2003), You Don’t Love Me Yet (2007), Chronic City (2009), Dissident Gardens (2013) and A Gambler’s Anatomy (2016). In 2005, Jonathan Lethem was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.
“From the very beginning for me, my love for literature and my love for film were splendidly mixed-up and inextricable,” said Lethem. “I always saw the two great 20th Century storytelling forms as speaking to and through one another. So, when by my great good luck I fell in with Tom Luddy and Julie Huntsinger, I immediately recognized them as being of my tribe; they feel the same resonance and have designed their wonderful festival in the mountains to reflect it. When I learned they’d involved writers I admire like Michael Ondaatje and Rachel Kushner and Geoff Dyer in the heart of the program, I was thrilled – and envious! I’m still pinching myself in disbelief that it’s my turn to play at programming the Dream Multiplex.”
Past Guest Directors include Joshua Oppenheimer, Volker Schlöndorff, Rachel Kushner, Guy Maddin, Caetano Veloso, Michael Ondaatje, Alexander Payne, Salman Rushdie, Peter Bogdanovich, B. Ruby Rich, Phillip Lopate, Errol Morris, Bertrand Tavernier, John Boorman, John Simon, Buck Henry, Laurie Anderson, Stephen Sondheim, G. Cabrera Infante, Peter Sellars, Don DeLillo, J.P. Gorin, Edith Kramer and Slavoj Žižek.
The Guest Director program is sponsored by FilmStruck, Turner’s subscription on-demand service that offers film aficionados a comprehensive and constantly refreshed library of films including an eclectic mix of contemporary arthouse, indie, foreign, cult and classic Hollywood films. FilmStruck is the exclusive streaming home to the Warner Bros. classic film library and the Criterion Collection. FilmStruck was developed by Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and is managed by TCM in partnership with Warner Bros. and the Criterion Collection.
And coverage of the announcement from
Screen Daily and
The Movie City News.
DON GONE?
Poor Terry Gilliam.
After winning the right to screen his more than 25 year-in-the-making passion project, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, at Cannes, French courts have now decided that producer Paolo Branco owns the film's rights which almost certainly means the film's future is back to limbo status.
Soooo...for those of us that thought, we might see the film in Telluride in 10 weeks or so...looks very doubtful.
Reporting from a number of sources indicates that Branco's company is the sole owner of the film's rights and that he/they are ready to sue about anyone and everyone that was apart of the film's Cannes screening and French release.
Here's the story from
The Playlist.
That's it for this Monday. Come back for more tomorrow.
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