Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures and key player in yesterday’s Redacted press conference dust-up, responds to the chatter that the incident was a publicity stunt on Movie City Indie. As I noted earlier, DePalma has been milking the issue at a number of festivals, and it appears that Bowles finally reached a breaking point:

there was absolutely no calculation involved at the press conference yesterday. depalma has been on a toot about how we’ve compromised his film, and then he stated publicly at the official nyff press conference that in no uncertain terms mark cuban, for aesthetic reasons, wanted the photos out of the film. i had just arrived and this was one of the first things i heard. in an almost tourette’s like moment, i just blurted out out that it wasn’t true. [...] the fact of the matter is, none of the companies that have released depalma’s work in the last 30 years would ever touch this film. and because our company, which has had it’s fair share of controversial, uncompromising films, actually was the one stupid/brave/committed enough to do so, we end up being the evil force trying to shut down a director’s vision.

Bowles also notes that the Director’s Guild has sided against DePalma on the matter. You can read Bowles’ full comments here. Jurgen Fauth also has video of the press conference, which I’ve embedded above; you can here his take on the fracas here.

UPDATED 10/10: Last night, a commenter at Movie City Indie calling himself “A. Nonymous” disputed Bowles’ note that the DGA voted against DePalma, and stating that “an arbitrator ruled the company could use redacted photos in the film, rather than the unredacted photos Mr. De Palma wanted to include”–so it’s not so much that the DGA voted *against* DePalma, but that they sided *with* Magnolia/Mark Cuban.

And in the comments to this post, Matt V writes: “Check out the TypeKey profile name of the anonymous commenter on the mcindie site. DKorduner - Who, since he has a “DGA email address” is probably David Korduner, who is the General Counsel for the DGA. Why is he making (or at least trying to make) anonymous comments on a blog site?” A fair question, although perhaps the bigger issue, is what kind of lawyer tries to make anonymous blog comments using his work email address?