Bad Lit passes on the news that Diego Pillco, the construction worker who admitted to killing actress and Waitress writer/director Adrienne Shelly, has been sentenced to 25 years behind bars for the crime.

I still get sick to my stomache when I think about this story. I wrote a story for FILMMAKER Magazine last year about the Waitress team’s push to both capitalize on and redirect attention away from the murder when selling the film, first at Sundance and then to the mainstream art house audience. Waitress may not be the highest work of art, but it’s undoubtedly a personal, writer/director driven film, and I was particularly interested in the idea that the actors and producers who survived Shelly were tasked with uneviable responsibility of protecting her vision in her absence.

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Fox Searchlight has sent a cease and desist notice to CC2K, a fanboy-friendly pop culture site, demanding that they take down a review of recent WGA winner Diablo Cody’s script for the upcoming teen horror flick, Jennifer’s Body. A message from the site’s editors where the review used to be notes that the C & D was “very polite,” but the net result is, all the same, “no snarky review of Diablo Cody’s new script for you!”

Kate Coe is tracking some of the surrounding chatter at FishbowlLA, including a snarky comment from a Hollywood Elsewhere reader implying that the C & D’s are part of a wider conspiracy on the part of Fox Searchlight to “prevent anything or anyone from getting in the way of this processed fairytale.” We’re all for pointing fingers at Searchlight’s processing department, but what seems even more interesting are signs that, in this case, there might be a double standard. This can’t be a pure issue of copyright, because it seems that Searchlight has ordered the removal of one script review, whilst letting another’s site’s script review stand.
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Fox Searchlight sent out a press release this morning “announcing” that Juno has crossed the $100 million mark domestically, and with it, they laid bare their entire strategy for giving this film a platform release and selling is as a “crossover success story” before the film was ever released. Juno was opened like an indie in order to make this press release possible. If it they had just opened it like other films that appeal to the same demographic and fit into the same vague genre––Superbad, for example––and it still took twice as long to hit $100 million, even though its star quotient is much higher and its marketing campaign was arguably more aggressive, then that wouldn’t have been news. But make it look like it’s beating the odds, like it’s making history by playing on more screens than The Banger Sisters and making more money than Sideways (as if ANYONE remembers the last time a movie about/for 45 year-olds made more money than a movie about/for 16 year-olds)––now that’s a story!

In short: I think a draft of this press release was written in September, and details and dates were changed after the Oscar nominations. That is all.

So. Tired. Of. Talking. About. Juno.

Look, let’s get one thing straight: in that post that I wrote earlier this week,  I wasn’t making a statement about Juno’s quality. I’ve done that elsewhere, but at this point it seems like my energy would be best directed elsewhere–it’s not THAT offensive, and it’s certainly better than Little Miss Sunshine. All I was saying, is that the idea that this film has “crossed over” from an “indie” sphere to mainstream success is a fiction created and promoted by Fox Searchlight in order to align Juno with past “crossover” successes. This is working for them, so that’s great. But the idea that Juno is “small”, that it’s some kind of an underdog––either at the box office or within the clusterfuck of award’s season––is categorically insane.

It’s also somewhat troubling to think that if this kind of marketing coup works so well once, it’ll almost certainly work again, and at some point, there won’t be room in the marketplace for actual “small” films that have actually “crossed over”, because they’ll be pushed out of the conversation by studio films (I don’t care how much Juno cost to produce–it was paid for by a studio and it has the full benefit of a studio’s marketing apparatus) masquerading as “small” “crossovers.”

I don’t think I have anything left to say about this, but feel free to have at it/me in the comments.

I’ve read two stories in two hours that refer to Juno as “crossover hit.” I’m not denying that it is, so far, a hit, both with audiences and with critics. But tell me again how this film––made by a not-exactly-maverick director for a studio specialty division, starring three known actors and one tabloid staple, targeted at teens and young adults, both thematically and stylistically indebted (or, at the very least, related) to previous hits like Superbad, Ghost World and Napoleon Dynamite––qualifies as a “crossover”?

Yes, Searchlight bought “indie” credibility by taking Juno to a bunch of festivals and rolling it out slowly. But we’re also talking about a film that’s been advertising on NYTimes.com for over three months. This is so clearly a studio film that, in a bit of smart awards season strategy, has been sold by its distributor as an indie. Why are journalists who should know better playing along?

Now that Juno has won a big festival prize and Fox Searchlight has revamped its release plan to make the teen sex melocomedy look more like a prestige picture, various bloggers are have begun to seriously consider the film’s Oscar chances. I still think Searchlight would be better off selling this movie to teenagers than to the Academy dinosaurs, but if everyone else is doing it, I’ll play along.

I’m sure Searchlight will push for nominations for screenwriter Diablo Cody and lead actress Ellen Page. I think both pieces of work are sufficiently spectacular (in multiple senses of the word) to secure a nod, but despite the Academy’s love of ingenues, I think when it comes down to vote time the general consensus will that both will do better work once their talents mature a bit. This must be what everyone else is thinking, too, because out of nowhere, people are starting to talk (see the comments on this post) about Jennifer Garner’s work as the title character’s would-be adoptive baby mama as worthy of a Best Supporting Actress nomination. It’s not–which doesn’t mean it won’t get nominated, but I think that would be serious over-praise. It’s not bad work by any means, but there are at least three finer performances in that movie.

Searchlight probably doesn’t have the guts to push Jason Bateman for Best Supporting Actor, but man, I’d like to see them try. He’s absolutely the catalyst for everything Garner does, as well as much of Page’s performance in the film’s middle section. He transforms from the heroine’s confidant to, essentially, the film’s villain in the space of a single scene. And we’ve never seen subtlety like this from Bateman before. Even fans of his straight-man work in Arrested Development should be impressed. The big story of 2007 will be the emergence of the comedy with unexpected depth (it’s actually a throwback to the 30s, but that’s a discussion for another time). The performances of Bateman, Page and Michael Cera in Juno embody that theme, and deserve to be recognized as such.

A side note: Searchlight’s sudden post-fall festival focus on Juno must suck for the team behind Waitress. Certainly, no one could be mad that a film made for about a million dollars has grossed $20 million, but back in June, Keri Russell looked like a lock for a Best Actress nomination. Now … she doesn’t.

According to a press release sent via email by a Fox Searchlight publicist, the Juno release plan has been tweaked. Instead of rolling out wide on December 14, the film will now open in New York and L.A. on Wednesday, December 5 and roll out slowly after that. Seems significant: after all, Searchlight could easily have sold this thing as Superbad 2: The Taming of the Porksword. It looks to me like a  “let’s take advantage of critical interest in our hot young stars and screenwriter right before Oscar time” move if I’ve ever seen one. But I don’t know if have, so take my take with a grain of salt.

Fox Searchlight has (wisely, I think) decided to tack Hotel Chevalier onto prints of The Darjeeling Limited when the feature expands into wide release this weekend. According to this story in the NY Times, Searchlight is hoping that the short, which “in contrast to the feature, received nearly universal praise when it was shown alongside the longer film at some festivals,” and which has been downloaded legally on iTunes over 500,000 times, will lure audiences who would otherwise wait on Darjeeling for the DVD.

Surely, there will be some rib-cage fetishists who maintain that a big screen is mandatory in order to appreciate that single profile shot of Natalie Portman’s naked body in full, so it’s a gamble that might pay off. But it seems to me that the real crux of the story is the last sentence, in which Lia Miller reports that the studio “also is hoping the short is Oscar-worthy and plans to promote it as a contender in the best live-action short category.” This would be significant, because as far as I know, it would make Chevalier the first short film to garner Oscar attention after officially premiering on the Internet.

But doesn’t AMPAS have rules about that? I know documentaries can’t qualify for Oscars if they’ve been distributed online before meeting their theatrical requirements. I consulted AMPAS’ Live Action Short rules, and found that a Chevalier campaign would be shady proposition at best. More after the jump.

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There’s a Korean movie called Juno Jenny that has something to do with two teens and the night of awkward passion that leads to an unplanned pregnancy. This is news to Diablo Cody, who wrote the script for Fox Searchlight’s much-splooged-over Juno, which is about two teens and the night of awkward passion that leads to an unplanned pregnancy. She blogged the other day about her movie’s “spiritual cousins” which, as she puts it, “is a much nicer way to point out a cool/weird coincidence than going ‘OMG PLAGIARISM!’”:

There’s no adoption subplot and apparently the film is otherwise dissimilar to mine, but how fucked up is that? I bring this up because a journalist drilled me about it recently–awkward!–and also because I saw someone on our IMDB board wondering if Juno was a remake of the K-flick. So for the record, 1.) it isn’t a remake 2.) I haven’t seen Juno Jenny, though I want to now, and 3.) I don’t think anyone would even bat an eye about this if my film was called Jenny. The name Juno is just so darned distinctive that confusion is inevitable.

More on Juno’s various spiritual cousins at the link.