Matt Grady, formerly of Plexifilm, is launching a film and music distribution label called Factory 25, which has bought world rights (barring France) to Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland. According to a just-dropped press release, Factory 25 “will concentrate on releasing films theatrically, digitally and on DVD, as well as in conceptualized limited edition DVD/Vinyl combination packages.” For Frownland, the limited edition will include “in addition to extra footage (practically a given these days) … a comic book written in character by one of the actors, art drawn by lead actor Dore Mann, a soundtrack on vinyl, and a newsprint film poster.”

Apparently intent on hitting the hipster sweet spot between indie music and indie movies, Factory 25 also have plans to release a DVD set of videos by Damon & Naomi, early 90s indie rock doc Songs for Cassavetes, and Ben Wolfinsohn’s High School Record, a faux-documentary comedy starring members of Mika Miko and No Age that premiered at Sundance in 2005 (listen to my podcast with Wolfinsohn here).

This is exciting news, but I have questions. One thing the press release doesn’t specify is whether or not Frownland will be given a wider theatrical run; it’s had some isolated theatrical bookings and a run in France, but by no means has it reached market saturation. I also wonder, since they’re obviously buying stuff with cross over appeal to an audience that might not ordinarily care about indie film, if Factory 25 plans to find ways to subvert the current, stagnant indie film releasing model. I sent them an email; I’ll update this post when I get a response.

UPDATE: I asked Matt Grady via email to tell me a bit more about his plans for theatrical distribution, particularly in regards to Frownland, and he wrote: “I am looking into a series of event screenings that combine a musical performance with film screenings and am also working on having a couple film/music US tours in the fall. Frownland will continue to play event screenings…Frownland really lends itself to midnight screenings.”

Other projects on Factory 25’s slate include Dutch Harbor: Where The Sea Breaks Its Back, a documentary on Alaska featuring music by a supergroup including Will Oldham, Jim O’Rourke, David Grubbs and Michael Krassner called the Boxhead Ensemble, which will tour and perform with the film; and a Spiritualized concert film, which Grady directed and is currently in post-production.

Newsflash: a major metropolitan newspaper known to be struggling to stay afloat has allocated resources to something not totally shameless! The Los Angeles Times has launched a weekly column on independent film, called Indie Focus, to be written by freelancer Mark Olsen. Olsen’s first Indie Focus story, on the perhaps unlikely double feature of Frownland and The Pleasure of Being Robbed beginning on Thursday at the Silent Movie theater, is online now; it’ll appear in the print edition of Sunday’s Calendar section, which is kind of a big deal. A newspaper attempting to combat their industry’s total desperation with a gesture that says indie film reporting (or really, any kind of arts coverage that demands an audience beyond 12 year old boys) is not only important, but worthy of the highest-profile platform that they have to offer? More like this, please.

As the hipster kleptomaniac at the center of Josh Safdie’s adorable debut feature The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Eleonore Hendricks steals a lot of things, but mainly the audiences’ hearts. The twentysomething actress, despite her newfound indie cinema fame, still works at the video store Cinema Nolita and binges on way too much Lukas Moodysson. After just wrapping Eric Juhola’s short film The Nowhere Kids (a fictional speculation on Gotham Award nominee and Slamdance winner Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa), Hendricks is getting ready to begin production on Safdie’s new project, Go Get Some Rosemary. In the meantime, I caught up with her to chat about Barbara Loden’s Wanda, her extra special week of moviegoing and why she gave up listening to WFMU. …Read more

Ronnie Bronstein is unlike anyone else I’ve ever met. Whip smart and endlessly self-deprecating, Ronnie’s acidic humor masks a sweetness and empathetic quality that’s rare for someone so talented and driven. His feature debut Frownland was for many, this humble author included, the definitive independent film of 2007, one that brings real credence back to that oft used, barely meaningful term. It screens this thursday at BAM. …Read more

• “There’s been a bit of talk lately about Manic Pixie Dream Girls,” writes Matt Prigge. “It got me thinking about a more interesting and reflexive variation on this character: the kook.” Examples include Annie Hall, “most Eric Rohmer women,” and Marcia Rudd’s character from Little Murders, which screens tonight at BAM in Brooklyn with a Q & A with Elliott Gould to follow.
• Laure Parsons has launched Infinicine, a new site with news coverage, discussion boards and other resourced dedicated to “information and dialog about the brave new world of digital distribution.”
• At the FILMMAKER Blog, Scott Macaulay points to Roger Ebert’s three-and-a-half star review of Frownland, which opens in Chicago today. Ebert acknowledges that the film is a tricky sell––”Now why would you want to see this film? Most readers of this review probably wouldn’t. I’m writing for the rest of us”––but ultimately calls the film a “rebirth of the need for expression that inspired the American independent movement in the first place.”

FILMMAKER Magazine is doing a sort of “where are they now?” with past with former honorees of their “25 New Faces of Independent Film” list (see this year’s installment here). This catch-up with Ronald Bronstein has some interesting bits of news about how the Frownland director/Butterknife star has been spending his time.

First, though Frownland is still without U.S. distribution, it has been added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. “I took this as a good indicator that it was time to stop pushing the forlorned thing, assume it’ll have some kind of life ahead of it, and move onto my next project with more active fervor,” Bronstein says. That project is currently in rehearsals, with plans to shoot this winter.

Meanwhile, Bronstein says he plans to continue his “semi-reluctant plunge into acting” with a lead role in the next feature by Josh and Bennie Safdie. To celebrate that bit of good news, I’ve embedded the Jerry Lewis-inspired Safdie short Jerry Ruis, Shall We Do This? above, which we gave an award to when I was on the short film jury at CineVegas last month.

FINALLY, LILLIAN AND DAN Trailer

Finally, Lillian and Dan comes to CineVegas almost a full year after its first and only significant public screening, as part of the M-word heavy Summer 2007 Independents Week series at Harvard Film Archives. It’s a find, a definite cousin of the work being made in the Bronstein household––as with Frownland, the mumbling here is so stylized and disturbed that it’s like a precision bomb against the twee subtelties explored by other contemporary filmmakers––it’s more like Tourettescore. But there’s also a tenderness here, and lofty aesthetic ambitions underpinned with authentic melancholy. It’s a heartbreaker.

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Is Yeast a movie, or a dare? Its official synopsis contains this brag about director Mary Bronstein’s level of experience: “Conceived and made by an actor with no concept of the language of filmmaking, takes traditional dramatic structure and throws it out of the window to be swept away by the street cleaners.” It’s less a pre-emptive defense than a come on, a tease designed to seduce a certain kind of audience into stepping up to the plate. But it’s not pure provocation. Even fans of Frownland (which Bronstein starred in under the direction of her husband Ronald) may not be ready for Yeast’s full-on assault on the senses. This is a film that not only seeks to dodge the audience’s comfort zone, but it actually, actively mocks it. It’s not just abrasive; it’s restless, punishing, totally juvenile in its humor and indifferent to narrative flow or niceties of image. It appears to offers moments of genuine redemption or closure, and then undermines those moments with prankish punchlines. It is resolutely indelicate, and often absurd. It’s a nasty little stink bomb of a film that’s going to instigate a fierce tug of war between supporters and detractors––if it doesn’t completely clear the room. I think it’s a laugh riot and a must-see. Consider yourself warned.

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The worm turns and squirms in Frownland, an aptly named film made on the cheap in and around New York. An up-close, painfully intimate portrait of a hapless, manipulative schlub, a Loser with a capital L, the film offers for our horror and our empathy a creature whose very existence is a rebuke to the stultifying uniformity (the niceness, the neatness) of what now often passes for American independent cinema. Written and directed by Ronald Bronstein, making his feature-film debut, this is personal cinema at its most uncompromising and fierce.

The first paragraph of Manohla Dargis’ rave review of  in the New York Times. Read the full thing here.

Frownland [trailer]

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Scott Macaulay reminds that Ronnie Bronstein’s Frownland begins a one-week run at the IFC Center in New York this Friday. More than that, he explains why it’s a must see:

If you’re someone who follows and cares about American independent cinema, you’ve noticed that what passes for independent film today is often markedly different from what we thought of as independent film 20 years ago. In films today, scenes have buttons. Second acts have set pieces. Characters are given “petting the dog” moments to make them more likeable. Films are crafted to appeal to quadrants. In other words, many of them are forced by the brutality of the marketplace to assimilate the same storytelling logic as a studio film. More so than just about anything I’ve seen in the last year, Frownland defies all of this.

I wish I was going to be in town this weekend––I’ve only seen a screener of Frownland, and have been trying in vain for a year to see it on a big screen. Alas, I’ll be at SXSW, where Mary Bronstein’s Yeast premieres on Monday. If you’re in New York and not making the trip to Austin, you can buy Frownland tickets here. And if you’re only familiar with Mary and Ronnie’s work in Butterknife, definitely check out the Frownland trailer above.

BUTTERKNIFE 5: Laugh Attack

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This episode of Butterknife co-stars Sean Prince Williams (again), the cinematographer of Frownland. You can go to Spout.com’s Butterknife page for more info on the series, to watch future episodes, to talk about the show, and to sign up for email updates.

Previous episodes:

Plastic Hassle (with Kentucker Audley)
Sicilian Style (with Tony Baker and Frank V. Ross)
Key Witness (with Michael Tully)
Bongo Board (with Sean Prince Williams)

Yeast [trailer]

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Welcome to the first of many posts that we’ll be doing over the next couple of weeks, previewing upcoming SXSW premieres and profiling their makers. I’m so excited to start this plug fest with the work of a good friend of Spout, Mary Bronstein’s Yeast. Mary is featured in the webseries Butterknife, and she also starred in her husband Ronnie Bronstein’s debut feature, Frownland (which, incidentally, will be running for a week at the IFC Center in New York concurrent with Yeast’s debut in Austin).

Mary stars again in Yeast, alongside Greta Gerwig (Hannah Takes the Stairs), and together they explore friendships that are, according to the SXSW synopsis, “Ebola-infested, maggot-filled and bursting at the seams.” You can watch the trailer for Yeast above. Below, check out Mary’s answers to the 4 Questions We’re Asking Everybody (heretofore known as the 4QWAE). Yeast, which is screening in the Narrative Competition at SXSW, premieres at 7pm on Monday, March 10 at the Alamo Ritz; for more information, go here.

Tell us about your movie. Who did you work with, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.

“It’s like Laverne and Shirley meets Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May…on PCP!!”

Sorry…here’s the real 25 word-or-less: Yeast is a film about a maddeningly oblivious, tyrannical and stunted young woman trying to negotiate two toxic friendships.

Something that the synopsis doesn’t say is that Yeast turned out to be a lot funnier than I had originally anticipated. Another thing to know is that it isn’t a study in realism, or the way people “really” behave. It is more hyper-realism. We were interested in telling the story from the inside-out. Showing on the outside what the character is feeling on the outside. I find this more interesting than dialog about how characters feel. For example, sometimes you may be so frustrated at someone you wish you could just hit that person in the face. In real life you don’t, but you might say “You know, you are like, kind of being a little bit annoying right now.” In this movie you would actually hit the person.

I decided to make this film after I realized that I didn’t want to wait around for other people to make projects. I wanted to make a film about female friendships that dealt with the issues of resentment, hostility and emotional manipulation that often are present in too-close enmeshed friendships of either sex. I wanted to make a film about women that I’ve never seen before, about people who have no business being friends with each other but don’t know how to stop. And I wanted to see if I could pull it off.

…Read more

• On the podcast: There Will Be Blood. There will also be demented Christmas moments. Behold visual aids, for the former and for the latter.
• The MPAA found a way to unite conservatives and liberals though a single act of censorship.
• Someone else found a way to blame Disney for turning your daughter into a slut.
• There is still a trailer for The Dark Knight, but the six-minute prequel bootleg is no more.
• Will Mark Romanek’s experience with Trent Reznor impact his remake of The Wolfman?
• Your iPod has broken you.
• Why The Hobbit is going to happen.
• Has Jodie Foster made her own Joe vs. the Volcano?
• Judd Apatow: good at both viral marketing and blow-job jokes.
• If Tracy Morgan was just a little bit more delusional, we might not have to suffer First Sunday.
• Oh, and I was watching 30 Rock when I should have been working. Oops.
• 2007: The Year of the Unwanted Pregnancy.
• Mike Figgis, pornographer.
• Belle and Sebastian, the musical.
• Sweeney Todd: a review, a marketing con
• Speaking of marketing con(troversy)s, a blogger invents one about The Dark Knight.
• Frowland’s latest honor sparks consideration of what it means to be undistributed.
• Focus Features scales new frontiers of advertorial.
• Can Clooney rub some of his magic dust on Zellweger? Does that sound dirty?
• A studio’s strike hypocrisy, somehow revealed by Jackass.

indieWIRE has released the results of their annual critic’s poll for the best undistributed films of 2007, and Ronnie Bronstein’s Frownland has made the top ten. The Gotham award winner received seven votes, the same number as Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, which is interesting for a number of reasons. For one thing, Ferrara and Bronstein were two of just three American directors to make the Top Ten. For another, in the case of both films, whether or not they’re actually undistributed is basically a question of semantics.

I first heard that IFC had acquired Go Go Tales back at the New York Film Festival in September, and have heard a number of confirmations of that rumor since. Anthony Kaufmann even references those whispers in his indieWIRE write-up of the poll, noting that “for now, [Go Go Tales is] still technically available.” It basically gets to keep its place on the list because IFC hasn’t yet issued a press release.

Meanwhile, Silent Light earned 20 votes in the poll, which would have been good enough to tie for second place…had the film not been disqualified because Tartan quietly acquired U.S. distribution rights last month. I certainly didn’t get a press release about that––I’ve got to be one of the film’s most vocal supporters, and I didn’t find out about the deal until a month after the fact. Frownland, meanwhile, has distribution in France, and due to the number of North American film festivals where it’s played, it’s probably been seen by more non-critics on this continent than the film ranked right below it on the list, Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha.

This is not about me fronting like Silent Light deserves recognition and Go Go Tales (which I’m on the record as having loved) does not, nor am I trying to argue with the rules of this particular poll. But it does seem like proof positive that not only is the line between “distributed” and “undistributed” getting a lot murkier, but the idea of distribution-as-victory is maybe not all it’s cracked up to be.

…Read more