Landmark-theaters | SpoutBlog

Adventures in Branding With Samsung and Sean Penn

By Karina Longworth posted 2 years ago

Variety has a write-up on a new initiative at Samsung to support indie film. The electronics manufacturer is partnering with Landmark Theaters to essentially pay for marketing campaigns on behalf of specific pictures, in an effort to “bolster the company’s brand image among American consumers, especially the affluent auds that indies attract.” I guess ideally, the partnership will go both ways–ie: the chosen indie films will theoretically have the chance to bolster their images among the mainstream consumers that Samsung attracts.

The deal will include a Samsung sponsorship of Landmark’s Truly Indie program, through which filmmakers pay a fee to distribute their films in Landmark theaters and gain access Landmark’s marketing apparatus. Samsung will also install a number of blue seats in Landmark auditoriums across the country, through which lucky ticketbuyers can apparently expect to be offered Samsung swag.
The first film to be promoted under the deal is Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, which is a perhaps unwittingly strong match for a business proposition pairing corporate sponsorship with independent productions. Wild tells the story of an idealistic young hippie who impulsively gives up all his cash and worldly possessions to live “off the grid,” with disastrous consequences. Lesson learned: ascetic individualism is noble in spirit, but consumerism makes the world go round.

More on the Samsung deal here, and for our interview with Sean Penn from Wild’s Telluride premiere, click thisaway.

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Hollywood, Indies

Mark Cuban on Dancing With The Stars?

By Karina Longworth posted 2 years ago

Yesterday, TMZ breathlessly announced that they’d landed the tightly-guarded list of the cast and alternates for the upcoming season of ABC’s reality competition, Dancing With the Stars. Then the page view whores made us click through a maddening gallery to confirm earlier rumors that one of those alleged dancing stars is indeed Mark Cuban, the brash billionaire who owns the Dallas Mavericks and who, as owner of Landmark Theaters and Magnolia Pictures, is also at the forefront of the movement to close the theatrical/DVD distribution window.

I’m willing to bet that Mark Cuban is not on the final list, which is set to be announced on ABC’s Good Morning America tomorrow. My reasoning is three-fold: First, according to an interview that appeared late last week in Portfolio, Cuban is currently recovering from hip replacement surgery. Second, he already did the reality TV thing once, and it didn’t go so well. Third (and probably most compelling), today TMZ published a blurb covering their collective asses if the official cast list fails to match their gallery: “Well placed on-set sources tell us that execs, fearing someone would leak the cast to TMZ, gave the show’s staff and crew names that may or may not be 100% accurate.” Looking at TMZ’s list, Cuban and one of the two former Beverly Hills 90210 babes seem like the easiest names to scratch off.

So here’s the deal: If Mark Cuban is *not* on Dancing With the Stars, I win the satisfaction of being correct in my assumptions. If it turns out that the part-time movie mogul *is* on the show’s official cast list, as punishment for being wrong about this I promise to live-blog Cuban’s Dancing performance for as long as he manages to stay on the show. I’ve convinced myself that either way, I win on this — I mean, if Louis B. Mayer had entered a dance marathon, we would have wanted a document of it, right?

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Indies