A strange twist in the Mark Cuban story tonight, one which pushes it a little bit further into our wheelhouse.New York Times blogger Floyd Norris has published an email allegedly sent on May 05, 2007 to Cuban by Fort Worth SEC lawyer Jeffrey Norris (”no known relation to me”, notes the blogging Norris). In the email, Jeffrey Norris essentially tells on Cuban to SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, who is CCed, regarding Cuban’s involvement with Loose Change, a 9/11 conspiracy theory film which appeared online in three different incarnations over three years, becoming an internet sensation.
Addressing Cox, Norris explains that Cuban “participated in distributing the vicious and absurd documentary” and declares that Cuban’s “support for this project is irresponsible and immoral.” Floyd Norris posits that the email may be evidence that Cuban is “the victim of a political hit job because he helped finance a movie that was scathingly critical of President Bush.”
Only one problem: there’s no solid evidence that Cuban ever did get involved with financing or distributing the movie.
According to WIRED and other sources, Mark Cuban, founder of 2929 Entertainment (which includes the eponymous production company, Magnolia Pictures, HDNet and Landmark Theaters), has been charged with insider training. FORBES has the filing, which contends that in 2004, Cuban became privy to the knowledge that Mamma.com, in which he owned 600,000 shares, was set to offer public shares at a cut price. Despite agreeing to keep the information confidential, the filing charges, Cuban sold his shares, and thereby “avoided losses in excess of $750,000.”
For those of us who are SEC illiterate, Sillicon Alley Insider offers a detailed timeline of exactly what the Commission is alleging Cuban did. They conclude that “if the SEC’s reporting of the facts is true and complete, it certainly appears that Mark traded while in possession of material non-public information.”
We’ll be refreshing Cuban’s blog all afternoon and wil let you know if he posts a comment.
UPDATE! That was quick. Cuban now has a statement, signed by his lawyer, on his blog. It reads in part: “This matter, which has been pending before the Commission for nearly two years, has no merit and is a product of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion…Mr. Cuban stated, ‘I am disappointed that the Commission chose to bring this case based upon its Enforcement staff’s win-at-any-cost ambitions. The staff’s process was result-oriented, facts be damned. The government’s claims are false and they will be proven to be so.’”
I believe this Hollywood Reporter story on the struggles faced by several American Cannes premieres to find a stateside distributor is the first notice that 2929 Entertainment has decided to give James Gray’s Two Lovers to Magnolia to distribute.
The film famously drew mixed reactions in Cannes; I gave it a thumbs up with some reservations, whilst the very idea of waiting in line for it drove Lisa Schwarzbaum to expletives. Lovers has a lower profile than What Just Happened?, another film which 2929 recently decided to let their sister company distribute when buyers didn’t materialize. Both bleak and stylized, the romantic melodrama might even be a tougher sell to audiences than a satire about old men who work in the film industry. We’ll see––Magnolia’s planning a limited release in early 2009.
Our friend Kevin Kelly was at that Mark Cuban panel at the TCA featured in the vague WIRED post mentioned earlier, and he sent along some further context––and quotes!
Apparently, the panel’s essential purpose was to promote Humboldt County, a SXSW vet and now a Magnolia release which will debut on VOD three weeks before hitting theaters in September. Also on the panel was Humboldt co-star Peter Bogdanovich, and talk about an odd pairing. On the one hand, you’ve got mogul Cuban making his cocky techno-evangelist pitch about how business travelers held captive in hotels are dying to charge their corporate cards $12 for the chance to see films like Flawless and Finding Amanda.
Then there’s old Pete, still an active theatrical patron himself (“Sex in the City was amazing because it was all women. I was the only guy in the theater, and the women loved it, and I loved that the women loved it”), but conscious that it’s an experience that’s diminishing for a reason (in part because trailers are “unbelievably violent, fast, crazy, noisy garbage.”) And he acknowledges that even if, for him, nothing’s going “to replace the experience of seeing a movie on the big screen with an audience,” alternate philosophies of distribution “seems to be working in terms of getting people to see the films.”
I wish I had been there. Excerpts from Kevin’s transcription of the even follow after the jump.
Consider this WIRED story more than loosely related to yesterday’s back-and-forth on theatrical distribution, and maybe sort of possibly related to today’s rampant speculation on Che. At the Television Critics Association conference yesterday, vertically integrated movie mogul Mark Cuban announced that he’s going to start selling Magnolia’s theatrical releases on HDNET’s On Demand cable service––BEFORE they debut in theaters.
I *think* the news nugget here is that this reverse day-and-date roll out wil now apply to ALL Magnolia releases, because otherwise, it’s not really news at all––Cuban’s companies have experimented with this tactic before, and box office grosses would suggest that it didn’t work so well for Redacted. Unless it’s the Cuban-as-cowboy quotes––such as “Landmark is the only national theater chain that will support HDNet’s Ultra Sneak Previews” and “I don’t care what the MPAA does.” But then, that’s not really news, either.
Longtime YouTube hater Mark Cuban, writing two days before the video site’s new Screening Room launch was announced, predicted that fast-growing Hulu will eventually put YouTube out of business. “The Youtube business model is broken and there is no light at the end of the tunnel as they are currently constructed,” he blogged. Because Hulu has the right to put ads on every clip and not, like YouTube, not just those produced by “partners”, “the more traffic Hulu generates, the more money it makes. The more traffic Youtube generates, the more money it loses.” I’ll be interested to see how he responds to Screening Room; if skeptical, he’d hardly be alone. Some links:
“In all the coverage in the blogosphere, no one has mentioned that this is the exact same thing AtomFilms did for 10 years, and it didn’t work for them,” writes Chris Albrecht, a former Atom employee, at NewTeeVee. And why didn’t it work? “YouTube has a much more massive scale than Atom could have ever dreamed of, but that doesn’t change the fundamental situation. People prefer farts being lit on fire to artsy short films.”
Another potential issue: much of the content that will be screening in the Room has been seen elsewhere. Two of the four films available at launch were pulled from the first issue of Wholphin, and according to the Wholphin blog, “Another dozen Wholphin films have been selected to appear in the Screening Room throughout the year.” Also of note: the Miguel Arteta/Miranda July short Are You The Favorite Person of Anybody?, a Wholphin title which was pitched in YouTube’s press release about the Room, has been on YouTube for almost two years.
Scott Kirsner has some suggestions for how filmmakers can make the most out of their Screening Room deals, recommending that they “post in the YouTube comments area, so YouTube users feel you are a real, accessible human being — not some remote big-shot director!”
Maybe Cuban can’t see the light at the end of YouTube’s tunnel, but Silicon Alley Insider can. “Google famously hasn’t figured out how to sell ads in the video stream itself, though it keeps promising that it will. Doesn’t matter…their most lucrative opportunities, so far, haven’t been in the videos themselves but on the real estate surrounding it.”
The Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading, which made some snippy headlines last month after Focus gave the film an undesirable September release date, has been selected to open the Venice Film Festival. For those keeping track: the last film Focus landed in that slot at that festival was Atonement; three years ago, they used the ame method to launch Brokeback Mountain.
There’s a long piece in this morning’s Hollywood Reporter on Sex and the City––the show, the movie, the brand––as a New York City tourist attraction. Says Michael Patrick King, director of the film: “The amount of girls coming to New York to have a $17 cosmo — everybody benefited in a great way.”
2929 Productions have bought in to two projects from producers Kevin Spacey and Dana Brunetti and Ben Mezrich––AKA the creative team behind the hit 21. Brunetti sums up the appeal of working from a Mezrich literary source: “Guys that normally aren’t readers will dive into a Ben Mezrich story and read it quickly, and then pass it around to other guys. It’s chick lit for men.”
Here’s a look at the notable films opening this week that we’ve previously covered here on SpoutBlog:
Redacted: Bill O’Reilly can finally get a look at the film he’s sight-unseen been threatening to boycott, while Magnolia finally gets to put that whole all-press-is-good-press maxim to the test. Here’s my review from Telluride; for a recap on the possibly-contrived battle between director Brian DePalma and producer/distributor Mark Cuban, see here, here and here.
Beowulf: Is director Robert Zemeckis not doing press for this film because he knows it’s a bad idea to compete with the post-Comic-Con gushage over Angelina Jolie’s nakedness?
Smiley Face: Kevin and Paul are big fans of Gregg Araki’s stoner comedy, which came off a successful festival run to be all but abandoned by its distributor. The film opens on one screen in L.A. today before going straight to DVD. Listen to Paul’s interview with Araki here.
Margot at the Wedding: Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to The Squid and the Whale is disappointing, despite Nicole Kidman’s strong performance as a wicked sister. Read the review here.
Magnolia Pictures and Landmark Theaters Owner Mark Cuban was voted off ABC’s Dancing With the Stars last night. Above, watch his final performance; below the jump, in his ABC-mandated exit interview with Jimmy Kimmel, Cuban talks about wearing a onesie, buying the Cubs, and baring his “unshaved” hip replacement scar on national television. Throughout this whole DwtS thing, Cuban has downplayed his secondary career as an indie film mogul in order to play up his persona as a magnanimous billionaire of the people, so it’s not a surprise that recent Magnolia controversies did not come up on Kimmel.
Did YouTube “borrow” branding from a successful internet film festival?
Nikki Finke claimed Warner Brothers had instituted a corporate policy against casting women, then baited Gloria Allred into threatening a WB boycott. WB was like, “No you didn’t,” and then Nikki was like, “Yes, in fact, I did.”
In more devastating Warner Brothers news, the studio continues to show a lack of support for Jesse James by making it nearly impossible for non-coastal critics to see it.
Juno is not a remake of another film about a pregnant teen with ‘Juno’ in the title.
The Austin Film Festival memorializesMoonlighting.
“Any network that can be used to share cat pictures can be used to bring down a government.” This and other pearls of wisdom from from academic/blogger Henry Jenkins.
On FilmCouch, Paul and Kevin talk to Rob Parrish, the mastermind of Next to Heaven, a web series carved out of the public domain. Watch the most recent episode of Next to Heavenhere.
New York Film Festival:
Mark Cuban confirmed to us that he would not release Brian DePalma’s director’s cut of Redacted. DePalma took the case to the DGA, who ruled that Magnolia could release the “redacted” version. DePalma eventually gives up.
It looks like the “battle” over Redacted is over. Brian DePalma was a guest this morning on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show. Lehrer asked DePalma to comment on the lead story on the gossip page of this morning’s NY Daily News, which is essentially a transcription of the widely-circulated video documenting Monday’s DePalma press conference at the New York Film Festival. DePalma gave a restrained recap of the situation and then said, “I exhausted my legal options about 24 hours ago.”
He was most likely referencing the alleged DGA decision that ruled Magnolia can, against the director’s wishes, release the film with black bars placed over the faces in the images in question. I say “alleged” because this DGA decision has not been reported in the trades nor confirmed by press release––I’m getting my information from comments made on Movie City Indie by Magnolia’s Eamonn Bowles and someone who appears to be DGA General Counsel David Korduner.
Regardless, this appears to be as far as DePalma is willing to fight. At the end of the segment, Lehrer asked DePalma if the battle will delay Redacted’s release date, and the director said no. “I’m afraid that controversy is over,” he sighed, clearly resigned. There’s no indication he has any plans to take Mark Cuban up on his offer to let DePalma take the film off Magnolia’s hands.
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?
Several film blogs have posted Jamie Stuart’s thoughts on yesterday’s NYFF press conference for Brian DePalma’s Redacted. In a nutshell: DePalma mentioned that the film’s final montage (which consists of real photographs of real victims of real terror and war-associated violence, and which is thought by many to be the most powerful portion of the film) is in danger of being “redacted” by the film’s distributor, Magnolia Pictures, at the request of the Magnolia/HD Net founder Mark Cuban. According to Stuart, DePalma’s comments were discredited yesterday by Magnolia’s president:
As [DePalma] began discussing the film’s use of actual war photographs and their graphic nature, Eamonn Bowles from Magnolia began shouting from the rear of the Walter Reade Theater to refute De Palma’s claims that Mark Cuban was trying to, well, redact them from the picture’s release. Then, just as the press conference was coming to a close, producer Jason Kliot rushed the stage and grabbed moderator Jim Hoberman’s mic to offer the crowd his version of this distribution controversy. I was left wondering how spontaneous this all was or whether they knew it would be immediately blogged upon to stoke media attention.
I was less inclined to see this as a pure stunt. I knew DePalma had been pushing this button at press conferences as far back as Telluride, where his statements were vague enough to be misinterpreted but loud enough to be difficult to miss. If this fighting between filmmaker and distributer started as a ploy for attention, then it doesn’t make sense that Magnolia would wait this long to publicly respond. Still, unsure how to interpret this latest event, I sent an email this morning to Mark Cuban to get the official word. Cuban confirmed to me that Magnolia has, indeed, asked DePalma to remove the images from the film, and will not release Redacted unless the final montage is cut. More details after the jump.
Apologies for the poor quality video, but above you’ll find evidence of sometime-movie mogul Mark Cuban’s debut on Dancing With the Stars. The Magnolia Pictures chief/simultaneous distribution evangelist/financier and distributor of Brian DePalma’s Redacted performed last night; his fate as a reality TV star will be decided by “America” tonight.
What you don’t see above is the prologue, which you can allegedly watch on ABC.com (I’m still waiting for the video to load). In a segment designed to introduce the audience to Cuban and his partner, Kym, Cuban revealed that he had hip replacement surgery just seven weeks before rehearsals began for Dancing With the Stars. “Most people are still on crutches,” Cuban says, lifting up his practice shorts to reveal a massive scar. Kym’s voiceover commends Cuban for working through the pain while we watch footage of him practicing with a tortured expression on his face. Cut to Cuban, interview style: “I’m not going through all this pain and agony just because. I’m there to win.”
It strikes me that, whether it’s his doing or that of Dancing’s producers, Cuban has managed to hit on a magic combination of about 100 winning reality TV cliches: rich fish out of water, an American Idol’s beginner’s enthusiasm for competitive performance, Extreme Makeover-branded physical struggle, non-household name reifying his stardom by going on a show mostly staffed by declining B-listers united in the deception that they’re so famous they don’t need to be there. On a show like this, it seems like a brilliant strategy: the audience, it seems, unfailingly rewards not those who perform well, but those who perform *surprisingly* well.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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According to WIRED and other sources, Mark Cuban, founder of 2929 Entertainment (which includes the eponymous production company, Magnolia Pictures, HDNet and Landmark Theaters), has been charged with insider training. FORBES has the filing, which contends that in 2004, Cuban became privy to the knowledge that Mamma.com, in which he owned 600,000 shares, was set to offer public shares at a cut price. Despite agreeing to keep the information confidential, the filing charges, Cuban sold his shares, and thereby “avoided losses in excess of $750,000.”
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