Yesterday, I posted about Jamie Stuart’s In Spring, a video which had the filmmaker visiting the offices of THINKFilm and turning an interview with Werner Herzog (ostensibly occasioned by the impending release of Encounters at the End of the World) into––I thought––a brilliant piece of satire on the current state of indie film distribution in general and, unavoidably, the rumored struggles of THINKFilm in particular. It was also, on a not entirely subtextual level, about the thorny relationship between journalists and their subjects. Stuart has been doing meta festival coverage for awhile, but In Spring felt like a giant leap forward in his critique of the press process. In my post, I wondered how he was getting away with it. “What does he tell publicists he’s going to do?” I wrote. “Will any of them ever let him do it again?

By the end of the day yesterday, Stuart had removed the video from his website. He replaced it with a short video response, in which he explained that although THINK had no legal recourse against him, when they asked him to take the video down he complied based on the inference that somebody’s job was on the line.

I was away from the computer for most of yesterday afternoon and was kept abreast of the ongoing status of In Spring via emails and IMs on my phone. It wasn’t until today that I noticed that around the same time that Stuart was being pressured to remove the video––and just about when a FILMMAKER Magazine blog post about Spring was being removed––another blog post popped up, defending THINK’s right to protect themselves from negative reporting. Or, “reporting.”

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Above is a screencap of a ScreenDaily headline as seen in my Google Reader yesterday. I don’t actually subscribe to ScreenDaily, so I couldn’t read the story, but it appears to indicate that troubled distributor ThinkFilm’s international sales division has taken on the job of repping the troubling Down and Dirty Pictures, as well as the latest film from the guy who made Il Postino, for sale in Cannes.

This *could* be part of the answer to the question posed at the top of AJ Schnack’s second post today on THINK’s troubles: “What is Mark Urman doing in Cannes when the company has no money to pay anyone?” But it seems like the situation has become a little too dire for THINKFilm to bail themselves out on a couple of commissions.
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• J.J. Abrams says he will “honor his contractual obligation to work as a director” on his upcoming Star Trek reinvention, but will also serve some time in the picket lines outside Paramount, where writers are apparently chanting things like “Who’s got more money than they can count? Paramount!” (There’s no indication as to who raised their pencil to write that one.) Also seen on picket lines yesterday: James L. Brooks, Tina Fey, and the writers of Lost.
• Meanwhile, Hollywood’s two most beloved presidential candidates both issued statements yesterday in support of the writers. Barack Obama characterized the fight as “a test of whether media corporations are going to give writers a fair share of the wealth their work creates or continue concentrating profits in the hands of their executives.” Hillary Clinton was, predictably, a little less acerbic in her criticism of those executives. “I support the Writers Guild’s pursuit of a fair contract that pay them for their work in all mediums,” Clinton said. “I hope the producers and writers will return to the bargaining table.”
• American Film Market is the last event where indie producers can close projects that will be wrapped before the SAG and Directors Guild reach their own pre-strike deadline in March, and so far it looks like slow going. Said Mark Urman of ThinkFilm: “Actors normally on a one on/one off indie/studio film schedule now are looking for big paydays in big, stupid Hollywood movies.”

Anne Thompson of the Hoolywood Reporter’s Risky Business column wrote a great piece about how an Indy production costing less than $1 million was able to position itself for a prominent Oscar nomination. It was no accident that Half Nelson star Ryan Gosling is a Best Actor nominee, Thompson says in her column “How ThinkFilm goosed Gosling’s Oscar drive.”

ThinkFilm’s distribution and marketing president Mark Urman “made the decision to pursue a Best Actor Oscar nomination” when ThinkFilm acquired Half Nelson more than a year ago at Sundance 2006. The strategies were put into play. Among them were the film’s August opening (squeezing in ahead of the pack), sending out thousands of DVDs to the Academy and SAG nominating committee, and taking out ads in the LA Times that focused on Gosling as a brilliant new talent. Urman and Gosling also had luck on their side, because the best actor competition was lighter than usual. And, as Thompson quotes Urman in her column, from time to time the Academy likes to take part in the “discovery” of new talent:

Urman, a veteran Oscar marketer who’d played a role in winning campaigns for Lionsgate’s “Gods and Monsters” and “Affliction,” knew that acting nominations for breakthrough newcomer performances are doable. “We all generalize that the Academy is one giant brain,” he says. “But there are trends. There is a steady affection for the discovery, like Julie Christie in ‘Darling.’ The Academy has always enjoyed making an investment in a career.”

Apparently so. Urman’s strategies worked. I’m happy for Gosling and Half Nelson, that an Indy film and emerging actor can play with the big boys. But even while it gives me more faith in the Academy, it simultaneously gives me less. Gosling made it to the short list not as much for his stunning acting talent as for ThinkFilm’s marketing talent and the money they were willing to throw into promotions. It’s still all a big game, which is made even more apparent when you see all the two-columned prediction lists out there–one column for who various critics think will win the top honors, and another column for who they think deserves to win.