Mary And Max | SpoutBlog

Sony Classics Begins Pre-Buying. Sundance News 01/12/09

By Christopher Campbell posted 10 months ago

The 2009 Sundance Film Festival doesn’t kick off until Thursday, but there are already a few acquisitions and other news of note to report:

Sony Pictures Classics has picked up both James Toback’s documentary Tyson (which Karina saw at Cannes) and Carlos Cuaron’s Rudo y Cursi. SPC co-president Michael Barker explained the reason for pre-buying: “It’s an advantage to have a company attached, to be able to answer questions, knowing what you’re going to do with it.” SPC also has Davis Guggenheim’s new doc, It Might Get Loud, at the festival.
Though not U.S. distributor-related, congratulations must go out anyway to Cherien Dabis (who recently was interviewed on SpoutBlog’s Media Diet) for selling Canadian and international rights to her new Sundance-bound film Amreeka to Entertainment One.
The documentary short you’ll be watching ahead of Thursday’s festival opener, Mary and Max, is actually a commercial for Sundance sponsor Honda. It will be one of the three shorts that have just gone up today on the automaker’s “Power of Dreams” website.

By Christopher Campbell posted 1 year ago

The 2009 Sundance Film Festival will open with the claymation feature Mary and Max from Oscar-winning director Adam Elliot. Featuring the voices of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toni Collette, the film tells the story of a 20-year pen-pal correspondence, though Variety’s synopsis makes it sound creepier by noting that the friendship is initially between an 8-year-old girl and an obese, 42-year-old man.
Sony is making a movie about an African-American who spends 34 years in the White House. No, it’s not a hopeful prophesizing biopic of an 8½-term Obama. The adaptation of A Butler Well Served by This Election will tell the true story of Eugene Allen, who served Presidents Truman through Reagan.
Another film based on a true story is being made at Paramount about a journalist who blows the lid on a con man posing as a federal agent assigned to clean up a drug-ravaged Missouri town.
And yet another film based on a true story, this one described as “Erin Brockovich-style,” is in development to tell the story of multiple tragedy-stricken Collene Campbell and her fight for victims’ rights laws in California.
Twilight has now prematurely sold out more than 2,000 shows scheduled for tonight and this weekend, which Variety claims has given all the major studios “Twilight envy.” Really? All the studios? Because Warner Bros. seems pretty well-endowed these days.