Azazel Jacobs‘ Momma’s Man, which premiered at Sundance in 2008 and was rescued from the ashes of ThinkFilm by Kino for a theatrical release last summer — is finally out on DVD today. The package features a pretty impressive slate of extras, including Momma’s Family, described as a 42 minute “featurette on the clash realities that takes place in Momma’s Azazel Jacobs returns to the set of the film and can’t leave”; Capitalism: Child Labor, a 2006 short by Azazel’s father (and Momma’s co-star) Ken Jacobs; plus deleted scenes and an audio conversation with the Jacobs family.
Kino’s site has buying information; you can also check out my review of Momma’s Man, our interview with Azazel from Sundance, and some further thoughts on his three features.
The headline to this Hollywood Reporter story is pure provocation: “Has ThinkFilm Lost Its Mind?” The three pages that follow offer little in the way of analysis of the sanity of the studio’s recent moves; instead, Alex Ben Block contrasts angry accusations from filmmakers who claim to have been wronged by the distributor, with defensive statements from Think/Capitol Films head David Bergstein.
The big takeaway (beyond Betstain’s annoying insistence that “he has image problems because nobody in Hollywood really knows him”) is his repeated claim that he’s not really concerned with the short term profits and losses associated with theatrical releases (which probably won’t sound like news to certain filmmakers he’s worked with over the past year). Instead, he’s got his eyes on building a digital rights library that can be leveraged when the current modes of distribution and consumption become extinct. “Our business plan is not so much about the movie business,” he told Block. “It’s really to build a global digital distribution business. It’s based on the expectation that in the not too distant future most content will be delivered digitally and on-demand.”
And apparently, he’s perfectly content enraging filmmakers and creditors today in order to come out ahead of the flop on a longer timeline. More details––including details on Bergstein’s future acquisitions plans, the status of David O. Russell’s beleaguered Think production, and testimony from apparently the only Think-associated filmmaker willing to come out and defend the company’s leader––after the jump.
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Anthony Kaufman brings news that THINKFilm has given up distribution rights on Azazel Jacobs’ Momma’s Man to Kino International. THINK announced their acquisition of the film in early March, about six weeks after the film was unveiled at Sundance. Just last week, THINK’s Mark Urman told Kaufmann that they planned on going through with the release of both Momma’s and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, saying that if the company “didn’t think we could get what they deserve, I wouldn’t be proceeding with them. These films are not cash-intensive films. These films will get everything they need.” No word yet on whether or not the troubled company still thinks they can give Marina Zenovich’s doc what it deserves.

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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Can he do this? Is this legal? How does he do it? What interview questions does he ask? What does he tell publicists he’s going to do? Will any of them ever let him do it again?
All of those questions, and surely more, are sparked by Jamie Stuart’s latest video, In Spring. Described as a tribute to Bunuel and Dali, it’s a highly stylized document of Stuart’s visit to the New York offices of embattled distributor THINKFilm to interview Werner Herzog about his latest film, Encounters at the End of the World. Except Herzog is playing “Gunter Merkwurdigeliebe, THINKfilm Chairman, CEO and President.” Except I don’t think he knows that. After the interview, Stuart’s voiceover inform us, his “crew took part in snorting lines of Grade A Bolivian cocaine with the executives,” an experience which led them to conclude that “the film industry is as solid and secure as ever.” Well, after all that, who wouldn’t?
Watch it here.

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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I’ve been tracking the odd pop cultural situation that awaits this month’s release of The Tracey Fragments for awhile now. The film, which I’ve written about before, stars Juno phenom Ellen Page; it premiered at Berlin in 2007 and played tons of festivals, but by year’s end had failed to secure U.S. theatrical distribution. Then, in February of this year, when Page was at the peak of her powers as a precocious Oscar nominee and face of one of the biggest “surprise” hits in recent memory, Tracey was picked up by ThinkFilm for domestic distribution.
This is a film which, despite positive reviews and an award from Berlin, went almost completely unnoticed when it screened at Toronto in September, largely because it didn’t have a distributor that could afford to hire track suited boys to pass out branded Tic Tacs on its behalf. And yet, as soon as ThinkFilm put out a new trailer for the film, it promptly attracted a bunch of negative blog attention, ranging from unfair to inaccurate.
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