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.
IFCFirstTake has posted the new, theatrical trailer for Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairson YouTube, and for your viewing pleasure, I’ve embedded it above. I think it does a bang-up job of sculpting Hannah’s rangy charms into something perfectly palatable for mass consumption.
If you’ve been living under a rock (and/or haven’t read this, this, this or this, or watched this or listened to this), Hannah (and Swanberg, and his crew of fabulously young, talented, beautiful collaborators) were the toast of SXSW 2007. The movie’s theatrical debut on August 22 will kick off the The New Talkies: Generation DIY, the two-week festival of new American indies at the IFC Center here in New York. After playing at IFC for a week, Hannah will be available on video-on-demand via IFC’s InTheaters program, and on August 28, Swanberg’s second film, LOL, will be released on DVD by Benten Films.
This whole chain of events is incredible exciting to those of us who have been watching people like Swanberg and Andrew Bujalski and Aaron Katz carve out their own niche over the past few years. I’m only going to be in town for the first week of The New Talkies (Telluride beckons), but mark your calendars, because I’m nevertheless planning heaps of coverage.
Our friend 
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.
