None of this year’s Sundance Film Festival entries has generated the excitement of last year’s “Little Miss Sunshine,” bought by Fox Searchlight for a festival-record price of $10.5 million — a bargain. But the film-buying market has been day-after-Thanksgiving intense.
The Weinstein Co. has acquired all or part of four films (the John Cusack-as-Iraq-war-widower drama “Grace Is Gone,” the mother-son immigrant tale “La Misma Luna,” the Billy Crudup-Mandy Moore romantic comedy “Dedication” and the mock horror film “Teeth”), and Fox Searchlight has grabbed three (the late Adrienne Shelly’s “Waitress,” the creepy-kid chiller “Joshua” and the other half of “La Misma Luna”).
Paramount Vantage paid the reported festival-high price of $8 million to $9 million for the British ’80s-nostalgia kid tale “Son of Rambow,” and just about every other distributor is going home with at least one goody.
“This has been the most rabid festival fever ever,” said Magnolia Pictures president Eamonn Bowles, whose company picked up the documentary “Crazy Love” and the horror-by-airwaves movie “The Signal.” “It’s not so much that one film got an amazing price, but all of these films got the highest money that they could have ever expected.”
Bowles’ theory is that so few films have been sold over the past year’s festivals that companies need to stock up.
Which side (of the camera) are you on?
Two documentaries, both on gripping topics, wind up exploring the relationship between the subject and the filmmaker — not necessarily on purpose.
Amir Bar-Lev’s “My Kid Could Paint That” tracks the meteoric art-world rise of abstract painter Marla Olmstead, who happens to be a 4-year-old girl. David Stenn’s “Girl 27” investigates a long-forgotten 1937 scandal in which an MGM chorus girl accused a studio conventioneer of rape.
Bar-Lev originally set out to explore what defines modern art and what it means when a 4-year-old’s paintings can fetch thousands of dollars. But the story turns when “60 Minutes” questions whether little Marla was doing all of the work on her own; her father is a painter, after all.
Although the Olmstead family had opened its household up to Bar-Lev for months, the filmmaker starts having his own doubts while the family worries about its participation in his film.
It’s fascinating stuff, expertly told, and you leave with your mind whirring.
Although Bar-Lev doesn’t appear till late in his own film, Stenn puts himself front and center from the start of “Girl 27.” His movie isn’t just about righting historical wrongs; it’s about his quest to tell this story and to coax the now-eightysomething victim, Patricia Douglas, to go on camera.
Stenn, a Chicago-area native who wrote biographies of Clara Bow and Jean Harlow, features talking-head interviews with himself plus his own voice-overs. He tells us repeatedly how much this all means to him, and we hear several people, including saved phone messages from his former book editor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, testifying to his wonderfulness.
By the end of each movie, the subjects have reached opposite conclusions about their cinematic chroniclers. Douglas loves Stenn. The Olmstead family declined to appear at Sundance, and the mother sent a letter to be read expressing disappointment in Bar-Lev’s movie.
No surprise, “My Kid Could Paint That” is the film widely viewed as one of Sundance’s highlights. Sony Pictures Classics acquired it here for a reported $1 million to $2 million, which could buy a lot of paintings, even Marla’s.
How not to freeze the cheese
The Illinois Film Office pushed to place itself on the Sundance map this year by setting up shop in a Main Street storefront and hosting two receptions, one in outgoing director Brenda Sexton’s condo and the other in a Main Street lounge to celebrate the acclaimed Chicago-made “Grace Is Gone.”
The only hitch was a plan to serve Lou Malnati’s deep-dish pizzas that had been donated and flown in from Chicago. Someone out here froze it “wrong” — meaning that person didn’t remove the pies from their Styrofoam insulation before sticking them into freezers.
So no Lou Malnati’s. Still, there was more than enough Eli’s cheesecake to go around.
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Read Pop Machine, Mark Caros blog about popular culture, at bancodeprofissionais.com/popmachine
