The Hollywood Reporter is tracing steps back to Cannes and noting that the festival’s most highly anticipated films from some of its brightest auteurs, “Che,” by Soderbergh, “Synecdoche, New York,”by Charlie Kaufman and James Gray’s “Two Lovers” have had a difficult time being picked up.
It’s another, “the indie-film market is in the shitter” piece and it saliently points out that a few years ago, these three films would have been snatched up almost immediately and times have changed, blah, blah, blah (not to totally dismiss the problem, it’s real, but we’ve heard it all too often of late and we’re presumably all aware of it). ‘Synechdoche’ – a script we just read and need to review soon – just got picked up at what sounds like a lower bid than they’d hoped, but the other two are still looking for distribution.
Anyhow, the part that caught our eye was the fact that four indie distributors are apparently circling the epic Che Guevara biopic and none of them are the Weinstein Company apparently (Harvey’s people had been in exclusive pre-Cannes negotiations for the flick, but nothing came to fruition).
According to the article, director Stephen Soderbergh still hopes to release the two-part, four-hour-plus film as one movie, and now in limited December openings (in time for Oscar season of course). Apparently no major cutting or editing has happened to the film and Soderbergh’s only trimmed 5-7 minutes off both films (nothing too substantial). And it sounds like the filmmaker is sticking to his guns. Evidently one distributor had offered to put out the film in one three-hour cut and they were ruled out of the picture immediately.
Back to the original premise. The horizon still looks bleak, this concluding line is sadly, spot-on for the foreseeable future and basically states: ‘manage your expectations’. “As filmmakers who settled for less upfront at Cannes learned, less-than-commercial films now need to be made cheaply, and beggars can’t be choosers.”
Back to the present: Dear baby Jesus, please have “Che” play the New York Film Festival so we don’t have to travel far and wide to see it, thank you.
