When the Academy loosened its qualifying rules for Oscar Docus last fall, more than one longtime member of the doc community told me that the difficulty of the new rules would be finding theater screens in art house-challenged Manhattan.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Coliseum Cinemas on W. 181st Street, where for the rest of this week, you can check out the Sundance favorite ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED at 2 PM and 4 PM.
As reported Friday by Stu at Defamer:
"Where is the marketing? Where are the reviews? Where is the heated discussion about the Polanski case?...
HBO Documentary Films purchased Wanted and Desired for $1 million out of Sundance, planning a cable premiere and a DVD release — but no theatrical run. Except that to qualify for an Oscar, you have to screen "for a minimum of seven days in both Los Angeles County and the Borough of Manhattan."... HBO is protecting its audience for the June 9 cable premiere and keeping its Oscar hopes alive by dumping it in the farthest reaches of Upper Manhattan for the bare minimum two afternoon screenings per day...
This isn't exactly the kind of treatment supposedly Oscar-worthy films deserve, is it?"
In Los Angeles, the same bare minimum is taking place at Laemmle's One Pasadena, deep in the basement bowels of an alley off of Colorado Blvd.
Look, God bless HBO. They've been pushing documentary as much or more than anyone for decades. And Lord knows that Sheila Nevins should have been invited into the Academy years ago. I give them that and a bag a chips.
But like they're bought and paid for run of WHITE LIGHT/BLACK RAIN last year, HBO is, once again, laughing at the Academy and it's nonsensical rules. No matter what the Academy does in terms of setting the bar for true theatrical runs, HBO writes the check and qualifies. 14 cities? No problem. Manhattan? We'll take care of it.
What they won't do is give the film a real theatrical opening. Put the movie at the Film Forum or the IFC - two venues that would likely take the film in a second - and let it get reviewed and be seen by paying audiences on a big screen? Nope, not interested. Even though a film about Polanski that was a hit in Park City might actually be a big draw in Manhattan (not to mention doc-phobic LA)? Still not interested and please go fuck yourself.
And I don't buy Stu's insinuation that this is about "protecting its audience" for the HBO premiere in June. Sheila has made it clear that she thinks "the war is over between TV and theatrical", but in the same interview, she said that "Maybe the happy home for documentaries is the very short theatrical release with no expectations". The latter is not what's happening here.
So, not on the merits of POLANSKI - which I haven't seen but have heard great things about - but the Academy's a bunch of suckers if they shortlist any HBO film when HBO won't even do the minimal work to allow that film to be a true theatrical release. Give them a raft of Emmys. Give them Peabodys. Give Sheila the Academy membership that she so deserves. But don't let them anywhere near the Kodak unless the films get reviewed, get publicized and get seen by paying audiences.
181st Street's a joke and no one at the Academy should be laughing.
No way! I lived a ten minute walk from this theater for six years and just moved out of the neighborhood. The film Mad Hot Ballroom had a long run at the Coliseum. Many of the kids in that film are from Washington Heights and the billboard was still up in August '07.
The funny thing is, while HBO may be taking the long way around the Academy, there is an audience for docs uptown that could be cultivated if someone took a closer look.
Posted by: Yance | March 31, 2008 at 08:02 AM
Oh, how I wish that this was part of a great plan to bring docs uptown!
Posted by: AJ Schnack | March 31, 2008 at 02:52 PM