Once upon a time, there was a studio in Hollywood called MGM Studios which had once been three separate studios. Through the studio system, it created a slew of great movies that are considered classics like The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind and Ben-Hur (both versions) as well as the Tom and Jerry cartoon shorts (as created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera).

Then, TV came along in the 1950s, and while the studio struggled, it also persevered and created a few good series such as “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” and re-invigorated the Tom and Jerry cartoons by hiring Chuck Jones to direct them. It was during this era when people started buying and selling the studio as a whole or parts of the studio and when the studio started relying on big budget tentpoles to bring in the dough for an entire year.

You can follow the rest of this convoluted story by starting at this section of the studio’s Wikipedia page, but it gets a little dizzying. Suffice to say, there are now a bunch of companies and/or banks who lent money to the studio which has lost a lot of money and they want it back.

When we last left MGM, things appeared to be on the up-and-up because the studio had been granted a reprieve from paying back its loans, which meant that anyone who was interested in buying the company had a bit longer to think about it and/or complete their due diligence (aka, investigation into whether or not it would make sense for them to buy a debt-ridden movie studio).

Those same lenders who are being lead by JPMorgan Chase are getting anxious now, says Carl DiOrio at The Hollywood Reporter, and only six of the 12 studios and entities which had submitted non-binding bids have been invited to the second round of bidding. Three of the six were identified as Time Warner, Lionsgate, and Access Industries.

The more I read about this and as I start to see values like $3.7 billion attributed to the amount of debt retained by MGM, the more abstract this whole idea appears to me. DiOrio suggests that half that value is all the company and the lenders could expect to get from a sale and that bankruptcy re-organization is more likely if the lenders don’t like that dollar amount.

At this point in time, if I held a note on MGM Studios, I’d probably welcome the chance to cherry-pick at the film library and try to pick up the pieces that could get me the most value later on, such as the James Bond film library and the rights to re-broadcast Gone With the Wind. When that much money is involved, sometimes it’s just best to cut your losses and run, and apologize to your own investors later.

Of course, there is a concrete human element that I can’t ignore and it’s that of the hundreds of employees who had nothing to do with making the bad artistic decisions that helped lead to the company’s downfall who work at the main branch of the company and would lose their jobs in the worst economic recession of the 21st century. I’m talking about people like Marvin the Mailroom Guy and Administrative Assistant Andrea, not Tom Cruise’s sister, Paula Wagner, who is currently the head of the United Artists division of MGM. But that’s the only reason I would suggest to my fellow lenders that we would accept a low offer, and that’s just not good enough.

In the end, though, I would bet that just because it was one of the original Hollywood studios, there’s going to be another last-minute save or consortium or something that will swoop in and make everything better.

Because wouldn’t that make for a better ending to the movie?

Related Posts: James Bond franchise future in doubt and/or in safe hands

As at least almost every character in the Star Wars universe has said at least once, I’ve got a bad feeling about producer Judd Apatow’s next movie.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, he’s re-teaming up with “Freaks and Geeks” creator Paul Feig to produce an untitled comedy for Universal Pictures and Kristen Wiig who played one of Katherine Heigl’s sister bosses in Knocked Up.

Wiig wrote the screenplay with comic actress Annie Mumolo and THR says it will be about two women who are battling to plan a friend’s wedding party. Feig will direct and be the executive producer, the two women will also get co-producer credit, and in addition to Apatow, Barry Mendel (Whip It) will also help call the shots.

Now, I’ll be the first person to admit that I know absolutely nothing about what it means to be a movie producer. However, if it’s anything like being an editor, then I know that some producers can have a great impact on how a movie gets made and in what direction a story can take.

I’m really glad that Wiig and Mumolo have producer credits because they’ll be able to really push to retain those elements of the script that male audiences won’t understand but female audiences can find hilarious. At the same time, I also hope this becomes a “wedding comedy” that doesn’t alienate the male part of the equation or pump up the female bits too much because too much focus on one gender’s view of the whole thing could lead to charges of the movie being either misogynist or misandrist, something Apatow’s already familiar with.

No word yet on who Wiig’s co-star will be or when filming will commence.

Despite his implying in his Valentine’s Day review that anyone who liked the movie shouldn’t be taken out on a second date, I still retain a fondness for Chicago Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert because he’s an old-school newspaperman who has successfully made the transition to new media.

That he’s also battled various cancers and the loss of his lower jaw while doing so and still manages to maintain a busy writing schedule is no small feat, and so this Esquire magazine profile of Ebert is something that’s I really needed to read right now.

Also? Fuck Disney for making his so pissed off that he had to resort to capslocks-style shouting.

And speaking of actors who became directors in the 1990s, Mel Gibson’s comeback doesn’t seem to be going well.

While his Edge of Darkness has a 55% fresh rating on the Tomatometer, it has only grossed $37 million in its first two and a half weeks of release. For a film with a reported $80 million budget, that’s not so good.

Perhaps audiences needs to see him getting beaten up some more, is what his business manager and/or agent is thinking, for Gibson and his production studio Icon Productions took an action movie screenplay with them to the European Film Festival and sold the hell out of it, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Called How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Gibson stars and co-wrote the screenplay about a career criminal (Gibson) who gets sent to a Mexican prison and how he survives the experience. The film was directed by Adrian Grunberg, Gibson’s first assistant director on his Apocalypto.

Thanks to a flurry of deals with international distributors, Vacation will be shown in Benelux, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Greece, the Philippines, Portugal, Scandinavia, South Africa, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, and the Middle East. Though there is no word on who will distribute in the U.S. and Canada, Icon Productions will handle distribution in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and the U.K.

Filming starts in an actual Mexican prison in March.

They say wine and cheese get better with age; I’m not so sure the same can be said about actor-directors from the 1990s.

Take Kevin Costner, for example. According to Variety, his next project will be to direct and star in a film called A Little War of Our Own about a sheriff who has to prevent an outbreak of violence in his town against the backdrop of World War II.

Fully financed by Beacon Pictures, Armyan Bern­stein is re-teaming up with Costner as producer (last picture they worked together on was The Guardian) and the pair are looking for a second male lead to play opposite Costner as a German U-boat commander from Dan Gordon’s screenplay.

Don’t get me wrong; I love some of the movies he’s done or been in, but for some reason, almost all the films Kevin Costner has made in the 2000s haven’t lived up to the same promise of the work that propelled him into stardom in the first place.

If I had to peg Costner down as an actor, he does folksy and charming well (Tin Cup), he does tired and cynical well (Bull Durham). He’s good in Westerns (Dances With Wolves) and he’s a great romantic hero (The Bodyguard). But Denzel Washington who is the same age as he is can do the same things and has earned more recent acting Academy Award nominations and statues than Costner.

Maybe it was a mistake for Costner to continue being a director/producer and bog himself down in those details because they take away from the acting process. Maybe he’s just not the kind of guy who can multitask like that.

In any case, Little War will start filming in the fall.

Someday, I would really like to meet Brian Grazer, look him in the eye and say, “What the hell were you thinking?!”

The latest WTF-ery from the man who produced Real Genius and The Da Vinci Code—but who also produced Undercover Brother and Fun With Dick and Jane—is that Twilight werewolf Taylor Lautner will be playing the titular role in the Stretch Armstrong movie that will now be released in 2012 due to being filmed for 3D.

According to The Hollywood Reporter‘s Heat Vision blog, the plot now goes something like this:

The story developed for the movie, being produced by Imagine and Hasbro, sees an uptight spy who stumbles across a stretching formula, which he takes and must now adjust to in everyday life and when fighting crime.

When I think of Lautner, I don’t think of the word “uptight,” but I think I get why they used the word because now Armstrong has got to expand his boundaries and his imagination to fight crime, yadda, yadda. It’s just the plot seems so boring and now the movie’s starring someone I only like because he looks pretty.

Also noted by THR is the fact that Battleship is getting a sci-fi veneer onto its action plot and that the release date for that film is also getting pushed back to Memorial Day 2012. I’m not sure what director Peter Berg is thinking either because the game is all about the Cold War and it’s also the original turn-based strategy game… hey wait, could he be changing the thought behind the game mechanics and drawing inspiration from Starcraft?

Related Posts: Production date set for Brian Grazer’s Stretch Armstrong movie, Universal and Hasbro sign a six-year pact (updated)

Oh, Kevin Smith, I think you won my heart back again.

That’s what I’m talking about! Well-framed talking heads dialogue, snappy banter, crude sexual humor… that’s the Kevin Smith whose films I’ve loved.

All is forgiven for caving in on the movie title. Cop Out (formerly known as A Couple of Dicks) hits the streets on February 26, 2010.

Related Posts: Trailer Watch: Cop Out trailer

I’ve been thinking a lot about screenwriters recently because I’ll be helping a friend do a reading in March and any time I hear that a writer or a writing team has landed a deal, I give a little cheer because I know how hard it is to create new stories for a jaded audience.

I’m not sure how much this applies to writers Michael Diliberti and Matthew Sullivan who sold their script L.A. P.I. to Rough House, the production company set up by actor Danny McBride and his collaborators Jody Hill (director of Observe and Report) and David Gordon Green (director of Pineapple Express and Your Highness, which also stars McBride).

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Hill will direct and McBride will star as a private investigator in L.A.—obviously—but almost every other detail about the plot is being kept tightly under wrap.

I can’t decide whether or not this is a good move as when you think about Los Angeles and fictional private detectives, you think about Phillip Marlowe or Jim Rockford, right? Also, the film is being described as an action-comedy, which I think means there’s going to be less sleuthing and more antics, which as a fan of the detective genre I’m not sure I can fully support.

This isn’t the first deal for Diliberti and Sullivan, as they’ve been tasked with re-adapting Brewster’s Millions for Warner Bros., and according to IMDBPro, their first script Comic Con has an option out on it, but doesn’t state which studio has it.

In an awards ceremony that featured David Hyde Pierce performing a rap song which name-checked the films in contention, the winner of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival dramatic Grand Jury Prize was Winter’s Bone directed by Debra Granik, adapted from the novel by David Woodrell. (The complete list of Sundance winners is here.)

However, it was Roadside Attractions who was the big winner, according to Variety, because they were able to pick up the North American distribution rights for perhaps under half a million dollars, outbidding and outlasting Apparition, Samuel Goldwyn Films, Sony Pictures Classics, and the Weinstein Co.

The film, for which Granik and Anne Rosellini also won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, stars Jennifer Lawrence (Lauren Pearson from “The Bill Engvall Show”) as a teen living in the Ozarks whose meth-dealing father has put up the family home as a bond against being held in jail till his court appearance and has since disappeared. It’s up to the teen to conduct her own “Dog the Bounty Hunter”-style hunt, and she doesn’t even have a black SUV or a large bosomed-assistant/wife at her disposal.

Two other films also picked up distribution deals:

The Killer Inside Me: No matter what you say, Gordon and Anne Thompson, I’m not sure I want to see this film which was decried by audience members just minutes after finishing up its screening for scenes of graphic violence between its star deputy sherrif Casey Affleck upon his prostitute lover Jessica Alba. I’m lucky enough that I will not be triggered upon seeing the movie, but there are very many people who will not be. There’s a long conversation to be had about the value of graphic violence in film, but I think I’ll save it for another article.

IFC Films is the lucky studio that picked up the rights for just over $1 million for the film which was directed by Michael Winterbottom and adapted from the 1952 novel by Jim Thompson (who also wrote the novel which was the basis for The Grifters).

Blue Valentine: Written/directed by Derek Cianfrance and starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as a married couple on the verge of divorce, The Weinstein Co. picked up the North American theatrical and Pan-Asian satellite rights for something in the “low seven figures,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Including the previously announced pick-ups and that of the documentaries Family Affair and Waiting for Superman, the international rights sale of Holy Rollers and the U.S. distribution of foreign language Contracorriente (aka Undertow), this brings the total number of deals made at Sundance to 10; many are taking that to be an indicator that the industry has bounced back:

“There’s a sense of relief and comfort that the market is still pretty healthy,” said Micah Green, co-head of [Creatie Artists Agency]’s film finance group. “The pace of sales is more deliberate now. If you check back in three to four months, I think you’ll find more films will have sold than in previous years. The market is more fragmented, so there’s less of a herd mentality. People are responding more to the films than who else is chasing them.”

Let’s just hope the industry’s also strong enough to support the sale of two large film catalogs, eh?

As the sun set over the wintry and cold panorama of film goers, swag hunters, celebs, critics, actual movie fans, and some phonies in Park City, Utah at the Sundance film festival yesterday, three different sets of directors, cast members and producers could celebrate for they had all landed the best honor there is to be had at the festival: a domestic distribution deal.

The Kids Are All Right: Focus Features picked up this drama/comedy which stars Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as a lesbian couple whose children do some sleuthing and find out that their biological father is Mark Ruffalo. I have to say that I love the premise of this movie because it’s rather unique among all the kinds of stories one could tell about the new nuclear family.

Directed by and co-written by indie-familiar Lisa Cholodenko, Focus will be releasing Kids in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and South Africa to the tune of $4.8 million but they haven’t announced when they would be doing so.

Hesher: I never thought I’d hear the word “hesher” ever again, but here it is as the name of Joseph Gordon-Leavitt’s character in a drama about a motherless boy (played by Devin Brochu) who forms an unlikely friendship with Hesher and Natalie Portman’s character and what happens when their lifestyles collide. Newmarket Films picked up the U.S. distribution rights for $1 million and there’s apparently a deal in the works to bring the film to Canada as well.

Twelve: The only reason why the $2 million purchase of the domestic rights to Joel Schumacher’s teen drama—which hasn’t even made its public debut yet—would make sense to me would be if either the buyers received a private screening or if Hannover House is trying to capitalize on the “Let’s watch rich Manhattan teens ruin their lives” zeitgeist.

Based on the novel by Nick McDonell, the ensemble drama features a performance by Chace Crawford as a teenage drug dealer who sells pot to his rich prep school friends and takes place over the course of five days at the turn of the 21st century.

Sundance closes its festival this coming Sunday. (Source: Variety)

In one of his op-ed pieces, Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Gleiberman declared that thanks to Twilight: New Moon, the age of Hollywood trying to placate only the 18 to 34-year old male demographic was over.

I am understandably torn about this.

I think it’s totally awesome that Hollywood is starting to take young women’s needs seriously when it comes to entertainment. The success of the High School Musical TV franchise was built on the yearnings of teenage girls, and those yearnings also lead to the silver screen debut of the franchise earning over $90 million in the U.S.

With New Moon earning over $142 million in its opening weekend and shattering the record previously held by the similarly age-range targeted The Dark Knight, it proves without a doubt that young women will flock to the movie theaters just as much as young men will.

My problem is that what the average teenage girl normally wants out of her entertainment isn’t very good, nor would any of it pass a Bechdel test because the average teenage girl is mostly concerned with teenage boys and whether or not they’ll think she’s pretty due to the demands of her raging hormones and the societal pressure surrounding her. There’s only so many different kinds of movies one can make that would appeal to this inner need, and I doubt you’ll see any of them on an American Film Institute Top 100 list or winning any major awards.

The feminist within me is warring with my inner critic, mostly because when I add in this report that women are taking on stronger roles in TV production and actually making good series that a wide audience wants to watch, it would almost make me think that an increase in female studio presidents or chairs or an increase in the ranks of female directors and screenwriters would mean that there would be a corresponding increase in the variety of stories for female characters in movies.

And that’s where I’d be wrong.

As reported by Jezebel.com during a conversation they had with New York Times movie critic Manohla Dargis, the fact that women like Universal Pictures co-chair Donna Langley exist means absolutely nothing when you compare it to Hollywood’s total output over the last decade:

For me the most sobering thing of the last ten years is that there really was a point where four of the studios were run by women… and you would have thought that would lead to an uptick of women directors. I’m not saying I’ve done a systematic analysis, but it doesn’t look like it changed very much… Working within the system has not worked. It has not helped women filmmakers or, even more important, you and me, women audiences, to have women in the studio system. … I think the studio system as it exists now is a no-win situation for women filmmakers.

The sad thing is that this isn’t a fight that’s new to me. When I started writing for Sequential Tart in either 2000 or 2001, one of the things that impressed me about the group as a whole is that though the online comics ‘zine was–and still is!–written, edited, and published only by women, what a variety of tastes and styles we had!

The common refrain and what made me sad to leave Tart after I was hired at Wizard Entertainment was that our strength as a ‘zine and an arbiter of taste was our diversity in what we liked. Sure, there was a great propensity towards indie comics more than mainstream comics, but that’s because just like Hollywood, the majority of mainstream comics stories and characters in the U.S. haven’t been written by or created for women and girls since the industry began.

Thankfully, girls who want to read comics that reflect who they are as people can turn to Japanese manga to fill that void. There is no equivalent substitute for female film fans, and to answer the question why would probably entail me getting a sociology degree.

Yet, just as the fight goes on for female comics fans to be served entertainment by the Big Two that appeals to them without pandering or completely missing the point, one can hope that the second decade of the 21st century can start to turn things around for women who love movies.

Or at least he’s in negotiations to do so.

According to Variety, Sam Worthington is currently working out a deal to star in Universal Pictures’ Dracula Year Zero which will be directed by Alex Proyas (Dark City, Knowing) from a script by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless.

Though the trade says the exact plot of the movie is a secret, Steven James Snyder over at Techland.com had a conversation with Proyas where he revealed a bit more about how he’s approaching this most iconic of movie monsters:

It’s all about how Vlad of Transylvania became this creature; the choices that he made to make him into this tragic character. It’s so intriguing to me, to approach this as a character study on a huge, epic canvas. The script is from these two young guys who have never really done a script before, but they basically did their thing and have reinvented the whole context of this most familiar personality.

It’s worth it to note that the original novel by Bram Stoker was itself a reworking of the history of Transylvanian lore about Vlad the Impaler combined with subtle influences of Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel Carmilla and John Polidori’s The Vampyre, both of which preceded Stoker’s publication.

Of course, Universal’s re-telling of the vampire story is part of a major bid to re-establish the studio in the public’s eye as the place to go when you want to see a movie featuring monsters and I have a feeling that the fate of this new Dracula movie is going to rest with how audiences react to the upcoming The Wolfman in February.

It’s been only four days so far, but already the distribution rights to a movie have been negotiated at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

The lucky winners of the “first Sundance get” award are Spanish director Rodrigo Cortes, screenwriter Chris Sparling, and producers Peter Safran and Adrian Guerra whose Buried made its world premiere during the “Park City at Midnight” series on Saturday. The film stars Ryan Reynolds as an unlucky contract driver in Iraq whose convoy gets attacked by insurgents and he winds buried alive in a coffin, which appealed to Lionsgate.

According to Variety‘s insiders, the deal was done for between $3 million and $4 million, and was helped along by the fact that apparently the first screening was so packed that buyers from Fox Searchlight had to leave Sundance to go see it in Salt Lake City the next day.

As much as I love Ryan Reynolds, though, I am a bit concerned about the logistics of this movie, as anyone who watches “Mythbusters” knows that it is nearly impossible for someone who is buried alive in a coffin underground to live long enough to break free from it due to rising carbon dioxide levels inside the coffin. It doesn’t help to know that Reynolds’ character is buried with a candle in the coffin because as everyone knows, fire needs oxygen in order to sustain itself, thus rapidly depleting the available supply for the poor contract worker.

There’s no word yet on when the film will be released.

Related Posts: Ryan Reynolds to be Buried alive