Brian Brooks is managing editor of MovieLine.
The dog days of summer are coming to a close as Venice, Telluride and Toronto gear up with dozens of titles that will eventually make their way to U.S. screens ' at least those that receive a theatrical release. For Labor Day weekend audiences, a string of past festival pics are headed for their box office run. Sundance titles The Ambassador, For A Good Time, Call' and Little Birds make their bows this holiday. Austrian filmmaker Karl Markovics' Breathing debuts in the U.S. after screening last year at Cannes. China Lion's The Bullet Vanishes heads to North America, targeting Chinese audiences.
The Ambassador
Director: Mads Brügger
Writers: Maja Jul Larsen, Mads Brügger
Cast: Mads Brügger
Distributor: Drafthouse Films
Documentary filmmaker Mads Brügger made a splash Stateside back in 2010 at the Sundance Film Festival where his The Red Chapel won the World Cinema documentary prize. His latest, The Ambassador, features the Danish filmmaker-journalist posing as a European diplomat as he goes under cover to investigate the blood diamond trade in Africa. '[We] were big fans of Mads because of Red Chapel, and The Ambassador was one of our big targets for Sundance this year,' Drafthouse Films exec James Shapiro said. 'Corruption in Africa isn't a revelation but he really throws himself in the thick of it and risks everything including his life to show an account of modern day colonialism. It hit us right in the gut and ' next thing we know, we're making an offer to Trust Nordic,' the sales company.
Shapiro said it's 'not a huge mystery' that a film like this will appeal to the 'NPR crowd,' but it will also appeal to their Alamo Drafthouse fan base. 'Mads is a very unique filmmaker and, for lack of a better word, he's a badass! They love that stuff. We've done some double features with Red Chapel [thanks to a partnership with Kino Lorber] and Mads is in the country right now touring LA, New York and Austin. The Ambassador opened Wednesday at IFC Center. It will bow Friday in LA at Cinefamily and in Austin at the Alamo Drafthouse and in San Francisco. It will expand to about a dozen markets next week.
For A Good Time, Call'
Director: Jamie Travis
Writers: Lauren Miller, Katie Anne Naylon
Cast: Ari Graynor, Lauren Miller, Justin Long, James Wolk
Distributor: Focus Features
Focus picked up the comedy out of Sundance earlier this year. It centers on a pair of 'frenemies' who decide to make ends meet by setting a phone sex business. 'It's rare you find a film with this much humor, raunch and heart,' said Focus Features president Andrew Karpen. 'What we've learned is that the people who see this film really love it,' so they plan go slow 'and let word of mouth drive this film.' Toward that end Focus set up several word-of-mouth screenings ahead of this weekend's theatrical bow. Women 18-34 are the audience and 'may relate more to the friendship part then the phone sex,' Karpen said, but 'guys like it too.'
For A Good Time, Call' follows other Sundance pickups for Focus including last year's Pariah and the previous year's Oscar-nominated The Kids Are All Right. The distributor also nabbed Beginners out of Toronto and Karpen said their team will be back at the festival next week. For A Good Time, Call' will open in 10 markets over the holiday weekend, including Toronto.
Little Birds
Director-writer: Elgin James
Cast: Juno Temple, Kay Panabaker, Leslie Mann, Kate Bosworth, Kyle Gallner
Distributor: Millennium Films
The drama Little Birds was originally slated to open a year ago, but Millennium held off after its writer-director Elgin James ran afoul of the courts and served jail time. James' extraordinary journey from gang member to filmmaker in competition at Sundance received a profile by Deadline last Spring. But producer Jamie Patricof noted that the entire filmmaking team remained committed to the feature through difficult days. The 2011 Sundance premiere concernstwo young women who face a 'life-changing event' after they leave their Salton Sea, CA home to follow boys they meet back to Los Angeles.
Veteran indie producer Patricof noted that every film faces something 'that will go wrong' along the way. He lost funding while producing his Oscar-nominated titles Half Nelson and Blue Valentine, for examlple. 'But this was definitely not something we'd expect,' he said. 'It's a testament to the crew, actors and everyone that held it together.' Millennium Films bowed Little Birds at the Angelika Theater on Wednesday in New York. It will open in Los Angeles on September 14th. James 'went from foster care to homeless to gang member to jail to Sundance filmmaker,' said Patricof. 'Not many people have had a similar path.'
The Bullet Vanishes
Director: Lo Chi-leung
Writers: Lo Chi-leung, Yeung Sin-ling
Cast: Nicholas Tse, Lau Ching-wan, Yang Mi
Distributor: China Lion
L.A.-based distributor China Lion picked up The Bullet Vanishes through Hong Kong sales agent Emperor outside any formal festivals or film markets. In 1930s Shanghai a police newcomer sets off to investigate bizarre homicides taking place at a local arsenal. 'We're targeting Mandarin-speaking Chinese-Americans and Canadians,' China Lion exec Robert Lundberg said. 'We think there will be some art house and fanboy audiences as well.' Lundberg said China Lion will bow The Bullet Vanishes on 14 screens in eight markets over the weekend. Targeted cities include Boston, LA, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washinton, D.C. and Vancouver.
Breathing
Director-writer: Karl Markovics
Cast: Thomas Schubert, Karin Lischka, Georg Friedrick
Distributor: Kino Lorber Films
'I saw a woman dead in a room [and] the vision stayed with me,' Austrian filmmaker Karl Markovics said of the idea that eventually morphed into Breathing, his 2011 feature that won prizes at the Cannes, Sarajevo and Zurich film festivals and is now hitting U.S. theaters this weekend. Markovics said some time had passed after seeing 'the vision' before he actually started shooting. The project went through Austria's usual rigor of funding ' namely three sources where virtually every film made in the Central European mostly Alpine country finds their production funds. 'Austria doesn't have the same studio or even independent film industry that America does,' Markovics noted. 'And Austria is a very small market. We speak German, but our films have difficulty finding distribution even in Germany which has a large market because of our dialect.'
Markovics scrambled to finish the film after shooting in late 2010, hoping to score a slot in Cannes that May. He sent a rough cut and eventually received an acceptance in the Directors Fortnight sidebar. Kino Lorber will open Breathing at Cinema Village in New York with other dates to follow.
'Being infamous is not fun. It becomes a weird occupation in and of itself.' Michael Cimino spoke those words at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday as he introduced a digitally remastered version of Heaven's Gate. One of the most notorious box office flops of all time, the film is credited with contributing to the demise of United Artists and halting the auteur movement of 70s Hollywood. Cimino was coming off Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for The Deer Hunter when Heaven's Gate came out in 1980 and cratered his career. On the Lido Thursday to accept a life achievement award along with debuting the updated pic, he said he at first didn't want to revisit it, 'I've had enough rejection for 33 years.' Cimino oversaw the digital remastering and said technology had advanced enough that seeing it now was like seeing a new movie. It's also a longer movie. The new version runs 216 minutes.
Meanwhile, a lot of heat surrounded Ariel Vroman's out of competition title, The Iceman. Michael Shannon has drawn great notices for his take on real-life contract killer/family man Richard Kuklinski. Reaction was also positive for strong performances by Winona Ryder and Ray Liotta. Ryder, who'll next be seen in Gary Fleder's Homefront, said she's scaling back on work in general. 'I want to have a good life and so a film has to be pretty great to make me want to leave my life. I'm not in a place where I want to keep working just to work,' she said.
Rentrak reported today that 2016: Obama's America is benefitting from the runup to the Republican National Convention. The Rocky Mountain Pictures political documentary has generated $10.6 million since its release seven weeks ago. Now the pic is hot in four of the 12 major battleground states where GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney and President Obama are campaigning the heaviest: Florida, Ohio, Colorado, and Virginia. Texas continues to drive revenue as well as Georgia, Illinois, and Arizona. California and New York also are listed in the Top 10 states contributing the most gross dollars to the documentary's box office but 'individual markets including Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City are part of the lowest performing areas by contrast to the norm,' Rentrak says. 2016 Obama's America has grown +341% as it expands into more movie screens. Based on conservative author Dinesh D'Souza's best-seller The Roots Of Obama's Rage, it initially opened in only one theater in Houston on July 13th, then expanded to 1,091 theaters last weekend, and will increase to almost 1,800 theaters by Friday. It's now become the #1 all-time biggest grossing conservative documentary besting Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed's $7.7M. And the 6th all-time biggest political documentary behind liberal docs by Michael Moore and Al Gore. (Neither ranking is adjusted for inflation or higher ticket prices.) 2016 Obama's America is co-directed by D'Souza and John Sullivan and produced by Academy Award winner Gerald R. Molen (co-producer of Schindler's List). In fact, Molen credits 'learning some lessons' from Michael Moore for the film: 'When he released Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004 ahead of the election, it sparked intense debate.' 2016 Obama's America detractors decry it as a slick infomercial heavy with conspiracy theories. But D'Souza says he made the film to motivate moviegoers to question what an Obama second term would look like.
The Weinstein Company's R-rated outlaw drama Lawless opened in the dog days of August in 2,565 theaters Wednesday. Its $1.1M was good enough to narrowly edge out two-week-straight #1 The Expendables 2 from Millenium/Lionsgate. 
I'm surprised TWC didn't platform the pic before taking it out wide this Labor day weekend. 'What usually happens for a Wednesday opening is that you can get around 12.5 times that number for the 6 days Wednesday through Monday which would put us at $13.5M,' a Weinstein exec tells me. 'Anything $12 million or better would be pretty good all things considered. So I think we would be very happy with that number.' The Weinstein Company bought U.S. rights to the film at Cannes 2011 and have partnered with both Sean Combs' Revolt Films and Ron Burkle's Yucaipa Films. This gritty bootlegger tale based on real-life Prohibition figures reteams The Proposition team of director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave. It stars Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce, Jessica Chastain, and Mia Wasikowska. Tracking on the film has been decent particularly with males aged 17-34.
Among the new initiatives to bow in Venice this year is a market that's been met with curiosity mixed with skepticism and a wait-and-see stance in Hollywood and Europe.
The proximity to Toronto which starts on September 6 ' and the notorious cost of Venice ' mean Hollywood tends to sit this one out biz-wise. But veteran French exec Pascal Diot, who is heading up the new business initiative, tells me, 'There was a lot of business here about 15 years ago, but Toronto wasn't as big then' We found it abnormal that a festival as prestigious as Venice didn't have a market.' He allows the fest 'also found it ridiculous to cross with Toronto,' so the market will run only from Aug 30-Sept 3, allowing execs enough time to hightail it to Canada. One European sales exec says he thinks Venice's real market 'is still Toronto' where deals are sealed after an initial taste. 'And it's fine like that,' the exec says. 'I don't think Venice wanted to create an extra market, it wanted to improve working conditions for buyers.' The improved conditions include a fully dedicated space at the Excelsior Hotel, a digital video library, industry business center, industry club and an exclusive meeting area for producers, buyers and sellers.
Pitt-starrer Killing Them Softly, which was directed by Chopper helmer Andrew Dominik. Inferno explains they are sorting things out, but this makes you respect the companies like Sony Pictures Classics, which manage to proceed at a slow but steady pace, year after year, running it like a business, squeezing every dollar out of the films they distribute, and not over reaching like so many upstart companies seem to do. I'd hoped that Inferno would earn a place at the table as a viable new player, but this certainly doesn't help. Chapter 11 is by no means fatal, but it is serious.
Picture Arts & Sciences opened up its extensive, and impressive, film vaults for the press on Tuesday and provided clear proof they are also running a world class archival and preservation program for film and digital and other materials. As the Academy's Managing Director of Programming, Education and Preservation Randy Haberkamp said, 'this is what we do the other 364 days of the year' in a demonstation that the organization is about much more than just Oscar night. As a preview of what film fans will get a chance to see on September 10th (for invited guests) and 11th (the public) and in honor of the 10th anniversary of the Academy's Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study located on Vine St. in Hollywood, Academy officials led by Haberkamp showed off the impressive space that used to be an ABC television studio and is now housing three floors of vaults and storage areas for the approximately 400 restoration projects and other programs the Academy sponsors each year. The 10th anniversary event called Inside The Vaults will also feature the Los Angeles premiere of the Archive's newly restored print of the 1920 The Mark Of Zorro as well as the rare Mary Pickford short The New York Hat (1912). In relation to the latter, the Academy and the Mary Pickford Foundation are partnering on a multi-year initiative to promote the 'legacy of Pickford and the silent film era'. Pickford was one of the founders of 
the Academy. Artifacts from her career including letters and photos will be displayed, including a 1959 letter in which she discussed her plans and support for a Hollywood museum. Haberkamp said at long last the Academy is trying to make her dream come true with the creation (in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) of a permanent Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. The museum project is currently in the midst of a major fundraising drive and expects to reach the next leg of its goal with Board approval on October 16. Bob Iger, along with Governors Tom Hanks and Annette Bening are leading that financial effort.
out film and materials to archives around the world. Last year over 525 items were loaned out and 888 were used by the Academy for their own programs. Another vault, kept at freezing temperatures as low as 40 degrees and 25% relative humidity is what they loosely refer to as a 'before and after' vault housing various pieces of film including alternate takes and rarely seen sequences. It is a researcher's paradise with new entries coming in all the time. Currently archivists are working on the large Saul Bass collection.
The Academy employs four full-time preservationists who are hard at work on many projects including the preservation of 230 war shorts that were made on very dicey nitrate film and are now being painstakingly restored at a pace of several dozen a year. Since nitrate is very dangerous the Academy actually leases vaults at the UCLA Archives facility in Santa Clarita to store them. The vault also includes the 60,000 trailer collection, the world's largest. 70 to 100 researchers come in each year to use these facilities. Another vault showed work in progress on numerous film and video programs including clips from Oscar shows, Academy special programs and filmmakers' own home movies which have been donated to the Academy.
photos , production designs and other items from their massive collection that numbers over 70,000. Work being done included an original production design sketch for a house in Gone With The Wind that is one of many objects being borrowed by the Frankfurt Film Museum for an exhibit later this year called '85 Years Of Oscar'. Work is also being done for the Academy's own exhibition of Universal Horror coming this Fall in honor of U's 100th anniversary. In the last 12 months alone the Academy's Events and Exhibitions efforts (overseen by Ellen Harrington) totaled 90 different programs including 58 in Los Angeles, 14 each in New York and Washington D.C. and 2 in London among other locations.
the library has only limited shelf space left for the ever-expanding collections. Lining the halls of the Pickford (which also includes a state-of-the-art screening facility) are some of the rarest and earliest examples of poster art
As was rumored, Imagine Entertainment partners Ron Howard and Brian Grazer will film Jay-Z's Budweiser Made In America music festival, September 1-2 in Philadelphia. The feature will be released next year.
Chinese director Wong Kar Wai will be the Jury President of the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival.
The Zurich Film Festival today announced this year's headliners for its Master Class series. Instructors will include writer-director Frank Darabont (The Green Mile, The Walking Dead); producer Michael Shamberg (Pulp Fiction, Erin Brockovich); editor Pietro Scalia (Gladiator, Black Hawk Down), producer Greg Shapiro (The Hurt Locker), screenwriter Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, About Elly); director Daniel Espinosa (Safe House, Easy Money), director Benh Zeitlin (Beasts Of The Southern Wild) and UTA's David Flynn. Additionally producer Jerry Weintraub (the Ocean's Eleven series, among others) will lead a session as well as receive a career achievement award. Espinosa, Shamberg and Scalia also will be on the fest's fiction jury of which Darabont will serve as president. Richard Gere will receive the fest's Golden Icon award and John Travolta will be honored with the Golden Eye award at the opening night screening of Oliver Stone's Savages. Fest runs September 20-30.
Eagle Pictures has snapped up Italian rights to director Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist ahead of its world premiere Wednesday at the Venice Film Festival. K5 International is handling international sales. The movie is also screening at Toronto on September 8th. Based on the novel by Mohsin Hamid, it stars Kate Hudson and Riz Ahmed (Four Lions, Trishna) plus Kiefer Sutherland, Liev Schreiber, Martin Donovan and Om Puri (Singularity, East is East). Bart Walker at Cinetic and Hal Sadoff for the Doha Film Institute are handling the film's North American rights.
The Locarno Film Festival's artistic director Olivier Père is leaving the festival circuit to become the general director of Arte France Cinema. The festival board of governors is expected to decide on a successor on September 4. Festival president Marco Solarier expressed his thanks to Père 'for his work and major achievements. Père said he was 'very sad to be leaving the festival but am also immensely satisfied with what has been achieved' solidifying Locarno's standing in international cinema.
West Beirut and Lila Says director Ziad Doueiri's The Attack will have its world premiere in Toronto next month. Cohen Media Group and Focus Features' alternative distribution arm, Focus World, will jointly handle the film's North American release in 2013. Cohen will take theatrical, DVD and sales and Focus World will handle all digital media and TV rights. (The film was at one time in development at Focus.) Based on the best-selling book by Yasmina Khadra, the drama focuses on a Palestinian doctor who discovers uncomfortable truths about his wife following a suicide bombing. Doueiri and Joelle Touma wrote the script. Jean Bréhat and Rachid Bouchareb are producers. John Wells also has a producing credit. A 3B production, The Attack is co-produced by Douri Film, UAG, Scope Pictures and Random House Films.
NEW
Holdovers / 3RD+ Weekends
Hit And Run opened Wednesday and lost what little steam it had going into this weekend ending up #10. Open Road picked up the U.S distribution rights and changed the name of the film from Outrun. My sources said the low-budget comedic chase movie would have been a solid win for Open Road with $10M for the 5-day opening. But it made only $5.5M. The film stars Kristin Bell and Dax Shepard who also wrote and co-directed with David Palmer. (They teamed up on Brother's Justice in 2010). Shepard and Bell tried their best to drum up biz with appearances at word-of-mouth screenings all summer and on Kimmel, MTV, CMT, Spike. The film's featured 1967 Lincoln also offered marketing opportunities on car enthusiast TV shows and websites. No go. Well, you know a movie is in trouble when Bradley Cooper appears in it looking unrecognizable in dreds.
Guild/IATSE Local 700 union contract have settled. The deal came just as the new reality show was facing an air date on Syfy of September 18th so any more delays beyond the 3 days were going to affect the premiere. Callahan said the editors were employed by Burbank-based Blueprint Post Production without health or retirement benefits. Also, assistant editors were receiving pay rates well below union scale, Callahan said. A picket line for the 11-member crew was set up outside Blueprint's offices for 3 days and production was halted on the show. In addition editors who work under an IATSE Local 700 union contract on another Mission Control show, Face Off, refused to cross the picket line and delayed their show, too. Tonight, Callahan issued this statement about the settlement:
The courageous sisters and brothers of the Hot Set editorial crew will return to work on Monday with employer-paid health and retirement benefits! They walked off their jobs at Blueprint Post on Wednesday, and, after three days of picketing in the Burbank sun, won an agreement to ensure that postproduction on Hot Set will be done union. Kudos to the crew for the bravery they demonstrated in this fight. They stood up for themselves and for one another, and, in so doing, they took a stand for all editors and assistant editors working in reality television.
A group of IATSE specialized projectionists known as film revisors have begun informational picketing outside the Toronto International Film Festival's Bell Lightbox headquarters over the outsourcing of digital cinema file revisions for the September 6-16 event. Pickets are also set up at Deluxe Entertainment Services Group in Toronto, which has been contracted to handle revisions of digital movie files for the festival. If the labor action continues ' it's not a strike ' festival 
Sony Pictures for years was developing a Lance Armstrong biopic. Tonight that story received an ignoble ending. The celebrated athlete will be stripped Friday of his 7 Tour de France titles and banned from cycling for life by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. So I raise the question: Did Hollywood miss its chance to tell a fascinating hero's story? Or is there now an even more complex and interesting saga? Tonight, in his statement, Lance stressed that he decided to stop fighting the USADA investigation into whether he doped not because of new incriminating evidence but because he was up against a deadline. This was the last night he could decide to keep trying to prove his innocence. In a statement he described the USADA investigation as an 'unconstitutional witch hunt' especially after the U.S. Justice Department conducted its own probe and took no action. Tonight's ending is not neat and tidy: rather, it's messy and sad. It also should be a movie, albeit a different one from first envisioned.
PREVIOUS: Geoff Boucher wouldn't confirm or deny it on the phone to me just now. But a reliable Hollywood source tells me tonight that the Los Angeles Times 'Hero Complex' blogger is moving on for reasons unclear. This would be a huge loss for the paper and it follows on the heels of longtime movie columnist Patrick Goldstein taking a buyout instead of working for the new editorial leadership. 'Hero Complex' is a great blog, Boucher is an expert in all things comics, and as Indiewire's Anne Thompson wrote recently, 'The LAT's Geoff Boucher is the new model entertainment writer, constantly creating and repurposing and sending 
out new material online, via his 'Hero Complex' blog. Boucher came to the LAT in 1991 and, after years covering crime and local politics, he switched to the Hollywood beat covering film and music and then became the paper's go-to geek. As someone who didn't grow up with Marvel or DC comics, I truly envied Boucher's extensive knowledge about his beat evident in everything he wrote. Boucher's exit follows Editor Davan Maharaj's arrival and then a new entertainment editorial team announced June 20th. That was like moving deck chairs on the Titanic given that the newspaper has become lazy and irrelevant and its showbiz ads have fallen 25% every year as studio and theater chains abandon the publication. Seriously, no Boucher & no Goldstein = no showbiz readers.
Sleepwalk With Me
Samsara
Hermano (Brother)
Neighboring Sounds