2006 was the first full year of Cinematical, and it was a very busy year for its bloggers. A lot of big news, shocking news and ongoing news kept us busy as we followed the important stories and passed the significant bits onto you. There was good news, bad news, unexpected news and unbelievable news. There were deaths, births, rebirths and remakes. There was so much going on that it takes an amazing film geek to recall everything (have you tested your memory yet?).

But what was the most important story for film in 2006? The end of the box office slump? The Weinsteins' devilish pact with Blockbuster? Peter Jackson's possibilities of directing The Hobbit? Uwe Boll boxing his critics? Sorry, but none of those affected the consciousness of cinema as much as these other stories from the past 12 months:

• Disney Buys Pixar - When 2006 began, the future of Disney's relationship with Pixar was still uncertain. There had been hint of a new deal between the two companies in the last few days of 2005, but nothing was concrete. Three weeks went by, in which time the new year came in and Pixar's stock prices went up, and then finally the first installment of news came through on January 19: Disney would buy Pixar. Three days later, we were reminded that the deal was not yet done, that it was still awaiting approval from Steve Jobs and the rest of the animation studio's board. On January 23, however, it was in the bag: Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion. And John Lasseter was named head of Disney animation.
  
  The story didn't end there. Throughout 2006, the effects of the acquisition continued to be felt. First, Toy Story 3 was killed. But then it was greenlit again. Disney closed its new computer animation studio, Circle 7. Then many months went by before Disney fired a whole lot of people working in its animation departments. Finally, just a few weeks ago, the company announced they'd be trying out the ol' hand-drawn stuff again. By year's end, it felt as though Pixar was the one who owned Disney.
  

Any horror fan knows it: We love to watch. Perhaps through giddy fingers; maybe with a stomach-kick queasiness. But horror film is, at heart, deliberately looking at the worst possible things, and not looking away. Director JT Petty knows it; his first film, Soft for Digging, was a low-budget, high-ambition horror film made for less than $6,000; his next directorial gig was Mimic: Sentinel. "I make my living making scary movies," he explains early on in S&MAN, "but this is going to be about scary movies." Opening with a nod to a few classics -- Peeping Tom, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer -- Petty introduces us to three different filmmakers working in what he calls 'underground horror" -- a shot-on-video world of cheap thrills and cheaper production budgets, sold on-line, at conventions or by mail. As Petty explains, "It's not snuff" -- the unholy grail of long-rumored real-life death caught on film for purposes of entertainment -- "but it's close."

In the uneven (but not uninteresting) S&MAN, Petty introduces us to three separate film makers: Fred Vogel, who creates gonzo horror films under the August Underground banner; Erik Rost, who creates stalker/snuff-themed films in the S&MAN series; and Bill Zebub, the creative force behind slasher flicks like Kill the Scream Queen and The Crucifier. Vogel looks like a well-groomed sports buff; Rost is a self-deprecating, self-promoting craftsman; Zebub looks like he was peeled off the bottom of a cab in his native New Jersey after a particularly rockin' Sammy Hagar show. And they make films about killing people. Zebub says it best, and bluntly: "I don't shoot movies to make art; I shoot movies so perverts will give me money."

Though they won't even announced the nominees for their competitive awards until October, the folks at IFP (a group, for the non-independent film freaks among, you dedicated to "serving the independent film community as a source for networking and support while promoting film as a vital and influential public art form") have announced that they will honor Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner of 2929 Entertainment at their annual Gotham Awards this fall. According to IFP exec director Michelle Byrd, the pair are being recognized for their consistent willingness to think outside the box when it comes to film production and distribution. Though their day-and-date release strategy has received significant opposition from theater owners, it's starting to be adopted by other distributors, and seems to have been embraced, at least to a degree, by the viewing public. Said Byrd of the pair, "They are visionaries who have introduced exciting and new distribution models, and who continue to showcase tremendous diversity in the films they produce, release and exhibit." So yeah, she thinks they're pretty cool.

Though the awards ceremony doesn't take place until late November, does anyone really think Cuban will have cooled off enough by then NOT to talk about the NBA refs? I'm saying he's got to at least slip in a David Stern reference.

Odds and ends for Thursday:

• Even though IMDB lists Zach Braff as its director, Barry Sonnenfeld is in final negotiations to helm Andrew Henry's Meadow for 20th Century Fox. Pic, which is based on the popular children's book, follows a boy inventor who escapes suburbia and travels to a meadow. There, he sets up some sort of community where he eventually teams up with other outcasts on a mission to save their parents. Braff, along with his brother Adam, originally set up the pic and developed the story while Adam wrote the script. Perhaps, since Zach is now off directing a Danish re-make, he has relinquished his director's hat.

• Who knew Catherine Zeta-Jones was so into magic. Apparently, the actress is in talks to star opposite Guy Pearce in biopic about the one and only Harry Houdini. Set in the mid-twenties, Death Defying Acts will pick up Houdini's story while he's at the height of his career, touring the country and amazing the public with his brilliant escape acts. That's right folks, David Blane has nothing on this guy. Zeta-Jones will play an exotic psychic (I wonder if that means she tells your fortune while in her underwear?) who seduces Houdini into a passionate affair.

• Well, it looks like HDNet Films is really starting to make some moves. Not long after Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban's company decided to up its budget cap from under $2 million to under $5 million (assuming the right talent was attached), comes word that Zoe Cassavetes' Broken English has wrapped up its stars and will become the latest HDNet venture to head into production. Onboard what appears to be a quirky romantic comedy about a woman lost in her 30's and looking for love, will be Parker Posey, Drea de Matteo, Gena Rowlands, Jeanne Moreau, Justin Theroux and Josh Hamilton.

According to director Alex Steyermark, day-and-date releasing (or something close to it) is totally cool -- "just not for his film." Steyermark, whose One Last Thing ... is being theatrically released by Mark Cuban's Magnolia Pictures on May 5, is concerned that his film's television and DVD debuts (on May 19 and 23, respectively) will come too soon for necessary interest in the project to build. Despite the fact that he knew from day one that a day-and-date release was possible, Steyermark spent a lot of time last week complaining to The Hollywood Reporter about the situation, and (in a hilarious way, of course) described it as "day-and-date rape."

One Last Thing ... is Steyermark's second directorial effort (his first, Prey for Rock and Roll, starred Gina Gershon and Lori Petty), and tells the story of "a terminally ill teen who makes a provocative final wish." Starring Will & Grace's Michael Angarano as the kid and Cynthia Nixon as his mom (Gershon and Ethan Hawke also appear, among others), the film played at Toronto last fall where it received mixed reviews, but it has a great rating on the IMDb. Steyermark's bellyaching aside, his film is expect to hit screens in about 25 different markets on May 5.

After over fifteen years in the making -- and making Malick look rushed -- Caveh Zahedi's I Am a Sex Addict opened in Zahedi's own Bay Area this week, at the Balboa. The notable, quotable Neva Chonin has the best piece, from The Chronicle. The first weekend's screenings also include an extensive series of in-person appearances by Zahedi and his fellow filmmakers from in front and behind the camera; The Balboa's Website has more information. And, fascinatingly, the release of I Am a Sex Addict also had the nice side-effect of inducing a media-mogul slapfight that's based around ownership of the film's future rights; we have the story, if that look behind the curtain appeals to you in any way, shape or form.

Also this week, the weeklies have some nice film-related stuff, including a discussion of Jim Jones and the new documentary Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple in the  Bay Guardian. The ever-ready Cheryl Eddy has a review.

Plus,  Adam and Steve opens at The Castro, with writer-director-actor Craig Chester and actor Chris Kattan in attendance Friday night; man, can you go to a movie in this city without the director present this weekend? And, sure, you can; I was just exaggerating for effect.

San Francisco had 25 days of rain in March. Twenty-five days of rain.

Despite the fact that over 70 million homes receive his HDNet channel, Mark Cuban is still not making any money on his HD dream. Part of the problem (I'm not going to get into how many/few homes have HD TVs and receivers) is that some major cable companies -- including Comcast -- still refuse to carry either HDNet or its sister channel, HDNet Movies. In fact, a couple of years ago, Comcast, Cox, and Time Warner collectively created an HD channel of their own called INHD, which they conceived as "a Cuban-killer." (He's still here. As is HDNet.)

Because of Cuban's feud with Comcast, as Karina mentioned in her column, there were rumblings that his Landmark Theaters, the biggest independent chain in the country, might refuse to show films that were part of distributor IFC Films' day/date release deal with Comcast. No official, public statements were made, however, so things continued as normal, and Caveh Zahedi's I Am a Sex Addict (part of the day/date deal) was scheduled to open at a Landmark theater in Berkeley on Friday, April 7. Then, yesterday, Zahedi heard from IFC that the film had been pulled by the theater because of Cuban's beef with Comcast. Not surprisingly, Zahedi was upset, and (quite reasonably, it would seem) blamed Cuban for the affair. According to Cuban's comment on the above post (scroll down the page a little, and you'll find it), however, IFC knew the film would not be screened at any Landmark theaters and schedule it anyway. Hmm.

No matter who's to blame, the fact is that a little indie film is caught up in something much, much bigger than it is. Can you even imagine how frustrating this must be for the filmmakers who, after IFC's deal with Comcast, were thrilled at the prospect of (relatively) wide distribution for the babies, only to run into this roadblock? Man alive, what a nightmare.

Despite the insistence of theater owners that the multi-platform "super release" of Bubble was a complete disaster, 2929 is trying again with another niche film. Magnolia Pictures (a company that is under the 2929 umbrella) will release Herbie Hancock: Possibilities in theaters (just NY and LA) on April 14 and have it out on DVD four days later; the movie will air on Mark Cuban's HDNet TV channel on April 23. The film is a documentary that both explores Hancock's past and offers a detailed look at the recording of his most recent album on which folks like Sting, Annie Lennox, and Christina Aguilera appear.

While this film and its release schedule seems likely to affect only a tiny group of people (who, admittedly, will be incredibly happy), the small audience isn't a problem for 2929. According to Magnolia's VP of home entertainment Randy Wells, despite Bubble's "failure" at the box office, the total take from the theatrical and DVD sales, combined with PPV income, was about $5 million. Though that number is small compared to the profits pulled in by major studio releases, it's a huge success when one considers that the movie only cost about $1.5 million to make. Additionally, Wells maintains that releasing films on DVD and PPV or cable while they're still in theaters dramatically reduces advertising costs because the various releases can "draft" off of one another's hype.

A Landmark Business, moderated by indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez, brought together representatives from all aspects of Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's vertically integrated filmmaking factory, now called Wagner/Cuban Companies: Ted Mundorff, film buyer for Landmark Theaters; Tom Quinn, acquisition exec for Magnolia Pictures; Eammon Bowles, President of Magnolia; Elizabeth Glass, buyer for HD Net and HDNet Movies; Bill Banowsky, head of the new distribution initiative, Truly Indie; and Wagner himself, who easily stole the show by spouting his party's platform. Wagner's rhetoric was probably pre-packaged but undeniably convincing nonetheless.

Wagner/Cuban's various distribution revolutions were the order of the day. In all the hype surrounding the conglomerate's groundbreaking day/date strategy, their equally ballsy Truly Indie program has been somewhat overlooked. Banowsky described it as a "producer empowered distribution alternative." The concept came from the exhibition sector: Landmark shows a couple hundred films on its 300 screens a year, but half of its profits come from about 20 titles. In fact, the bottom 50-70 films, as Banowsky explained it, actually lose money for the chain. So the various sectors of the company got together and came up with Truly Indie, which essentially allows producers to pay a single fee to rent space at a Landmark Theater, and simultaneously hire Truly Indie to market and promote their film. It's sort of a second (last?) chance, for filmmakers who, say,  come off the festival circuit without a viable theatrical option. Truly Indie will allow such filmmakers to buy themselves a brief theatrical run, and still have the opportunity to cash in on the DVD rights. Wagner elaborates on the mission:

"We should be listening to the voice of independent cinema. I'd go to fests like this one [and hear filmmakers say], "I'm shut out of the system!" So what we're trying to do is open up the system. If you believe in your product, you should have a chance to release it."

The conversation soon, predictably, turned to day/date, and the company men are, rightfully, defensive. Here's where the Wagner quips really start to heat up. Some excerpts after the jump.

 

The most shocking moment of Sunday night's Oscar ceremony came early in the evening, long before Three 6 Mafia or Crash scored their twin victories for mediocrity. An hour or so after losing the night's first award to George Clooney, Jake Gyllenhaal trotted out on stage to ostensibly announce one of the night's many disposable montages. "They're called epics," he near-monotoned. "Extravaganzas. Spectacles." With that last one, Jake's voice took an unexpected up-turn. He went on to list a few (oddly amalgamated for mass cross-generational appeal) examples of the genre in question – "West Side Story. Star Wars. Ben-Hur." – before delivering the kicker: "You can't properly watch these on a television set, and good luck trying to enjoy them on a portable DVD." Gyllenhaal punctuated that embarrassingly over-scripted slice of Academy propaganda with a desperate, self-referential giggle – a composure break that lasted long enough for an insert shot of Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams, Gyllenhaal's Brokeback Mountain co-stars, just two members of what sounded like a large chunk of the audience laughing along with him. It was rather amazing, a pure, bumbling moment of transparency that neatly struck down whatever was left of Sid Gannis' sad house of cards. The new takeaway for the evening: If Hollywood can't take its own last-ditch propaganda seriously, how can we?