Throughout this article: your very first look at “The Marc Pease Experience.” And now the bad news…
Paramount has been very public about its decision to shift any and all emphasis away from middle-to-small-range films and focus solely on big budget monoliths that nobody can understand, like this month’s iffy “G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra” and last month’s blockbuster “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” One of the causalities of this was the loss of the wonderful Paramount Vantage arm of Paramount, which just two years ago co-produced two Academy Award nominees for Best Picture — “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood.”
While Paramount Vantage was supposedly “absorbed” by Paramount and turned into a production wing, well, that hasn’t really happened.
We talked to Todd Louiso, director of the underrated Phillip Seymour Hoffman drama “Love Liza,” this morning, about his experience with his follow-up film, “The Marc Pease Experience.” The film is unfortunately the latest Paramount Vantage casualty.
Even though the movie stars comic heavyweights Jason Schwartzman and Ben Stiller, as well as talented up-and-coming actress Anna Kendrick (who stars in a number of Playlist-approved projects, like “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” and “Up in the Air,” as well as some movie called “New Moon”) it’s being dumped in ten markets on August 21st. The movie won’t even be playing in New York or Los Angeles.
The film centers around an endearing premise (and here we’ll just quote from the official synopsis – it’s been a while since we read the script): “Schwartzman plays Marc Pease, a man 10 years out of high school and still living in the past when he was the star in his high school’s musicals. During the course of one day, as Pease’s former teacher/mentor Mr. Gribble (Stiller) oversees the opening night of another show, Pease finally exorcises his demons and realizes there’s more to life than Broadway artistry.” Sounds good, right?
Not good enough, apparently. You cannot find anything concrete about this movie online aside from a basic synopsis and cast. There’s not a trailer, there are no promotional photos; there are pages set up at New York Times online and Yahoo movies, but nothing is on those pages accept the bare bones.
Lousio told us the cities in which ‘Marc Pease’ is opening: San Francisco, Chicago, Philly, Miami, Dallas, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Seattle, Sacramento, and Boston (“maybe,” he added).
The production of the movie was broken down to us like this: “We shot and were editing, then realized we needed to go back and add some stuff, which isn’t uncommon, and then the writer’s strike hit. So we had to wait for 6 months, then we got the footage in and it looked good. And it was while we were finding a release date that Paramount Vantage went under.”
Louiso added that he found out about the plan to dump the film into these ten markets about four months ago. “It’s been really hard to accept that role [of just waiting helplessly for the thing to come out]. To have complete control over it and then to have no control, and give it over, it’s been tough.”
The inside scoop on the Vantage movies in the pipeline was that there was basically a mandate from Paramount to all the Paramount Vantage movies “on the way out” that “We’re just not going to put any more money into them.” This is why the 10 cities, an obligation by the studio to release the film theatrically, don’t include New York and L.A. — because it’s just too expensive to promote and release a movie in these cities.
He says, “There’s a possibility that it could gain momentum and have a wider platform release, but it’s unlikely because of the level of PR the studio has committed.”
This is a real shame. The movie sounds like a lot of fun (the script was very good), the cast and crew are extremely talented people, and if it’s one thing we could use in a summer full of robotic things crashing into one another, it’s a nice, small-scale comedy. (No, “(500) Days of Summer” doesn’t count.) Even though we mostly cover movies that you can actually see in New York, this movie deserves all the attention it can get, and we’re happy to oblige.
What’s even stranger is that there is actually a fairly high profile comedy opening this August and carrying with it the Paramount Vantage tag — the awful-looking “The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard,” directed by “Chappelle’s Show” alum Neal Brennan, is coming out August 14th. Gary Sanchez Productions, Adam McKay and Will Ferrell’s company produced ‘The Goods,’ and Paramount was probably worried about maintaining that relationship, even if it means putting out a total bomb.
Louiso added that you should see a DVD of the movie by the end of the year, hopefully. – Drew Taylor