Veteran Players, New Teams

Company Flow

Comments (0) By Anthony Kaufman Tuesday, Jan 1 2002

Night of the hunted: Eric Per Sullivan in Wendigo

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He feels a smaller organization is better suited to care for non-Hollywood movies. "It's not about a giant machinery, where a production division makes a film and the marketing division inherits something that they don't even get or understand," he explains. "When you're a company of our size, everything you do is predicated on the love you felt when you saw the film. It's your girlfriend: You know what it likes, what clothing makes it look pretty, and where it will flourish and flounder."

In addition to Content, Magnolia, and Think, art-house audiences must get used to yet another pair of logos. Winstar Cinema, distributor most recently of François Ozon's Under the Sandand a pair of Jacques Demy rereleases, changed its name to Wellspring Media, ultimately remaining intact after parent company Winstar Communications went bankrupt. Changes are also in store for the newly christened Cowboy Pictures, formerly Cowboy Booking International (whose 2001 titles included La Ciénaga, The Endurance, and Fat Girl). While slight, the name variation signals a shift toward larger distribution efforts. They have ceased programming the art film calendar for the Screening Room and will instead focus on their 2002 slate, which includes the documentary Promises, Shohei Imamura's Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, and Shunji Iwai's All About Lily Chou-Chou. As to rumors of their involvement in Miramax's now delayed World Cinema Film Series (a program akin to the Shooting Gallery's, which will cycle a package of films nationally), Cowboy's Noah Cowan offered no comment, but said, "We're expecting something big in the beginning of the new year."