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domino harvey wrote:

oh yeah wrote:Interesting title. At this rate, Soderbergh's next film will be titled Dapper Danny.

(Yes, I'm here all week, folks).

Will you be explaining why that's funny at some point during your residency?

I met Rebecca Blunt a long time ago through my wife. Apparently she pitched this idea to Channing when all of us were bowling four years ago (I don't recall any of that). She gave me the script to read in the fall of 2014 and asked if I would help find a director for it. After two weeks, I told her that, like Dick Cheney, I had called off the search and chosen myself. Then I gave it to Chan...

domino harvey wrote:Soderbergh addresses Blunt speculation

I met Rebecca Blunt a long time ago through my wife. Apparently she pitched this idea to Channing when all of us were bowling four years ago (I don't recall any of that). She gave me the script to read in the fall of 2014 and asked if I would help find a director for it. After two weeks, I told her that, like Dick Cheney, I had called off the search and chosen myself. Then I gave it to Chan...

Steven Soderbergh wrote:Well, that's going to be news to Rebecca Blunt.

Steven Soderbergh wrote:In response to questions about the screenplay’s author, Mr. Soderbergh said in an email, “Clarify? Me? Why would I do that? I can tell you that Rebecca Blunt is enjoying all this immensely.”

It’s been interesting. As I’ve been trying to describe to people, you can’t use the studio metric to judge how the film performed because it just doesn’t apply at all. We were in profit as soon as the movie opened. We have a couple of weeks of playability left to see what the final result is gonna be, where there aren’t really any big releases that are going up against it. I’m curious, given the strength of the reviews and the exit polls, to see what’s going to happen and whether or not word-of-mouth will push us downfield a little further. What we haven’t been able to determine, and it’s the biggest question mark, is why what we thought would be the core audience for this movie – the rural, southern audience – didn’t show up. In fact, West Virginia was near to the bottom of all the states for our box office. I can’t figure out why that is. We targeted this audience very directly and repeatedly, and they did not show up. We can’t figure out why. I don’t know if there’s just a deep suspicion of what they perceive to be a Hollywood movie trying to portray their lifestyle. It’s very strange.

Here’s the thing: our campaign was not focussed on big city audiences. We went after the audience that isn’t courted so much, that’s sort of in the middle of the country. We really ignored New York and LA, we just decided that’s not our audience, in our minds. And yet, over the weekend, 25 out of the top 30 grossing screens were in New York and LA, because those crowds are review-driven and they read the reviews and they went. It’s all part of this larger experiment, we’ll see how the next couple of weeks play out. Like I said, there was no version of this in which we lose, ever, it was just a matter of how big can we win? We’ll see what happens. I’ve got something else in the holster that I’m gonna put through this same model, and we’ll see what happens on that one.