Response to Special Presentations.

For anyone who is curious. We had about 90 people show up to the advance screening of PontyPool, pretty good for a Canadian film with no stars and a hard to explain premise. Most of the people seemed to like it but I think many (including me ) didn't understand it. Financially it worked. While the people didn't pay to get in we sold enough stuff at the snack bar to total more than we would have made from the showing of The Wrestler it replaced.

We had 320 people show up for the Observe and Report screening, that's almost a sell out. Considering there was a $5.00 ticket price that's pretty good. Warner sent a ton of prizes so almost everyone got something. I did get caught off guard a bit by how early people started showing up and we weren't quite ready. The silly popcorn machine decided to act up and we kept running out of popcorn. That lead to lines which probably hurt snack bar sales. Financially we were way better off than showing Gran Torino. The $5.00 admission went to charity so we didn't make anything on the tickets. However, snack bar sales were probably one of the highest single showing totals ever.

Naturally I hope the studios want to do more screenings...

Upcoming Special Presentations.

We have a couple special things happening at Western Film I don't think I have mentioned on here.

Monday Mar 23rd at 7:00. We are having the London Premiere of a Canadian Film Pontypool, directed by Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo). Maple Pictures asked me to do the screening. Bruce was originally supposed to be here but had to cancel. It looks like a film that's a little hard to describe. The basic descrip would be several people trapped in a radio station by zombies but I doubt Bruce McDonald would make anything that simple.
Admission is free at the door.




Monday Mar 30th at 7pm. An advance screening of Seth Rogen's film Observe and Report courtesy of Warner Bros. This is being done as a charity screening through a sorority, I can't remember the name right now.
Tickets will be $5.00 at the door. Show up early for good seats! There is a possibility this one could sell out.
The original plan was for Seth Rogen to be here for the screening but that didn't happen. I'm almost happy the crowd control and security issues would have been a real pain.



It won't let me embed it but if you can watch the age restricted red-band trailer, it gives a much better idea of the film than the toned down one above.

Director Ron Mann at Western Film this weekend.

The Film Studies Department contacted me a while ago about bringing in director Ron Mann and showing his 1999 film Grass. We agreed to show it, it's always cool to have a director on site. I wasn't sure how many people would come as Grass is about 10 years old and out on DVD. It ended up he has a new film called Know Your Mushrooms he was willing to show as well. That is even cooler, it plays at the Berlin and Victoria Film Festivals not long after it shows at Western Film.

There was a bit of hesitation about the combination of films as Grass is about the history of marijuana and Mushrooms has some content about 'magic' mushrooms. We didn't want it to appear as if we were promoting drug use.

So for any readers who actually live in London, Grass is playing at 2pm Saturday Jan 24th, there will be a Q&A with Ron Mann about 3:30 and Know Your Mushrooms will play at 4pm. Admission is Free.

Hope to see you there.

Things don't always work out / Weirdsville

I was contacted by a distributor named Equinoxe about playing a Canadian film called Weirdsville. Apparently it is aimed at the student type market. It stars a couple somewhat well-known guys, Wes Bentley who was in American Beauty and Scott Speedman who was in the Underworld movies and Felicity. The trailer made it look like a quirky black comedy, I was looking forward to seeing it. It's about a couple of stoners who try to hide the body of a woman who overdosed, involves Satan worshippers as well.

I was going to play it as it looked interesting and I try to support Canadian films when I can.

However playing it would have been a bit of a risk. The release date is Oct 5th so I would have had to commit to the movie for that week without knowing what else might have been available. There hasn't been a lot of promotion and when they contacted me there wasn't a lot of time left before it was supposed to come out. Playing a movie that hasn't been promoted enough is a guarantee of an empty theatre. They did send me a trailer which a few of you may have seen, it played in front of a couple shows of Hairspray. They also sent me some posters. The posters were a clue I might not want to play the film. They were smaller than the standard movie poster size. It may not seem like a big deal but it signals a low promotion budget to me.

The sticking point was the admission price. This would have been a first run showing which normally carries a higher admission price. However I tried charging $7.50 for a first run movie called Paper Clips once and it didn't work very well. Even through I tried to make it clear as possible the price was different for Paper Clips only. I still had people thinking we had raised our prices for all movies. I also had people showing up expecting to pay $4.25. As a result I don't want to try that again so I told Equinoxe I would only charge our usual $4.24.

Equinoxe decided they couldn't open the film at $4.24 so we won't be playing it. I pulled the trailer and posters.

I think they probably shot themselves in the foot. Unless the film does well in the larger cities or the Hyland picks it up it probably won't play in theaters anywhere in London now.

Who knows maybe we'll end up playing it later if it does get some press, but I doubt it.

Special Presentations Hatchet / Thing-Fest.

There's a couple special films coming to Western Film in October.

On Oct 19 and 20th at midnight we are playing a horror movie called Hatchet. Apparently it's a homage to the slasher flicks of the 80's and is funny as well as gory. Some of the actors who played various movie bad guys in the 80's make appearances. Robert Englund who played Freddy Kruger, Kane Hodder who played Jason in the Friday the 13th films and Tony Todd who played The Candyman.
It's a first run exclusive showing. The distributor contacted me about doing the showing a couple weeks ago. It's basically a promo for the DVD release of the film which I'm not really keen on but that's the way things are going. The distributor sent me a whole bunch of posters so I'm going to go around to the various comic book store and see if they will help promote the show.




The following weekend there will be a showing at Midnight on Saturday Oct 27th of John Carpenter's classic The Thing as part of Thing-Fest . This is the 7th year of the fest. These guys are serious fans. They went out to B.C. and found the original shooting locations where there were still some remnants of the sets. I've been surprised at the lengths people have gone to to see the movie, literally. There was a guy from Ireland one year, a few who had come from the US and I got an e-mail a few days ago from a guy who's coming from New York this year. He was worried we would sell out on him. The theatre seats 375 so I don't think it will be an issue.