Photo credit: box cover for "All the Boys Love Mandy Lane," Anchor Bay.
Rachel Dodes, writing for the Wall Street Journal:
Director Jonathan Levine's latest movie, "All the Boys Love Mandy Lane" stars the actress Amber Heard as a beautiful but aloof high-school student who gets invited to a weekend getaway with the popular crowd, only to see her classmates murdered one by one. The movie posters, depicting a blood-spattered Ms. Heard, pitch the film as "the kind of party where everyone gets wasted."But the story behind the movie's tortured journey to theaters is even scarier.
I've had the pleasure of a "festival friendship" with one of the film's producers, and I know that it has been personally torturous to him that the film wasn't available in the U.S. Other films that he produced were considered poor material for distribution even though they played festivals and were acclaimed as good (even great) films.
It just goes to show: sometimes it's not enough to make a great film to make a living at it. You have to make a great film that is deemed commercially viable – or simply escapes bad luck in business.
