Today's theme: Hello and Goodbye...
Austin-based distributor, marketing and festival scheduler B-Side is closing effective March 1. CEO and founder Chris Hyams announced the news in a post on the B-Side blog, citing economic pressures and the ongoing upheaval in the film business as the reasons behind the decision of their investors to stop funding the company. He writes, "The timing is especially disappointing, as the past year has been our best ever. In 2009, we opened our New York office and launched a new distribution business, successfully releasing 8 films. We grew to 220 film festival partners worldwide and started off 2010 with our widely praised Sundance collaboration." IDA worked with B-Side for the 2009 DocuWeeks event, and we'll be sad to see them go.
Another online video site has bit the dust. As reported in VideoNuze, Veoh is closing shop. The site was never quite able to best YouTube at the user generated content game, and when they switched to premium content aggregation, Hulu came along to ruin that party for them. In addition to male-skewing featured categories such as "Popular Anime," "Cool Sci Fi" and "Beautiful Girls," Veoh had a "Documentary and Biography" section which included selections ranging from 1925 Battleship Potemkin to short pieces on the atom bomb and marijuana.
On a happier note, Quentin Tarantino has saved classic movie house New Beverly Cinema from being turned into a generic storefront! Owned and operated by the Torgan family since 1978, the theater had hit hard times in the mid-2000s. It was at that point that the Inglorious Basterds director began making regular contributions to help keep the theater's doors open. When family patriarch Sherman Torgan passed away unexpectedly in 2007, the Torgan's discovered that they had right of first refusal to find another buyer, and Tarantino stepped in. While I doubt he'll be manning the popcorn counter anytime in the near future, keep an eye out for specially curated evenings that have the Tarantino stamp. [Source: The Hollywood Reporter]