The Ohio Sci-Fi and Horror Marathons

I’ve been thinking about moon and last years unfortunate cancellation. I do not want anyone to think I am bashing the fine folks who work so hard to put this wonderful show together every year. But can someone tell me why cancellations happen? Do the film companies just arbitrarily change their minds and say “Nah we don’t feel like sending you the films we have already promised we would send. We need them to use them as paperweights to keep our piles of cash from blowing away”?
Just curious having never been involved in dealing with film companies.

Well, I've never directly been involved, but from talking to Joe, Bruce and Jeff over the years, I understand there can be any number of reasons for the cancellations.

Sometimes, it's simply a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. A particular print of a film may be spoken for, unbeknownst to the person who spoke to the Marathon organizer. Sometimes the rights for the film to play in the area are spoken for (another venue may have "exclusive rights" to show a particular classic film within a certain period of time). Sometimes, I suspect the cost is an issue ("We double checked, and even though I told you we could send you the cost for 100 widgets, it's really going to be 456 quadroons" - values made up because I have no idea what it actually costs to send a film and get the rights to show it.)

Then there are simple mistakes. For the Horror thon, they sent a copy of Suspiria instead of Inferno. I know of more than one occasion when they said "We'll send you this film," then they discovered that the print was unusable.

And a not insignificant number of films come from collectors, who are prone to being unreliable.

I'm sure Bruce or Joe can cite other reasons that films we expect to have don't show up on the day of the marathon, but that's probably most of 'em.

I am also not directly involved, but I can draw educated guesses based on my relationships with those who do that sort of thing.

In the case of Moon, Bruce explained at the marathon that something came up late in the process which caused the print's availability to be questionable. However, rather than scratch it from the program entirely, he went with a back-up plan. The film that was shown in it's place is a collector's print, probably owned by Bruce himself or someone very close to him so it was readily available.

Now this is where it gets a little dicey and things like "presentation rights" factor in. This particular film was shown at our sister marathon in Boston two years prior and is something Bruce had been wanting to show for a while. Boston could not advertise it or in fact even reveal what it was after the fact. When word leaked out, they decided to play it safe, but I suspect that it was always in his back pocket for occasions just like the one that came up with Moon.

They figured, if nothing goes wrong and we get to show Moon, that's great, but the back-up plan was a well regarded modern classic which hasn't shown at the Marathon in ten years, so there's that. Everyone is happy.

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Thanks I didn't know about the the presentation rights issue. I always imagined the film companies as having multiple copies of of all but the most obscure stuff. It always felt like the film companies were being capricious. But I guess I have been underestimating the complexity of the situation.

Thanks again to Bruce and company for dealing with these variables.

And then there was what I like to call RE-ANIMATOR-GATE which took place at the 1st Shocktoberfest at the Grandview, The studio shipped the print and it never showed up and when I say never I mean never!! So we had to make a last minute replacement using a collectors print. The Replacement movie was a great substitute but you try standing in front of 300 people who just had to endure "Texas Chainsaw Massacre The Next Generation" and tell them RE-ANIMATOR wasn't going to be playing...it wasn't pretty.

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Hooray for last minute cancellations, the bane of any programmer's life. Here are the Marathon-related cases that I have specific knowledge of:

*Inferno (2010 Shock Around the Clock)
-20th Century Fox has a really nice archive print of this Argento classic, but they stipulate that to screen it, the theater must have someone from the cast or crew in attendance as a guest. Since the total cost for this looked to be a bit prohibitive (considering at that point we were also angling for a potential big name, big dollar guest), we were referred to Criterion (the Fox film outlet, not the DVD company), who told us that they had a somewhat old, but playable print. Well, the week before the Marathon, "old, but playable" turned into "pretty worn, but possibly playable." Then, three days before the event, "pretty worn" turned into "oh, we made a mistake! We thought you were referring to Suspiria! No, no, no our Inferno print is in terrible shape and needs to be junked." Yeah, folks, stuff like this happens.

*Zombie and Cannibal Ferox (2007 Incredible 2-Headed Marathon)
-The boys at Grindhouse Releasing are usually reliable, but in this case they had a slight hiccup. Two days before the Marathon, the prints of these two Italian classics hadn't shown up. We called Grindhouse, only to find out that they had mistakenly booked the duo for the weekend after the event. Whoops. On the bright side, they were totally cool about it and gave us Ferox the next year with only the shipping charge to be paid.

*The ever popular, still not screened Slither (2007 Sci-Fi)
-Pretty simple: the print never showed up. Three years later, the print did show up at the Grandview for the Horror Marathon, but we replaced it at the last minute with Robogeisha.

These are the only recent non-time-related cancellations that I can think of. There have been cases where a film is advertised on the flier but not shown, but sometimes that's been due to not knowing 100% of there's a print available before creating those initial promo materials.

To address one of Aaron's points, repertory prints almost never have any exclusive rights clauses for a municipal area. If a print of Frankenstein had been playing in town two weeks before the Marathon, we probably still could've booked it for our event.

And in my experiences, studios are usually up front about their rental costs, so its incredibly rare for them to come back to the theater late in the game and try to charge more money. Now, shipping fees can often be up in the air until after the event; theaters sometimes don't know if they'll have to ship a print back to a local depot, to another venue or to the distributor vault in another state, so that fee can fluctuate.

Joe, about 3 or 4 summers ago, the Music Box played a print of Inferno that was pretty nice. Don't know where they got that, but there certainly wasn't anyone from the film in attendance.

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