When it comes to Hollywood odd couples, Paramount Pictures and MTV Films are right up there with Miramax and Disney.
The conventional 90-year-old studio and the music channel's hipster film division have had some uneasy moments in the nine years since they were thrown together by their parent, Viacom Inc. But never have their clashing worldviews been more evident than with the new film "Better Luck Tomorrow" -- at least before it became an unexpected hit.
The movie, which was purchased by MTV Films and released April 11 through Paramount's specialty label, Paramount Classics, opened to an unusually high $27,775 per screen on 13 screens. With its edgy tale of drug dealing and murder among academically stellar Asian American kids in suburbia, the film was a natural fit for MTV Films, which picked it up for $500,000 at last year's Sundance Film Festival.
" 'Better Luck Tomorrow' generated controversy since the first day it screened," said David Gale, MTV Films executive vice president. "A lot of executives who saw it were put off by what the movie was about, and that, in many ways, was what excited us about it."
One of those put-off executives was Paramount Classics' co-president, Ruth Vitale, who attended the festival with several Paramount executives and made it known publicly that she hated the movie.
Vitale, who runs Paramount Classics with partner David Dinerstein, said disagreements are inevitable in the emotion-laden world of moviemaking.
"The movie business is a very opinionated business," Vitale said. "Better Luck Tomorrow" "is not a movie that I personally liked the message. That doesn't mean there isn't business to be done with it.... MTV clearly understood that they knew how to market this movie to their audience."
MTV Films' unbridled enthusiasm also miffed top executives because they were not consulted about the purchase. "We sometimes like to know a little early on," said Rob Friedman, Paramount Pictures chief operating officer, who added that they found out about the acquisition in the newspaper.
Still, the movie's success marks a turning point for MTV Films: It was the company's first acquisition, and it controlled all of the marketing -- from posters to the TV advertising to the grass-roots campaign.
"Even though Paramount didn't go into it with confidence, they came out of it with confidence," Gale said. "Everybody feels like this is the beginning of a whole new way of making, distributing and marketing movies [for MTV] that are more specialized and come out of festivals like Sundance."
