Specialty isn't its specialty

IT'S AN open secret in Hollywood that Warner Bros. is totally clueless about the independent film business. The studio's Warner Independent Pictures division has been a perennial also-ran, having released a string of films over the last two years that has largely disappeared without a trace. Warner finally acknowledged the obvious, announcing Thursday that it was closing both of its specialty divisions, Picturehouse and Warner Independent Pictures.

According to Warner Bros. President Alan Horn, with the studio having just absorbed New Line Cinema, which had overseen Picturehouse, it decided that it was redundant to have separate entities releasing films when everything could be marketed under the big Warner Bros. studio umbrella.

"We haven't thrown in the towel," Horn told me Thursday. "If there is a specialty movie that interests us or we find something we want to buy, we'll still do it. But marketing is marketing is marketing. I don't think you need a specialty label to market a specialty picture. The tools just aren't that different. Take 'Juno.' In my view, its success wasn't a function of whether it was at Fox or Fox Searchlight. What made it a hit was the movie itself, not the marketing."

Say what???

I couldn't be a bigger fan of Horn, who is a class act and a great businessman. But when it comes to the world of specialty films -- movies made for a minimal cost that contend for Oscars and don't feature superheroes and $100 million worth of special effects -- Horn couldn't possibly be more out to lunch. Fox Searchlight, widely acknowledged as the premier specialty division in the business, has been a huge success story, whether with "Napoleon Dynamite," "Little Miss Sunshine" or "28 Days Later," precisely because it has its own marketing and distribution staff, all with a keen insiders' knowledge of what it takes to promote the kind of distinctive films that would be lost inside a big studio marketing machine.

It was telling that when I asked Horn the other day to cite an example of a specialty movie that big Warner could successfully market, he offered up "Driving Miss Daisy" and "Million Dollar Baby," two star-driven Oscar winners -- one genteel, one gritty -- but each made by filmmakers with a long history of mainstream Hollywood fare.

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Autonomy was needed