CANNES, FRANCE — Generally, the tortoise doesn't beat the hare in Hollywood.
No matter what Aesop's fable suggests, show business winners are deemed to be films like "The Dark Knight," "Iron Man," "Transformers" -- blockbusters that start off at a sprint and never slow down. There's only one small corner for patience in the film world, and you can find it at the Cannes Film Festival.
This year's festival gathering opened Wednesday without many U.S. distributors -- here-today, gone-tomorrow outfits like Paramount Vantage and Warner Independent Pictures that were done in by either liberal spending, tightfisted ownership or a combination of both.
But one of the most enduring buyers of independent film, Sony Pictures Classics, is back once again on the French Riviera and hungry for action. The tiny movie unit inside the Japanese conglomerate kicked off the festival with two opening-day purchases, snapping up U.S. and Canadian distribution rights to the historical thriller "The White Ribbon" and the love story "Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky."
Earlier this month, longtime Sony Pictures Classics heads Michael Barker and Tom Bernard extended their contracts with their parent company for an additional four years, cementing Barker and Bernard's partnership of some 30 years (18 of them at Sony). Yet it's not the fidelity of Barker and Bernard's movie marriage that has set them apart; rather, it's their business model, combined with their long-standing relationships with acclaimed filmmakers and producers.
While some distributors of movies made outside the studio system spend more than $10 million releasing a movie and sometimes a nearly equal amount buying films, Barker and Bernard lay out a fraction of that, letting the movie sell itself. If there's a bidding war at a film festival, it's highly unlikely Sony Pictures Classics will be in the middle of it.
"We're not about the opening weekend -- we've never been about that," Barker says. Adds Bernard: "Our goal is if we can integrate films into the culture, they will have a long life in our library."
The kind of money Sony Pictures Classics makes on a given movie is about equal to what Sony Pictures spends on spandex for "Spider-Man." Though last year's Cannes title "Synecdoche, New York" didn't exactly set the art house circuit on fire, the movie did gross more than $3 million -- a decent return considering Sony Pictures Classics didn't pay any money to acquire the film's distribution rights.
