Curtis Hanson has been around Hollywood long enough to know how cruel show business can be. But he is still in pain over the bungled release of In Her Shoes.
It is a fate that he now hopes can be changed through the current DVD release, which kicked off Jan 31.
The film, originally launched by 20th Century Fox at the 2005 Toronto filmfest, was wrongly sold in North America as a breezy Cameron Diaz comedy.
“The theatrical release was very disheartening,” the 60-year-old Hanson tells the Toronto Sun in a telephone interview from his production office in Los Angeles. “It was marketed as something that it was very much not!
Its real identity — the emotionally gritty story of redemption for two sisters and the grandmother they didn’t know they had — was ignored. And Diaz was not working solo. Toni Collette and Shirley MacLaine were just as crucial.
“When you try to pretend that something is a comedy when it is not, then it is a bad comedy because you don’t have the material (to back up the ad campaign). You can only pull the wool so far and our picture was misrepresented by the marketing.
“We were really unhappy about it through the whole process. If the picture had been better presented and the numbers were no better, we would have felt all right. But we felt trashed. Basically, the movie was trashed.”
In Her Shoes earned just $33 million in the U.S. and Canada. With a different campaign that emphasized the relationship of the two sisters, it has earned $50 million in the rest of the world so far, a track record that proves his point, Hanson says. As for North America, it is time to start fresh.
“The positive thing that makes us hopeful is that the investment (in time and money) to watch movies at home is a very different one from the one to go out to the movies. So the people who weren’t really drawn to the original marketing campaign, but who maybe heard the movie was good, now they see it’s on DVD and maybe they say: ‘Let’s check it out!’ ”
There is lots to check out from the same director who gave us such diverse fare as L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys and 8 Mile. In Her Shoes, besides being an enjoyable film to experience, is an excellent example of how to enhance it with from-the-heart bonus materials.
For example, there is a captivating visit with the real-life seniors who populate his film as extras in scenes where Diaz shows up to visit MacLaine at her Florida retirement home. Another bonus promotes the idea of adopting pets from shelters, a reason the charming dog in the movie is a mutt, not a purebred fashion accessory.
“The so-called behind-the-scenes things, which are nothing more than advertisements, don’t do it for me,” Hanson says. “And I’m not one who likes doing the audio commentary, because I like the movie, in a sense, to speak for itself.
“But what I do like to do, when appropriate, is create something for the DVD that opens a little window on the movie, that encourages people to look at it in a different way than they might have, or to see something that we experienced.
“That’s what that thing with the elders was... We were really affected by them and we really enjoyed the interaction. One of the themes of the movie is the way in which these generations can help each other.”
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