We Don’t Think the Cat Should Get Killed
July 8, 2020 2:56 PM Subscribe
When it finally happened, as an indie directed by Michael Hoffman, with a cast that included Michael Keaton, Robert Downey Jr., Catherine O’Hara, Bebe Neuwirth, Ari Graynor, and Dunne, Game 6 suffered an unfavorable rollout. After premiering at Sundance in 2005, the movie opened on a handful of screens in March 2006 before practically disappearing. The only film written by one of the most celebrated and influential figures in American letters, a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, isn’t available to stream on Amazon or Hulu or Netflix or HBO Max or the Criterion Collection. For most people in 2020, Game 6 does not exist. A movie’s journey from creation to audience is beset with all sorts of obstacles, illustrating just how vulnerable the ecosystem of movie viewership really is. The story of Game 6 is an object lesson in just that. From “The Trivia Is Exceptional”: The Making and Disappearance of Don DeLillo’s ‘Game 6’ [The Ringer]
Wow, I never knew this movie existed and now I desperately want to see it. I find it hard to believe that you couldn't just promo the film as being written by Don DeLillo and the names of the actors and not be able to get a good turnout in every rep/art-house cinema out there. Like even if the movie wasn't good you'd still want to see it to see what went wrong.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:47 PM on July 8, 2020 [9 favorites]
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:47 PM on July 8, 2020 [9 favorites]
This movie is definitely out there, if you know where to look.
posted by ryanrs at 4:44 PM on July 8, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by ryanrs at 4:44 PM on July 8, 2020 [1 favorite]
Where should we look?
posted by something something at 4:45 PM on July 8, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by something something at 4:45 PM on July 8, 2020 [1 favorite]
Private torrent sites and/or mefi mail.
posted by ryanrs at 4:56 PM on July 8, 2020 [5 favorites]
posted by ryanrs at 4:56 PM on July 8, 2020 [5 favorites]
This is fascinating! I think the part at the end about the distribution failure is really the key piece. The trailer is confusing and almost unwatchable. (Though it sort of nostalgically reminds me of those confusing and unwatchable trailers you'd see when you rented indie movies in the 90s).
I'm also surprised that, on the Ringer of all sites, they don't mention the weird coincidence that it was filmed months before the Red Sox finally did win the World Series! I assume that's why the distribution company made such a big deal about the 1986 angle, but it seems like the way they went about it was off. They mention it bombed in Boston, which kinda makes sense - people probably didn't want to watch a movie about the 1986 Series right after finally defeating the curse. Interestingly, Fever Pitch was also released that year, which is a very different movie but also uses the Red Sox and the curse as a storytelling frame.
One other thing, when I was reading the synopsis at the beginning of the article, I thought "oh, that sounds a little like The Paper" which is a mostly-forgotten (but much bigger-budget, studio) Ron Howard movie about a very stressful make-or-break day in the life of a writer (reporter) on a hot NYC summer day who's dealing with some family drama and which stars ... Michael Keaton. That's kinda weird, right?
posted by lunasol at 4:56 PM on July 8, 2020 [3 favorites]
I'm also surprised that, on the Ringer of all sites, they don't mention the weird coincidence that it was filmed months before the Red Sox finally did win the World Series! I assume that's why the distribution company made such a big deal about the 1986 angle, but it seems like the way they went about it was off. They mention it bombed in Boston, which kinda makes sense - people probably didn't want to watch a movie about the 1986 Series right after finally defeating the curse. Interestingly, Fever Pitch was also released that year, which is a very different movie but also uses the Red Sox and the curse as a storytelling frame.
One other thing, when I was reading the synopsis at the beginning of the article, I thought "oh, that sounds a little like The Paper" which is a mostly-forgotten (but much bigger-budget, studio) Ron Howard movie about a very stressful make-or-break day in the life of a writer (reporter) on a hot NYC summer day who's dealing with some family drama and which stars ... Michael Keaton. That's kinda weird, right?
posted by lunasol at 4:56 PM on July 8, 2020 [3 favorites]
oh wow what the fuck was that trailer
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:20 PM on July 8, 2020 [8 favorites]
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:20 PM on July 8, 2020 [8 favorites]
Interestingly, Fever Pitch was also released that year, which is a very different movie but also uses the Red Sox and the curse as a storytelling frame.
Fever Pitch also had access to Busch Stadium during game 4 of the series, and re-wrote its ending when the Sox unexpectedly won.
posted by Navelgazer at 5:45 PM on July 8, 2020 [5 favorites]
Fever Pitch also had access to Busch Stadium during game 4 of the series, and re-wrote its ending when the Sox unexpectedly won.
posted by Navelgazer at 5:45 PM on July 8, 2020 [5 favorites]
I mean, one thing about the trailer is I probably could have told you it was Don DeLillo adjacent without knowing he wrote it. I think it's the combo of magical-existentialism and baseball.
posted by theweasel at 5:47 PM on July 8, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by theweasel at 5:47 PM on July 8, 2020 [2 favorites]
I am trying but failing to imagine the kind of person who would watch that trailer and think, "Oh, that looks interesting, I'd like to see that movie."
posted by Bugbread at 6:05 PM on July 8, 2020 [7 favorites]
posted by Bugbread at 6:05 PM on July 8, 2020 [7 favorites]
... so is the movie any good?
posted by panama joe at 7:36 PM on July 8, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by panama joe at 7:36 PM on July 8, 2020 [1 favorite]
Not if you don't like movies with cats getting killed.
posted by hippybear at 8:57 PM on July 8, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 8:57 PM on July 8, 2020 [3 favorites]
I am trying but failing to imagine the kind of person who would watch that trailer and think, "Oh, that looks interesting, I'd like to see that movie."
Oh, hi! That'd be me. I look at it like this, movie studios are used to making trailers about movies that fit certain genres and formulas on how they tell stories to audiences. That's the usual bread and butter stuff that runs variations on the same kinds of themes and beats that they know mass audiences like. When a movie comes out that doesn't fit those parameters, the studios rarely know how to market it because it doesn't have those same patterns, so they try to shoehorn it into some other more familiar packaging because they think that's what audiences want and because the absence of those patterns makes paring the movie down to a trailer difficult no matter what as the emotions the movie is playing with aren't necessarily clear and "big".
A confused or conflicted trailer can mean there's something more challenging or unusual about the movie. So the cues I looked at here were, an interesting cast Keaton, Catherine O'Hara, Bebe Neuwirth, Robert Downey, Griffin Dunne, because that suggests something of interest in the movie to get all those people to sign up on a lower budget production, the director who was involved with an odd variety of movies, a mix of more genre accessible and harder to categorize stuff, Soapdish and One Fine Day on the one side, Some Girls and Restoration on the other, the subject matter, I personally like baseball and wanted to see how that was matched to the story of a playwright especially as the specific game ends in a spectacularly bad fashion for the Red Sox, making me curious how that will be used (plus the enjoyment of seeing the Red Sox lose again), and of course most notably seeing DeLillo wrote it all made it something I really wanted to see. It didn't quite live up to my hopes, but it was still rewarding enough to make the watching more than worth the time.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:58 PM on July 8, 2020 [11 favorites]
Oh, hi! That'd be me. I look at it like this, movie studios are used to making trailers about movies that fit certain genres and formulas on how they tell stories to audiences. That's the usual bread and butter stuff that runs variations on the same kinds of themes and beats that they know mass audiences like. When a movie comes out that doesn't fit those parameters, the studios rarely know how to market it because it doesn't have those same patterns, so they try to shoehorn it into some other more familiar packaging because they think that's what audiences want and because the absence of those patterns makes paring the movie down to a trailer difficult no matter what as the emotions the movie is playing with aren't necessarily clear and "big".
A confused or conflicted trailer can mean there's something more challenging or unusual about the movie. So the cues I looked at here were, an interesting cast Keaton, Catherine O'Hara, Bebe Neuwirth, Robert Downey, Griffin Dunne, because that suggests something of interest in the movie to get all those people to sign up on a lower budget production, the director who was involved with an odd variety of movies, a mix of more genre accessible and harder to categorize stuff, Soapdish and One Fine Day on the one side, Some Girls and Restoration on the other, the subject matter, I personally like baseball and wanted to see how that was matched to the story of a playwright especially as the specific game ends in a spectacularly bad fashion for the Red Sox, making me curious how that will be used (plus the enjoyment of seeing the Red Sox lose again), and of course most notably seeing DeLillo wrote it all made it something I really wanted to see. It didn't quite live up to my hopes, but it was still rewarding enough to make the watching more than worth the time.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:58 PM on July 8, 2020 [11 favorites]
I appreciate the answer. A lot of that seems like things that are outside the trailer (the cast, director, writer, etc.), but the part about how the baseball thread ties to the playwright thread, and the fact that a confused or conflicted trailer points to the movie itself being challenging or unusual, are both in-trailer things that make sense. I suspect that the editors were only aiming for the former one, not the latter one, but I get where you're coming from.
posted by Bugbread at 11:46 PM on July 8, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by Bugbread at 11:46 PM on July 8, 2020 [2 favorites]
Yeah, it isn't that a bad trailer doesn't present problems as it does send the wrong kinds of signals about what to expect going in, which is going to affect how the audience reacts to the movie, it's just that if you find you enjoy odd movies, then a confused trailer can almost end up being kind of a plus in a way. But it's also a good sign that the movie isn't going to appeal to a lot of people who might be looking for something more familiar, as odd in this sense certainly isn't what everyone wants to get from watching. That's completely understandable as well.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:06 AM on July 9, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by gusottertrout at 12:06 AM on July 9, 2020 [2 favorites]
Oh, and for the curious, the link between baseball and the writer the movie is, well, playing with, is in fact the idea of "the play" as something both predetermined, as in a script, and random, as in baseball, but where the mindset might inform the outcome, as in seeing the Red Sox as cursed, their loss preordained, rather than subject to randomness and/or in how a script doesn't entirely capture the real, without any absolute answer to be found in either, at least that's from my somewhat hazy memory of it.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:39 AM on July 9, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by gusottertrout at 12:39 AM on July 9, 2020 [1 favorite]
Sorry to add another post, but I just belatedly realized how delightfully appropriate the mention of the trailer was, since that too fits into the themes of the film, where the desire of the "fan", in wanting to see the Red Sox win or a movie to be good, is contrasted to the response of the "critic" who carries the knowledge of past history into the event and expects failure. I'm quite amused.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:43 AM on July 9, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by gusottertrout at 1:43 AM on July 9, 2020 [1 favorite]
It's not mentioned in the article, but movies featuring US sports are box office poison for international markets, where American indies often make nice business. For instance, Brad Pitt's movies make typically 60-70% of their box office in international markets. Tree of Life, an arthouse movie, did 77%, while Moneyball, a baseball drama, did 31%, and the guy is a A-lister. If Game 6 was already a hard sell in the US, there was no foreign lifeline to expect.
posted by elgilito at 2:38 AM on July 9, 2020 [8 favorites]
posted by elgilito at 2:38 AM on July 9, 2020 [8 favorites]
After watching that trailer it feels like a big nerd watched Birdman and then invented a time machine so they could go back and make the Billy Crystal version where BASEBALL BLOVIATION was a key plot point, except they couldn't get Billy Crystal and ended up with Michael Keaton.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:25 AM on July 9, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:25 AM on July 9, 2020 [1 favorite]
Also everything I hated about White Noise is on full display.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:28 AM on July 9, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:28 AM on July 9, 2020 [1 favorite]
Looks like I'm not the first to make this comparison, though the take is on the other end of the spectrum.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:36 AM on July 9, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:36 AM on July 9, 2020 [1 favorite]
FWIW, although none of the major streaming services have it, you can buy the DVD on Amazon for less than five dollars. You know, if you still have a DVD player.
posted by tom_r at 8:28 AM on July 9, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by tom_r at 8:28 AM on July 9, 2020 [1 favorite]
Man, the language of trailers sure has evolved over the last fifteen years (though I think even in 2005 having Don LaFontaine in was already pretty passé.)
posted by Navelgazer at 8:46 AM on July 9, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by Navelgazer at 8:46 AM on July 9, 2020 [1 favorite]
It's not mentioned in the article, but movies featuring US sports are box office poison for international markets, where American indies often make nice business. For instance, Brad Pitt's movies make typically 60-70% of their box office in international markets. Tree of Life, an arthouse movie, did 77%, while Moneyball, a baseball drama, did 31%, and the guy is a A-lister. If Game 6 was already a hard sell in the US, there was no foreign lifeline to expect.
And the Serenade model (produce a good script with top-level talent for $500,000, give the cast and crew back-end) is a great model except that, yeah, Kindred fucked them and beggars can't be choosers when it comes to distribution. (My just-out-of-film-school internship was with a small distribution company who, at that point, was sending out "The Secret Lives of Dentists" and Jean-Luc Godard's "In Praise of Love," and fuck me it's a particularly shady part of an already shady industry. I'm pretty sure I was an unwitting courier for mob payments a few times, and I definitely had to talk on the phone with nearly-suicidal theatre-owners to get them not to bail on showing our movies. That job sucked.)
Anyway, Serenade's model is a great idea for getting cool indies out there, but it really rests on the talent involved having some assurance that there will be a back end for them to collect on, and that's up to the distributor.
posted by Navelgazer at 8:54 AM on July 9, 2020 [2 favorites]
And the Serenade model (produce a good script with top-level talent for $500,000, give the cast and crew back-end) is a great model except that, yeah, Kindred fucked them and beggars can't be choosers when it comes to distribution. (My just-out-of-film-school internship was with a small distribution company who, at that point, was sending out "The Secret Lives of Dentists" and Jean-Luc Godard's "In Praise of Love," and fuck me it's a particularly shady part of an already shady industry. I'm pretty sure I was an unwitting courier for mob payments a few times, and I definitely had to talk on the phone with nearly-suicidal theatre-owners to get them not to bail on showing our movies. That job sucked.)
Anyway, Serenade's model is a great idea for getting cool indies out there, but it really rests on the talent involved having some assurance that there will be a back end for them to collect on, and that's up to the distributor.
posted by Navelgazer at 8:54 AM on July 9, 2020 [2 favorites]
I think the problem is that Game 6 was written in a kind of obsolete vernacular
posted by Dmenet at 11:26 AM on July 9, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by Dmenet at 11:26 AM on July 9, 2020 [3 favorites]
And then there is this event which sort of ties everything together, thematically.
posted by grumpybear69 at 3:49 PM on July 9, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by grumpybear69 at 3:49 PM on July 9, 2020 [2 favorites]
So a kind Mefite was able to hook me up with a copy of the movie and I watched it last night. It's a good movie and if it were in more theatres people would have seen it. Hopefully they'll be able to get this onto a streaming service for more people to see. The dialogue kind of threw me off at first - it felt like I was watching a play that had been adapted into a film - but then I got used to it and enjoyed it. I think if they had kept the cat getting shot it would have made it harder for the film to end the way that it did so that change might be less about studio exec squeamishness and more about wondering how the characters would be able to move from that point to the ending.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:48 PM on July 10, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:48 PM on July 10, 2020 [1 favorite]
What’s the song in the trailer? It sounds like either Yo La Tengo or Hal Hartley alter ego Ned Rifle (whose incidental music showed up in other mid-2000s trailers).
posted by pxe2000 at 1:22 PM on July 11, 2020
posted by pxe2000 at 1:22 PM on July 11, 2020
That trailer is not good (primarily b/c of the music and the v/o), but I'm of a mind with gusottertrout: the badness of the trailer suggests to me a distributor's inability to market an unconventional, intriguing art house film to a larger audience. It immediately reminded me of the trailer to Dead Again, which isn't quite as unfocused but is similarly attempting to put a more conventional spin on the film.
posted by Saxon Kane at 6:18 PM on July 11, 2020
posted by Saxon Kane at 6:18 PM on July 11, 2020
What’s the song in the trailer? It sounds like either Yo La Tengo or Hal Hartley alter ego Ned Rifle
It is indeed Yo La Tengo.
posted by lunasol at 11:56 AM on July 14, 2020
It is indeed Yo La Tengo.
posted by lunasol at 11:56 AM on July 14, 2020
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