What's the formula for success? Teens, drugs, Ben Kingsley kisses and 90s nostalgia, evidently. Jonathan Levine's The Wackness scored the best per-screen average of the weekend -- $24,166 -- at six theaters in New York and Los Angeles, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo.

On the other hand, French thriller Tell No One packed them in without any of those elements, earning $20,120 per-screen at eight theaters, according to Leonard Klady's estimates at Movie City News. As somebody once said: C'est la vie.

At the one theater in Los Angeles where it opened, the box office went Kabluey for the film with the same name ($7,900 in receipts) while Alex Gibney's entertaining, if schematic, doc, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, made $7,307 per screen at 26 theaters celebrating independence across the nation.

Not as many were interested in Holding Trevor ($3,400 per-screen at 2 theaters) and audiences declined interest in Diminished Capacity ($2,830 per-screen at 4 theaters). You can read more about all these releases in Indie Spotlight, the new column by Eric D. Snider.

Notable holdovers include Trumbo ($4,233 per-screen average, 6 theaters, 2nd week of release); Mongol ($3,490 per-screen, 253 theaters, 5th week); Brick Lane ($3,451 per-screen, 31 theaters, 3rd week); Roman de Gare ($2,400 per-screen, 37 theaters, 11th week), and The Visitor ($2,017 per-screen, 176 theaters, 13th week).

Kit Kittredge: An American Girl broke into the overall top 10, expanding to more than 1,800 theaters and drawing $1,953 per screen -- but that's a very disappointing figure after the gangbusters box office of its very limited first two weeks of release. The film has grossed more than $6.1 million so far.

Cinematical has received this exclusive clip from Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, a new documentary written and directed by a very talented friend of ours, Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room). The film, which premiered back at the Sundance Film Festival, chronicles, well, the life and times of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas); Gonzo journalist, author, psychedelic supporter and all-around nutty dude. James reviewed the film back at The Dance, and said: " ... Gibney's documentary captures Thompson's bizarre orbit though American letters and politics with extensive use of archival footage but also through recreations, animation and more." IMDb has it at a 9.2 rating out of 10, and Rotten Tomatoes is showing 82% so far for a film I know a lot of people are anticipating. If there's one man you'd want to see a documentary about, it's Thompson. I'm definitely looking forward to this one. You? (For more, also check out James' audio interview with Gibney.)

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson hits theaters on July 4th.

Last week, indieWIRE ran a provocative piece by Anthony Kaufman about the financial woes of THINKfilm, one of my favorite indie distributors. Kaufman detailed the cash flow problems at THINKfilm, which were causing acrimony between the distrib and many of its filmmakers, who were alleging that the distributor hadn't paid what it owed to them, as well as to advertising companies charged with marketing films under THINKfilm's banner.

Now indieWIRE has a follow-up piece up by Eugene Hernandez, which says that director/producer Alex Gibney, whose film Taxi to the Darkside won the best documentary Oscar this year and was supposed to receive a major theatrical push by THINKfilm following its win, is seeking more than $1 million in damages from the ailing distributor.

While THINKfilm did pay the film's producers the minimums guaranteed by their contract on May 5, Gibney's complaint alleges that THINKfilm failed to disclose that it did not have the financial resources to support the film's theatrical push following its Oscar win, and "jeopardized the success of the film by failing to abide by the terms of contracts it entered into with public relations firms and advisers and failed to pay such firms for work done and expenses incurred."

Back in January, we wrote about director AJ Schnack's (Kurt Cobain: About a Son) efforts to create awards for non-fiction filmmaking that would be ... somewhat more relevant than the Academy Awards. Back when the Oscar shortlist for docs came out, Schnack wrote an angry diatribe about the process and the films selected (and, more importantly, those that were not selected) that echoed the sentiments of many of us who write about, or make, documentary films.

Although I'm not at all displeased that Alex Gibney ultimately won the Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, and would have been equally happy if No End in Sight had won, there were some glaring omissions in the Oscar shortlist that were truly appalling, most notably In the Shadow of the Moon and King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

"Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter." -- Revelations 1:19

Hunter S. Thompson said he always quoted the Bible in his writings -- the lengthy, disciplined-yet-crazy, meticulous-yet-mercurial, false-yet-true not-quite-journalism he crafted for Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone and others -- not because of its prose or principles but because it was the only book guaranteed to be available in the hotel rooms where Thompson would drink, dope and dictate the stories that made him famous in the '60s and '70s. That sort of limited access to information seems unimaginable in this day and age, when you can plug a CAT-5 cable in at almost any hotel and access the Web. And Thompson made his name in a very different world than the one we live in; at the same time, it's not that different. The United States was mired in a long and seemingly unwinnable war; civil liberties were being curtailed in the name of preserving freedom; political primary campaigns were less about issues than personalities. Those things were going on in the '60s and '70s, and some could suggest they're going on now, and our past is woven into our present; when I was looking for something appropriate from Revelations to start this review, I could have looked on the Web ... but I still found a Bible in the bedside table at my hotel.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson is a new documentary about Thompson's life and legacy, written and directed by Alex Gibney. Gibney's previously looked at greed (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and war's madness (Taxi to the Dark Side) in prior documentaries that combined journalistic integrity with artistic expression. Looking at the life and work of another journalist who gave what read like track reports for the four horsemen of the apocalypse must have seemed like a natural idea. And while Gonzo incorporates recreations and impressionistic re-stagings (the film opens with a bald, pallid obvious stand-in for Thompson stabbing single fingers at an electric typewriter, then recreates a famed photo of an armed Thompson drawing down on a keyboard in the snow), it also lets Thompson's own work and own voice speak for themselves.

The inaugural AFI Dallas International Film Festival got the city excited about movies last year. True, the purist in me felt it wasn't the most adventurous of programs, and I wish there was a wider range of docs and foreign-language titles, but the festival did stretch the boundaries of what normally plays in the multiplexes. Celebrities like David Lynch (Inland Empire), Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz), and Morgan Freeman (10 Items or Less) grabbed the attention of the local media, and it felt like "the thing to do" for people seeking a night out. I've lived here for years, but I was frankly surprised at how many folks turned out for little-known, unheralded pictures -- staying respectfully right to the end -- as well as the star-driven buzz titles.

The challenge now is to build on that success. Dallas Observer film critic and blogger Robert Wilonsky at Unfair Park posted the news that the festival has announced the first 15 selections for its second edition, which will be held from March 27-April 6. Two of the films are playing at Sundance: Nacho Vigalando's Timecrimes, a time travel suspense drama I loved when it premiered at Fantastic Fest (Jette liked it too, Kim wrote about the wild Sundance party, and Scott interviewed the irrepressible Nacho), and Alex Gibney's doc Gonzo: The Life & Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

Other docs include the US premieres of Scott Hicks' Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts and Michael Albright's Sonic Youth: Sleeping Nights Awake as well as Robyn Bliley's Circus Rosaire, Helen Hood Scheer's Jump! and Robert Patton-Spruill's Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome. Narrative feature highlights include Helen Hunt's Then She Found Me, Stuart Gordon's Stuck (based on a true story that took place in nearby Fort Worth), and the world premiere of Jeffrey Goodman's "noirish thriller" The Last Lullaby. As we did last year, we'll be covering the festival at Cinematical, so stay turned for regular updates.

Director Alex Gibney has tackled greed (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and war (the Oscar-shortlisted Taxi to the Dark Side); with his new documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, he tackles a new set of sins and excesses -- from Thompson's then-radical new journalism blending of fact and fiction in the '60s, to Thompson's legendary appetite for self-destruction. Gibney's film includes interviews with a host of people who knew Thompson and his work -- from Hell's Angels leader Sonny Barger to ex-President Jimmy Carter; Thompson moved in eccentric circles, and Gibney's documentary captures Thompson's bizarre orbit though American letters and politics with extensive use of archival footage but also through recreations, animation and more. Asked if Thompson's legacy of mixing fact and fiction made it easy to make a less-than-conventional documentary, Gibney's answer is swift: "I think it made it mandatory; we had to go there. ..."


This interview, like all of Cinematical's podcast offerings, is now available through iTunes; if you'd like, you can subscribe at this link. Also, you can listen directly here at Cinematical by clicking below:

You're probably thinking you don't need another documentary about the Iraq War. But you're wrong, because Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side is finally being released, and the film is one of three necessary docs dealing with Iraq. The triad, which would make a great box set if only the same company distributed all three films, also includes Charles Ferguson's very highly acclaimed Sundance jury-award-winner No End in Sight (on which Gibney was a producer) and Patricia Foulkrod's under-appreciated 2006 work The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends.

What do they have in common? Well, if you put them together and watch them all, you'll feel like an expert on three important aspects of the war and its most significant repercussions. They may not tell you everything there is to know about the Iraq War, but they're more thorough and informative than most. No End in Sight is the most directly involved with the actual conflict, from its causes to its effects (read Kim's review here). The Ground Truth more specifically deals with the American soldiers, but in an all-encompassing, training-to-homecoming portrait of modern combat and its consequences (see my review here). Taxi to the Dark Side is sort of like a flip side to that film, though it doesn't necessarily focus on the enemy combatants. Instead it deals with suspected enemies, soldiers or otherwise, who are held and oftentimes tortured in prisons such as Iraq's Abu Ghraib.

Taxi to the Dark Side somewhat falls outside the box (set), though, in that it really isn't about Iraq. In fact, Gibney insists that his documentary is not an 'Iraq film.' Yes, it does feature a lot of details about, and footage of, Iraq's Abu Ghraib, which is probably the best-known prison of its kind, but it also prominently features Bagram, in Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, the two other facilities used in the detention and interrogation of individuals presumed to be involved with Al-Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgency or any other enemy of the U.S. in its "War on Terror."

Alex Gibney's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room won acclaim for its inventive, expressive but journalistic and rigorous expose of the facts and finances behind a story that came to represent turn-of-the-millennium capitalism gone mad. Now, with Taxi to the Dark Side, which opens today in New York and expands nationwide in the coming weeks, Gibney's looking at a very different kind of power, and a very different level of abuse. Winner of Best Documentary honors at both the Tribeca and Chicago International film festivals, Taxi's uncompromising look at the death of an Afghan cab driver named Dilawar at the hands of U.S. military interrogators at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan in 2002 has made it one of the films selected for the 'shortlist' of films eligible for this year's best Documentary Oscar. Gibney's interest in the material isn't just academic or moral; his late father served as an interrogator for the U.S. Navy during World War II. At the same time, Gibney's film is fiercely principled: " ... if you study Osama Bin Laden's words, if you study other terrorist groups throughout history, the goal is to get liberal democratic societies to publicly undermine their own principles. Well, in this case? Mission accomplished." Gibney spoke with Cinematical in San Francisco. Also, you can listen to the interview by clicking below:





Cinematical: Your previous film, (about) the last days of Enron, was similarly about the excesses of power, but a lot lighter. Were you looking for something that didn't quite have the kind of comedic potential for your next project, or did you stumble across Taxi to the Dark Side in a moment of fortune?

Alex Gibney: I guess I stumbled across it -- the way someone would stumble across a corpse in a dark room. It was brought to me, in fact I was on a panel talking about Enron, and a very angry attorney who was on that panel said "if I helped get together some of the money, would you do (Taxi to the Dark Side)?" And I said I would. And my father also encouraged me to do it, because he was a Naval Interrogator during World War II; I felt honor-bound to do the film, but it was a tough one to do, it was a very dark topic. But I will tell you that in earlier cuts, I tried to render this subject in a tone that was more similar to Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, that had dark humor in it. Because there was dark humor to be found in this story. But I found that viewers, as we showed this story to them, once they saw and heard the details as to how Dilawar was murdered, they weren't in any mood for jokes. This tended to be a much more serious subject that took us to a much darker place.

Cinematical: Say what you will about the excesses of Enron, but at least they didn't kill anyone; automatically, you're dealing with that (in Taxi to the Dark Side). Someone brought you the kernel of this story; was it your decision to focus on Dilawar, to follow that one narrative thread through the process?

AG: Yes, it was my decision to focus on Dilawar. Because you can't make films about things and sort of abstract ideas; you have to make films about characters, about people. And the story of Dilawar, to me, seemed very powerful. Because he was a pure innocent. And there was something that haunted me in Tim Golden's original article; he had said, I think in the very last page of the article, a very long, front-page piece in the New York Times, that they discovered on day three of a five-day interrogation that Dilawar was almost certainly innocent. And yet over the next two days, they tortured him mercilessly anyway. And it told me something about the kind of momentum of torture has that was haunting to me. So, for those two reasons, it felt right. And the other key reason for the Dilawar story, I think, was that what was interesting about the Dilawar story is that as you follow it, it's kind of a murder mystery; it takes you to different parts of the torture system; the people who interrogated him are sent to Abu Ghraib; the people in his taxi are sent to Guantanamo -- in effect to cover up the fact that they had arrested an innocent man. And all those roads ultimately lead to the White House. So for all those reasons, the Dilawar story seemed a great one, the most right.

UPDATE: The Daily Variety story was incorrect; the MPAA actually rejected a trailer for Taxi to the Darkside, and not the poster. Here's the Variety clarification: "The MPAA did not approve a theatrical trailer for Alex Gibney's documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side" that contained scenes with nudity and images that the org deemed inappropriate for all audiences. ThinkFilm has not yet officially submitted the one-sheet art referenced in a Dec. 19 story, but Daily Variety failed to indicate that it was the trailer that was rejected and not the one-sheet artwork."

ThinkFilm is prepping an appeal to the MPAA, but this one doesn't concern a film's rating. It's about a poster. The poster art for Taxi to the Dark Side -- a documentary about the pattern of torture practice that is on the short list for Academy Award consideration -- is causing a stir due to its depiction of a hooded man being led by American soldiers. The original news photo was taken by photographer Shaun Schwarz, and had been censored before -- when the military erased it from Schwarz' camera. (He later retrieved it from his hard drive.) Variety is reporting that the MPAA has officially rejected the poster, and if ThinkFilm goes forward with the marketing, they could have their "R" rating revoked. Taxi to the Dark Side is due for release on January 11th.

An MPAA spokesman says "We treat all films the same. Ads will be seen by all audiences, including children. If the advertising is not suitable for all audiences it will not be approved by the advertising administration." Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), the film's writer, producer, and director says, "Not permitting us to use an image of a hooded man that comes from a documentary photograph is censorship, pure and simple. Intentional or not, the MPAA's disapproval of the poster is a political act, undermining legitimate criticism of the Bush administration. I agree that the image is offensive; it's also real." I've got to side with Gibney on this one. This isn't horror movie imagery cooked up to sell tickets, this is really happening in the world today. And considering the explosive subject matter, I feel the poster is tastefully done. What do you guys think?

Economy is everywhere. It's in the classrooms, through the world, and even on the bookshelves. If you haven't read Steven D. Levitt and and Stephen J. Dubner's bestselling pop culture economy book, Freakonomics, you've probably at least heard of it, or have spotted the apple-orange cover to the right. After making the waves in the reader world, using economics to discuss mundane and controversial topics, Variety reports that an excellent collection of popular documentary directors are coming together to film a doc based on the book.

Under producers Chad Troutwine (Paris je t'aime) and Seth Gordon (The King of Kong), Freakonomics will bring together Super Size Me's Morgan Spurlock, Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing from Jesus Camp, Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), My Country My Country's Laura Poitras, Eugene Jarecki of Why We Fight, and finally Jehane Noujaim (Control Room) -- each of whom will film a section of the book. Most of the directors are still finalizing topics, but Gibney is said to be filming a segment on cheating teachers and sumo wrestlers, while Jarecki will tackle one of the most controversial segments -- that a drop in crime can be attributed to Roe v. Wade. But it's not just politics under the microscope -- other issues covered in the book include Adam Vinatieri's football career as a field goal kicker.

Each segment will be 15 minutes long, and will then come together into a feature-length documentary that includes an intro and interstitials from Gordon. Producer Troutwine says: "I stalked the authors for a year because I saw cinematic appeal to the book as soon as I read it. It showed that conventional wisdom should always be tested and never trusted, and that is what documentaries are all about." Are you ready to get freaky with economics?

Documentary filmmakers deserve much more love and attention than they receive. One way to get more attention is to make the list of 15 documentaries short-listed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Variety has this year's list and cites three Iraq War-themed films as being "center stage": Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro's Body of War, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight (which Cinematical's Kim Voynar gave high marks when it played at Sundance) and Richard Robbins' Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.

Kim is a self-styled "documentary dork" -- her words, not mine -- and wrote a column two months ago about films she thought "have (or ought to have) a shot at Oscar gold." She included No End in Sight, as well as the following docs that all made the short list: Sean Fine and Andrea Nix-Fine's War/Dance, Michael Moore's Sicko, Daniel Karslake's For the Bible Tells Me So, and Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's Nanking. Kim was pulling for Logan Smalley's Darius Goes West, which sadly did not make the list. Other notable exclusions included David Singleton's In the Shadow of the Moon and Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

Here are the remaining eight that did make the list. First, the ones we've covered so far: Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire, Richard Berge and Bonni Cohen's The Rape of Europa, Weijun Chen's Please Vote for Me and Peter Raymont's A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman. Next, the ones we haven't seen yet: Steven Okazaki's White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which has played on HBO), Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side (due for release in January), Bill Haney's The Price of Sugar and Tricia Regan's Autism: The Musical.

Now the Academy's Documentary Branch will review the 15 films and narrow the list still further to the final five nominees, which will be announced on January 22.

If the tone of No End in Sight, one of the latest in a slew of docs around the Iraq war, feels a little familiar -- hard-edged reporting, decisive point of view, insider perspectives and razor-sharp editing -- there may be a reason. The film was exec-produced by Alex Gibney, who directed last year's Oscar-nominated Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room. The two films, although they have different subject matter, have key similarities at the core. Both are about men abusing power and privilege, the inherent dangers of trusting those in authority without questioning their motives and motivations, and the consequences of blind arrogance and willful ignorance. No End in Sight is about war, Enron about business, but both structurally and in overall message, the films have much in common.

Former policy wonk Charles Ferguson, who made a killing in the business world when he sold his software company off to Microsoft for a cool $133 million, decided he wanted to make a film about the Iraq war. The resulting film, No End in Sight, does three basic things: Shows the decision-making process that has led to the post-invasion situation we are currently in with Iraq, paints a picture of the giant hole the administration has dug us into there, and explores what (if anything) it might take to get us out. If the film's title strikes you as a bit negative, well, Ferguson clearly doesn't have the most optimistic outlook on the Iraq situation, but with deliberation and aforethought, he shows the viewer exactly why.