This Friday night, Cyan Pictures releases THE OH IN OHIO, starring Parker Posey, Paul Rudd, Danny DeVito, Mischa Barton, Heather Graham and Liza Minnelli.

It’s in theaters in and around New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Cleveland this weekend, then expands nationally in August.

Ohio won the audience award at every festival in which it competed, and has pulled in a slew of strong pre-release reviews (from places like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter and Ain’t it Cool News ). Check out the the trailer and see for yourself

So, watch the film this weekend. And, if you’re watching it on Friday night, join us at one of our informal bi-coastal premiere parties.

New York: See the film Friday at 7:30pm @ the Loews 19th St. Then head down to B Bar (40 E. Fourth St.) and get plastered.

San Francisco: See the film Friday at 7:30pm @ the Landmark Lumiere. Then head over to Vertigo (1160 Polk St.) and get equally plastered.

Los Angeles: See the film Friday evening, wherever you want. Then head to Sushi Dan (8000 W. Sunset Blvd.) from 10:00 on and get plastered with sushi nearby.

Oh in Ohio. In theaters Friday. Be there. Bring friends.

Thanks much,

josh

With Cyan’s release of The Oh in Ohio just around the corner (7/14 in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Cleveland; 8/4 in a whole lot of additional cities nationwide), my days are crazier than ever.

Nearly every newspaper and magazine you can think of has RSVP’ed to our slew of upcoming press screenings; trailers, posters, screeners and prints of the film are high-tailing it around the country via FedEx; and early buzz is brewing in our favor. Consider IMDB’s take:

Unless it gets swallowed up by blockbusters and higher-profile indies, this stealth sex comedy should go into wider and wider release as the summer picks up. We hear Posey’s physical comedy is aces, Rudd’s brooding is unparalleled, and DeVito doesn’t plays it as hammy as you’d expect. Liza Minnelli locks down another bizarro role as a sex guru, while Heather Graham goes uncredited as a clerk who gets Parker P. hooked on the buzz.

And, of course, on a daily basis, everything falls apart completely, then somehow gets pieced tenuously back together. One of my Cyan colleagues tagged an email last night: “I should have been a doctor.”

Another, this morning, commented that he felt like “a Vietnam soldier considering shooting himself in the foot just to get pulled from the front line.”

[Though we dropped the name Long Tail Releasing for Cyan’s distribution arm largely because having two different company names was confusing the hell out of people, I’ve also had increasing reservations about the extensive philosphical waxing going on around the internet about the power and importance of the Long Tail effect in film.

As I continually receive emails asking for my thoughts on the matter, I thought I’d post my usual response here.]

There’s a great David Foster Wallace essay about television, “E Pluribus Unum”, in which Wallace states:

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

Which, essentially, is the classic argument for the importance of the Long Tail in media: if only we could democratize distribution sufficiently, we could let all this wonderful, refined niche content find its own set of consumers!

That’s a lovely idea. But, speaking as someone who gets sent reams of unreleased indie films each day, I can definitively say most of the film along the far end of the Long Tail isn’t there because it’s niche-ey, it’s there because it’s remarkably badly made.

So, at some level, the Long Tail is the result of a sort of Darwinian winnowing process, in which the 15,000 films submitted each year to Sundance, Cannes and TriBeCa are pared to the hundred or so fit for broader consumption. And, looking back over the past ten years, as the number of films submitted to festivals has exploded yet the overall quality of films released hasn’t much changed, I’m not sure that a larger quantity of films along the tail necessarily dictates better films at the head.

However, I do believe that, between the crap in the Long Tail, and the major releases in the head, there exists a sort of ‘medium tail’ – content too small to justify release given the economics of traditional film distribution, yet quite good and potentially highly appealing to at least a specific, focused audience group. That’s where changes in how film distribution works should really intersect with Long Tail thinking in a positive way.

A quick post to let the world know that I’m in Austin at the moment for SxSW, an odd little festival I can best describe as what would happen if you crossed Sundance with MacWorld.

The Oh in Ohio premieres here this evening, with the lovely Helen Jane Hearn and Aubrey Sabala escorting me down the red carpet as dual dates.

I’m back in NYC by Wednesday, however, in time for an Underground fundraiser. If you’re in the city, and fancy a Maker’s Mark open bar, come on by.

The Cyan Pictures First Annual Oscar Pool closes tonight at midnight; if you’ve been meaning to throw your vote into the fast-growing pile, here’s your last chance. Go! Go now! And don’t forget to give your full name, or I won’t be able to track you back down when you win, as we’re not collecting emails.

In other news, as our having two company names – Cyan Pictures and Long Tail Releasing – was apparently too confusing for most agents and producers, we’re sadly dropping the Long Tail name, and calling everything (both production and distribution) Cyan.

So, with that in mind, the latest distribution-side news from Cyan: two new films we acquired just earlier this week, which we’ve slated for mid-summer and early fall theatrical release, respectively.

1. The Oh in Ohio, starring Parker Posey, Paul Rudd, Danny Devito, Mischa Barton, Heather Graham and Liza Minnelli. A smart and very quirky comedy, “The Oh in Ohio tells the story of Priscilla Chase (Posey), a young Cleveland woman who seems to have it all – the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect husband – except for in bed, where sex has always left her a bit short of the finish line. When the problem drives her husband (Rudd) to unexpectedly leave her for one of his high school students (Barton), Priscillaís idyllic world is shattered. She sets out on a quest to become just as good at sex as she is at everything else in life – a wild journey that leads her into the arms of the man she least expected (DeVito), and to the discovery that satisfaction often comes from the most unlikely places.”

2. We Go Way Back, an indie drama that won both the Grand Jury prize and Kodak Vision Award for best cinematography at Sundance’s sister festival Slamdance, a month back. Loglined as “a funny, tender character study about a young actress named Kate whose refusal to admit to her romantic and professional dissatisfaction leads her to a surreal confrontation with her own past,” it’s also the best, most subtle look at quarter-life crisis I’ve ever seen on film. Plus, it’s beautifully written, shot and acted, and scored by indie-rocker Laura Veirs with a slew of The Decemberists’ music in as well.

I’m unequivocally excited about both films, and think you all should be, too. More details on these, and the handful of other similarly cool post-Sundance acquisitions we’re still chasing down, over the next few weeks.

Oh, and final note: both of these films will be part of the Oscar Pool prize pack. Further incentive to put on your best Academy thinking caps.

Entries keep rolling in for Cyan’s First Annual Oscar Pool. From them, I’ve deduced three main points:

1. I have no idea who you people are. Seriously, I recognize the names on, at most, 10% of the entries. Percentage-wise, that’s about the same as the ratio between the number of visitors to this site, and the total number of people I’ve ever met in my life who I could plausibly imagine coming here. Who the hell are you other 90%, and what the hell are you doing reading my drivel?

2. James Surowiecki was right – there’s a definite wisdom that emerges from a crowd. Though some categories are closer than others, in nearly every one, a clear Oscar favorite has shaken out. The day before the awards, I’ll be closing the Cyan polls and posting the collective results; should be interesting to see how closely we mirror the Academy itself.

3. That wisdom only appears, however, when people use some basis for their decisions other than the age-old ‘rectal generation method.’ Which is to say, given the utterly random scattershot of answers for the three best short categories, it’s clear you people are pulling guesses for those out of your collective ass.

Two months back, I mentioned that Colin suckered me into helping log his just-shot film, Underground. Logging is the process of capturing video from tape to harddrive, and of slicing, dicing and notating it for the editor, who runs with things from there.

After viewing the editor’s first month of work, however, it’s clear she didn’t so much ‘run’ with the film as ‘limp painfully in a sideways direction’ with it.

So, combining the philosophies of ‘if you want something done right, do it yourself’ and ‘misery loves company’, Colin gave the editor the boot, took on editing the film himself, and, this morning, somehow conned me into agreeing to co-edit it with him.

There’s now a copy of Final Cut Pro HD for Dummies sitting on my desk. Which, given the obvious stupidity of me jumping into this, seems an appropriate choice.

Earlier this afternoon, I stopped in to Starbucks for a business meeting. And though I normally buy my coffee beans elsewhere, I was there, I had a gift card to blow through, and so decided to pick up a pound.

As I sorted through the bags of choices, I heard myself ask, “are any of these coffees Fair Trade certified?”

Which, in all of my prior life, I had never even considered asking – having, similarly, say, never chained myself to a large redwood tree at the threat of its clear-cutting.

At Sundance, however, I had watched the documentary Black Gold, which dives deep into the world of coffee, examining the intertwining of farmers, traders, unions, multinationals, consumers and corner coffee shops. The film is taglined, “your coffee will never taste the same again,” which, apparently, is correct.

So as I paid for my first (or, at least, for my first proactively selected) bag of Fair Trade beans, I thought about Black Gold, and was struck, as I am every few months, by a wave of profound appreciation for the power of film.

Somehow, ninety minutes spent sitting in the dark, watching lights flicker against a blank wall, had left me seeing the real world itself in a new, different way.

And, as I look over our year’s plans for Cyan, as we prepare to make a few announcements next week and to roll ahead on some big actions throughout the rest of the month, I’m happy to see that we’re increasingly refocusing on that power of film, on wielding it in a smart, purposeful way.

Which makes me think, now more than ever, this definitely beats having a real job.

With the Oscars just a month off, we’re kicking off an official Cyan Pictures Oscar Pool. So, head over, weigh in with your predictions on whose names will be pulled out of those little envelopes, and, if you’re the closest guesser, win a care package of free copies of Long Tail’s next five releases.

[Also, please use your full name at the bottom of the form; we aren’t collecting email addresses, so we won’t be able to announce your win with just a first name.]

The last time I ended up the subject of a comic strip, it was in Yale’s campus newspaper, after I had broken up with a girl who penned one of the regular cartoons, and who used that podium to extract thinly-veiled revenge over several subsequent weeks.

I fare better this time through, popping up mid-way through the latest, Slamdance-focused iteration of CulturePulp, a strip penned by Mike Russell for The Oregonian.

Also, for the record, and even if the tinting of my glasses as drawn in the strip might make it appear otherwise, I have not yet reached the point of Hollywood douche-baggery that is wearing sunglasses indoors.