Gibney v. ThinkFilm: Lawsuit to the Dark Side

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:45:00 GMT

With his new film, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson opening soon and filming already started on his adaptation of the best-selling Freakonomics, Alex Gibney -- whose previous work has included Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room -- is developing a reputation as one of the canniest documentary filmmakers in the business. He should have his eyes pointed straight at the future, but instead, he's bogged down with a movie that was released last year: Taxi to the Dark Side.

According to IndieWire, Gibney has filed a lawsuit against ThinkFilm, the distributors of Taxi to the Dark Side, through the Independent Film & Television Alliance. The amount? A cool million. The issue? Gibney insists that ThinkFilm misled him about their preparedness to release the film, misled him about their financial clout, and failed to give Taxi to the Dark Side the theatrical release it needed to turn a profit. Gibney's also asking for legal costs and a return of distribution rights to the film.

For their part, ThinkFilm -- who are currently cash-poor and facing a major crisis as creditors breathe down their necks -- claim bad faith on the part of Gibney. While not denying the charges outright, they do say that Gibney was paid in full, if not on time, and attempt to turn his reputation as a champion of the little guy against him: "How ironic that a man who professes to care so much about the people who worked hard on his film would then inflict such insult and injury upon the blameless and tireless THINKFilm staff," says the company's Mark Urman. Whatever happens with the lawsuit, ThinkFilm is burning a lot of bridges that won't be easy to rebuild.

Related Posts:

Take Five: Taxi!

Morning Deal Report: Bollocks

Take Five: Taxi!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 22:00:00 GMT

We were looking forward to, in light of the Friday premiere of Teeth, bringing you a Take Five featuring nothing but movies featuring a vagina dentata. Unfortunately, the search for five such films proved rather, well, unsettling. So instead, you get this list, about taxicabs. Why taxicabs? Because this Friday also brings us the debut, in New York and L.A., of Taxi to the Dark Side, a new film from Alex Gibney, the prolific documentarian who also brought us Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, No End in Sight, and Who Killed the Electric Car?. His new effort focuses on the dismaying tale of an Afghani hack who was caught up — in error — in the U.S. anti-terrorist net, shedding yet another angle on the seemingly infinite human stories that can be found inside the confines of a taxi. Taxicabs and Hollywood films came into their own at about the same time, and ever since then, some of the most memorable scenes in cinema have involved having someone drive someone else around and urban area for cash. Taxi to the Dark Side, like most things involving the terror war, is likely to be a bummer, so here's some further taxicab confessions to get you from point A to point B.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

Well, you knew we were going here, didn't you? There's no more indelible vision of life behind the wheel of a cab than in Martin Scorsese's masterwork, one of the greatest screen treatments of alienation and unfocused rage ever captured. From the scenes of Travis Bickle's yellow cab emerging from New York steam-clouds to the look on his face as a murderous passenger (played by Scorsese in full mile-a-minute mode) spells out the grim fate that awaits his cheating wife to the final, anticlimactically calm chit-chat he shares with his fellow hacks after he's somehow emerged a hero from a maniacal bloodbath, Taxi Driver perfectly captures the banality of brutality that lurks on the mean streets of New York and only emerges in the scary moments of privacy that we think we share with cabbies. For an excellent companion piece to this essential American film, track down American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince, a documentary biography Scorsese filmed at the same time of the unstable, hilarious, deranged young man who plays the gun dealer in Taxi Driver.

HEAVY METAL (1981)

Much as with the rest of the film, there are many levels at which you can appreciate the "Harry Canyon" segment of this legendary (or, rather, notorious) Canadian animated production based on a number of strips from the French-language fantasy comic anthology of the same name. You can enjoy the low-grade stunt casting of TV hack Richard Romano as futuristic New York City hack Harry Canyon. You can enjoy the attempt at animating the striking, ultra-detailed visual style of outstanding Spanish underground cartoonist Juan Giménez, and think of how much more enjoyable it would have been if the producers had more than $200 to spend on the segment. You can give yourself over to the goofball interpretation of 1940s noir dialogue set in the far future and written by a 1970s pseudo-hippie. And, believe it or not, you can actually appreciate one of the more interesting revisions of the cynical-cabbie-and-his-fare-on-the-lam. But honestly, we'd advise you to do what millions of other people have done when watching this movie: light up a fattie and wait for Harry to get it on with the hot alien chick.

D.C. CAB (1983)

Crap-movie auteur Joel Schumacher didn't just come out of nowhere. No, the man behind such memorably rotten movies as The Number 23, Batman & Robin and Dying Young has, in fact, been making unwatchable movies for three decades, and this was one of the first. Schumacher actually wrote this stinker as well, which delivers on the promise of its title by being set in Washington, D.C. and featuring taxicabs, but is somewhat of a letdown in other areas, such as its claim of being a 'comedy' despite having no jokes and its claim of featuring a 'cast' even though no one in it can act. Still, it's instructive to watch in order to see why Barney Miller's Max Gail didn't become a big movie star (answer: because he's a terrible actor), how many bad movies Bill Maher was in before he hit it big with his talk show (answer: fifty billion kazillion), why anyone ever thought that Adam Baldwin might have potential (answer: his brother Stephen made him look good by comparison), and what the eternal appeal of Mr. T is (answer: it's fun to watch him yell at people). A must-see, if your only other option is Batman & Robin.

NIGHT ON EARTH (1991)

One of Jim Jarmusch's most inconsistent films, but that's the nature of the beast: it's an episodic tale of five people in five different cities taking five different taxis to five different places for five different purposes, and the movie stands or falls by the strength of the performances and how deeply the viewer identifies with the characters in each segment. One of the problems with the film, and one reason why it enjoys a generally low critical opinion, is the 'lead' story, a cutesy and uncompelling bit of stunt casting with Winona Ryder (then Hollywood's It Girl) and a bored-looking Gena Rowlands. But the Helsinki segment is deeply affecting, one of the most moving stories the often ice-cool Jarmusch has ever delivered; the Rome segment features one of the last performances by Roberto Begnini that can't be described as insufferable; and the Paris segment is downright charming. All told, it's not a complete success, but it's a small and sometimes effective movie, one that perfectly captures the often-surreal interactions between driver and passenger familiar to anyone who spends a lot of time in taxis.

THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)

Okay, okay, we're cheating. There are a million other movies about taxicabs, and almost any of them would be a better fit on this list than The Big Lebowski. But dammit, it's one of our favorite movies all the same, and even though only about three of its 117-minute running time is spent in a taxicab (understandable, since it's set in modern-day Los Angeles, where everyone has their own car), for our money, it's the funniest three minutes in a cab ever captured on film. The miserable cab ride home from Malibu after mistreatment at the hands of the sheriff — and exacerbated by a cabbie (played by a furious Ajgie Kirkland) who insists on exposing him to the Eagles — is one of the most memorable scenes in a movie full of great, funny moments. And it's not just stuck in there, either; like many scenes in the Coen's delightfully flipped noir, it's an echo of The Big Sleep. In that unforgettable adaptation of Raymond Chandler's impenetrable detective yarn, Bogie (as Philip Marlowe) seduces a friendly cab driver while on his way to chasing down a lead; here, the Dude has no such luck, ending up by the side of the road with Don Henley ringing in his ears.

The Screengrab : enron: the smartest guys in the room

Gibney v. ThinkFilm: Lawsuit to the Dark Side

Take Five: Taxi!