ThinkFilms Sold: The Canadian Film Distributor Pyrrhic Disaster for Tax-Payers

(Toronto) Canada’s ThinkFilms Distribution, the boutique film distribution company created and owned by Robert Lantos, was purchased by Los Angeles-based producer David Bergstein who will assemble it as part of a conglomerate. It was purchased, some speculate, with a price between $15-million and $25-million, according to The Globe and Mail today.

Mr. Lantos is subject to a regular pounding on The Canadian Film Insider (along with Atom Egoyan, Don McKellar, and various other individuals), but that is simply a matter of economics. Nobody has thrown away more Canadian tax-dollars on films that Canadians hate and don’t got to see and don’t accept as part of their culture (as is the Telefilm mandate for funding films). He has repaid virtually none of the perhaps $100 million in Canadian funding for his features over the years (this reporter is afrad to even look), and has emerged as Canada’s biggest cultural funding agency leach by an enormous margin. It is impossible to say how many good films that Canadians would enjoy and actually go to see were not made because Lantos scooped his sometimes 50% of English Canadian feature film financing and produced the astronomically bad 1% domestic box office, and often sub-1% record that Telefilm Canada is fingered with. One man is truly responsible for much of that, based on financing figures and economics easily drawn up from the Telefilm investment records by anybody who cares to dig. Yes, accountability is easy when we’re talking about half the money. We can look directly at Robert Lantos for accountability.

Now, let’s move into some speculation. Robert Lantos created Think Films Distribution a few years back. He did it for purely business reasons. He saw that Telefilm had moved in a new direction. It was drifting in mandate and the people running it started to expect that before they handed out the money for a feature to be produced, it would have to have a distributor attached. And they were going to pay out a few million in promotion budgets to those distributors as part of the concept. As no distributor in their right mind would bother with most of Lantos’s disasters, and with the likely concept hatched in his mind that: “Gee, if I am a distributor, then I will see a percentage of those couple of million that Telefilm is suddenly handing out for promotion of films, right off the top, just like I do with my Producer’s Fee right off the top of a film’s budget”, Mr Lantos formed ThinkFilm.

Sure, the last few years have been compete nightmares from a business standpoint if the millions he has sacked from Telefilm for marketing for his failed productions are taken out of the picture. They artificially propped up a failed distribution company that would have gone out of business in any free market economy situation. But Lantos, just last year, pulled in some $6-million plus from Telefilm to finance the failed marketing/distribution of turkeys like WHERE THE TRUTH LIES and BEING JULIA, neither of which succeeded in returning even half their initial investments. Complete bombs, in other words. Suicide for any legitimate free-market distributor, in plain terms.

But, Mr. Lantos did a smart thing. He drew attention to ThinkFilms by signing up a bunch of “controversial” films that drew headlines this year. He downplayed his Canadian failures and the money from Canadian tax-payers which propped up his failed distribution arm which was created to ensure funding for his features. He emphasised the concept that somehow ThinkFilms was edgy American Indy. A happening company. No doubt when he showed the books to Bergstein, he didn’t have to explain the fact that the company got its stay alive funding from Telefilm and the Canadian Taxpayers.

So the questions to come are: Now that ThinkFilm is in American hands, will Telefilm continue to drop millions its way to promote Lantos’s losers? Did Lantos sign an agreement with Bergstein that he must distribute another 100% certain Lantos loser with the upcoming FUGITIVE PIECES (filmed mostly in the Greek Islands, with millions in Canadian tax-payer money)? Most scary of all, will Telefilm start to advance Canadian tax-payer millions in marketing money to ThinkFilms now that its in an American’s hands?

And the big question, on which we can only speculate: Did Robert Lantos sell ThinkFilm because he saw the writing on the wall from Telefilm who is suddenly going to do the right thing and cut him off from funding based on his hopelessly disastrous track record that has cost Canadians so many millions and kept English Canadian film a complete laughing stock with the Canadian Public?

The Canadian Film Insider speculates that the answer is “yes”.