John August

The Nines

The Nines opens Friday

Projects, Sundance, The Nines

I feel like I’ve done [so](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-nines26aug26,1,7639090.story) [much](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/movies/04augu.html?ex=1343880000&en=601a154e3e1861a5&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss) [publicity](http://www.menshealth.com/cda/article.do?site=MensHealth&channel=guy.wisdom&category=life.lessons&conitem=03044e632f144110VgnVCM20000012281eac____) on it that everyone probably sick of me talking about it, but here’s the direct appeal:

My movie THE NINES opens this Friday, August 31st, in Los Angeles and New York.
—
Please come see it. And if you can’t, keep reading to find out how to get it to play near you.

In LA, it’s exclusively at the Nuart (on Santa Monica, just west of the 405). In New York, it’s at Sunshine Cinemas on Houston. You can find maps (and a lot of other information) at the official site: [lookforthenines.com](http://lookforthenines.com).

nines posterFor those who haven’t been paying attention, or who need to convince friends to accompany them: The movie stars Ryan Reynolds, Hope Davis and Melissa McCarthy, along with Elle Fanning, David Denman, Octavia Spencer and Dahlia Salem. I wrote and directed. We [premiered at Sundance](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/sundance-recap), and will be competing in [Critics’ Week](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/nines-at-venice) at the Venice Film Festival next week. I’m really proud of it, and happy that it’s gotten great reviews (we’re 100% on [Rotten Tomatoes](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_nines/) so far).This will change.

All that’s left is to sell tickets.

If you’re friends with filmmakers, you’ll know that they always plead for you to see their movies opening weekend. And you do, to be supportive, though you know in your heart that your $9.00 won’t make the tiniest bit of difference in that film’s multi-million dollar weekend.

But with The Nines, your buying tickets actually matters. A lot.

Because we’re on just two screens, it’s all about the per-screen average this first week. With a great per-screen average, we can plan for a more aggressive expansion. With a less-than-great per-screen average, it will be much more difficult.Anticipating the natural follow-up question: No, I’m not sure what those benchmarks would be — it’s not a single answer. The distributor needs to feel confident in committing new money for prints and advertising; the exhibitors need to want to show it; the entertainment press needs to point out how well the film did on two screens, on Labor Day Weekend, no less.

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that two tickets can push us over a certain threshold, and convince Landmark, Laemmle’s, or Pacific to give us better screens, be it a week or a month from now. Put it this way: You might prefer to see The Nines at The Arclight. Or in San Francisco. Or Vancouver. But the best chance of that happening is if you buy a ticket for it at The Nuart or The Sunshine, this weekend.

And the very best tickets you can buy are for the special screenings we’re holding on Friday night.

  • LOS ANGELES
  • Nuart Theater on Santa Monica (map)
  • Friday, August 31st
  • 7:30 p.m. After-show Q&A with John August, Melissa McCarthy and other cast/crew
  • 10:00 p.m. Introduction by John and Melissa
  • NEW YORK
  • Sunshine Cinemas on Houston (map)
  • Friday, August 31st
  • 8 p.m. Special guests Ryan Reynolds and producer Bruce Cohen

Tickets for these and all shows are online:

At [Moviefone](http://movies.aol.com/movie/the-nines/28598/showtimes?date=20070831)
At [Movietickets.com](http://www.movietickets.com/house_detail.asp?house_id=464&rdate=8%2F31%2F2007)

(In both cases, you may need to provide dates and zipcodes; the sites seem to overrule URLS with cookies.My kingdom for a true permalink. For LA, try 90046. For NYC, try 10002. August 31st is the opening day.)

If you’re not able to make it — or if you live in one of the 2,000 markets in which it’s not playing — but want to support us anyway, I can tell you off-the-record that a ticket sold is a ticket sold. They don’t count heads. And those under-attended Sunday matinees need love, too.

There will be at least two more bits of Nines-related news this week before the opening. I leave for Venice on Saturday, which should preclude checking back obsessively. But probably won’t.

The Nines trailer, HD

Projects, The Nines, Video

The super-deluxe HD version of the trailer is now up at Apple. Me like.

[Check it out.](http://www.apple.com/trailers/newmarket/thenines/)

It’s not showing up on AppleTV yet, for whatever reason. I don’t know what subset makes it through, but I presume it’s coming at some point.

Trailer competition, second update

Projects, Software, The Nines, Video

Just so you know, the radio silence around the [trailer competition](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/trailer-competition-update) is not for lack of interest or intent. Stuff got very crazy, very quickly, and we had a hard enough time getting the real trailer finished up. (Plus there was [other](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/the-big-fox-deal) [stuff](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/home-from-africa) going on.)

We have all the clips ready to go, but we’re going to delay the launch until sometime early in September. That will give people — the New York and Los Angeles people — a chance to see the movie. And it will give us about five seconds to breathe.

Because I’m a curious geek, I threw all the trailer competition footage into Apple’s new iMovie 2008. The good news is that the application seems optimized for MP4 footage — it was really simple to throw the clips together. The bad news is that the program is almost unusable, at least for anything beyond the most basic vacation footage.

Some frustrations:

* It freezes the last frame of every clip. My workaround was to use half-second dissolves on every cut, which is incredibly hacky and unacceptable.
* Only the roughest volume changes are possible.
* You can’t split audio from video.
* The spacebar works differently than any Quicktime application. It doesn’t play/pause. It jumps within the clip.
* It uses a text-selection metaphor for grabbing footage, which is innovative but really imprecise.
* The “handles” for marking the edges of clips work differently depending on which mode you’re in. It’s bewildering.

I really wanted to like the program. It demoes well. But it’s a disaster.

Press Day

Meta, Projects, The Nines

Today was press day for The Nines, which meant six solid hours of talking about the movie. And it was fine. I conducted all of my interviews sitting next to [Melissa McCarthy](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0565250/), so it was a good excuse to exercise our pact of mutual appreciation.Ryan and I have a similar covenant, but the world is pretty sick of it after the last publicity barrage. So we left him to fend for himself. And I slandered him, repeatedly.

Nines postersThe event was held at The Four Seasons. While driving there on Burton Way, I passed a construction site, and muttered under my breath about when the fuckin’ Nines posters were going to get plastered on every available plywood surface.

And then I saw one. It was enough to make me start believing in that book The Secret.That and a disbelief in the laws of science, logic or the fallacy of egocentrism. So, seeing the poster, plus those three things.

This picture is actually from St. Andrews at Hollywood Blvd. So there are at least two places in LA to see the wilding posters.

secondlifeNear the end of the press junket, we held a roundtable in Second Life, which was actually held in the SL re-creation of my house.It’s on Metaversatility island, if you want to stop by.

Lest anyone doubt that it was really me at the other end of the keyboard, here’s photographic proof. It was frustrating only because the questions came too quickly. I wanted to answer all of them, but by the time I’d finished one response, five more had gotten stacked up.