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November 28, 2005
A stately pressure doc: where the Wal-Mart bucks aren't
SF Chronicle's Ron Dicker parlays with Robert Greenwald about the cost of Wal*Mart, the doc: "The distribution pattern is not designed to maximize dollars... For every house party we do, in a sense we lose money because, for every person who buys a DVD, 20 or thousands come and watch without paying anything, which is fine. It's not about selling tickets. It's about reaching people." ... Greenwald, a 61-year-old father of four, already has amassed Hollywood-standard riches in his dramas, which include the Farrah Fawcett beaten-wife vehicle The Burning Bed. He takes no profit off the documentaries. "The reason was I knew that I would be attacked... I didn't want the Bush administration, Fox News or Wal-Mart to attack, saying I wanted to make a buck. That's always the first line of attack. This makes them silent, at least for a while." Retaliation has ranged from death threats to exhumed reviews of Greenwald's 1980 flop Xanadu."That came courtesy of Wal-Mart... "It hurt my feelings and cost me a lot of money in therapy," he says, chuckling... "But it hasn't made me change my opinion of Wal-Mart."
Posted by pride at November 28, 2005 05:40 AM
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