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Not the despot as played by actor Randall Park in “The Interview” but the real deal, the supreme leader befriended by Dennis Rodman during his bizarre basketball-diplomacy visits to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The ex-NBA star was accompanied by a British film crew on some trips and the result, “Dennis Rodman’s Big Bang in Pyongyang,” will premiere Jan. 25 at Slamdance, an indie showcase that runs at the same time as the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
Chief Productions, the company that made the movie, will be shopping for a theater distribution deal. After what Sony Pictures went through with “The Interview,” will anyone bite?
“I think some people will be nervous,” said Jason Resnick, a distribution consultant and former Universal Pictures senior vice president. “The larger the organization, the more uptight people get.”
Sony was hit with an epic cyberattack in November, a
month before the scheduled release of “The Interview,” a Seth Rogen farce about a bumbling talkshow host hired by the U.S. to kill Kim. It was pulled from major theaters after the hackers, linked by the FBI to North Korea, threatened violence.
Dennis Rodman visits The FOX Business Network at FOX Studios in New York City on Dec. 9, 2014.
The hack sent a chill through Hollywood. New Regency Productions Inc. shelved plans for a movie called “Pyongyang” starring Steve Carell, according to a person familiar with the situation. But studios may have warmed up.
‘Wake-Up Call’
The Rodman film has “a lot of commercial potential given what has happened,” Resnick said. “After the hacking, people were running and hiding, but now people want to take a stand.”The Sony attack and the threats have “certainly woken us all up and made us aware of a new method of censorship and bullying,” said Stephanie Striegel, an independent producer.
North Korea seems to have been a wake-up call for Rodman too. In a clip from “Dennis Rodman’s Big Bang in Pyongyang” that Chief Productions released this week, he breaks down, saying he wasn’t aware the North Korean leader “kills people a lot” and rambling about having received death threats.
“I’m not Martin Luther King,” he says at one point, “If someone’ll shoot me, please do it today.”
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, right, arrives to attend the inauguration of a Korean... Read More
‘Ludicrous Combination’
Rodman, 53, who has five National Basketball Association championship rings, won’t be at Slamdance for the premiere but the documentary’s director, Colin Offland, will attend.Offland said he decided to make the movie after learning the former rebound specialist was setting up a game with some onetime NBA players for Kim’s birthday in January 2014. The draw was the spectacle as much as the unlikely friendship between the diminutive dictator and Rodman, a man of many piercings, tattoos and hair-dyes who according to his website is 6-foot-8.
“When the story broke that Dennis Rodman planned to stage a basketball match between an NBA team and the DPRK national team, with an Irish bookmaker as it’s sponsor, I couldn’t believe just how ludicrous a combination it was,” Offland said. “I did everything I could to get involved.”
Rodman’s first North Korean adventure, with members of the Harlem Globetrotters in 2012, was organized and documented by Vice Media Inc. “The Hermit Kingdom” was shown on HBO.
Slamdance, founded in 1995, has screened early works of directors such as Christopher Nolan, who became famous with “The Dark Knight,” and Lena Dunham, the creator and a star of the HBO series “Girls.” Oren Peli’s “Paranormal Activity” was screened at Slamdance and later picked up by Paramount Pictures. Made for $15,000, it grossed $193 million worldwide.
“‘The Interview’ is an example of what kind of trouble you can get into, but it was through the independent sector that the film ended up being seen, so you could see the Rodman film being embraced by the independent sector too,” said Josh Braun, co-founder of Submarine Entertainment, a sales, production and consulting firm. “There are some distribution companies that think controversy is good commercially for a film.”
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