If you have friends in high places you can get those swanky parties thrown around town this time of year – like the time Arianna Huffington held a party for the King’s Speech. Good times! But if you have friends in high places, and if your movie didn’t make a dime, and if your campaign rides on a wing and a prayer, well, you do what you have to do. Why, because let’s face it, getting work in Hollywood over the age of 40 is impossible, even for veterans like Sally Field who really had to audition the old fashioned way for Lincoln. Ann Down has been working in Hollywood for decades, in television and in film, and yet this is the first time even the faintest whisper of a potential Oscar nomination is upon her.
Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg:
Matt Cowal, Magnolia’s senior VP of marketing and publicity, tells THR they would have if Compliance had made money. “This is a film that, unfortunately, we’re going to take a loss on,” he says. “If it had worked, like some of our films have, we would have supported Ann with a terrific end-of-the-year awards campaign, like we did for Melancholia and I Am Love.” Instead, he says, “When a film is already out on DVD, supporting actress awards buzz does help, but it’s not a game-changer on the film’s bottom line, so we just are trying to be as responsible as we can.”
Dowd, a soft-spoken, working-class wife and mother of three kids, two of whom have special needs, reveals to THR that Magnolia’s refusal to pay for screeners—while her fellow contenders, few of whom have garnered the number of accolades that she has and almost all of whom have exponentially larger net-worths, had theirs paid for—prompted her and her husband to make a difficult decision: to foot the bill themselves, putting $6,000 on their credit card and borrowing $7,000 from friends. They feel that this might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for her and that a nomination could change the course of her career, so they want to give her a fighting chance.
