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| R.J. Cutler‘s Anna Wintour doc "The September Issue" made a very fashionable entrance into theaters this weekend. According to estimates provided by Rentrak earlier this afternoon, the Roadside Attractions release - which premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival - grossed a massive $240,078 from six New York screens, giving it an average of $40,013. That's the second-best per-theater-average of any 2009 release (behind "Sunshine Cleaning")... - - - "We're thrilled with this opening," Roadside Attractions' Howard Cohen told indieWIRE this afternoon, "people are fascinated by Anna Wintour and wanted to see this intimate and funny film, the first real portrait of a legend who's reigned at Vogue for 20 years. Of course the recognition factor from ‘The Devil Wears Prada' was a major factor in getting this kind of immediate and large response-we knew that and helped that along. We did giant wildposing all over Manhattan with an image of her and a quote referring to TDWP. [ read more ] |
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| Initially, The September Issue comes off as something like the Teen Vogue segments of The Hills (though her royal highness Anna Wintour is swapped in for cut-rate LA imitation Lisa Love, the MTV reality show's masterful manner of spinning diegetic commentary out of eye rolls taken out of context is left intact), genetically blended into an alternate universe version of The Office. Except in this office, the workers actually work, and in fact are terrified not to because their boss is Michael Scott's polar opposite: impatient, undemonstrative, and absolutely incapable of taking no for an answer. - - - |
| Shot adroitly by Bob Richman, The September Issueshifts from runway to office to meetings to photo shoots, as Vogue assembles the seasonal issue that sells clothes worldwide, and sells the advertising that keep the magazine ahead of its competition. Wintour’s influence is so crucial that the chairman of Neiman Marcus pleads with her at a breakfast in Paris to pressure designers to deliver their goods on time for the stores. Wintour here is complicated. She is blunt and decisive but through most of the film she takes her trademark dark glasses off in the office, and for interviews with Cutler. She discusses her father, a journalist, and reacts with sadness when her daughter Bee shows little desire to enter either journalism or fashion. Besides a keen sense of style, Wintour’s gifts as an editor involve inspiring fear and loyalty among those who work for her and forging a strategy to groom celebrities to drive magazine’s sales. The numbers prove her right so far. [ read more ] |
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