Producer Gary Lucchesi, who together with Tom Rosenberg runs Lakeshore Entertainment, had a sour experience with his first foray into the horror genre, in the form of Midnight Meat Train. Distributor Lionsgate dumped the movie on 102 screens, including many discount and dollar theaters, merely to to fulfill the letter of its contractual obligation. At the recent press day for Henry Poole Is Here, I asked him about what happened, from his perspective.

“A disaster — we were completely screwed. It was a nightmare,” says Lucchesi. Lionsgate explained their rationale, “but it went from being the highest-testing trailer they ever had, with a different regime, to it being, ‘We couldn’t figure out television spots.’ And then they said it was like this movie Bug that they had made, but at that point it was a different executive team at Lionsgate, and that’s the reality. Sometimes… in this business you need advocacy on the marketing and distribution side just as much as you need an advocate when you start making the movie. We have an example here with Overture, who I presume is treating you nicely; they’ve treated us great. You believe that they’re sincere about their affection for the movie, they’ve worked very hard on the television spots and the trailer. There was thought that went into the poster, there was attention and care given to everything that’s going on, they’re spending money to try to market it. There’s a game plan, and if it works it will be a credit to their tenacity and their steadfastness. That’s usually the normal thing, but then there are times when the studio says, ‘Hey, we don’t get it. We wish we hadn’t made the movie.’ I mean, they had money in the film, just like we did, and they said, ‘We don’t want to do horror anymore,’ basically. And we hadn’t done any horror prior to that. We liked Clive (Barker), he’s a great guy. Ryuhei (Kitamura, the director) came in, we hired him, he worked really hard.”

Here Lucchesi pauses, and cocks his head slightly to the side for just a moment. “I like staying alive, I enjoy what I do, I enjoy the challenges,” he continues. “To make losers makes it harder to make anything, and we make a variety of product. I will tell you that had Midnight Meat Train worked, it would’ve been easier to make another Henry Poole. That’s the reality. Right now, in terms of the future, we’re looking at probably doing slightly bigger titles (at Lakeshore). We have Underworld 3, Crank 2, we have The Ugly Truth, which is a comedy with Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler; we’re doing Fame, The Lincoln Lawyer — they’re bigger titles, they’re not as susceptible to the (marketing) challenges of smaller movies. But we did a number of them. That’s Hollywood.”