New York, NY, May 15, 2007 – Variety and AMC will join forces at the 60th Annual Cannes Film Festival to launch Festival Shootout (www.festivalshootout.com), a dedicated web portal to entertain, inform and link movie lovers and industry insiders with unprecedented access to the world’s premiere film festival.
Festival Shootout expands on the critical success of AMC series “Sunday Morning ShootOut” and provides a powerful mechanism to extend both the network and Variety‘s coverage of the festival on multiple platforms.
Online
Festival Shootout will create an interactive, vibrant community among fans and insiders through news, photos, blogs and AMC’s exclusive original video content.
- AMC will produce original video content with two web-only episodes posted each day from the Cannes Film Festival. “Festival Diary” will follow breakout talents and chronicle their experiences through video interviews and Vlogs, while “Scene Insider” will feature on-location reporting from Variety journalists.
- Variety blogs Fest Central and Thompson on Hollywood will provide moment-to-moment festival coverage from every angle, including gossip, rumors, celebrity sightings and business deals
- All Variety reviews and news coverage
- Clips and trailers from the festival’s most hotly anticipated films
The new site may be visited at www.festivalshootout.com, as well as on the ShootOut page on www.amctv.com.
On Location
At the 60th Annual Cannes Film Festival, Variety and AMC will co-host an invitation-only event presented by the Maybach Family Foundation to celebrate Festival Shootout and honor Peter Bart and Peter Guber.
On Air
AMC will premiere a one-hour special, “ShootOut: The Cannes Film Festival,” Sunday, June 3 at 11:00 AM ET/PT. Hosts Peter Bart and Peter Guber will bring their insiders’ perspectives to the festival’s most exclusive events along with in-depth and intimate interviews with Academy Award-winning director Roman Polanski, controversial documentary filmmaker Michael Moore and many more surprise guests.
“ShootOut: The Cannes Film Festival” will also premiere primetime festival updates from Cannes, starting the week of May 22nd.
“AMC’s collaboration with Variety is very important to the network, and I am pleased to announce this broad expansion,” stated Charlie Collier, General Manager of AMC. “By combining Peter Bart and Peter Guber’s expert insight into the Hollywood community with Variety‘s authority, Festival Shootout will provide a multi-platform infrastructure that will link our viewers and the industry with the most important directors, producers, and actors at Cannes. This is a very important day for Shootout and our two brands. We look forward to building valued content and maximize our business relationship in the days to come.”
“We are extremely excited about Variety‘s alliance with AMC. This relationship signals to the industry that both companies are dedicated in their commitment of being the most accurate and timely resource for festival content worldwide,” said Charlie Koones, President and Publisher of Variety. “Festival Shootout provides a unique opportunity for both brands to build valued content that directly speaks to the sophisticated entertainment consumer.”
About “Sunday Morning ShootOut”
“Sunday Morning ShootOut” is a half-hour weekly series on AMC hosted by entertainment industry veterans, Peter Guber and Peter Bart. Guber is the chairman of Mandalay Pictures, former CEO of Sony Pictures, the producer of dozens of Hollywood’s most successful movies including Midnight Express, Batman and Rainman. Bart is editor-in-chief of Variety, and a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. In his career as an executive at Paramount Pictures and as president of Lorimar, Bart played a major role creating classics like The Godfather, Rosemary’s Baby and The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Hailed as must-watch television viewing for anyone interested in the entertainment business, “Sunday Morning ShootOut” features a distinguished roster of Hollywood’s most prominent producers, directors, writers and stars debating perspectives on the winners and losers at the box-office, the rising and falling fortunes of the stars and studios themselves and the emerging trends that are forever reshaping the business of entertainment.
The show airs every Sunday morning at 11 am (ET/PT) on AMC. The series can also be viewed at http://movies.yahoo.com, beginning at 12 Noon (PT) following the premiere of each episode.
Sunday Morning ShootOut is produced by Scott Sternberg Productions.
About AMC
AMC, a division of Rainbow Media’s Entertainment Services, which also includes WE tv and IFC Companies, is a 24-hour, movie-based network, dedicated to the American movie fan. The network, which reaches over 90 million homes, offers a comprehensive library of popular movies and a critically-acclaimed slate of original programming that is a diverse, movie-based mix of original series, documentaries and specials. AMC has garnered many of the industry’s highest honors, including 14 Emmy awards. AMC is “TV for movie people.”
About the Variety Group/Reed Business Information (RBI)
The Variety Group – Daily Variety, Daily Variety Gotham, Weekly Variety, Variety China, Variety.com, 411 Publishing, Video Business and Tradeshow Week – are all owned by Reed Business Information (RBI), the largest business publisher in the U.S. RBI is a member of the Reed Elsevier Group plc (NYSE: RUK and ENL) – a world-leading publisher and information provider operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business industry sectors.