The picture above is the proof that ‘Soaked in Bleach’ was scheduled at Arena Cinema Hollywood. Anyway, the independent theater hasn’t denied it, it has even tweeted the following a few days ago: ‘Regarding Soaked in Bleach. the engagement was cancelled, Join us for one of the many great #indiefilms we regularly present in #Hollywood’.
Despite the inquisitor tweets Arena Cinema has received in response, they haven’t given any explanation since… I sent them tweets too, tracked them on Facebook and even called them, but there is a complete silence regarding the issue, and the person I got on the phone said he couldn’t talk about it.
Actor Christian Meoli is operating Arena Cinema according to his profile on Linkedin, he is the CEO of Voltaire Media, which operates the indie theater, and I tried to contact him too, via Twitter and Facebook, but I am still waiting for an answer. I understand these people are very busy since they have to handle a million of jobs at the same time, but is it only a matter of being busy? Do they really want to give us an answer?
The irony in the story is that Meoli has a part in ‘Soaked in Bleach’, according to IMDb, he plays officer Levinowski! So why would a guy having a part in a movie cancel several screenings of the said movie? It does not make any sense to me, unless the threats had more consequences for this Hollywood theater? Tom Grant said that the threats just worked on one of the theaters screening the film, as all the other ones apparently ignored them. Did Courtney use her powerful Hollywood connections to intimidate the place? Who knows, I can only speculate but I have no doubt she has a lot of power.
Do you want an example? According to the book ‘Who Killed Kurt Cobain? The Mysterious Death of an Icon’ by Ian Halperin and Max Wallace, in the early 90’s David Geffen called Jeffrey Katzenberg, president of Disney (and also his partner at Dreamworks) to shelve a book about Courtney Love, which was scheduled to be released by Hyperion Books, a division of Disney. Hyperion never commented on the subject and writers have told friends they were paid a large sum of money to abandon the project.
A cease and desist letter is a document sent to a business ‘to halt purportedly-unlawful activity and not take it up again later’, and cease and desist letters are sometimes ‘used to intimidate recipients’, says Wikipedia. The letters generally threaten the subject with legal action, and in this case it was certainly pure intimidation as screening a movie can’t be considered as unlawful! Courtney Love and her lawyers had already done a similar action in the past, just before the premiere of ‘Kurt and Courtney’, Nick Broomfield’s documentary. San Francisco independent theater Roxie Cinema received a letter threatening legal action if the movie was screened, but Roxie owner Bill Banning decided to go ahead anyway, since he considered it ‘a free speech issue’. Very good for him, but the film was banned from Sundance Film Festival a month earlier, and Love’s lawyers used another strategy this time, complaining about the unlicensed use of live recordings by Nirvana and Hole. According to this Huffington article, Love tried very hard to stop the film from being made and managed to persuade MTV to cease their involvement. By paying?
There is no doubt she was at work again with ‘Soaked in Bleach’, and I am waiting for a response from Arena Cinema or Meoli himself. However, I will probably never get one and that’s a shame because it is an open door for any speculation.