By mcneditor editor@moviecitynews.com

STRAUS UNVEILS BGP AS NEW YORK-BASED DOMESTIC SALES COMPANY

For Immediate Release

New York, NY (April 2, 2012) – Former New Line executive and producer Bill Straus has launched BGP, a Gotham-based domestic sales company.  Straus, who has had a producing deal with Circle of Confusion since 2003, will continue to work in affiliation with the well-regarded production-management company.  Straus’s producing banner, Billy Goat Pictures, will remain as a separate entity.

Among BGP’s initial clients will be THE PLAYROOM, a film by Julia Dyer (“Late Bloomers”) starring indie sensations John Hawkes (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”) and Molly Parker (DexterThe Firm).  Set in 1970’s suburbia, the film concerns a teenager and her younger siblings as they spend the night in their attic telling each other fantastical stories, while downstairs their parents entertain guests over the course of a gin-soaked evening.

THE PLAYROOM will premiere in the gala spotlight section of next month’s Tribeca Film Festival.  Hawkes has also garnered a lot of attention lately for a series of performances that include his Academy Award™ nominated role in WINTER’S BONE, the soon-to-be released Sundance hit THE SURROGATE, and a recurring role on HBO’s Eastbound and Down.

Straus’s producing credits include THE LAST RITES OF JOE MAY, WEAPONS, and the upcoming STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON at New Line/Warner Brothers.

“BGP is a boutique sales company focused on quality over quantity,” said Straus. “Because of our size, there will be a premium on client attentiveness and long term strategies when necessary.”

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One Response to “STRAUS UNVEILS BGP AS NEW YORK-BASED DOMESTIC SALES COMPANY”

  1. Filmnerd says:

    Awesome! Good luck to Bill, a stand-up guy with a heart of gold.

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“I don’t really think, Sean, that you need to know about my various sexual liaisons. Or that anyone else needs to. I did write about them. I filled a hundred pages of Moleskine notebooks with my one-night stands, my affairs. But I decided they didn’t belong in a professional memoir. First of all, these are real people we’re talking about. Many of them were enjoyable. Some were abject failures. My wife said to me when she read the pages, ‘Of what purpose is this in a memoir? Of what purpose is this other than to titillate?’ The point is, I never see them. It’s because I have nothing in common with them, frankly. And probably didn’t at the time. I could not provide a sensible reason why I married these women. The thing is, in the case of my marriages, it takes two people to fuck up a marriage. It wasn’t simply the fault of these women that I lost interest in them and realised they were insignificant relationships. Which is how I look at them right now–as being insignificant. I see them as blips.”
~ William Friedkin On Cutting Interviewers Off At The Sass

“I have to imagine from Mr. Spielberg’s point of view, the paradigm shift in the 1970s was just the new “normal,” a “halcyon era” from which we are straying in the 21st century–because theatrical exhibition is tenuous (as it has been since the 1940s), the home video market has dried up and people are watching pirated movies on their phone. Spielberg’s coming-of-age era was for him the halcyon period that the 21st century “implosion” will cause to go “crashing into the ground.” But he is wrong. The market for movies is actually diverse and highly segmented–although from the top-down movie industry vantage point and media punditry you would not think this to be true.  Would we really mourn for Mr. Spielberg or ourselves if Lincoln would have been made for cable or had played on public television?  Is it bad for humanity that cable television is creating wonderful, resonant stories in long-form series that people want to watch at home on TV (or streamed onto their computer)? I don’t think so, but it is a paradigm shift and it might affect people’s theatrical moviegoing habits. Televisions in people’s homes have had that effect for seven decades–it is not a new phenomenon. As Art House cinema impresarios we need to focus on what WE can do at our theaters and in our communities. It is not productive for us to fret over what pundits say or about what well-meaning filmmakers like the Stevens–Spielberg and Soderbergh–say. We should fret about what we can do in our communities. What we can do to support filmmakers.”
~ From A Response By Russ Collins, CEO, Michigan Theater–Ann Arbor And Director, Art House Convergence, To Mr. Spielberg