As Bleecker Street Turns 10, Indie Studio Stays Committed to Making Movies for Grown-Ups
variety.comRebecca Rubin Senior Film and Media Reporter Bleecker Street executives Kent Sanderson and Myles Bender can vividly remember their first time seeing “Eye in the Sky,” a drone warfare thriller starring Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman that premiered in 2015 at Toronto Film Festival with hopes of finding distribution.
Not long into the Canadian screening, they were held rapt by film but quickly realized their contemporaries in the room didn’t feel the same way. “Within 15 minutes, I started watching a lot of other buyers get up and leave.
I guess they felt the film was too challenging,” says Sanderson, Bleecker Street’s president. He and Bender, head of marketing and creative advertising, pushed for their boss, the film company’s co-founder and CEO, Andrew Karpen, to watch the film so they could bid on the distribution rights.
Bender recalls, “We were looking at each other and saying, ‘What are we seeing that they aren’t?’” Karpen shared in the enthusiasm of his colleagues, none of whom were worried about scaring off audiences with a story that favors substance over flash.
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