Orphans of the studio mergers

Hollywood’s spate of big-ticket mergers might be keeping the town’s lawyers and accountants happy, but the deals are proving especially painful for a number of filmmakers.

In the wake of two massive show business deals -- Sony’s $4.9-billion pact with MGM and Disney’s $7.4-billion purchase of Pixar Animation Studios -- the production and development on three movies have been terminated, while two finished films have been shelved with no immediate plans for release.

Among the films stuck in limbo is “Romance & Cigarettes,” an ambitious $11-million musical written and directed by actor John Turturro. The movie, starring Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini and Susan Sarandon, was considered good enough to play at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival, but it’s collecting dust at Sony Pictures, which inherited the movie as part of April’s Sony-MGM transaction.

“Whenever and wherever we’ve shown the film, audiences have responded,” Turturro says. “So I hope we’re going to have a happy ending to the whole situation.”

Turturro’s predicament is increasingly common within Hollywood’s ever-shifting corporate sands. A filmmaker may start making a movie at a studio under one regime, only to see new management clear the decks of almost every existing project, and then watch as the entire studio is sold to a new owner.

“One of the great, great tragedies of a situation like this is [films get abandoned] all too often,” says Bingham Ray, who was running United Artists when it made “Romance & Cigarettes” and “The Woods,” another movie caught in the MGM-Sony merger.

Like Turturro’s musical, the $8-million thriller “The Woods” was a completed United Artists movie when owner MGM was merged into Sony. United Artists had planned to release both “The Woods” and “Romance & Cigarettes” last summer, but the distribution plans were scrapped when the deal closed.

“There isn’t a day that goes by when we don’t think about our movie and try to figure out a way to generate some momentum for it,” says Sean Furst, who produced “The Woods.”

“One studio had a very strong idea about how to release [‘Romance & Cigarettes’] and had a plan built for that,” John Penotti, who produced the film with Turturro, says of United Artists. “And we’re not sure the new studio has the same agenda.”

Sony says it considered releasing all of the movies that came through the door from MGM. Some former MGM-UA titles -- such as the Oscar-nominated “Capote” and the upcoming Terry Zwigoff movie “Art School Confidential” -- promptly found new homes at the studio’s specialized film unit, Sony Pictures Classics.

Other MGM or UA movies, including last Friday’s “The Pink Panther” and the next James Bond movie, “Casino Royale,” landed at Sony’s mainstream Columbia Pictures.

In the case of “Romance & Cigarettes,” Sony says that it gave Turturro additional money to rework the film but that the new version still held limited commercial appeal. The studio reached a similar conclusion about “The Woods.” Sony says it has helped organize screenings of the films for other buyers and has encouraged their makers to pursue different distributors, but there have been no takers.

In addition to the United Artists movies caught in the Sony-MGM deal, three Disney computer-animated movie projects became collateral damage as part of Disney’s Pixar purchase.

While the three -- Disney-made sequels to Pixar’s “Toy Story,” “Finding Nemo” and “Monsters, Inc.” -- might still become movies, Disney says the sequels will be produced by Pixar. What is less clear is whether any of the early production or scripts for the films, particularly after a year of creative labor on “Toy Story 3,” will be folded into a future Pixar production or pitched on the scrap heap.

Last year, when it looked as if Disney and animation giant Pixar were going to part ways, then-Disney Chairman Michael Eisner authorized his studio to start work on the sequels. Eisner had feuded with Pixar Chief Executive Steve Jobs over extending Pixar’s production and distribution deal, with Disney claiming it alone had the rights to make Pixar sequels.

Operating largely in secret under the code name Circle 7, Disney hired some 150 computer animators to start work on the sequels, and “Toy Story 3” had both a script by “Meet the Parents” co-screenwriter Jim Herzfeld and a director in Bradley Raymond, who made Disney’s direct-to-video “Lion King 1 1/2 .” A 2008 release date for “Toy Story 3” was penciled in.

Disney’s “Toy Story 3” filmmakers were far enough along that they completed a test where Woody (the character voiced by Tom Hanks in the first two movies) was made to look like the Pixar creation.

But when Disney announced its Pixar acquisition in late January, Jobs and new Disney head Robert Iger made it clear that when the deal closes, Buzz and Woody would be moving from Burbank’s Circle 7 to Pixar’s campus in Emeryville.

Steve Hulett, a business representative for the Animation Guild, a union for television and movie animators, says he is hopeful that the Circle 7 animators -- a number of whom are foreigners working under visas -- will soon find new jobs.

Disney “will try to find them something else to do,” Hulett said of the animators, especially the foreigners. “Because it costs a lot of money to get them over here, and it costs a lot of money to send them home.”

Herzfeld hopes his “Toy Story 3” baby won’t be thrown out in the merger’s bathwater. The screenwriter says that although Circle 7 may have been a mere gambit in Eisner’s negotiations with Jobs, its filmmakers and animators nevertheless approached the Pixar characters with reverence.

“A lot of people, including me, started working on the film because they loved ‘Toy Story’ and ‘Toy Story 2,’ ” Herzfeld says. “The hope is that [Pixar creative chief] John Lasseter, when things have calmed down, at least says, ‘Maybe they’ve got something.’ ”

Pixar and Disney declined to comment other than to say they will look at Circle 7’s ideas and try to find work for some of its animators.

Some films have come out of the process in very good shape. The makers of “Capote,” for example, had just finished filming their movie and were squirreled away in the editing room when the MGM-Sony deal went through, suddenly -- but temporarily -- leaving their movie without a home.

“It was obviously a stressful time,” says “Capote” producer Caroline Baron. “But [Sony Pictures Classics] understood it the moment they saw it.”