Sony Pictures Classics is an art-house film division of Sony Pictures Entertainment founded in December 1991 by former Orion Classics heads Michael Barker, Tom Bernard, and Marcie Bloom. It distributes, produces and acquires specialty films (especially of documentaries, independent films and art films) from the United States and around the world. As of 2012, Barker and Bernard are co-presidents of division.
Sony Pictures Classics has a history of making reasonable investments for small films, and getting a decent return. It has a history of not overspending and sharing money with the filmmakers honestly.
Sometimes, Sony Pictures Classics would agree to release some films for all other departments of Sony. But under Sony Pictures Classics' contract with Sony, all other departments of Sony (including the parent company) can't force Sony Pictures Classics to release any film it does not want to release.
Famous quotes containing the words sony, pictures and/or classics:
“In the end we beat them with Levi 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of Communist indoctrination and propaganda was drowned out by a three-ounce Sony Walkman. A huge totalitarian system ... has been brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes.... Now they’re lunch, and we’re number one on the planet.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“A higher class, in the estimation and love of this city- building, market-going race of mankind, are the poets, who, from the intellectual kingdom, feed the thought and imagination with ideas and pictures which raise men out of the world of corn and money, and console them for the short-comings of the day, and the meanness of labor and traffic.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is a difference between dramatizing your sensibility and your personality. The literary works which we think of as classics did the former. Much modern writing does the latter, and so has an affinity with, say, night-club acts in all their shoddy immediacy.”
—Paul Horgan (b. 1904)