Word: winfrey
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...While Oprah will woo the public, the involvement of Winfrey and Perry as executive producers only enhances the film's backstory - a crucial ingredient when it comes to becoming the talk of the Academy. Voters love hearing about the actress who saved a doomed production (Kate Winslet in The Reader) or a left-for-dead drama that went on to become the darling of critics and audiences (Slumdog Millionaire). Thus far, the narrative surrounding Precious is one of audiences and critics being moved to tears, caught off guard by its stark portrayal of poverty and wrapped up in its uncompromised...
...what might have seemed like only idle speculation a week ago took on a new dimension of seriousness Sept. 19, when the film Winfrey is producing took the festival's top award. Lee Daniels' Precious (based on the novel Push by Sapphire), the story of an illiterate black teen in 1980s Harlem who is both abused by her mother and pregnant with a second child by her father, was honored with Toronto's coveted audience award, following in the wake of last year's Toronto-to-Oscar champion Slumdog Millionaire. It was only the latest in a long line...
...What's different about the Precious campaign is the O factor. At the same press conference where she toyed with the notion of undertaking a film club, Winfrey announced her intention to lead a promotional blitz on behalf of Precious across her various platforms, hoping to "bring in different audiences" by promoting the film on her show, in her magazine and on her satellite-radio channel...
...behind The Great Debaters - a film that went on to gross only $30 million. She produced and co-starred in 1998's Beloved, 12 years after she was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in The Color Purple. If Precious were to be crowned Best Picture next February, Winfrey could well be singled out as one of the producers to take the stage to accept the award: Oprah would have her own Oscar...
...Winfrey is keeping the focus on the story that first inspired her to sign on to the project. "None of us who sees the movie can now walk through the world and allow the Preciouses of the world to be invisible," Winfrey told reporters in Toronto. But few things on earth are as precious as an Oprah Winfrey endorsement, and that's the X factor that is bound to have Hollywood insiders talking throughout the winter, wondering just how far this one woman can take an independent film - and how they can convince her to do the same for them...