I just watched American Cannibal (a purported documentary on reality TV).
KB, eager to get out of porn, invests $100,000 to make a reality show.
With his goatee and sleazy anecdotes about selling Houston’s labia and the Paris Hilton sex tape, Blatt looks like the devil.
(Dan, the Editor of Genesis magazine, says his company EroticBid.com came up with the idea for selling Houston’s labia while Blatt maintains that he came up with the idea on Joseph Elkind’s boat with Houston.)
My question is how much of this documentary was staged, scripted and acted.
Kevin Blatt knew at least one of the filmmakers (Perry Grebin, Michael Nigro) from Ohio and he was set-up with the two protagonists.
Blatt does not have an office in the back of a strip club.
Now that I know that parts of the so-called “documentary” were invented, I don’t trust any of it.
“If you buy everything in that movie,” says a source, “you’re a sucker, just like people who watch reality television and believes what they read on tmz.com and the New York Post. It’s shot like The Blair Witch Project.
“American Cannibal started off as an educational project for college students on how to pitch television. That’s how they were able to get all the meetings with people in reality TV such as Phil Gurin.”
That Perry and Michael purport to have made a documentary but staged scenes and intentionally told lies in it makes them every bit as sleazy as their protagonists.
Lance writes on IMDB: “I saw this terribly obvious “film” at Tribeca (I also know someone who worked on the project) and it’s definitely NOT all real. The directors did not set out to make a true documentary. Pretending to capture the struggles of aspiring writers? A guide on how to pitch? Please. These guys just wanted to make something provocative. Is criticizing reality TV anything new or groundbreaking?”
Mister Movie writes on YouTube: “In May of last year I outed Perry Grebin and Mike Nigro to the New York Times that they set everything up in American Cannibal. It serves them right that this girl was injured.”
Rafiq writes: “I saw this at Tribeca last year and the filmmakers lied to our faces… In the movie you can see it over the shoulder… This has got to be the best marketing ever.”
As Stephen Holden wrote in the March 16, 2007 New York Times:
Almost immediately upon reaching the island, the project collapses from sloppy planning, union problems and an injury to a contestant. As one thing after another goes wrong, the documentary itself is sabotaged by acts of God and legal problems. None of the tests the contestants endure are shown, and the ultimate fate of the injured woman is left unclear.
The documentary illustrates the premise that if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Until everything collapses, and the filmmakers are left grasping at straws, it’s absorbing in a sick way. The fact that all the people we see in the reality-TV business appear to sneer at their own genre doesn’t excuse their culpability for perpetuating that toxic phenomenon. Mr. Ripley, Mr. Roberts and Mr. Blatt, in particular, earn every failure and setback that comes their way.
LOL! Kevin Blatt has never seen $100,000.
$100,000??? To make a reality show? I simply find that so hard to believe. The profit from a reality show/docu-film is such a long shot I question the earnings it could make that would allow him to get back ANY kind of profit. To invest that kind of money in a project like A.C., is simply near sighted at best. Right now the market for something like A.C. simply has not been good for anyone getting into the game, the only ones doing well are the programmers who have the resources to sink a large amount of money into something like a reality show, but A.C. has so many things going against it, so far no one is stepping up to distribute it and honestly the only outlet I see is a shelf life at Blockbuster or netflix. The market in mainstream is being taken over by horror films right now so I simply don’t see Kevin reaping anything long term from the film, I could be wrong, but I know I’m not.
I wonder if Michael Nigro is any relation to the Dante Nigro whose GMC Denali Lindsay Lohan allegedly commandeered to attempt to chase down her former assistant?