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Lawyers for Live Nation raised concerns about an upcoming documentary about last year’s deadly Astroworld tragedy in a new filing last week.

According to a letter dated April 8 obtained by Rolling Stone, Live Nation said it was concerned that Concert Crush: The Travis Scott Festival Tragedy could “taint” the jury pool if released in select Texas theaters. The filing also raised concerns over the fact that Riccardo Ramos, an attorney for 20 victims in the case, also served as co-producer on the film.

Concert Crush was directed by Charlie Minn,...

Gravitas Ventures has picked up North American distribution rights to Fully Realized Humans, an indie comedy from director Joshua Leonard. The film, which screened at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, will get a day-and-date release on July 30.

Leonard co-wrote and co-stars alongside Jess Weixler in what is described as an honest and hilarious portrait of a married couple on the precipice of parenthood. The pic follows Jackie (Weixler) and Elliot (Leonard) who, with less than a month until the birth of their first child, embark on a madcap odyssey of self-discovery in an attempt to rid themselves of the inherited dysfunction of their own upbringings.

Ross Partridge, Janicza Bravo, Jennifer Lafleur, Beth Grant, Tom Bower, and Michael Chieffo co-star. Leonard also produced the pic with Chelsea Bo and Sean Drummond. Gravitas Ventures Vice President of Acquisitions Tony Piantedosi negotiated the deal with Ben Schwartz and Josh Braun of Submarine.

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Gravitas has...

Gravitas Ventures, an independent film distributor, has acquired worldwide rights to Charlie Minn’s next three documentaries.

Those projects — “7 Murders a Day,” “Who Shot Colosio?” and “Miracle on 4th Street” — complement Minn’s background in investigative journalism. Minn directed and produced the non-fiction films, which were shot both prior to and during the coronavirus pandemic. They are set to release on video-on-demand later this spring.

Minn has worked on 32 documentaries in his career, including “Parkland: Inside Building 12,” “A Nightmare in Las Cruces” and “Es El Chapo.” He was also a producer on “America’s Most Wanted.”

“Charlie has a deep history in telling stories starting when he was a news reporter and during his time with ‘America’s Most Wanted,’ and we can’t wait to share his work,” said Gravitas executive Brett Rogalsky.

Content company Slater Brothers Entertainment co-produced the docs. “We are excited that Gravitas has partnered with us on...

Yesterday, 11 hours of bodycam footage from law enforcement outside the Pulse Nightclub mass shooting during the standoff with the shooter was released to ABC News. Now comes word that documentarian Charlie Minn, a former producer on John Walsh’s America’s Most Wanted: America Fights Back, who has 23 docus under his belt, is completing a new feature documentary revealing what happened in the 192 minutes it took before the police overtook the Pulse shooter. That shooting…...

Imagine if the man who killed your father or shot you square in the face was suddenly cross-examining you in the courtroom, badgering you for irrelevant details. Several survivors of the Long Island Railroad shooting on December 7, 1993, found themselves in this almost comically absurd situation during perpetrator Colin Ferguson's trial.

Ferguson, citing institutional racism as the cause of his anger, had fired top attorney Ron Kuby, who was arguing for an insanity plea, and insisted on representing himself. Once his aghast victims took the stand, he asked them such outlandish questions as "Were you smiling when you thought the gunfire was just firecrackers?"

Had Charlie Minn's documentary The Long Island Railroad Massacre zeroed in on this particular — an...

"To follow news of the Mexican cartel wars is to perpetually learn anew of the worst thing you have ever heard of," writes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice: "the village-size mass graves, the revenge-killings on entire families. This is the silent wreckage; El Sicario, Room 164 introduces us to the personnel…. The film's sparse, almost banal presentation is a virtue, for to boldface the horrors under discussion would only trivialize or sensationalize them, as the Mexican murder magazines do."

As Max Goldberg wrote here in the Notebook back in February, in the documentary beginning its one-week run at New York's Film Forum today, "a former assassin describes his experiences working and killing for the Mexican narco-state in a bland motel room on the Us side of the border — bland except for the extraordinary charge that comes of the sicario's claim that he once tortured a man in this very same room.

True crime stories have to be pretty important to merit a documentation more than 15 years after the fact. Horrific and sad as they are, murders are unfortunately a fact of life in most modern television and movies, making the real thing sadly mundane in comparison. The massacre that took place at the Las Cruces Bowl in 1990 is in no way lacking in horror, but even if time has provided some distance between the survivors and the events, it has not yet provided sufficient illumination to make them seem more notable than that. Director Charlie Minn clearly has a great deal of interest in and compassion for the events that played out (enough that he even includes himself in the proceedings towards the end here), but he doesn’t have the proper context, insight, or grasp of the broader implications to make A Nightmare in Las Crucas an integral part of this ongoing story.

An unspeakable crime that took place 20 years ago in Las Cruces, New Mexico has been memorialized in film--much to the discomfort of some of the area's locals. The execution-style murders of seven people at a Las Cruces bowling alley in February of 1990 are the subject of A Nightmare in Las Cruces,  a self-distributed documentary by filmmaker Charlie Minn.  Depicted in the film is the sad truth that the murders were needless.  After two men stormed the bowling alley and forced the seven victims (including children) to lie on the floor, they stole several thousand...