This was announced over a month ago, but I missed it.

The Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award is a non-competitive award for producers. In a way this is pretty messed up, considering that the original point of the whole thing was keep the workers in the industry from unionizing by dangling an award in front of them (gladly, it didn’t work). So, when the people behind the awards start to give these to themselves, it kind of destroys that original idea.

This award is not an annual thing. There have been quite big caps between them, like the nine years between Dino D. Laurentiis in 2000 and John Calley in 2009. Most of the recipients are household names for movie fans, because these are the people who got to put their names on a bunch of big movies and sometimes even the studios, like in the case of Disney, Warner and Goldwyn (the G in MGM).

These awards are not handed out in the big televised ceremony. Instead, these are handed out with the other special awards in a separate event. These also get announced quite a bit beforehand. Like the recipients for next year were announced on 10th of June this year.

So, why am I talking about this? Because after 90 years of studio heads patting themselves on the backs, they finally gave this award to someone actually cool: Christina Vachon and Pamela Koffler.

Who? While the history is somewhat murky, because the information on Wikipedia is not consistent, they are the founders of Killer Films, a company they have run at least 30 years (again, the origins are murky, so possibly up to 35 years). Killer Films is not your traditional production company. They take risks.

One of their early films was Kids. It was not a good movie, but it was controversial. It’s kind of a coming-of-age movie, but it’s almost like all the fears of conservatives put on film. there’s drug use, sex and AIDS looming over everything.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the movies they’ve made (that I’ve seen and I have not seen some of their most important movies like I’m Not There and Materialists, which is their biggest hit), with some information which can include spoilers:

• Happiness – a movie in which a major plot point is that the son of a pedophile asks his father why the father has never raped the son, and yes, this messed up, but it also works, since the question comes from a place of love, because the son feels he isn’t good enough
• Boys Don’t Cry – an Oscar-winning movie about a trans man
• Hedwig and the Angry Inch< - a very weird movie about a trans woman trying to get justice for songs stolen from her/li>
• One Hour Photo – Robin Williams starring in a psychological thriller
• A Dirty Shame – he is working on another movie, but right now this is the latest John Waters movie and it’s about a neighborhood where everyone is either puritanical about sex, or a sex addict with unusual practice, however, you can switch sides if knocked on the head
• Carol – a quite restrained lesbian movie
• First Reformed – the one good Paul Schrader directed movie about a priest who likes to punish himself physically in private
• Past Lives – a very traditional movie, in comparison, about a married woman who meets the love of her youth again
• May December – an actress goes to meet a former teacher who was caught having sex with her student, who she is currently married to
• A Different Man – a man with a disease that causes growths on his face, goes through an experimental treatment to become “normal”, but meets another man with the same disease, who seems to have his life very much in order

So, they are not afraid to support movies with controversial subjects. They are queer themselves, so they produce a lot of queer movies.

They are the kind of producers we need: They are not interested in making big movies, they make these small budget projects which are a great counterweight to the shit we see from Hollywood, which has shown itself to be incapable of doing small or mid-sized projects.

They have given opportunities to many great filmmakers. Todd Haynes, Kimberly Peirce and Celine Song made their first movies with Killer Films.

While many of the previous winners of this award have only been able to cannibalize existing trends, they have actually built something. So, yes, give them the Thalberg award, and go out and find more people who also deserve this for working outside of the major studios, and still being able to have such a positive effect on the art form without really taking any credit for it.