Today’s New York Times and Tuesday’s indieWIRE both report on filmmaker Alex Gibney’s binding arbitration suit against THINKFilm over how the distributor financed and promoted the distribution of Gibney’s Oscar-winning film Taxi to the Dark Side. The documentary has made less than $250,000 at the box office thus far.

The suit, filed June 19 through the Independent Film & Television Alliance, came two days before film exec Mark Gill’s Cassandra-meets-Chicken-Little keynote address at the Los Angeles Film Festival’s Film Financing Conference, the transcript of which appears in Variety’s Anne Thompson’s blog.

Models for keeping theatrical distribution alive have circulated over the past several years, and as the dollar definition of “low-budget” rises in concert with the rise in marketing and distribution costs, perhaps the expectations for documentaries to perform as well as other so-called low-budget indie features—or as well as Fahrenheit 911, An Inconvenient Truth or March of the Penguins—was a tad unreasonable. And perhaps the appetite of a company like THINKFilm was a tad voracious—particularly in 2007, when the box office decline had been well underway for at least a year.

As Zeitgeist Films celebrates its 20th anniversary—and many a distributor, whether indie or studio-dependent, has come and gone in that time span—maybe a modestly capitalized, cost-efficient/cost-effective company like that one is the sensible solution. Zeitgeist did quite well with The Corporation, grossing $3.5 million, and confirmed its brand with such titles as Ballets Russes, Into Great Silence, Up the Yangtse, Manufactured Landscapes and one of its very first films, Let’s Get Lost. These are titles freighted with honors and awards, and could very well embody the kind of films for which The Long Tail was conceived.