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November 06, 2007

Whatever Happened To Patrick Goldstein?

Last week, Patrick was busy trying to make the writers look silly.

This week, he is reporting – and I use the phrase gingerly – from the lunch and dinner tables of Hollywood insiders who endlessly court the LA Times about the “problem” in the indie film world.

And there are problems. But Patrick misses them completely by doing what is so popular these days, listening to executives and financiers moan and whine and making the mistake of thinking their whining is news. One of the top rule of journalism… if someone is whining to you, a reporter, about it, they are probably either spinning or dead wrong about the problem… or they would quietly be fixing it themselves.

Patrick’s boogieman of the week is outside funding, which is an absurdity on its face, since not one of the “We’re got $20 million a movie” funders that sprung to life in the last year have a movie in the marketplace. They have their own problems, particularly the stock market, which is indicative of slumping financial markets, which is making their mostly borrowed money at risk… but that’s another conversation.

It didn’t take more than 20 minutes to do the research…but Patrick was apparently to busy at lunch with someone really important to bother to look at actual figures. The September/October numbers for indie and dependent adult-fare films grossing over $1 million in 2005 was just under $68 million.

The same figure for 2006 would eventually be $155 million… but if you bother to consider where Patrick’s “great successes that are missing this year,” The Queen and Babel, were at this time last year, it is a completely different story. Those two films made $79 million of their total domestic $91 million AFTER the first weekend of November. So the real number to compare to last year’s great success at this point is $77 million.

And that brings us to 2007, which obviously has millions still to come from the indie and Dependent adult-fare films that have already been released… so far, is $84 million… best EVER.

How many of these films are in the marketplace this Sept/Oct? Fifteen… exactly the same number as last year.

On top of that, the box office numbers are more evenly distributed amongst the films than in previous years for this period. There were three titles over $10 million gross at this point in this category last year, same as this year. In 2005, the year of Capote (which had about $5 million in the bank as of early November), there were none.

Moreover, there are four such titles between $5 million and $10 million this year, just one last year, and four in 2005, even though those were the top four titles for this period overall.

But there must be a crisis going on… they keep telling us there is one!

Yes. The crisis is in short-term memory.

Apparently they forget last year’s fall, featuring: The Black Dahlia, Marie Antoinette, The Last Kiss, All the King's Men, Running with Scissors, Little Children, Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker, Death of a President, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Confetti, Deliver Us from Evil, and Sherrybaby, amongst others.

How do those titles compare to: Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Rendition, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Things We Lost in the Fire, The Hunting Party, King of California, Wristcutters: A Love Story, Sleuth, Reservation Road, Fierce People, Lake of Fire, Rails & Ties, and Slipstream, amongst others?

Me? I see six high profile titles bombing in these months last year (The Black Dahlia, Marie Antoinette, The Last Kiss, All the King's Men, Running with Scissors, Little Children) and five more this year (Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Rendition, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Things We Lost in the Fire, Reservation Road). But I see a significant difference there already… only three films of this year’s five have been on more than 350 screens, while five of six of last year’s bombs were on more than 350 by now. So that makes last year worse… no?

There is a real problem in specialized distribution these days… but it’s not outside money funding too many films. It’s the majors taking over the indie business and the screens with it, making the competition cutthroat amongst them and almost impossible to crack for the true indies (aside from Lionsgate). Quality films are for adults, adults take their time getting to the movie theater, and keeping screens long enough to get momentum is really, really difficult.

But we’ve discussed this before. What shocks me is that a guy as smart and experienced as Patrick Goldstein is doing all of his reporting on a terribly wrongheaded story like this from a dining table and not even bothering to crunch a number for himself. Hollywood is full of self-created mythologies… but we don’t need them from a respected reporter at our hometown paper. Really, it’s inexcusable. And it’s all too symbolic of the struggles of Traditional Media right now, still too arrogant to work the shoe leather that got them their place at the table in the first place.

Posted by poland at November 6, 2007 11:39 AM

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Posted by: Tofu at November 6, 2007 09:11 PM

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