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October 31, 2009

Friday Estimates by Klady - These Is Them

Title - Distrib - Gross * - Theater - % Change – Cume
This is It - Sony - 7.9 - 3481 - New - 19.1
Paranormal Activity - Par - 5.8 - 2404 - 23% - 74
Couples Retreat - Uni - 2.4 - 3026 - 35% - 82.9
Law Abiding Citizen - Overture - 2.3 - 2764 - 43% - 46.4
Where the Wild Things Are - WB - 1.9 - 3645 - 56% - 58.6
Saw VI - Lions Gate - 1.9 - 3036 - 73% - 19.1
The Stepfather - Sony - 1.1 - 2346 - 48% - 22.5
Cirque de Freak: Vampire's Assistant - Uni - 1 - 2754 - 57% - 8.7
Astro Boy - Summit - 0.95 - 3020 - 48% - 8.8
Amelia - Searchlight - 0.9 - 1070 - 29% - 6.2

Also Debuting
The Boondock Saints II - Apparition - 0.27 - 68
London Dreams - Studio 18 - 39,700 - 51
Aladin - Eros - 17,500 - 56
The House of the Devil - Magnolia - 9,400 - 3
Skin - JDF - 6,300 - 4
Gentlemen Broncos - Searchlight - 5,200 - 2
Storm - Film Movement - 2,850 - 2
Looking for Palladin - Wildcat - 1,300 - 1

==========

"it is certainly not the posthumous blockbuster that the Jackson estate had anticipated."

Oy.

"My $90M all-in number looks like a pipe dream," one rival studio exec told me after the pic's weak bow.

Are you f-ing kidding me????

Are we going to start judging sporting events based on what Don King or Vince McMahon tell us they anticipate?

What delusional planet do people come from when they think that this movie was going to be so much bigger than it is? Instead of looking at the facts of what is, there is this crazy need to make it all about some people's wild fantasy of what it could be.

It is, by this hour, the second biggest first-run concert film of ALL TIME. Concert films - and almost every other one involves the actual concert experience and not bits and pieces slickly thrown together to offer an incomplete glimpse at what might have been - are not a huge box office business. Never have been. The reason I included the phrase "first run" is that Woodstock is thought to have grossed over $50 million after a decade plus of playing around the world in revival house after revival house. Of course, in this era, most of that gross is replaced by DVD sales and rentals, which will dwarf the $50 million figure, even in this DVD economy. If you want to use the other crazy stat of the week - the one that makes Paranormal Activity the most profitable movie ever - Woodstock is easy the most profitable concert film against costs in history.

Anyway...

This Is it is benefiting from a market that is afraid to release a movie over Halloween weekend, so there is no other wide release. (And indeed, it will pay a price tonight, as most other films will.) It is also being slowed a bit by not being able to expand its event feel with more IMAX screens, as only limited screens have been released to the film and in most cases, only after 9pm. And, of course, it is fighting the biggest problem there is for a film like this... everyone knows the DVD is coming and coming soon and that there is very little new material in this film... one song... which is already on the radio.

My guess is that this movie stops at $40m/$50m domestic... and that is a massive success. But then again, listen to Disney, which did $19m with the Jonas Bros phenomenon, or Paramount, which did less than $19 million domestic with U2 (back in the day), The Rolling Stones by Scorsese, and Neil Young COMBINED, or listen to The Weinsteins, who can tell you about doing less than $19 million with Madonna at the height of her music career and controversy career.

Yeah... This Is It is soooooo disappointing!

And this is from someone who, I'll remind, would not have seen the film were I not overnighted tickets from IMAX, thought the film was modestly enjoyable, and wouldn't push anyone to spend the time and money to go see the thing when there are quality small films out there to see in any major city.

I just hate the lie - and it is a lie, whether intentionally so or not... repeating someone else's falsehoods is not a form of truth telling - that this film is disappointing at the box office. It is going to do about twice what was a reasonable expectation. It will be the biggest documentary of the year by 3 or 4 times and the #3 doc of all time worldwide behind F/911 and March of The Penguins, having crushed Miley Cyrus' total international gross in its very first day.

This is truly a sickness. It is right along side, for me, attacking Obama less than a month after he got into office for failing to change the economy and now, less than a year into his presidency, trying to paint him as a failure for not already passing the most significant American legislation - health care - since LBJ.

Meanwhile...

We all must continue to applaud Paranormal Activity, which continues to outperform my expectations week after week.

I am still frustrated by the overhype, but in this case, it has pushed the ball up the hill to remarkable results. Does this kind of surprise success make it harder form something like This Is It? Obviously so. And as Drew McWeeny points out in SMF 7, Paramount did a great job of selling their marketing hook, that the film was driven by demand... when in fact, it was planned to go wide with theaters booked and ads bought, from the beginning.

But PA is not a new paradigm for marketing. It is a classic paradigm... well, "classic" when it works. And it has worked here, well executed, well timed, and kept far away from its true birthing room as an idea, Steven Spielberg's screening room.

Both of these films are remarkable successes based on high quality hype. But one has hyped its hype better than the other. The biggest difference in perception of the bottom line is that, not reality.

Posted by dpoland at 09:15 AM | Comments (11)

October 30, 2009

Super Movie Friends 7

SMF is SUPER-SIZED this week... over an hour on three segments with HitFix's Drew McWeeny, Jen Yamato, and Cinematical's Todd Gilchrist on HORROR. All three segments link to the others and there are mp3s for the whole thing. Enjoy!

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Posted by dpoland at 08:29 PM | Comments (30)

20 Weeks To Oscar - 20 Weeks To Go

Quietly – amazingly quietly – Avatar is becoming a serious Best Picture player. Fox isn’t pushing it. They aren’t advertising it. They are doing what they have done for years… sell the movie and if awards come, so be it. And no matter the media response to the teaser trailer, you can feel the ground rumbling under the earth’s crust for this one now. The movie is going to be very, very big.

Even if it fails by some standards, it is almost impossible to imagine the film grossing less than $500 million worldwide. That would put it with Potter 6, Ice Age 3, and Trannies 2 (in that order… do people realize that IA3 has outgrossed Tr2 worldwide?) in that financial category. This is very rarified air for a title that is neither a sequel, animated or based on a major literary work… you know, what grandpa used to call “an original.”

There are sixty-seven $500m worldwide grossers in history and only Ghost, The Day After Tomorrow, Forrest Gump, Armageddon, Night At The Museum, I Am Legend, Hancock, The Sixth Sense, Star Wars, ET, and Jurassic Park qualify in that rarified grouping. Five of the eleven were Best Picture nominated. Only one won. But still…

The full column...

The chart...

Posted by dpoland at 08:24 PM | Comments (39)

Battsek Out At Miramax

Daniel was well liked and rather effective.

I don't know. The New Disney is really, really not going to be The Old Disney... not even The New Old Disney.

It as though Bob Iger, who for years has seemed to be playing a very, very smart game of chess in reestablishing what Eisner and Katzenberg had built after they had allowed it to overmature and ripen into too many personal vendettas and self-reflections, has suddenly gotten God and is going to try to turn Disney 3.0 into a hard-driving future-focused leader instead of being a solid, sleepy, history-considering village.

There is something honorable about Iger and his new right-hand, Rich Ross, knowing their intent well enough to not bother keeping Miramax alive as anything much more than a non-theatrical brand. (That's what Battsek's exit suggests... and it also suggests more to come.) But there is also something a little bit scary about a company like this galloping so intensely and almost without any restraint towards an uncertain future.

I've been watching the well-curated, tremendous 4-disc Blu-ray packages of Up and Monsters. Inc. and it struck me yesterday just how different the Disney brand may be soon... how many more icons will be placed in the background of The Castle in years to come.

The only good thing about this news is that it will create an even greater vacuum in the art house distribution world... and no matter how tough things are, nature abhors a vacuum. But as small as a Miramax business should be at a company like D3.0, not having one is just not smart. The future of the film business is the ability to play to ALL fields, as the revenues for all filmed entertainment gets smaller. Studios that throw away $10 million a year here and $10 million a year there are setting themselves up for dangerous waters ahead. Take a look at the history of the 1960s in the business. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

Posted by dpoland at 01:09 PM | Comments (6)

October 29, 2009

Circle Of Jerk du Jour

Gawker made a big deal out of catching Nikki Finke re-spinning her ignorance, but they make it seem like a unique event and not the daily reality of Hollywood's answer to Rush Limbaugh... all self-promotion, all talking points fed to her by others, all rage and unearned arrogance over insight and knowledge, all the time.

But the idiocy around anyone calling This Is It "disappointing" is a classic and epic form of insider masturbation... all insiders... most journalists.

On Tuesday night - Thursday, the film will come close to matching the 3-day weekend opening of The Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience. Before this weekend is over, it will be the second highest grossing concert film in movie history with only the $65 million run of the Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour ahead of it domestically.

A $30 million domestic gross for this piece of kitsch history will be a massive success. It likely means $70m+ worldwide, which puts the film about $45 million away from profitability. The big question for Sony, in terms of profitability, will be DVD sales and record sales. And that DVD is more likely than most to sell strongly... at least in the 6 or 7 million range, which would put Sony well into the black before the record sales.

Who set this up to be a perceived failure? An overzealous press - which yes, includes Rush Finkebaugh - hyping this thing into the stratosphere... overconsidering the information offered by the electronic ticker sellers... trying to draw eyeballs to their various blogs instead of thinking.

And to be fair to Darling Nikki, it is not she who needs to be smacked for listening to Sony insiders who were mouth breathing about this film last week... even if she needs to go back to Journalism 101: Don't Be A Laydown, Use Your Brain. It is whoever at Sony told her that they were expecting the film to do better than the tracking and pre-sale based estimates. Dumb.

This is the opposite number to Paranormal Activities, where the media has tripped over its own feet to praise the grosses of the film. And indeed, a $15,00 production plus another minimum of $500,000 in finishing costs, millions spent to make prints, etc, is more impressive against a gross of over $50 million than this $60m investment in a concert film, album, and DVD. But it will still work out to be a good piece of business for Sony.

I guess that's not enough.

Posted by dpoland at 09:26 PM | Comments (15)

BYOB - 102909

Posted by dpoland at 09:21 PM | Comments (37)

More Fake News

I don't mind Paramount pushing out new stats to promote a movie. "Most Profitable Movie Ever" would be a more significant stat than "Best Friday Matinee Gross For A Comedy Starring Hermaphrodites"... if it were true.

"Most Profitable Movie By Percentage, Based On Publicized And Obviously False Production Cost" wouldn't probably play as well. But I don't blame Paramount or the movie, Paranormal Activity, for selling this lie of language. It is the media that sells this stuff with misleading headlines who should be embarrassed (and/or publicly flogged).

The most profitable movies released in 2009 to-date will be, by a distance, The Hangover, Transformers 2, Ice Age 3, and Harry Potter VI. Paranormal Activity will be very, very profitable, along the numbers of Taken.

Again... the enthusiasm is what drives this movie. And the media, which sells a movie like to a wider-than-normal audience, much more than Twitter or even TV ads or trailers, can be manipulated. But when we start lying outright in headlines, it really pisses me off. People want to get angry over The Hollywood Film Awards or The Golden Globes, but the same people love to roll over for stuff like this.

I apologize again if this feels like a slam on this specific movie or the publicity dept at Par. It's not. Never has a movie's actual content been more irrelevant to its gross. And the publicity and marketing has been brilliant in selling this film with similar skills to see a Roland Emmerich show-up-to-see-landmarks-explode film.

But when media wonders why journalism is dying, it needs to ask Walt Kelly, not just Craigslist.

Posted by dpoland at 08:49 AM | Comments (29)

October 28, 2009

Oooh Hoo Hoo!

This will be a quickie.

The stars of This Is It! are Don Brochu, Brandon Key, Tim Patterson and Kevin Stitt. They edited the footage together and made it coherent.

There is always something interesting about a backstage glimpse of a big talent putting things together. This is not Michael Jackson's best work. It's not even a full rehearsal, with the exception of one number. I have been to many sound checks that blew it out more impressively.

One thing you do get from the film is that Jackson was a person and not a freak.

In any case, for what this is, it is very well put together and worth seeing. It's not something I would spend the time on, but that's an issue of personal interest. If you are interested, you aren't going to walk out of the theater disappointed, even if there will be small disappointments along the way.

One a side note, singer Judith Hill may offer the sexiest onscreen performance of the year without trying much. She's one of those women who sizzles with the combination of looks and a clear charm that comes across on screen, much more so than in stills. And she can sing her ass off. Killer.

So... if you are going to see This Is It, you should see it in IMAX, even if most of the IMAX opportunities are FauxMAX. The experience is about feeling like you are in the room and the size and somewhat better sound make that experience all the more real.

Seacrest out.

Posted by dpoland at 11:54 PM | Comments (0)

How Do You Deal With Scientology?

You know... I try to stay out of the religious beliefs of others.

And whatever you or I feel about Scientology, the people who believe are true believers... and if you want to say they are crazy, you can start lining up people who think that Judaism and Christianity are equally dubious.

The one thing that struck me, however, about both the 2-night Nightline coverage and the BBC Panorama coverage is that I have real concerns about any organization that seeks religious standing with the US government and refuses to speak about their beliefs.

When a publicist/believer explains that he won't speak about, either to confirm or deny, the basic positions of the faith, something is wrong... really wrong. And I am saying this as someone who deals with people who cannot tell the truth, as a matter of business course, every day. I am not even talking about lying with a straight face, which some do and some do not.

Can you imagine if Christians decided that Jesus rising was not to be spoken of publicly, but was still at the center of the idea of Jesus as the third part of the holy trinity. Can you imagine if priests stormed out of interviews if asked about whether the faith believed that Jesus had risen?

Would anyone be able to take them seriously?

Like I said, what you have faith in is not my call... but when you refuse to acknowledge what you believe, it suggests a lack of true faith and by the very lack of transparency, it calls your beliefs into question.

Me? I have no problem with Tom Cruise being anti-psychiatry. That's his right, just as it's Jenny McCarthy's right to be anti-vaccination. These are opinions and we should all be allowed to express ours without fear of being called "crazy" simply for having them. And we should be willing and able, to a reasonable degree, to defend our positions... or at least exclaim our faith, no matter how blind.

In any case, here is the Nightline Package -
Nightline Day 1
Nightline Day 2

And here is a channel on YouTube where you can see the BBC's "Scientology & Me"

Also, this little bit on Paul Haggis... who seems to remain one of the sober individuals of this industry, even when we disagree on ideas profoundly. How could anyone ask more of someone's principals?

Decide for yourself.

Posted by dpoland at 02:04 PM | Comments (24)

AMPAS Governor's Awards

Quietly creeping up on us is the Governor's Awards, this year's spin-off of the honorary awards traditionally featured during the Oscar telecast.

This show, which will be taped but not televised, is in the ballroom at Hollywood & Highland where the Governor's Ball is done each year (since the Kodak). The honorees this year are John Calley, Roger Corman, Lauren Bacall, and the great cinematographer, Gordon Willis.

The only reason it is now on my radar at all is that I looked it up after being reminded that it was happening after I tried to schedule something with a friend who is obliged to attend. That's a little quiet when you consider The Academy is honoring 4 true legends.

Sadly, Calley is not expected to attend due to health issues. And the price per ticket is scaring away some who you would expect to be in the ballroom... $350 a head for dinner.

Posted by dpoland at 01:59 PM | Comments (9)

Ray (RH) Greene Offers A Singing, Dancing, Movie-History Dracula Halloween

Posted by dpoland at 11:39 AM | Comments (1)

October 27, 2009

MJ's Pissed!

In LA, as people lined up for the first screenings of This Is It, a hellacious wind blew across the southland and knocked out electricity in Hollywood and beyond.

It has to be the ghost of Michael Jackson, enraged that he is being raped in death by the Brits, the Japanese, and a guy named after a taco.

On a lighter note, IMAX screens with the film are being limited to evening shows in mostly multiplex-imax houses because the screens are already taken up with Where The Wild Things Are. So keep the kids up late, make then dance like Michael in front of the mall's Ben & Jerry's and take them to those late night IMAX shows. And remember, this is all about the art... and it's what Michael wanted... that is, on the list of what he wanted right after not being dead.

Posted by dpoland at 06:20 PM | Comments (32)

CHANGING LANDSCAPE - 10/27/09

PRECIOUS BACKLASH - I am already feeling the urge to lash back at the talk of backlash.

It is the profound arrogance of the entertainment media to delude ourselves that we, not the real movie goers or even the privileged awards voters, decide what should be praised and how intensely. It is the same pathetic mindset that happens when Variety pans a movie like The Road or AntiChrist and other media monkeys line up to suggest that this is a meaningful moment in the history of the film and future audience reaction.

There can be no backlash against Precious because, so far, the entire definition of how the movie plays has been based on a breathless media and Oprah... not necessarily in that order.

Some fools are even wondering aloud whether Lee Daniels is costing himself a Best Director win by being honest in public... when he is a long ways away from getting a nomination, much less a win. (This is true of all the filmmakers in play, not just him.)

STOP!!!! Get some perspective. And stop damaging a movie like Precious by treating it, months before the response to the movie from real people and real voters will be heard, like the Holy Grail.

You know why Up In The Air has gone quiet lately? Because the folks at Paramount marketing get the joke. It's hard to live up to the endless, screaming hype. Plus it turns a pulpy picture like Precious and really, a smoother-edged pulpy picture like Up In The Air into something an audience has to do... to cross off its list of responsibilities... and disallows the honest discovery of the film.

For me, this goes back to Brokeback Mountain, which actually may have won had so many not assumed that it was a mortal lock to win and that any other result was backlash. This just wasn't the case. The love for the film, once people saw it, was not universal. Not close. But worse, the positioning of inevitability emboldened Oscar voters who didn't love the film to feel even more strongly about not loving it. They wanted to kill the hype... the finger-waving "I'm not going" of it all, not the movie.

You can't tell people, "And you... and you... and you... you're gonna love me." You have to let them love you. And that is exactly, by the way, what Dreamgirls says at the end of that song, when the show immediately goes on without Effie.

Let me also point out... the overwrought screeching around this film is not coming from Lionsgate. It's the media... really a few loud voices. This is not to discount the many people who have seen and love the film or the audience awards. But this is not a film that can march up to the Kodak and demand its Oscar. This is a year of many colors and we are a long way from a frontrunner.

Calm down and let's get on without talk of frontrunners or backlashes until they are more than a figment of our prideful imaginations.

SOUPY & STERN - I had a thought sitting at the back of my head and finally got to look into whether I was having an aneurysm... I wasn't. Soupy Sales was Howard Stern's radio lead-in at WNBC when Stern rose to national fame/infamy and eventually got fired in a flash in September 1985.

When Stern got dumped - I happened to be working in the building at the time - the first rumor was that Sales was behind having him fired. But it wasn't true. Stern had very crudely attacked the lead anchor of the lead money-making news show on WNBC-TV, which was also in the same building. She was the straw that broke management's back on Stern.

But remembering back to those days, it amused me to remember that Soupy was still working in the big leagues then and leading into the dark side of modern radio.

SNL KAGAN'S LATEST SILLY STUDY RESULT - I don't have the study in front of me, so I can't deconstruct the details, but good gosh a'mighty, this "expensive movies are more profitable than small movies" headline is a load of excrement of monumental proportion.

Why?

First, the geniuses didn't factor in marketing costs - which have been the fastest growing cost for theatrical distribution for the last decade, until the last year or so - or foreign box office - which is greater in most studio release cases than domestic - or DVD revenues.

Really? A grown up analyst is analyzing profits and losses based on 35% or less of the revenue stream and distribution costs that are often greater than the cost of production and on the over-$100m titles represent no less than $100m worldwide?

Idiocy.

All a smart person has to do is to read the lead of Variety's story on the study - "Films boasting production pricetags of more than $100 million actually generate higher returns than mid-range pics, averaging $247 million in net profits per release."

Seriously. That has to be a typo, right?

Of the Top 30 grossers of 2009 so far, the total domestic gross is $3.127 billion... or an average domestic gross of $184 million. Generously estimating that this represents only 40% of the theatrical gross (foreign, 60%), means an average $460 million gross worldwide. That's a rental return to the distributor of $253 million. Let's be even more generous and estimate an additional $150 million NET in post-theatrical revenue.

So we're at $400 million. Minimum production and distribution cost... $200 million. Realistic but still generous average cost... $275 million. About half of these high-cost titles carry heavy percentage players... but to be generous again, let's cut it down to 5% of net going out the door to participants. That's another $20 million.

So... even under this generous and mostly unrealistic scenerio, you're looking at a $100 million+ cost movie being $105 million into profit.

But what's the real truth. Three movies will make significantly more profit than $105 million. And five of the movies will lose money. That leaves nine films somewhere in the middle.

And this doesn't include Land of The Lost or Where The Wild Things Are in this year's numbers, as neither has gone Top 30 yet. (WTWTA should get there.)

Yes, making The Dark Knight or Transformers 2 or Harry Potter is a better business than making The Proposal or Paul Blart: Mall Cop. But franchise chasing can shut down studios...or at least, get a lot of people fired. In the last decade, no $40 million movie got any major (or even any Dependent) in trouble.

But if you want to know the real truth, simply look at how the business itself has changed. Studios have gotten as far away as possible from funding all but a handful of franchise movies on their own. If there is all this profit in making expensive movies, how come no one other than rich ambitious outsiders are wanting to put the money on the line?

RICKY GERVAIS HOSTS GOLDEN GLOBES - Great for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association... and a completely wrong-headed idea for The Oscars. Equally stoopid, the notion that Neil Patrick Harris should complete the triple crown by adding Oscar hosting duties to the Tonys (great performance) and the Emmys (not so great). The Emmys were easily the worst televised awards show of the year this year. Very little worked... and it was trying so hard that it bordered on Stephen Fetchit.

I love Gervais. But he has a very specific kind of humor. And it is so distinctly not an Oscar kind of humor.

Truth is, Billy Crystal is a middlebrow funnyman. He's never going to demand much more from the audience than they are going to be happy to give up from their couches. And that is why he is so well remembered as an Oscar host.

The same is true of Jay Leno. He gave up being edgy, which he once was (a bit), to become Middle America's funny man. And he did it brilliantly. Would I trade an hour of Leno for 15 minutes of Lewis Black? No. 20 minutes of Letterman? No. But I am not the guy's core audience. Oscar's TV audiences ARE his core audience. (Note; I do find Leno funny... but it is just a soft kind of funny... every once in a while, he let's something tough slip in and I remember just how funny he really can be.)

Posted by dpoland at 01:24 PM | Comments (11)

With Due Respect...

It's almost impossible to decipher who is the john and who is the whore when it comes to the "Hollywood Film Awards."

I sometimes wonder why I haven't launched the MCN Movie Awards and I think the answer is that I'm just not cynical enough yet.

Posted by dpoland at 10:55 AM | Comments (4)

October 26, 2009

BYOB Monday

Been drivin'...

Salinas is beautiful.

Posted by dpoland at 05:29 PM | Comments (95)

October 25, 2009

Movie Biz Myopia

It drives me CRAZY... all the time... when smart writers who have been around forever get involved in trend stories that so utterly miss the point they are trying to explain. I just don't f-ing get what the major malfunction is.

Well, maybe I do... a bit. Hollywood's journalistic corps have a very bad tendency to get sucked into believing the bullshit being fed to them by studio execs, agents, and idiot financial analysts and then, when something happens, they see the story in the reflection of the bullshit, unable to get any real perspective on what's happening.

And so, Michael Cieply writes a story like, "The Skinnier Look of Studio Management," which somehow takes the various firings and reductions of The Seismic Industry Economic Destruction of the lack of anticipation of the DVD downturn by the studios and turns it into some silly (and essentially inaccurate) bit about head count at studios.

Can a guy who has been around as long as Cieply really believe that John Lesher was dumped by the man who hired him as the result of the studio making a strategic choice to make fewer movies? Is he kidding? The absolute failure of John Lesher as big studio chief followed directly on the heels of significant, but not absolute failure of Lesher as Dependent chief. But the reason he was fired was the same reason he was hired... to provide cover for the boss. And why hasn't Paramount ramped up production under Brad Grey in the ENTIRE time he has been in the job? Well, good question. But it's not a strategy of 2009.

Disney is a completely different thing. Bob Iger has decided on a major shift in corporate strategy. But getting rid of Dick Cook was most certainly NOT about getting rid of a salary or head count. Like Lesher and Universal's Shmuger & Linde, there will be massive payouts for years to come to get rid of these guys... if there is any financial malfeasance, it would be in how recklessly the post-firing deals are made and how many tens of millions are thrown away on execs that studios either no longer wish to follow or who are massive failures.

And about Universal... again... the notion that dumping Linde & Shmuger was some sort of $ issue is just plain stupid. For one thing, both of the jobs that Langley and Fogelson had will be filled... and on down the line. But moreover, the idea that firing the co-chiefs was about their salaries in any way... really... are you kidding? Does the NYT know how little money their salaries are in the big picture? Let me put it this way... NYT is bleeding more red ink quarterly than double the combined annual salaries of those two men... and life goes on...

And was I clear enough? The move to move two top execs up, much like the same exact move that brought in the regime that this new one is replacing, is about covering Ron Meyer's ass. It is not like the LA Times making Betsey Sharkey (and I really don't mean to be picking on you, Betsey) a film critic because she already had a job slot with TribCo and so they didn't need to manipulate a way to hire from outside. (This is also how Turan's previous partner, Ms Chocano, was slotted in as film critic, having already taken a slot as TV critic.) This is Meyer, in a time of pressure, dumping his familiar old guys to bring in some new familiar slightly less old guys to show that they are not going to make the same mistakes again. That's what the top dogs do.

And the New Line dump... again... not about dumping bodies... about a short-sighted idea of how to tighten things up as the division was having a couple of rough years after being an absolute cash cow for the previous five. And as it turned out, was a major profit center in 2009 for WB - with films made by the old team - after the company was absorbed into the bigger studio.

And this crazy irrelevance about whether Horn and Meyer will be replaced by one person instead of two... Cieply has been around long enough to know that the guys they replaced, Semel & Daly, were the only two man show in their day. It worked. And WB maintained the tradition when they left. But the idea that it will or will not continue based on payroll considerations is just plain dumb.

Seriously... Fox is the fattest studio in town by this standard, not just with a two-man crew leading the studio, but with divisions below and across. Is Cieply going to theorize that Peter Rice was not replaced, as such, at Searchlight because they didn't want to pay someone? Crazy. He was not replaced because the machine was built so that it could keep going and going effectively without him and with the team he worked with and showed complete respect to during his tenure. And if it ever crashed and burned... guess what... they would go find their next Peter Rice.

Vantage was shuttered because it lost a shitload of money. Warner Indie was shuttered because it was never a serious interest of the larger company and it lost the big studio in-house talent that needed a Dependent platform. Miramax is going small because the "middle business" is not anyplace anyone wants to be and Battsek can do 90% of what he's been doing without that part of the business in place. And the definition of what Focus will continue to be is being defined daily now.

Studios are shrinking because they got FFFAAAATTTT. But people, even very expensive people, are the cheapest commodity in the movie business. If your movie studio is going through $1.5 billion in production and marketing a year, a $5 million salary is NOT going to change the dynamic or the bottom line much.

Yes, it matters a lot to the people who have those salaries and are dead afraid that those jobs will be going away. (Well, mostly THEIR jobs going away scares them. Fuck everyone else.) The same overhype is true when studios push back against out of control agents demands and want to pay huge, but almost reasonable prices for talent. "Woe is us... the whole business is collapsing..." Silly. A $8 million payday against only 6% of the gross instead of $20 million plus 8% is not the end of anyone's world, even if it means that someone who is already too wealthy can't buy their 4th vacation house in cash this year.

None of the big executive salaries cut end up trickling down to people who work for a living... under $400k. Never!

You know, ass covering and tap dancing and fear of losing the platinum diamond-studded ring is part of the game and really, I don't mind it that much. It is what it is. But using that whining to distract NYT readers from the very real change that is coming/here that does/will have a major impact on everyone and the general disposition of movies that reach the public just pisses me off.

There was nothing shocking about The Hangover getting made... except that studios were making so many similarly dumb comedies for twice and three times the budget! Why?!?! I'm not taking anything away from the success of that film. But that is why they have always done cheap comedies. When they pay off, they are massive successes. (Todd Phillips personal payday will be over $45 million on the film.) But the question is not about trying to make more films like that one, but why any comedies are made for more than the $38 million that one was made for.

But media so often gets distracted by the wrong question. The idea of Hangover 2 being made is a no-brainer. That ship has sailed. It's a distraction. Imitation is death. But what steps will studios take to put themselves in position for the next one... the one they don't see coming... because no one can see them all coming, just as no one can see all the ones that miss.

It will not be about how much the person in the job makes or how many persons are in the job slot. And that you can take to the bank.

Posted by dpoland at 11:58 AM | Comments (53)

DP/30 - Paul Schneider, Bright Star

Posted by dpoland at 11:45 AM | Comments (13)

Weekend Estimates by Klady - Oct 25

Paranormal has clearly found normal, holding for what is estimated to be 3x Friday over the weekend... which is better than most horror genre films do. More congrats to Paramount marketing.

As for WTWTA, not sensational, but not deadly. You have to go back to July to find a movie other than Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs that opened to $30m or more and dropped less than 49% in the second weekend. My sense is that its still rather blurry about who the movie is for. But the door is closing on WB after this next weekend. $80m domestic is going to be a fight and foreign is going to define whether the film is profitable.

The most interesting number on the board, for me, is $1.3m for Aida Live... 1 screening... 4 hours long... in just 403 theaters. I have never been much of a believer in event programming satellited to theaters. But this is very interesting.

There is a certain amusement about An Education and AntiChrist having about the same per screen.

Posted by dpoland at 09:50 AM | Comments (41)

October 24, 2009

Breakfast In Beautiful Santa Cruz

Posted by dpoland at 11:49 AM | Comments (0)

Friday Estimates by Klady - pre-Halloween

The Friday before Halloween is stunningly consistent for horror/kill movies... $14 million has been the magic number. It started before Saw ever happened.

2002 - The Ring (wknd 2) & Ghost Ship - $10.2m - interrupted a little by Jackass opening
2003 - Scary Movie 3 & Texas Chainsaw Massacre (wknd 2)- expanded by comedy
2004 - The Grudge (wknd 2) & Saw - $14.2m
2005 - Saw II & The Fog (wknd 3) - $13.1m
2006 - Saw III & Grudge 2 (wknd 3) - $15.6m
2007 - Saw IV & 30 Days Of Night (wknd 2)- $17m
2008 - Saw V - $14m

So... $14m for Paranormal Activity & Saw VI combined is not terribly surprising. The question was always how those dollars would be split up and whether the duo would expand the market.

Lionsgate can't be happy. And really, Paramount may have cost both companies money by doing their big expansion directly against the Saw franchise... but not for sure. Paranormal is a created phenom and how the timing works on it is, honestly, a bit of a mystery. What works works... what doesn't doesn't. And this is already a win for Spielberg & Paramount Marketing.

Astroboy and Amelia should not be too surprising to anyone either. Astro is an improvement on the Fly Me To The Moon opening, but they also spent a load more on marketing and there is a known character, even if the young generation has no idea who he is. But it's easier to sell Iron Man meets Pinocchio than astronaut insects.

But Universal's flop with Cirque du Freak seems like a seriously missed opportunity. Yeah, the world is a bot vampired out. But the film never seemed to find a clear sell. And that's always a bad thing.

And let's not go crazy on the WTWTA drop. It is not a great hold. It will get better over the whole weekend. But it is also going right into the face of two new strong openings, plus Astro.

Posted by dpoland at 10:26 AM | Comments (30)

October 23, 2009

BYOB Monday

Been drivin'...

Salinas is beautiful.

Posted by dpoland at 09:52 AM | Comments (49)

Review: Amelia

I take no joy in participating in the disappearance of Amelia. I like Mira Nair and her work. Even though she is the most surprising 2-time-Oscar-winner in history, Hilary Swank seemed to be once again well cast for an oddball role. And really, Richard Gere was a pretty good call too, though perhaps he remains a little too good-looking for it not to obscure a barely-there turn by Ewan McGregor.

But the movie feels like no one was on instruments, guiding the thing to someplace safe.

The accents by both Swank and Gere, are legendarily bad… I mean, comedic. On top of that, McGregor’s accent – whatever it is meant to be – wanders in an out, much like his character. This is the glaring, easy catch of trouble.

So you sit there and try to move past the bad accents… as though you were on a date with someone with a specific physical thing that bothers you, but that you don’t want to judge him/her on that… makes you feel shallow… and you so want the date to become something good… maybe green people with big warts on their noses and pointy black hats are really good in bed or will make you feel safe from those flying monkeys you have always feared or will change your life by teaching you how to bathe without ever having water touch your skin…

Or not.

The greatest sin of Amelia is that it is dead boring. And I do consider that a sin when you are working with a story this full of opportunity. I have no idea why no one seems to have decided what this movie was going to be about, but it is not a hagiography, nor revisionist, nor episodic, nor enlightening.

For me, ANY angle chosen could have been made into an interesting movie. Sincerely, if the movie was about how boring this woman really was while the world was busy adoring her and the hype around her, it could have been fascinating. The elements to set that up are there. She resists promotion about her that she feels is misleading… but then she gives in without ever really exploring the conflict.

Who was this woman who, in this film, professes to being as comfortable sharing her vagina as Joe Gideon is in sharing his cock in All That Jazz? I’m not kidding. (I did, however, pull a punch by not using the "c word" as a balance to the word, "cock," in that last sentence. PC me.). That is the set up here. She claims to feel free to do whatever she feels like doing. And yet, the movie is utterly sexless.

And Nair gets caught in the mega-mistake of thinking that the view from the window of a plane, which most of us have found pleasure in – even thrills - as we have flown over great landscapes or magnificent cities, is a viable movie experience. Maybe in IMAX… and maybe for 5 minutes. But in every great or good movie about flying, the filmmaker remembered that the thrill of flying is on the character of the person flying.

In The Right Stuff, Phil Kaufman did a great job taking us into the experience of Chuck Yeager as he broke the sound barrier and beyond… but it was the stick of gum he borrowed and the cocky confidence he showed while the images and score told us he should be very nervous, and the angrily defiant look in his eyes even as he passed out… and ultimately how his entire part of the film set up why flying was life for him and how his wife and other pilots got that. The script, rather brilliantly, has outsiders who don't get it - who really represent the audience, as we start the journey - while allowing the audience to feel that we are allowed to identify as people who do get it. And by the end of the film, we do get it, as these men are heroic and "just like you and me" at the same time. But the lesson is. most often, that we mere mortals feel, in those great moments of tension, differently than these men with "the right stuff." It's not about the beauty of flight. It's about how one feels in the tight prison of the cabin... how much a person wants to go faster, higher, and farther than anyone else ever has or ever will.

Closer to what Nair seems to have been going for is Out of Africa, which was not a movie about flying. It was a movie about the freedom of spirit and the flying was a manifestation of that spirit, not the source. But Amelia is carrying the load, from start to finish, of the fact that there was nothing romantic about the experience of flying that Earhart had. There is no one who matters to her who is taking to the skies with her. This is a movie in which the greatest tension about flying these routes for the first time (under varying circumstances) is getting the plane off the ground.

WHAT?!?!?!?

There just isn’t anything very dramatic about being in the air. Either you are trying to take off, trying to land, or falling out of the sky unexpectedly. So how do you make a movie about a flier that isn’t about flying?

Again… not my call… but you have to make a choice.

And I have to say, for a woman who takes on two male lovers – one being her husband – and in a film that keeps trying to sell Earhart as a heterosexual being… whenever she gets around women, she seems happier and focused and like the most obvious closeted lesbian in movie history. Really. Every time the feminism idea turns up – and it’s yet another half-followed thread – Amelia lights up. I would have been fine with Amelia: The First Feminist as a movie. But the movie always seems to want to scurry back to convention.

And THAT would make a good movie too. “She wanted to be all these things, but she was raised to be a good girl, so she went along, and the only time she could find herself was alone in the sky or letting other women know that they could break their good girl bonds.”

Well, that would make a Phil Kaufman movie. Uma as Amelia, Maria de Medeiros as her dark, burrowing, little-seen, most intimate lover, and Fred Ward as her cuckolded wealthy husband who built her legend but never could give her an orgasm... and really wanted to.

But I digress…

People who are willing to accept travelogues with actors who are likeable might not gag on this thick, clunky, unaccomplished bit of mutton. Aside from the painful accents, there is nothing in this film that pokes you in the eye. But if you expect anything of any weight or lasting value out of a movie experience, you will have to be deeply disappointed in Amelia. The movie is, simply, lost.

Posted by dpoland at 08:11 AM | Comments (36)

Soupy Sails Away

Soupy Sales was one of those legendary characters of television who I was a little late to discover, missing the full impact of his magic. But from the first time anyone got an eyeful of that smile and that gentle, goofy energy, you had to love the guy.

I was unaware of it at the time, but he was the distinctly Jewish uncle any kid might want. He was silly, happy to be the butt of jokes, and while undeniably a grownup, one of us. I know it may seem a little odd to note his jewishness with Jewish performers dominating so much of early television, but so many of "us" were trying to be less Jewish and while Sales didn't wear a yamaka, there was comfort in the Northeastern ethnicity of his gentle growl.

One of the best remembered events of all early television is Sales' call on New Year's Day to kids to take "little green pieces of paper" out of their parents' pants and purses and to send them to him at the TV station.

And of course, there was Match Game...

Posted by dpoland at 07:17 AM | Comments (3)

Activity Chasing Paranormal

Universal is pushing out The Fourth Kind as though it was Paranormal Activity with a b-action...

... even though Universal was headed down this road before Paranormal started its careful roll out. The campaign also has shades of White Noise, which opened to $24m. Gold Circle, which produced the low budgeter, also made White Noise 2: The Light, which Universal sent direct-to-DVD and The Haunting in Connecticut, which Lionsgate opened to $21 million.

This might also be a good time to note that Paranormal itself is now sporting a DreamWorks logo next to Paramount's. Good thing Steven came up with a new ending.

Anyway, this entry was inspired by a director, Amanda Gusack, who is now out trying to get attention for her unreleased 2005 film, In Memorium...

Hey Guys - Before writing and directing THE BETRAYED for MGM (Melissa George, Oded Fehr) I wrote and directed a microbudget horror movie, entitled IN MEMORIUM, which premiered at the Hamptons Film Festival in 2005 and is still unreleased.

In recent weeks, it's received numerous comparisons to PARANORMAL ACTIVITY...

Posted by dpoland at 06:41 AM | Comments (15)

October 22, 2009

DP/30 Junket Quickies - Fantastic Mr Fox

Posted by dpoland at 10:45 PM | Comments (2)

The Movie Needed A One-Sheet. They Gave Us A Handsome Conceptual Piece With Unrecognizable Stars.

The poster also have the air of familiarity...

Even more interesting, the vast majority of posters for movies starring Eastwood are a giant headshot of Eastwood with various dark colors behind him.

Posted by dpoland at 05:39 PM | Comments (20)

Press Release - In Spite Of The Media Disdain For It...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

WOLVERINE CONTINUES TO SLASH ITS WAY THROUGH RECORDS ON THE
HOME ENTERTAINMENT CHARTS

Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment Announced Today That
X-Men Origins: Wolverine Now Holds the Record as the…

#1 Best Selling 2009 New Release Blu-ray Disc

#1 Title On Cable VOD For The Second Week In A Row

One Of The Top 10 All Time Best Selling Blu-ray Titles Ever

Posted by dpoland at 03:53 PM | Comments (4)

CHANGING LANDSCAPE - 10/22/09

It's a new Hot Blog offering... inspired by the last few days of noticing how many little changes were going on all at once. So, I am going to do a step more than we do on the front page and use these to note and comment on some of what is going on...

35MM 3D FROM TECHNICOLOR - This effort started rolling out publicly in September with tests of the 35MM 3D version of WB/NL's The Final Destination.

Now, as we head into an even bigger glut of 3D films without enough 3D screens to land on and evidence that movies promoted as 3D experiences demotivate 2D viewing with a significant percentage of the interested audience, there is a sense of urgency about expanding the screen count for the 3D opportunity.

So now, Technicolor announces some progress with more specific news to land at ShowEast... and you can expect pretty much every studio except Disney to jump on board before year's end.

This step could well be the tipping point for 3D and start the maturing process in earnest. Will people pay premium prices for 3D in non-IMAX, non-big-sound, regular movie theaters? We're gonna find out.

I think it will take the next year or so - at least through next summer - to find out what kind of traction they can get when virtually every theater becomes capable of being a 3D theater. There is still a very real novelty factor. But that never lasts too long.

Still, a big moment.

DISNEY'S DIGITAL CLOUD - It's news, but it's one of those stories that will get wildly overhyped before reality sets in. Disney has been going this way for a while. It's major DVD releases now get the Blu-ray treatment that includes a free digital download AND a non-Blu disc. The studio gets what many of us have understood for years. it's not the specific delivery system that matters, it's the availability and what people are willing to pay for it.

I am a firm believer (and have been for years now) that every studio will go in this same direction. That post-theatrical will be paid as one of number of "all-access" levels, which can start with delivery like this, but may also involve cross-charging of cable channels, radio, etc. The one sacred cow is and will remain theatrical release because it is the single opportunity to generate the largest per-person price point in this industry, because the experience is so unique and demands infrastructure (which buyers appreciate).

Like HULU, there will be some joint ventures along the way, but the bottom line remains the same. Every piece of content stands on its own as each studio/owner attempts to maximize revenues using all of the tools/delivery systems that are available.

Media needs to catch up with this. It is a world of multiple menus. You will be able to buy a la carte or you will be able to buy the entire Disney (or whomever) universe on a monthly basis. The studios will have to be concerned about the attractiveness of both kinds of packages in order to maximize revenues.

There will even be a direct-to-Redbox business build - you can bet - and it will act like direct-to-DVD used to at Blockbuster... and then Netflix Red Envelope. Someone will realize that promoting someone for Redbox exclusively, with the goal of reaching 2 million renters, generating about $5 million gross and $2 million net for the owner of the film, is a great opportunity. Of course, it will be for titles that are not likely to do huge sell-thru business. If I were Sony Home Ent, the next Left Behind movie would be the launch.

REPORTER LIFE 2K+10 - The Chicago News Co-Op signed the New York Times, which is a big step towards something really important. The basic notion is that serious reporting can be done by serious reporters on a local basis and that the shared revenues can be enough to make a good living... or at least a living, for now. The NYT (and everyone else) needs the help, really, as cutbacks on in-house reporters keep piling up. And with some sound editorial judgment from the leaders of the business, it should be an idea that can become viable all of the country and across the globe.

Add - 2:40p - Another communal concept

CIRCULATION REVENUE BEATS AD REVENUE @ NYT - "At the company’s New York Times Media Group, which includes The Times and The International Herald Tribune, circulation revenue reached $175.2 million in the third quarter, while ad revenue dropped to $164.5 million." (From The New York Times)

This unusual result is likely a direct response to a significant increase in the newsstand price of the paper. What is ironic is that after all the talk of Murdoch's WSJ coming after the NYT, it seems that it's going the other way. NYT is slowly moving away from the average daily reader and towards a group that can afford membership... more business, more "f-off" to subway readers. It's not NYT, it's NYT Box Office.

Posted by dpoland at 12:43 PM | Comments (1)

October 21, 2009

Wolverine & Sookie Stackhouse Duet, Circa 2000

Posted by dpoland at 11:25 PM | Comments (11)

Finally, Answers!

Q: Why Did Amelia Earhart disappear in 1937?
A; To avoid being embarrassed by the movie about her 72 years later.

Q: Can three horrible fake accents equal one irredeemable movie?
A: You bet ya.

Q. What's the difference between Amelia and two hours of uninterrupted sleep?
A. The latter is uninterrupted.

Q: What's so funny about Amelia and Trannys 2's DVD being released in the same week?
A: Trannys 2 is more entertaining.

An actual review to follow...

Posted by dpoland at 11:10 PM | Comments (85)

The TMNT Deal

Interesting.

The Turtles produce about $20 million a year in total revenue for 4Kids, which includes their cut on the licensing. That was off around 10% last year after being off about 4% the year before. It's hard to determine how that translates into net, since 4Kids has a big enough parade of shows to fill 5 hours a week of family programming. TMNT is the biggest of their properties.

There have been four TMNT movies made since 1993. Each of the first three - a New Line set - made less and less. The first film grossed the most: $135m domestic and $67m international. The fourth film, for WB, did $54m domestic, $42m international.

Obviously, Paramount did not buy this franchise with the hopes of making their money back after a decade or two. So we can only assume that they hope they can do a Transformers-esque major rebranding of the franchise that will not only make it a $400m+ worldwide grossing franchise, but will then lead to a TV rebrand worth tens of or hundreds of millions.

The ongoing value of the franchise does mean that they will eventually make their money back, even if they don't make a film... eventually... decades is not a joke. But beyond that, this purchase rivals the backbreaking costs behind WB relaunching Superman and dwarfs the rights costs to do Terminator reboots post-Cameron. It is probably the most expensive movie rights acquisitions in history.

None of these are for sale, as such. And remember that we are talking just about rights. Production costs and the rest are additional and include some risk...

But...

Bond, as the only truly ongoing consistent franchise, would probably be worth about $200 million... which would still take a decade or more to recoup.

Star Trek would probably be valued at about $150 million because of the hope of another round of television shows.

Batman, Transformers, and Spider-Man are proven in the stratosphere of worldwide grosses and would each be valued near $500 million on their own at this moment.

Would The Hulk be worth $60 million? Not right now. If someone thought they had a hit TV series coming that could be made relatively cheaply, perhaps. But not based on the movie results. Aside from Iron Man, superhot for the moment, there really isn't a single cartoon character that really seems worth a price tag this high.

The Spy Kids franchise generated almost the same exact amount of box office revenue with three films as TMNT has in four. Do you imagine that anyone would pay even $30 million for that franchise? Yet, production has been significantly cheaper and the television rights really haven't been exploited.

Well... the proof will be in the pudding. It is a big dollar gamble in a tight dollar world. 4Kids has been operating with annual losses for years, so this cash infusion is a home run for their short-term future. In the end, if Paramount can make this a $150m budget/$500m worldwide grossing (or better) kind of movie franchise and spin out a strong CG show for Nickelodeon based on the reboot (or vice versa), it will be a great call for the studio. And if not... not.

Posted by dpoland at 04:31 PM | Comments (25)

3 Tidbits

Ted Hope tweets, "NYC is considering a $3200 fee for filming in city owned buildings. This is a bad idea when we need to attract more movies here."

=========

“The cinema as we know it is falling apart,” says Francis Ford Coppola.

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Smart insight on how people use content from, of course, the WSJ. The plan is to take advantage of the heavy business users who have become used to the tools developed for the paper's online side and to charge them 50 bucks a month - as opposed to the 150 bucks a year currently set as the online subscription rate - to keep using them and to add more services, like access to Dow Jones Newswires or Bloomberg L.P.

This has been the holy grail for outlets like Variety, which have been trying to figure out for a long time how to hit multiple audiences at varying price points. Of course, they gave up one area of turf they should have owned with box office, where Box Office Mojo now has a lot of non-paying eyeballs, but a large number of subscribers at $78 a year (or so) who want more flexibility in using BOM's numbers (and avoiding ads).

The problem with trying this with most news and certainly film and tv industry news, is that there is nothing to own. "First" is just not important enough to generate a subscription from many people. A service that no one else can deliver is valuable... and no one owns movie news. (All we can try to do is to deliver the best opportunities to get to it and to get the best writing out of many, many options.)

The Hollywood Reporter and Variety used to be The Place to follow developing projects in print. Again... something they should have owned. But they don't seem to be focused on maximizing opportunities like that... narrowcasting. Everyone wants to be a broadcaster. Mistake.

Posted by dpoland at 01:03 PM | Comments (3)

It's Not Even In English And I Don't Speak French, But These Trailers Still Makes Me Want To See it

Jean Dujardin is a comic genius. He faces off with Billy The Kid, Jesse James, and Calamity Jane in a new take on a classic series that had been done both in live action and in cartoon...

TEASER

TRAILER

There are also there individual trailers for the supporting characters, Billy The Kid, Belle (The Girl), Calamity Jane, Pat Poker, and Luke's horse, Jolly Jumper.

AND... Here is the Terrence Hill version...

And the animated version...

Posted by dpoland at 11:58 AM | Comments (7)

Honorary Awards

PRODUCERS GUILD OF AMERICA TO HONOR JOHN LASSETER WITH
2010 DAVID O. SELZNICK ACHIEVEMENT AWARD IN MOTION PICTURES

LOS ANGELES (October 21, 2009) - The Producers Guild of America (PGA), a national non-profit trade group committed to protecting the rights and credits of producers in film, television and new media, announced today that John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer, Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios and Principal Creative Advisor, Walt Disney Imagineering will receive the 2010 David O. Selznick Achievement Award in Motion Pictures. The award will be presented to Lasseter at the 21st Annual PGA Awards ceremony on Sunday, January 24, 2010 at the Hollywood Palladium. Lasseter is the first producer of animated films to be awarded the Selznick Award by the PGA and was the co-recipient of the PGA’s first-ever Vanguard Award in 2002.

AND...

LAFCA will be honoring Jean-Paul Belmondo for his lifetime of work.

Posted by dpoland at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)

October 20, 2009

DP/30 Sneak Peek- Viggo Mortensen on The Road

Posted by dpoland at 07:59 PM | Comments (0)

When Scumbags Whine...

Harvey Levin, the Roman Polanski of former journalists, is complaining that his rights have been invaded by an investigation of how his organization investigated the Mel Gibson story and obtained information for pay from a policeman who broke his agreement with the state in doing selling the private info.

Boo hoo.

Somehow I find it hard to feel anything but disinterest in the complaint of someone soliciting a policeman to break the confidentiality of his job for the sake of invading someone else's privacy.

Fox News. Nikki Finke. Harvey Levin. Fair & Balanced.

Posted by dpoland at 06:57 PM | Comments (6)

DP/30 - Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs directors Lord & Miller

Posted by dpoland at 06:55 PM | Comments (4)

The Bagger Is Dead... Long Live The Bagger

I don't know Melena Ryzik. I have nothing against Melena Ryzik.

But "The Carpetbagger" was David Carr... not Ms. Ryzik, nor "The Baguette," aka Paula Schwartz, not Cieply or Barnes...

The smart people at the NYT should give Ms. Ryzik a break and let her start with her own catchy moniker. (It's worth noting that she chose Awards Daily to tell her story and not any of the gossip sites.)

It was MCN that gave The Carpetbagger the nickname, "The Bagger." This came some time after my first encounter with David Carr, at the Golden Globes party for The Lord of The Rings: Return Of The King. After enjoying the dulcet tones of Carr for the first time, in a loud space, I brought him to Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Phillipa Boyens... and before I left, he was dancing with Phil, spinning her with all the aplomb of a reporter who would be a legend.

Carr is a class act in a rough world. He is a true believer in journalism, women, music, and finding the exotic. He also mows a mean lawn.

I've never known him to be shy about who he liked... or who he did not. He is humble without ever sounding like he's trying too hard to be so. And he loves being at the New York Times.

David has wanted out of Baggerdom for a couple of years. His regular beat is media and there is no busier, tougher, more intensely evolving beat short of war reportage right now. And now, it seems, he will embrace that beat without taking time away to cover the awards silliness. Media Decoder will be his blog on choice.

I will miss The Bagger. He never lost his cynicism about all of this stuff... even when he was wandering though a theoretical conversation about what was coming next. He didn't always get it right. He got suckered now and again. But he was always sincere and always dredged up the enthusiasm.

Best of luck, Ms. Ryzik. I'm sure you'll be great and I look forward to meeting you soon enough. Maybe you will have some suggestions for a proper nickname.

Posted by dpoland at 03:58 PM | Comments (1)

The Benches Of Dahl... And Other Photos

IN THE COUNTRY...

Peaceful

Boots

The backyard gypsy caravan

Was the author the inspiration for the villain?

IN THE CITY...

And they say we Americans are celebrity obsessed

A promotion in the UK... but not at home

Posted by dpoland at 03:04 PM | Comments (0)

Mechanic & Shankman Step Into Oscar Producing Roles

Bill's a little bit inside... And Shank's a little bit dance-n-sing...
He's a little bit of Sherak's old boss... With a little bit of drag queen in his wig
I don't know if it's good or bad
But they'll make your Oscar show
He's a little bit inside... and he's a little bit dance and siiiiiiing...

This fits. Mechanic and Sherak were tight from the Fox years. Bill is a smart guy and has the time and energy to move the show along. On a list of musical theater mavens in the film game, Shankman also goes high on the list of performer/director/choreographers who can keep what happened last year moving forward.

Unlike some of the other musical types who might be expected to bring specific talent along with them - neither Tom Hanks nor Chace Crawford will not be hosting this year - Shankman's talent relationships - Travolta, Sandler, The Rock, Steve Martin, Latifah - are not likely to be expected to be host, though all will be likely to make appearances. (For Travolta, it may well be his industry relaunch after the tragic loss of his son.)

Interestingly, the Adam Sandler connection is not only with Shankman, but with Sherak via Revolution Studios, which funded 4 Sandler movies including Punch Drunk Love and Sandler-produced The Animal, the company's first greenlit production and second release. The connection also reaches to last year's producer, Bill Condon, whose Richard Pryor film is being made at Sony via Sandler's Happy Madison.

It's been suggested in Academy circles that another Revolution Studios veteran was intended to be announced as host at the same time that the producing team landed. Didn't happen. Don't expect a long wait... or too much of a surprise.

Posted by dpoland at 02:08 PM | Comments (6)

Economies Of Scale

So, Conde Nast is going to turn its magazines, starting with next month's GQ, into iPhone apps.

Great idea.

But then you see how these guys ("morons" seems so harsh) are pricing it. $2.99... per issue.

And now you understand, in a nutshell, why print media is dying. They just don't seem to get it.

For $9.99 a season, I got incredible iPhone access for an entire season of MLB. Admittedly, the offered app went from $3.99 a season for simple updates to $9.99 for updates plus radio from every market for every game to offering a few free live streaming TV games on the phone each day to one free game a day and 99¢ a game for live TV of the the others. And I expect new increases next season. But for 10 bucks a season, I had access to every game in real time.

I pay a ton for the NFL on DirecTV, but I can now access every Fox/CBS game on the iPhone for a grand total of $0.00.

So... for $2.99, I would happily buy a year of a magazine I like well enough to be interested in reading a couple of articles an edition and to gaze at January Jones' coverbreasts. (Note: The are plenty of free websites that not only re-print those breasts, but if that is really what I am looking for, will link to every time her breasts have appeared anywhere in the world... for free... except for the cost of showering right after you have looked at those sites.)

And did I mention... the apps will be sponsored by Grey Goose and Gillette, which means, on ad-supported apps that I already have, that I will be looking at one of those logos on every single page I look at.

Oh yes... and did I mention that you can get the full print magazine delivered to your door, without joining a Record Club or anything, for $1 per issue? And they want me to pay $2.99 per issue to read it on a screen smaller than the size of my palm?

Full version of The New Yorker every week for a year... with archives? $20... easy. More than that... unlikely. Certainly not when I can use the browser to Google a significant amount of New Yorker content for free. And I am already paying for the print edition (which will always be how I prefer to read The New Yorker.)

What would be the hottest iPhone app EVER? Vogue... every image in the magazine full frame with one link to another page that gives all the details on the clothes, etc, in the image (or maybe a page with notes on the image that links from the clean image). It's what every woman who reads fashion magazines would have to have... a perfect time killer... and even that at $2.99 a month might be self-defeating. $20 a year. $2.99 trial edition. $1.99 a month.

Anyway... I like the idea and think it is a very smart universe to get serious about. But I also think that when they do start realizing than 25¢ or maybe 50¢ an issue can work and start to adjust their financial planning to take that into realistic account, only then will they really be serious about the future.

What Old Media and often, the movie business, just can't seem to fully grasp is that the content is still king... but the $ values that they used to be able to get away with are OVER. Reset. Move on. The future is bright, even if it's not as fat.

Posted by dpoland at 12:14 PM | Comments (3)

Problematic... Or Not?

Posted by dpoland at 11:51 AM | Comments (12)

Press Release - The Academy Adjusts The Rules For A Little Innovation

Friends,

Interloper Films has received permission from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to perform live, private password-protected online screenings for press only of the 2009 Sundance-Award winning film, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC. It's the first time in film history that the Academy has granted special permission to do so, and you have been selected to be in a special group invited to participate!

We will be streaming TOMORROW, Wednesday, October 21st at 12:30PM Pacific/3:30 Eastern/8:30 Greenwich, followed by a live Q&A with subject of the film, Internet Pioneer Josh Harris, and director Ondi Timoner.

If you cannot attend, please let us know. We may arrange additional private screenings. Also, feel free to forward this to any colleagues whom you think would be interested in participating.

Academy eligibility rules dictate that for a film to be eligible for Oscar nomination, it mustn't be shown to the public in any venue or medium other than in theaters for 60 days after the initial theatrical release. That said, they have voted to allow this to occur in this case!

We also strongly believe that if we are successful, the film industry will follow suit and allow this to happen in a more widespread fashion. This is the age of online, after all, and now that the technology is here – let’s show the academy that this is viable and good for film and film makers!

Here’s what you do to be a part of this first online event:

1. Send an email to wlip-press-screening@interloperfilms.com to receive access credentials.
2. Please verify that you are a journalist or blogger with intention to write about the film.

See you there!

The WE LIVE IN PUBLIC team at Interloper Films

Posted by dpoland at 11:26 AM | Comments (1)

October 19, 2009

Why Can't Gotham Get Serious About Movie Awards?

I like IFP. I want to support IFP.

But regardless of how they keep on trying to make The Gotham Awards the first step on the road to Oscar - neck and neck with the idiotic National Board of Review - the event remains a very nice place to be honored... and completely meaningless when it comes to the rest of the award season.

A few years ago, 2004, they figured out how to pick the lowest hanging fruit of the awards tree - awards for actresses - with the "Breakthrough Actor Award" and got behind Catalina Sandino Moreno, then Amy Adams, then Rinko Kikuchi, then Ellen Page, and last year, Melissa Leo.

Best Feature has been less successful in pushing nominees along since the category was launched in 2004. The first two - Sideways and Capote - got in. The last three - Half Nelson, Into The Wild, and Frozen River - did not.

Breakthrough Director Award has gone to Joshua Marston, Bennett Miller, Ryan Fleck, Craig Zobel, and Lance Hammer... only Bennett went on to a nomination (or his film with it).

In the four years of "Best Ensemble," six films have won... only Babel got a Best Picture nod.

Writing and below-the-line awards were dropped over a decade ago.

And so... congrats to everyone who is being honored at this party.

This year, they are putting their bets on A Serious Man and The Hurt Locker. A 10 film Oscar BP list makes this safer than in past.

And for Breakthrough Actor, there is only one actress... which should make Jeremy Renner, the only actor on the list with a shot at an Oscar nod, a little anxious. (I wish him the very best of luck, indeed.)

Onward...

Posted by dpoland at 03:42 PM | Comments (8)

The BIG Story du Jour

The biggest news in the film world today is that Peter Chernin is quietly involved with Comcast's big for NBC/Universal. That should make the price tag higher (which is one key reason why he was keeping his involvement quiet.)

Comcast has been, while massive, a pretender in the bigger media picture for years. They keep trying to take over the world and they just haven't been able to figure out how to get it done.

Chernin knows how to get it done.

UniNBComcast would be a cable-instead-of-satellite mirror to Murdoch's News Corp empire with Time-Warner being the next widest player, followed by Viacom A&B, Disney, and the least broadly based, Sony.

The merger possibility is a hundred times more interesting... right... NOW.

Posted by dpoland at 02:02 PM | Comments (2)

Exits

MPAA chief Dan Glickman is heading out the door next year, having survived be the The Guy After Jack. (That's Jack Valenti, if you aren't playing inside baseball.)

Dan is a good man and a smart man and not Jack. And that is the issue facing the major studios - they are, in fact, the MPAA - as they look to fill the slot again. The industry has been lacking for a mouthy spokesparent, a role Valenti played to the hilt. Valenti also had the authority, by nature and by the length of tenure, to push back against the moguls a bit.

The role of lobbyist is important. And the industry needs a pro who knows his or her way around Washington. But I think it really needs that big voice, to fight the fight when the media starts defining the story and the studios themselves don't want to put their necks on the line.

==========

Kevin McCormick is out of his slot at WB. Not a shock. But not insignificant. Robinov continues to build his power base for when Alan Horn retires.

This is also clears McCormick to head into a top slot elsewhere - and God knows, others are looking - come the new year.

Posted by dpoland at 01:37 PM | Comments (1)

Spike Jonze Goes The Full Kanye

Posted by dpoland at 11:18 AM | Comments (5)

And The Paranomral Gimmicks Just Keep Comin'...

Posted by dpoland at 06:26 AM | Comments (2)

Gerard Butler Leads Q-300 in "Don Abs, Do Tell"

Posted by dpoland at 06:21 AM | Comments (5)

Hi there... I want to ask you guys a big favour...

From the inbox -

Hi there...
I want to ask you guys a big favour...

It would be awesome if you could place an article about me scooping for the new TARZAN movie directed by Stephen Sommers!

David Bentley from the COVENTRY TELEGRAPH also placed an article about me to be considered for the TARZAN MOVIE....
I would highly appreciate it if you could do something like that...I can send you some more photos if you like...

Here is some more information about myself.

Well like I said before I'm a highly self motivated 22- year old bodybuilder and actor.

I'm a huge TARZAN fan ( the walls of my room mostly consists out of Tarzan posters and movie stars) and I live and breathe movies...which is why my dream is to one day move to America/USA and become an actor (movie star) there... as California is the film/entertainment capital of the world.

I've been to the UK(London) for a year to gain life experience and enjoyed it there very much, but still I find the USA my final destination.
I'm currently staying in George, South Africa, in the garden route, which is between Capetown and Port Elizabeth.

Honestly I dont have that much film experience (I've been working with an Israeli fim company to do a comercial shot at Mosselbay, South Africa/ I've done some stage acting as well) but I believe that THE WILL TO WIN IS MORE CRUCIAL THAN THE SKILL TO WIN... and anything that I dont know by now I'm willing to learn very fast...
Though I'm outside the STATES it would be an honour to be part of this new TARZAN movie thats now in production by STEPHEN SOMMERS at WARNER BROS.

I'm an outdoor type of guy, and like to do a lot of challenging things such as: horse riding/ canoeing /target shooting/ hunting/ swimming/ working out/ mountain climbing/ cycling and anything that is physiqly demanding.

My personality is very open. I'm an extrovert and an outgoing kind of person.I worked a few years at a local gym where you are constantly working with people which is awesome.

BodyBuilding is my other passion which is a healthy sport and has tought me a lot of dedication and discepline. I have done quite a few local bodybuilding competions and placed always in the top 6. It would be awesome to compete in the USA shows someday...

Finally I have a great family and a twin brother who has basically the same interests as me such as bodybuilding and movies.

Thats about it for now....and thanks for the oppertunity to be in contact with you guys.
Hope to hear from you soon...

REGARDS
DEWET DU TOIT

Posted by dpoland at 06:03 AM | Comments (10)

October 18, 2009

Weekend Estimates by Klady - October 18

Dumb overguessing based on Friday's WTWTA numbers happened. And I think it is 100% safe to say that no one has the slightest f-ing idea what Sunday is really going to look like. Will more families show up? Fewer? You know when we'll know? When they show up at the movies and buy tickets. In the meanwhile, I think WB is playing this conservative, knowing they have the #1 movie and with no interest in being embarrassed by overestimating.

$21m+ is a very strong start for Gerry Butler and Law Abiding Citizen. Inglourious Basterds, Obsessed, Taken, and The Taking of Pelham 123 are really the only better openings this year in this genre range. It's not world beating, but really nothing to sneeze at either.

Screan Gems' The Stepfather suffered from opening opposite LAC. They should have moved the date.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is Sony's first $100m domestic animated movie. Major landmark. Slowly, they are building a strong rep with movies that have been consistently well reviewed and well liked.

Capitalism: A Love Story is on its way to grossing half of what Sicko grossed. Better days for Michael Moore in future, I hope... but this movie deserved its fate. Weak tea.

And a business note, since Patrick Goldstein's overzealous drum beating on C:ALS reminded me... he wonders why Paramount is releasing the GI Joe DVD in November. It's called Christmas, dummy. In years past, they could release a DVD like that at any time of year an expect big numbers. Now, they need to go where the money is. And they want Transformers 2 and GI Joe to be the 2 DVDs that the parent of every male kid feels compelled to buy for Christmas or even earlier. But Christmas buying starts the week before Thanksgiving these days. If they are not in the Wal-Marts and Toys-R-Us-es in November, something else will be bought. Yes... they are cash flow desperate over there. But this is a smart and obvious move and no sane person expects them to make a habit of a shortened DVD window.

Posted by dpoland at 09:37 AM | Comments (47)

October 17, 2009

Review - Where The Wild Things Are

There are occasional reminders why, amidst all the bullshit that flies in my profession these days, I still write about movies. Today, that reminder is Where The Wild Things Are.

Simply put, it is the great film about divorce and its effect on children of this generation. The last English-language film that hit the subject so cleanly and skillfully was Alan Parker’s long forgotten 1982 masterpiece, Shoot The Moon, written by Bo Goldman. The explosive front-parents of the film were Diane Keaton and Albert Finney, with Peter Weller and Karen Allen in mighty support. But it was kid actor Dana Hill who was the painful beating heart at the center of the film… an Oscar nomination that should have happened (amongst others for this film) but was overlooked, I think, because it was just too painful for Academy members to acknowledge. The nominees that year were hardly embarrassing in comparison. But the loss of this film is a real shame.

But I digress…

Like Eyes Wide Shut, Where The Wild Things Are stands to be one of the most misunderstood films of this year and perhaps, this decade. Critics, understandably, have gotten caught up in the “is it for kids or adults?” thing and the “it took so long to make” thing and the “why are those creatures talking about housing?” thing and the “it cost so much to make” thing. But those are, really, irrelevant to the piece of art that Spike Jonze, co-screenwriter Dave Eggers, and a bunch of extremely talented people have created.

I guess these are the same questions that faced Stephen Sondheim’s Mother Goose revisionist musical Into The Woods. The advantage that Sondheim had was that theater folks had more to hang onto with that production… actors they liked, a few songs they could remember well enough to hum or even recall the lyrics of, and an on-stage narrator who kept reminding the audience of the ironies.

WTWTA is certainly going to be more uncomfortable for adults than for children. We all chatter about the issues that are both overt and subtextual in this work. But children... well, to quote Sondheim, children will listen. And the narrative soundtrack of this film is what Max has heard and been challenged to process (without direct challenge by the adults who don’t quite understand what they are doing to their kids).

It is as complex and as simple as sleeping in a pile-on of warm fuzziness and love.

I didn’t go read other critics’ comments about the film or dig into Spike’s family history or even re-read Maurice Sendak’s book before jumping into this review. I will do all of these things. But upon my second experience of the film, I was able to push past the ice cream sundae of it all – before the subtext, the textures of the visuals are as dense and sweet and relentless as a sugar binge – and to start to read the movie. (I suspect that a third or fourth viewing will add even more layers of connection.) And my sense is that some of the withholding in some of the reviews I had read earlier and some of the discussions I had overheard was steeped in being overwhelmed by all of the stuff of the film. I’m sure this is unfair to many smart writers. And I am sure that there are some who completely get it in one sitting. I am not one of those people. For me, this is a film that requires – like most of the best films do – multiple viewings. It is not a movie about an angry kid in a suit who has a fantasy about being in charge… well… it is… but that is so much the surface of what it really is.

The psychological positioning of each of the “wild things” on the island is distinct (and distinctly blurred when appropriate), starting with Max’s father, Carol, who is no longer a central figure in Max’s life, but who once promised – by an inscription on a globe – that Max could rule his world. Dad lied. Mom, embodied by KW here, is the realist in this family and is trying to give her truth to her boy while still loving him so much that she has to fight off her instinct to indulge a more simplistic kind of protection of his innocence. Of course, the distinct nature of The Parents blurs with Max’s self-image as reflected by both. As a result, calling these two characters Max's Parents and nothing else would be to overgeneralize. But this is a big part of what they manifest for Max.

Lauren Ambrose voices KW and is great. But it is Gandolfini as Carol who really deserves – and will never get – serious consideration as an Oscar nominee. His performance, using only his voice, takes us through a range of emotion that actors very rarely are allowed by any screenplay. And he hits every single note perfectly.

Also with Max on the island are Judith (Catherine O’Hara) and her “husband” Ira (Forrest Whitaker). She is the cynic who is always pushing and he is the powerful man who happily subjugates himself to her needs. Douglas is Carol’s right hand man (later, his left hand man… you have to see the movie to get it), voiced by Chris Cooper. He is another powerful character who subjugates himself to another person, but who also knows the score, speaking the truth when he sees it as a necessity. And there is Alexander (Paul Dano), who feels unseen, unloved, and irrelevant, but cries out, hoping for more. There is also the least formed character, The Bull (Michael Berry, Jr) who seems to be a force of fear and nature, but who is never called on for much. Of all the characters, he is the one who feels like he is somewhere on a cutting room floor. (But maybe I will see more in him later.)

All of these characters embody Max’s ideas and confusion. Is Judith a part of his mother’s nature, a cynic asking questions that Max doesn’t really want to be confronted with? Sure. She may also be the voice of others in his life… and of his own sense of the truths he doesn’t want to confront. Is it very significant that Ira stays in the relationship with Judith, offering no doubt of his loyalty to her, no matter how nasty she gets? Yeah. I think so.

If Alexander often represents Max’s unheard self, is it significant that he both suffers at Max's discretion in much the same way Max sees himself suffering in the life-action section? And that Alexander also accepts Max for who he is when he sees through his non-king truth? Yeah. If fact, the only characters that allow themselves to fully believe in Max As King are Max and Carol. Everyone else goes along with Max’s kingship, but the idea that Max can fix what tore his parents asunder… that’s something that only a child believes… a child who feels guilt... a child who still believes that the parent who left just wants someone to help repair the rift.

And that is at the core of what I really think the movie is leading to… Max forgiving himself and his mother for the divorce.

I also can’t say enough about the set-up for the fantasy part of the film. Jonze does masterful job expressing the energy and excitement and rage and disappointment of a boy. Throughout that first 10 minutes or so, Jonze establishes elements that will repeat – like a psychological Wizard of Oz – throughout the film. Max’s artistic spirit establishes his ability to travel (across the waters of the subconscious) into his fantasy world. Snowballs will be dirtballs. A cave will be a pile-on of bodies. A heart representing love will turn up twice more. And there are others. But also importantly, he establishes that Max’s environment is, even while stretched by his fears, safe. His mother and his sister are human, flawed. But they are decent. And so is Max. For all of the young male rage, he is a good kid. And that keeps WTWTA from flying off the handle.

Anyway… there is a lot more in the details of the film to discuss. So I hope this will be a starting point for further discussion.

There are some interesting factoids that seem to be a bit off-topic now. For instance, the progenitor of this film's visual mastery is really Jim Henson’s 1986 release, Labyrinth, which was recently released in Blu-ray by Sony. Hoggle was a very complex piece of animatronics, before the CG era. And the massive Ludo was a similar size as the bigger “wild things.” I have little doubt that had Henson lived, that this film might have been made by him or in a very full collaboration with Spike Jonze or another director. Henson was a true innovator, though he never had quite the skills as a director that Jonze has. But he must be smiling from above with this film’s release. Like Jonze, he was a believer in the intelligence of children and this film would have been right up his alley. (He also happens to have suffered through a divorce and kept a close relationship with his ex, Jane, for the sake of all involved. I witnessed a number of KW/Carol moments of generous acceptance between them when I worked for the company briefly over 20 years ago.) The integration of puppets and CG for facial movement would have likely been pioneered by Henson before anyone. The work here in the film is truly spectacular, in part because of how much it doesn't call attention to itself. And now that Spike & Co have suffered through the creating the skill set, I would be surprised if Henson Co doesn’t pick up the methods for a new set of Muppet productions.

And then there are “Bob & Terry,” the wise owls whose insights can't be heard by angry young men. The names seem to be a clear reference to Daly & Semel. While I am not surprised that Spike might have snuck that in as a shot at the current leadership at Warners who didn’t make the completion of this film easy, I’m not sure what his relationship with the former management is. (Bob Daly & Terry Semel left a decade ago.) Perhaps it was Maurice Sendak who brought the names to the table, having been grinding away at WB, trying to get this to work as a feature since the early 90s.

And before the movie, I saw my first-ever CARA trailer green band notices done in a kind of 3D with shadow before the two Disney 3D trailers. Minor, but interesting.

But all of that is secondary to exceptional work by an exceptional filmmaker, whatever the box office numbers or the ultimate answer to whether this is a family film or an adult film. The most important answer is that Where The Wild Things Are is a grand and ambitious film that challenges adult viewers to see past the surface… perhaps as far as to where their wild things are.

Posted by dpoland at 03:19 PM | Comments (50)

Where The Wild Things Aren't

Good morning, San Francisco.

Thanks to jet lag, it was an early breakfast at Miller's (love that place) and the chance to get in the secod screening of Where The Wild Things Are that I have wanted to see before writing about the film, all before noon. (I know some people live like this all the time, but morning has become exotic to me over the years.)

So, off I went to the 10a show at the AMC. But wait... it is a "sensory enhanced" show. Ah. Huh?

It turns out that they have matinees sometimes specifically intended for autistic and otherwise sensorlly disabled kids. And guess what... I am not welcome. One father of a very sweet young lady who greeted me on line with a grab of my arm and a smile suggeted I just tell the ticket kid that I was autistic. I decided neither to fake it or to suggest he poll Hot Blog readers for confirmation.

Google Maps generously sent my through a half mile of homelessness, drugs, and rocked out rollers on the sidewalk down Ellis. It was both umcomfortble and a great reminder of how that contingent has become an accepted part of life in this city, just blocks from the most expensive hotels and retail stores in America.

Another reminder came at the doors of The Metreon, where 3 guards kept would-be ticket buyers at bay, the idea of the public entering this mall 15 minutes earlier than 10:30 apparently being a threat that would not be tolerated.

In any case... I am at an IMAX screen... a real one.. a real nice one... and looking forward to another look at this film, that like Fantastic Mr Fox, comes from a genius of children's literature, unafraid of challenging children to think like... well... children. It is we adults who harbor all the fear in the world... and cause all the unnatural reasons for it.

So now, safe in my $12 non-3D seat, I will sit back, relax, and open myself to Max's world... which can never come close to the surreal experience of highs and lows that this beautiful morning in this beautiful city has already offered...

Posted by dpoland at 10:25 AM | Comments (20)

Klady's Friday Estimates For Wild Things

Where The Wild Things Are is still getting mixed reviews, from raves to anguish and a lot of "I liked it, but it lost me somewhere" in between. This number reflects, however, the DaVinci Code of it all... the book is one of the most important children's books in history and the images in the advertising will make any child - especially boys - anxious to get the the theater even faster than GI Joe.

An apology of sorts to Paramount on Paranormal Activity. I still think the media has lost its collective mind in overhyping this thing. I guess we have nothing else better to do. But it looks like they are now heading towards a competition with Cloverfield in terms of box office and not Snakes On A Plane. Smart, focused effort... very Searchlight... very Megan Colligan (and her talented team)... wonder whether Sumner is now thinking about whether she should have Brad Grey's job... Brad should be very happy that they notion that was floated repeatedly over the summer of blaming/firing marketing after he blamed/fired Lesher didn't come to fruition... in classic style, the marketing department shows how much smarter it is than production, selling a nothing little gimmick film into profits while the monster films of the leadership return weakly on their massive investments.

Posted by dpoland at 08:21 AM | Comments (21)

Good Night. Good Morning.

Posted by dpoland at 08:19 AM | Comments (1)

October 16, 2009

BYOB Weekend - Oct 16, 2009

Posted by dpoland at 02:09 PM | Comments (26)

Voynaristic Baits Polanski With Hard Candy

20+ years after Polanski seduced a 13-year-old with the promise of fame, augmented by champagne and a half-quaalude, Hard Candy's photographer mixes a drink for a 14-year-old girl. She stammers something about how kids her age have been warned never to accept a drink fixed by someone else, dumps out the drinks he made, and makes a pair of fresh screwdrivers. When he wakes up strapped to a chair, Hayley's baby-faced innocence is replaced by a hard, calculating stare. That rule about not accepting drinks made by someone else, she notes mockingly, doesn't just apply to kids.

Roman Polanski's lucky he'll be dealing with the court system and not an avenging angel of raped and murdered girls in the innocent guise of a pixie haircut, open smile and red hoodie.

Posted by dpoland at 02:04 PM | Comments (44)

Priced To Death...

Back at LAX... I missed the place in the last 15 hours...

Anyway... I am not shy about paying for stuff while travelling. There is value in comfort. But when I stuck the NY Times and NY Post on the counter and then noticed the $2 price for each, my "no thanks" sensor went off.

It's not like years past, when a NY paper was an exotic, so a high price was about me paying for overnight shipping and delivery so I could read the early edition and wouldn't get another choice. These papers are now printed here and of the cost of production is not the same as home, it's very close.

Maybe I was paying $2 for my daily Times last time I was in NY, in June, and it just didn't register. But now it has.

It's almost as though they want me to read it online... for free. $75 a month for one newspaper, figuring Sundays. That's almost a monthly cable/satellite bill with premium channels.

I don't want to be too dramatic. $900 a year will not leave most NYT readers sweating the mortgage. But it suggests that we could be heading to the reading of print being a choice of economic class in a more overt way. And soon enough, even at $150 a year for m-f only, with a delivery discount, how many businesses will kill off their multiple subscriptions?

Sigh...

Posted by dpoland at 09:56 AM | Comments (3)

DP/30 - An Education x2

Posted by dpoland at 07:43 AM | Comments (0)

Never Quite That Simple...

Returning to LA on Thursday night after a week in London, I did the rounds of all the sites, looking to see if anything much was happening. Not much was.

But Patrick Goldstein's endless urge to slam "a bunch of bloggers and entertainment writers" in general, and in this case, using the London junket for The Fantastic Mr. Fox - which is what inspired and covered some of the cost of my aforementioned week in the city - as his excuse. His "issue" was that the production conflict between Wes Anderson and the animators who did the heavy-lifting on the film that the increasingly gossipy LA Times covered in a story last week. The question of this conflict was not addressed to Wes in a way that Patrick considers appropriate.

The problems with this are myriad.

First, Patrick has no idea what the content coming out of that trip is. He is using one blog entry by Jeffrey Wells as his basis for a general slamming of everyone on that trip. (How would he have felt had the LA Times paid for him to be there... as they do when business side writers like John Horn cover the very important - suck down the sarcasm - Maui Film Festival, a very nice event that has no business significance that can't be seen from a desk in Los Angeles?)

Second, he is acting like junkets don't happen om 50 weekends of the year and that the LA Times and every traditional media outlet that chooses to afford to be access them do just that, with all the upside and downside that all junkets have.

Third, while slamming Wells and presumably everyone else who he wants to see as lower on the food chain than he - however inaccurately - he does zero reporting in order to understand what the complete picture of what he is writing about is... in other words, he is every bit as much of a one-trick pony as he wants to accuse others of being.

But the biggest problem I have with this is at the core. There is an entire world of journalism out there and not all of it is about the same thing. Ironically, I brought up a conversation about this with other journos over the course of the 2-day junket. Even the LA Times has writers who are looking to break business-side news on films while another is covering the artistry while another is doing a review.

It is not every writer's job to be investigative... as a suck-up/attack-dog like Patrick must know as he rolls out his Rolodex into self-serving insights from movie friends on his blog on a weekly basis.

This brings up the other Big Lie in Patrick's piece, which is the notion that his bias is news-focused and not a personal position extended into an allegedly objective story.

Particularly in this case, where Chris Lee and his editors decided to hype one minor piece of insight into a piece of headline-stealing Newssip. Three members of the production team offered that they were uncomfortable with Anderson's way of doing the work, essentially upset that he did not live on the stage where they produced the stop-motion over the course of a couple of years. One of the three openly acknowledges that part of the discomfort is that Anderson asked him to do things differently than has been done before. The LA Times chose to judge this rather than report this...

"Despite a near-total ignorance of stop-motion production design, Anderson instructed Emmy-winning art director Nelson Lowry to steer clear of certain visual tropes that have come to characterize modern animation -- to basically turn his back on modern technology that would have made the animation process easier."

Wait... did the paper just attack a director for "steer(ing) clear of certain visual tropes that have come to characterize modern animation?" Is that a BAD thing?

This is now a daily issue in how we all cover the film industry. Nikki Finke is the drag queen of it, her act being a brilliant approximation of the woman in Showgirls who has a lever that shows her boobs as a punch line for every bad joke she tells on the stage of Cheetahs. It's all about the whoopi cushion fart that makes everyone laugh and very rarely about any real insight. The disease - which was always there, but much more mild - keeps spreading and getting more virulent as writers and editors compete for attention and status as "important," whether it is the LA Times or an independent blogger.

This year, it's GI Joe and Bruno and Star Trek and Julie & Julia and Up and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 and Funny People and Watchmen and right now, Paranormal Activity, and more... and Avatar to come.

Media is compelled to tell the story BEFORE the story. And it has made for some horrible work which is as often driven by predetermined, unsupported bias as by actual news or even good gossip.

For the last few years, every Pixar movie was going to underperform in the view of some movie-ignorant Wall Street analyst, and every time, the media has followed like sheep. NY-based Old Media writers for whom Nora Ephron is a god, hyped her film beyond its ability to deliver as a film... but then the film got written off at the box office prematurely, somewhat in response. Bruno is a $45m movie that made $137m worldwide, but you would never know that from a media made uncomfortable by a film about the very idiotic hype that we bump out as a group every day. Star Trek is a film people like, but will not be profitable... shhhhhh. And on and on.

When is the last time an event like Avatar's sneak peek screenings happened in the film world? Answer: Never. But if you read the media, constantly jostling for position, you would think that Paranormal Activity, with $12.5 million in the bank, likely on the way to two or three times that, is The Story of The Year and Avatar is a minor afterthought, almost a failure already. It's insanity. And it's not about news value. It's about ego.

We're in the middle of it with Where The Wild Things Are right now, as the film turns the corner with rave reviews and potentially very strong box office. But still, people like Patrick - using Anne Thompson as a springboard - are still finger-wagging because it took so long to become the film that Spike Jonze wanted to make. Is this position straight reporting or newssip with a built-in bias because of how Anne or Patrick or whomever feels about the film?

For me, the answer to the Fantastic Fox newssip - which I was completely aware of before I left for England, more than a week before sitting down with Wes and Bill Murray - was to be found in the film itself. Was there evidence of a stylistic conflict in the film itself? Was there any indication - not offered in the LAT story - that there was a business problem for Fox in how Anderson did his work?

The answer is "no."

From start to finish, there is no question about who made this film. It is Wes Anderson is every way. In fact, it is perhaps the most notable thing about the film is how clearly this is his film. Even George Clooney, not saying much of anything at the overflow press conference loaded with print media journalists from major outlets asking some of the worst questions you will ever hear (George's martial status being asked about in one out of every three queries), talked about going into the project wondering who the film was being made for... the eternal Wes Anderson question. And the answer that keeps making itself clear is that they are made for Wes the way Wes chooses to make them with the people Wes chooses to work with.

Remember when we used to get excited when artists got big, "dumb" studios to pay for their art... to make the movies they wanted to make and not some processed version of what they wanted to make? Remember when that was seen as good and not as an excuse for an attack piece?

In Newssip World, the artist is forever under attack because anything that is not formulaic... anything that sticks out... is fodder for hacks who are looking to make noise for themselves.

Please note: I am not calling Chris Lee a hack because of this story. I blame his editors, who have embarrassed him by directing his story towards the negative. And I am not defending Wes Anderson as a matter of "the artist is always right." This is an equally foolish stance. Anyone with eyes and ears can see that he is an odd guy. Maybe he is a pain in the ass. Maybe his style cost Fox millions in overruns. But if there is a serious story about his method of working on this film being a serious problem, it is not in Chris Lee's piece.

So... is it the responsibility of serious journalists - or even junket goofs, most of whom are old media print writers and television folks - to make LAT's bit of newssip the central theme of our coverage?

Of course not.

It is very important to note that even in the LAT piece, Wes Anderson is not shy about speaking about his method in working on this film. You would think, with all the negative energy, that he is just making excuses. And indeed, he may have been spring-loaded to discuss more process because of the LAT piece's negativity. But he is a filmmaker who seems ready - anxious, even - to get into the discussion of his process. If you have seen a single piece of hype for this film that sells the idea that Wes was on the set, manipulating the puppets, it will be news to me.

I should also point out, I have no love or admiration for the junket process as it works now. It is a machine and not in any way a call for serious discussion or insight. But it should also be noted that the posters for the film have quotes from Esquire, Empire, Elle, and Rolling Stone that were obviously squeezed out long before any junketeer or blogger got on the plane to London. What is broken about this system is worth discussing. But it is not what Patrick Goldstein wants to talk about.

Patrick has a disease that is very popular across the e-media spectrum these days... I-itis. As in, if I (or my paper) covered it in this way, that angle on the story is the important one, it must be seen as news, and it must be The Story.

But this is a load.

"But we broke it... it matters... the story is this bit of minutiae that we OWN... anyone simply addressing the work and not making about something negative is BAD... waaaaaaaaaaaa..."

And while I can't speak to Wells' work, as I don't and won't read it, my sense of the experience is that Anderson addressed the issue - as he does in the very same LAT piece, which could easily of spun positive with exactly the same quotes, if it so chose - over and over and over again.

It is process, not result. And process CAN matter. But as I have been publicly saying for over a decade now, deconstructing process without using the work itself as a touchstone is idiotic. It's terrible journalism. And it adds nothing of importance to the conversation.

Many of us blur the lines these days. It would be unfair for me, as one of the first to become a hybrid of business journalist, critic, advocate, and yes, sometime gossip, to claim that there is an easy, clear standard by which we all should live. But in the film world, we are, often, covering art. And when we wear our journalist hats, our opinions about the art are the least important part of anything that touches on news about the art or artists. We forget this. It is, sadly, all about us too much of the time. This is not an excuse for the self-indulgence of everyone who claims to be an artist. The artists certainly can be massive egotists and often make work that stinks.

But if WHORE and HARDASS are the only two options, we do the arts a massive disservice. Worse, we are lying to ourselves... and our readers.

Really, this is the endless arrogance of Old Media, back when one outlet or one writer (backed by unseen editors) defined most stories. And now, guys like Patrick want to have it both ways, slamming Jeff Wells for not asking the question he thinks he would ask (from the comfort of his desktop) in an entry surrounded by outright suck-ups to Ken Levine and Toby Emmerich.

Do better. All of us. Do better.

Posted by dpoland at 04:52 AM | Comments (16)

October 15, 2009

Indie Party Catch Up...

The Indie Spirit Awards are adding to the changes. First, it was the move to Friday night instead of Saturday afternoon. Today, they announced that the event will take place downtown in a tent. Oh... and Dick Clark Productions, which made the truly irrelevant HFPA into an awards season institution, is - with Overture chief Chris McGurk's wife, Jamie McGurk, sharing duties - exec producing the show. ( I don't mean to devalue McGurk's producing skills by making the Ovation connection, but it is a very unusual conflict of interest.)

And what's going to be "indie" about it? Well, they are going to be on live at 8p pst, so it will be late in NY. The show will still be in IFC, though with Dick Clark's company involved, you have to know that they are chasing a "broadcast network" for 2010 or 2011.

We'll judge the changes when they happen. But so far, it looks like one more effort by FIND to chase the establishment instead of building something of weight that really can make a difference in the community of indies... that is, for more than one night in a tent of already familiars.

Meanwhile, The Gotham Awards continue their bizarre chase of The Indie Spirits with an OCTOBER 19 list of nominees... excuse me... for what year?

Posted by dpoland at 10:30 PM | Comments (1)

October 14, 2009

From The Fox Premiere

George Clooney just blew off the host of the outdoor event that ate Leicester Square. It reminds you why Cannes and Sundance are it small cities/towns. I can't think of a big city that would shut down its tourist center like this... except for here. It is striking.

The event of this all has been pleasant indeed. The weather has been unusually great and Great Missenden, Roald Dahl's home, was a sight with its hills and dales bathed in sunlight. Dahl's home, in and of its self, was inspirational. A man of such emotional influence working in a shed the size smaller than most garages... and being at peace there.

OWA Meryl Streep took sick and isn't here. But Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, and Mr Clooney have all pulled their weight and been quite public in their affections for Wez (as his name seems to be pronunced here) and his unique style of handling actors in animation.

This is kind of a silly entry, huh? Sounds like I am at a junket. But the truth is, I have been enjoying London and slacking on work. So minutes before showtime, clacking away on my iPhone, dressed in a tux, this is my banal best of the moment. Still... it's all true.

Smarter writing to come...

Posted by dpoland at 11:15 AM | Comments (20)

October 12, 2009

Something lovely...

... about sitting in a cue for hours, hoping to get tickets to go into a show in London.

I hate lines... won't stand in 'em... just nothing worth the wait. But somehow, the show you want to see... in a town where waiting usually leads to actually getting in... I don't know... I have only good memories of this choice.

On this case, I got a late bug in my bonnet about Enron: The Musical, which is known here just as "Enron.". But it is a musical... apparently bought by Sony for film... and ending a run in a small theater in a few weeks before a new year's transfer to the West End. Smells of the excitement around Frost/Nixon. The concierge at The Dorchester couldn't swing tickets, though he did think that for 350£ per ticket, we could get them for tomorrow night. Oy. Even the concierge at Thr Dorchester could barely say it without laughing. But who knows... I might e someone who would spend a grand on theater tickets. (I am... on 10 theater tickets, not 2.).

So I sit on an old wooden staircase, hoping for returns. If not, we may go see something else. Maybe not. Nothing else seems all that exciting. There is a show called Orphans... also sold out. And the two gay nights out - La Cage and Priscilla - well, I don't know. I have deja vu just writing about them now.

And so I sit... kinda happy... in that way that sitting in Telluride under a tent bulging with water and rain making it heavier and heavier is fun.

Posted by dpoland at 09:17 AM | Comments (14)

BYOB - 1012

Posted by dpoland at 04:27 AM | Comments (87)

The Devolution Of The Dependent

I know that everyone with a financial stake in indie film is darkening their diapers these days. But the drama is predictable and sadly, could be much worse before the end of 2010.

This is, simply, how I see it: Miramax under The Weinsteins built a viable business out of indie, maximizing small pick-ups into big dollars, in perspective. The grew from a $150m budget Dependent at Disney into a $700 million a year fat pig of a company, teetering dangerously on becoming a loser.

Meanwhile, other studios saw their success - and figured they could control the failure - so they all jumped deeper and deeper into the pond... except two... Sony Classics and Paramount Classics, the first restrained by the self-control of its operators, Barker & Bernard, and the second restrained even more that SPC by the tight fist of Jonathan Dolgen, who made sure the division always made a profit, but also assured that it would never fly too high.

Searchlight was always a hybrid, closely watched over by Fox studio heads, and allowed to produce product for itself, but until recently, with a vigilant eye to investments that never crossed the $13m barrier.

Focus was a creation of two true indies, bought by Universal and merged, somewhere between Miramax and Searchlight.

Warner Indie was an acknowledgement that a company focused primarily on blockbusters – more so than the other majors, even - could not slow its pulse to handle smaller films, particularly coming out of a relationship with Soderbergh and Clooney that was important on the blockbuster side and needed earnest support on the indie side. Alan Horn was, it seems, earnestly supportive of the division, but not enough so to allow it to grow much outside of in-house cash machine talent.

So…

It’s early 2005. Searchlight had a massively profitable surprise in the summer of 2004 with Napoleon Dynamite and follows it up with their first film ever to crack $45 million domestic, Sideways, which in 2005 also gets the company its first Oscar nomination for Best Picture. This would lead to a rather confusing success at the end of 2005… the #3 Seachlight grosser of all-time at the time, The Ringer.

Brad Grey has taken over Paramount and is toying with the future of Paramount Classics. But even there, Vitale & Dinerstein had their first two films to ever crack 4.2 million domestic in 2005, Mad Hot Ballroom and pricey Sundance pick-up, Hustle & Flow.

Focus, having had its biggest success ever in 2003 with Lost In Translation slides back a step with a somewhat disappointing gross for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but is moving forward towards The Constant Gardener, Pride & Prejudice, and their first film to ever gross more than $45m domestic, Brokeback Mountain.

Sony Classics, having had just one movie in its entire history gross more than $11m domestic (Crouching Tiger in 2000… Oscar nom), is about to have its second, Kung fu Hustle, followed by its third that fall, Capote.

Warner Indie, slow starting in 2004, had a big 2005 on the way, with a mega-indie hit, March of The Penguins that would win Best Doc, a modestly profitable drama (from Clooney) that would get a Best Picture nod, and a Best Foreign Language nominee.

Things were looking up at the Dependents.

But the Dependent that led the way, Miramax, was going the other way. Disney had finally had enough of The Weinsteins expanding its annual budget out to major studio size. Even with five $50m domestic grosser in 2004 and two Best Picture nominations, profitability on those high grosser was iffy. Harvey had dodged a bullet by splitting Kill Bill into two films, making the project profitable while it would have lost money as one title. And Hero, after taking years to get a release, was marketed into a top-line moneymaker. But The Aviator was, in spite of awards and being Scorsese’s highest grosser ever, not only lost money, but symbolized what Disney didn’t like about The Weinsteins. With Dimension (aka The Money) practically shut down in 2004, Disney went into negotiations with The Brothers trying to get them to scale it back. Disney had it thrown back in their collective studio face and in a heated exchange of public positionings, sent The Boys out to find the private funding that they kept telling the media was going to be a piece of cake.

But in typical Hollywood media fashion, we media idiots – well, not me – kept selling the story that The Weinsteins would be the winner in this showdown with Disney… Eisner was a lumbering moron and Harvey was the fat, but fast-fingered genius who would make letting The Weinsteins go look like the biggest mistake since T-W allowed itself to be absorbed by AOL.

Eisner was right… everyone else was wrong.

It’s 2006.

The Weinsteins can’t seem to get the machine rolling. The Oscar machine has stalled. The only real hit they have is a Dimension sequel that they share profits on with Disney (Scary Movie 4). And they have entered into a distribution relationship with MGM that is awkward, driven by a pay-tv opportunity, and not very successful.

Only Searchlight is able to keep up the pace of the year before, with The Hills Have Eyes, Thank You For Smoking, Little Miss Sunshine, The Last King of Scotland, and Notes on A Scandal.

Miramax, under Daniel Battsek’s clipped management, swings for the fences with The Queen, a modestly budgeted unexpected hit that would go on to get Best Picture nominated.

But really… Searchlight is moving forward and aside from that one title, everyone else seems to have cooled back to normal…

Enter John Lesher. Agent. And now chief of the newly formed Paramount Vantage.

His first foray into the game is a movie he didn’t make, but got made as an agent, representing Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu. His marketing team, led by Searchlighter Megan Colligan, takes Babel to the promised land, a Best Picture nomination, including very strong box office for a mostly foreign language film. But in the process, the film ended up being a money loser, not a moneymaker.

But Lesher wasn’t just raising the bar on spending to sell Dependent films. He was greenlighting films from former clients at budgets that he had not been able to get anyone to sign off on as a world-class indie agent.

2007.

Margot At The Wedding was an outright flop. The Kite Runner took too long to roll out and never became the hit it was expected to be, losing money. And There Will Be Blood, a love project from Paul Thomas Anderson, did great considering its content… but would also lose a good amount of money.

Lesher also spent on was The Coen Bros’ No Country for Old Men… but he gave domestic distribution to Miramax as the two split on that film and Blood. It was said that Lesher didn’t really like o Country and vainly decided to take on the more difficult sale of Blood. In any case, Blood lost money for both companies. And some would say that No Country was driven perilously close to being a red ink film by the award chase.

Miramax was infected by Lesher’s Vantage. So was Searchlight, as Peter Rice’s fiefdom was expanded into a new brand, Fox Atomic, after he turned down overtures from Grey to run things. So was Focus, where the budget level was rising on their spends, chasing Oscar and big money, as well as expanding into the genre game with a growing division in Rogue. Even Sony Classics was getting worked into a frenzy, spending money to produce movies for the first time in its history. Even Warner Indie, barely in business, chased Oscar with In The Valley of Elah.

2008.

Having lost over $100 million in a Dependent division, which is more than Paramount Classics had spent in their entire 7-year run at the studio, Lesher is kicked upstairs into the production topper job at Paramount. The Duchess, Revolutionary Road, and Defiance will add to his remarkable history of not turning a profit on more than one film in his short history at the division he created.

Fox Searchlight has released 3 films in the first 9 months of the year, grossing $33m total. They only have one more movie on their schedule – The Secret Life of Bees - but they have picked up a film from Warners that the closed Warner Indie could not release and the big studio didn’t see working… and as they watch Slumdog skyrocket at TIFF, they also pick up a little film starring a resurgent Mickey Rourke.

Focus only has five films on their entire 2008 schedule. They can’t find much of an audience for the well-like In Bruges, Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day fails to find money in Enchanted lovers, and $12 million Sundance pick-up Hamlet 2 flops outright. The three films gross $25m total domestic. There is a reprieve in the form of the fast grossing Coen Bros film, Burn After Reading, which converts on star power (Pitt/Clooney) and the muscle of Oscar winner No Country. Still, there is only one film on the schedule in the last 3 months of the year… Milk.

Miramax has more product than the others – 8 films on the year – but can’t seem to convert. $9m each on a holocaust drama and a Sarah Jessica Parker comedy doesn’t make a dent. Two films get released on under 100 screens. A revisiting of Brideshead Revisited, TIFF hit Happy-Go-Lucky, and Blindness manage $13.3m between them. Those 7 pictures total will do about the same, as a group, as the studio’s Oscar movie, Doubt. That’s an entire year that grosses under $70m on new movies… while Lesher’s old division is still throwing movies that cost almost that to make at the market and Searchlight had its first $100m grosser in 2007 and is on its way to another with Slumdog.

Sony Classics, in the meantime, is back to doing what it has done for almost two decades… hitting singles and indie doubles with 19 releases in 2008, with ten of them grossing over $2 million, five grossing under $1 million, and the only film that could really be pegged as a financial disappointment being Rachel Getting Married, which was less painful as the studio cut bait on it when it wasn’t going their way.

In Conclusion.

Parent companies of The Dependents are not acting out against indies in some unpredictable way.

As you can, there are only two models that appear to be working in the last few years… and one of them has been discredited. That would be Lesher’s Bigger, Badded Indie approach. These divisions being in the $30m - $60m movie business is, as we have learned, insanity. For one thing, in a shrinking industry, pushed hard by the now-3-year-old DVD drop-off, the big studios want to get their programmers, both comedy and drama, back down into that budget range themselves. They don’t want their indie divisions doing it for them, in most cases limiting the upside by doing cheaper releases.

A tweener business, already discredited but a place that a few of these companies were drawn by the excess of others, is a death trap. Eeking out modest profits on a half-dozen movies only to gamble big on one last film that can eat all those profits and more… and which, on the upside, is only going to create profits in the tens of millions, is not a smart business model.

So you get the one that works… the one Sony Classics has been doing for 18 years.. the one that indie producers hate because it means bargains for SPC and less chance of making money for them… small.

Miramax being gutted… down to 20 or so employees… about the size of the staff at SPC (actually, in the range of 25 bodies, give or take)… leaning on the big studios machinery for some distribution muscle and a lot of Home Ent muscle… is a simple admission of learning from the last five years.

Focus is not that small yet… but don’t be surprised if it moves in that direction. The idea of shutting down the division is rather silly, in my eyes. Well run, there is no downside to NBC/U or any future buyer. There just can’t be any more big festival buys. What Focus has over Miramax – and may be its saving grace - is a more fully formed marketing team that can act as a place for smaller U films to land and get the attention they really need. Movies like Coraline, 9, and Burn After Reading – and now, A Serious Man – have an important place in a company like Universal. In fact, with studios very aware that family films are where the money really is, it must be noted that Coraline is easily Universal’s biggest animated hit ever and the only U-released animation to outgross 9 is An American Tale, from 23 years ago.

Vantage was closed because it lost more money in 2 years than any major can afford to lose without having its leadership changed. Warner Indie was never going to outlast Section Eight on that lot… the big studio just doesn’t care enough to be in a business that will never generate nine-figure profits in any year or, likely, in any 5 year period.

Even Searchlight is looking a bit off-balance these days. And I don’t blame that exclusively on Peter Rice’s exit, though he did carry more sway with Rothman and Jim G than his excellent team that now runs the place. But the market has changed dramatically in the last two years. And more projects that Searchlight considered too pricey last year and this will come back with lower budgets now… so there is an opportunity. But more than any of the other Dependents, the studio chief at the big studios is a hands-on player at Searchlight. And I scratch my head a little when I see dead division Fox Atomic’s Jennifer’s Body release by big Fox and big Fox’s The Fantastic Mr Fox being released by Searchlight.

This speaks to another phenomenon, which is most clearly manifested by Sony Worldwide Acquisition Group, which picks up films, offers them around the Sony stable of distribution arms, and then does theatrical deals for most with smaller indies before going to DVD with the films it acquires. Like the not-really-new trend of studios investing in foreign language product that is not meant for domestic release, but which creates opportunities (like Crouching Tiger and Kung Fu Hustle), it seems that all of the studios are heading towards being corporate machines that suck in product, figure out after the fact how the product can be best made profitable, and to use all their divisions – including The Dependents – to achieve those goals.

Ironically, that makes the people with the skill sets to maximize profit on these films all the more important. But it also suggests that the days of individual Dependent studio heads throwing money at a quality project on principle may be over. Small net profit movies is a good business to be in… but it is also a risk-averse business.

With due respect to Sony Classics, but can an indie industry of companies like that, which has an appetite that is driven in no small part by cost – even as they show excellent taste in what they pick up at bargain prices – survive? Is an industry of $2 million and $3 million cost films and industry… or a hobby? Obviously, non-US productions are often rolled out at those kinds of prices. But what is the American indie business at that scale?

That is the question of the moment… not “Wither Miramax?”

Posted by dpoland at 01:49 AM | Comments (11)

October 10, 2009

In London...

Nothing too terribly interesting at home to discuss... does it matter that the weather in London was surprisingly beautiful yesterday?

Aside from that, the one surprise of the day was running into (well... seeing and avoiding eye contact with...) Rob Marshall at The Young Vic production of R&H's Annie Get Your Gun. He's in London putting the final touches on Nine, which needs to lock and load for sound in order to be ready by the December release date that was obviously coming last month. (I'll avoid the onanism of self-linking.)

The production, starring AbFab and Little Voice's Jane Horrocks, has all the unavoidable charm of a score that features wall-to-wall classics. Director Richard Jones, who is known for pushing the envelope, brings some good ideas to the table... and fails to deliver fully on many of them. The most striking things about the show, for instance, are that it feels more age-realistic than any other version I have seen, bends the issues of period, casts blindly multi-racially (including what looks like a Jewish guy with a bad wig as Sitting Bull, a Black guy as Buffalo Bill, and a young Black girl as Annie's sidekick and reading tutor as they wander around the world), and is set against fake wood paneling on a boxed in 10-ft high set with a screen door splitting the stage for most of the show.

Sounds horrible, no? But it's not.

Aside from a lighting plan by Mimi Jordan Sherin that seems to be endlessly (and aggravatingly) disinterested in detail while the production design of the show by Ultz (just Ultz) screams out for precision lighting to make the Hopper stage images feel like Hopper images and the Bus Stop moments feel like Bus Stop, etc, a lot about this odd-looking production works.

The subtext, which seems intended, that everything is show biz and that it was run then, as it is now, by Jews who count the money and other wandering types who have more energy than integrity, is actually interesting. In other productions, the irony of "There's No Business..." is muted by a certain glamour to the proceedings. Not here. I loved the idea of Indians in suits dominating the trains or that Buffalo Bill is a brother getting one over on the white man in the one game where they fear another race enough to look the other way or the idea of Frank Butler bedding four bored, horny sisters at one time. But like the lighting, the director seems unwilling to punch in and push the ideas he has added over the top.

This problem manifests itself most profoundly when you realize that Jones seems profoundly bored with the songs that everybody walked into the theater humming and only turns on his big creative funnel when it comes to the least-known tunes. "Moonshine Lullaby" is the conceptual highlight of the first act, though I still was hoping it would become a greater piece of magic than it did. But a beautiful idea - a true classic - is in there.

Jones grabs onto interesting, twisted ideas but never quite finishes them with the flourish that would make the groundbreaking, manifested most clearly in the cheesy but funny videos of travels in the US west and then internationally. Basically, they have taken stock footage of the west and put a couple of kids - a boy and a girl... Frank and Annie as represented by children - in front of them using hacky green screen. I found the exercise endearing, though it never quite went anywhere. At the top of the second act, Annie touring Europe is done in a similar way, though I am not sure that her acceptance and later, rejection of Adolph Hitler's metal - time anomalies aside - really matches up with her embrace of Stalin and Mao. In any case, it's an interesting, cute, kitschy idea... and again, doesn't quite climb the hit it aspires to climb.

Still, in the end, with little more than some terrific orchestrations that get a lot out of a 4-piece orchestra and a heavy dose of sexualization, the classic songs survive more than thrill as they turn up in the show. It's hard not to love them, especially the raunchy version of "Doin' What Comes Natur'ily." Jones has a horrible habit of making every big number stop dead, grab applause, only to start it again, leaving it feeling like a reprise and not part of the organic original of 30 seconds earlier.

In the end, this feels like an interesting revisionist piece that is still in rehearsals... still not coming together. The lighting was aggravating me all night because it seems so obvious what the director is chasing and yet, as I wrote, the lighting seems downright random at times. Interesting ideas - like a conveyor belt that rolls the scenery past the train car and then, the boat - are a step away from being great, though the audience chose to enjoy many of them in spite of their incompleteness. (The home run of the conveyor belt, btw, is an "Indian" sitting with his back to the audience, in a chair, catching each of the items that has come down the belt and feeding them to another belt that heads backstage. It is subtle and perhaps done out of necessity, but takes on a metaphoric humor to which the production always seems to aspire.)

Annie is a fun night of theater. It's hard to miss. Everyone can sing, the songs are great, and there are fascinating touches all over the place. Perhaps the ultimate symbol of the show is a stage-wide, 6-ft high banner of Annie's image that represents her new-found stardom at one point... the art work, especially in a small space, is overwhelming. It's not quite a photo... not quite a painting... but it is quite arresting. And it just disappears after a while. There is no clear reason why it goes. There is no replacement of the image as the story evolves. It's just a great, great thing that simply goes away, never quite fulfilling its promise... another thing into the stew... clever director.

The makings of a great night of theater are there. Kerry Butler would be great in this version of the role if done in NY. In fact, Cheyenne Jackson - also of Xanadu - would make a strong Frank Butler in this piece too. That younger, sexier energy is the most compelling thing about this Young Vic production. It just needs to be finished.

** I'm a bit disappointed that Chloe, Atom Egoyan and Erin Cressida Wilson's remake of Anne Fontaine's sexually self-reflective thriller, ended up with Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisition Group. SPWAG has become, in the last year, the buyer of more and more movies that have real audience potential, but have not found major domestic theatrical buyers at the big fests. So Sony buys the films for DVD, basically, but with a theatrical commitment, which so far, has been filled exclusively by giving the films to small theatrical distributors to fulfill that commitment.

With Chloe being the 3rd or 4th buy of a TIFF premiere, SPWAG now has half the total films purchased at TIFF '09, the other being the Woody Harrelson oddball superhero comedy/actioner, Defendor. There is a good chance that Chloe is also the biggest $ buy from TIFF this year, as A Single Man has been the topper, at $1 million.

The nice thing about SWPAG buying up movies like Black Dynamite is that it does put money in the filmmakers' pockets, assures a strong DVD push, and gives them the chance to get a shot a being a theatrical surprise.

But it is a symbol of where things are right now. Films that would not have been considered risky a couple of years ago suddenly are scaring Dependents and True Indies alike. And as much as some folks want to dream of VOD being the savior, they are lemmings moving towards the cliff, not only following blindly, but dreaming that there is hope at the bottom of the cliff. (Of course, lemmings have been reconsidered, but give a man his metaphor, would ya?)

The economics of VOD are already marginal and a very few films are trying to take advantage of the pipeline right now. Imagine the cluster fornication when everyone is trying to sell VOD. Brutal. And price fighting will bring the price down to painfully low dollar figures.

** BOX OFFICE - Is anyone actually surprise that Couples Retreat opened? It's been 2 months since Julie & Julia and a a couple of weeks longer since The Ugly Truth, the last two mainstream comedies with any kind of female interest. It's not brain surgery... just look at how well both of those films held. There is an audience for this stuff and while audiences intuitively understood that Love Happens was being dumped, there is a good sized audience always waiting for these things, no matter what the reviews.

As I have written before, Paramount is doing a bang-up job on Paranormal Activity, decks cleared of anything to focus on except the November release of Up In The Air and December's limited for The Lovely Bones. That said, I still think that the drama around the box office is more than a little overstated at this point. Yes, the film will be mostly profit for Paramount. Yes, they are selling it conservatively, not spending a ton on TV. But I still think they are very creatively squeezing every dime they can out of a core audience that will soon be spent.

If this is a $100 million movie... or even a $60m movie, I will be eat my shoe. If the film ends up doing the $35m that Halloween II will do without the TV buys, than Par Marketing did a terrific job... probably slightly more profitable than Cloverfield. But it's hardly the second coming.

Posted by dpoland at 11:27 PM | Comments (36)

October 08, 2009

BYOB - Up In The Air

Posted by dpoland at 06:34 PM | Comments (130)

It's Not TV... Well, It Is TV... But It's 30 Rock...

Posted by dpoland at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)

October 07, 2009

Heading To London...

My wife and I are heading to London Thursday night. The impetus for the trip was in invitation from Fox to attend the London Film Festival premiere of Wes Anderson's The Fantastic Mr. Fox. The pitch, as I don't go on many of these trips, was that this would be the one and only opportunity to see the entire voice cast (Clooney, Steep, Murray, etc) together.

Even for that, a 10 hour plane flight just to see a movie and talk to the team - even that team - seemed a bit nutty. But we decided that a week in London, right before my wife is grounded for the duration of her pregnancy, was a nice idea. So we took the generous offer of airfare for me and a couple of hotel nights from the studio and I am paying for the rest of the nights, my wife's airfare, and whatever other costs are involved aside from the day trip to Roald Dahl's home (another big draw for me) and the festival tickets.

It's interesting that just before we go, there is this drama about "bloggers" and the FTC. Of course, any sane reading of the FTC's interest in this issue is about people who are getting computers and cars - Do you know how the car magazines choose their year's bests? I do... and it's ugly! - and iPhone-level toys. This notion that some out there have been kicking around that there is any quid pro quo expected when it comes to DVD release screeners is idiotic. The only thing studios get out of sending journalists promotional items is chatter - not always positive - about the promo items themselves.

James Rocchi wrote one of those "behind the scenes of the junket I am covering" pieces for MSN re: Couples Retreat's Tahiti junket. It brings up an interesting issue in that going on that junket is not really a choice that James or others can made.

I stopped going to all but one or two studio junkets a year because I am free to make that choice. On a movie like Couple's Retreat - assuming its general quality level from others, having not seen it - I have been known to pass on interviews, much less a trip to do them, after seeing a film. I passed on a few very high profile interviews in Toronto because i just couldn't smile my way through the conversation in order to score those actors for DP/30.

But I don't have an employer breathing down my neck to deliver page views or the kind of stuff they want to see in the paper or website. A part of James' annual income is based on going to junkets and talking to whatever big celebrity is there. And not liking the movie is not really an issue that the writer is allowed to indulge loudly. James: Junket Dude is not there to review the film. He's there to deliver content for MSN. And when James: The Critic does someday review the film, I am confident that he will speak his mind freely.

This doesn't mean that many writers - not just online, but in print and God knows, TV - do not assume the quid pro quo of it all without the studio saying a word... and not just for Tahiti junkets, but in any situation in which they can lay down for the studio and the talent and give it all up on cue. And again, in many case... That Is The Job.

A guy like Pete Hammond will tell you what he thinks privately... but it is his job through the awards season to be nice to everyone because his primary income comes from being paid nightly - often multiple times in the same night - to publicly interview the talent from these films. Pissing on the films in public just won't fly. He is doing his job.

If you know that any host on ET or Access or E! dislikes a film, they are NOT doing their job.

Anyway... I have never been shy about being 100% transparent about when studios pay for stuff. When I was with roughcut.com, a Time-Warner business, we took everything we could get... back when internet wasn't given much of anything. I did some set visits... but they were rarely worth much. (The last one was in 2005 for V for Vendetta.) When we started MCN, I was already dropping off the junket lists. I think the last time I took anything from a studio in connection to covering a movie was a 2 day trip to Lake Tahoe to talk to Joe Carnahan about Smokin' Aces. The studio couldn't have been nicer, I still am a Joe fan, and I realized that I had no business on those trips. I don't have a problem with those who go on them... but not my thing.

But you know... I'm very lucky. None of our writers or features on MCN are junket-driven, primarily because junkets are covered so extensively by so many other outlets. Why would we spend the man/woman hours duplicating that stuff?

The only travel I ever really accept is from a few film festivals each year. I am an active adviser to the Bermuda Film Festival and haven't really covered the festival as a festival in years. Seattle is a regular stop, but for years now, I have hosted an event or been on the jury, singing for my supper, as Anne Thompson says. (I even paid for extra room nights this year... willingly. Things are tough in FestWorld there these days.) San Francisco is usually good for a few hotel room nights and I usually pay for a number of extra days there. I may do 10-15 days a year at other fests that pay airfare and hotel, though I have done less and less of that. I spend a lot more covering fests than is ever paid for by fests.

Obviously, I get screeners during the award season and I get Blu-rays from all the studios, but most consistently from Sony and Disney. I am much more interested in covering Blu from the big picture perspective than from the individual films and you would be seeing a lot more content from each disc I get if the publicists who handle these companies had their druthers. But the wise folks at the two studios that send almost every title understand that they are feeding my Blu coverage, which is rare amongst writers who are not strictly reviewing Home Ent content. I don't get DVDs that aren't Blu-ray because that's not really the point. (Actually, some smaller companies send me stuff... but probably shouldn't. It rarely gets seen. I just don't have the time.)

Anyway... now you know what I take. I don't consider it breaking any rules. I don't think anyone can connect any review or coverage I have done across a career online of over a decade to any junket or "sample" in which I have ever indulged. Mostly this is because for years now, when I cover anything, it is because I have an interest, not because I am rolling along with the machinery. But again... I am very fortunate to be able to afford not to do things that don't interest me.

Onward...

Posted by dpoland at 11:30 PM | Comments (34)

DP/30 - Good Hair

Posted by dpoland at 10:05 PM | Comments (0)

Super Movie Friends 6 - Disgrace

The Full Discussion...

And a Sneak Peek about how to chase Oscar nominations for Disgrace and its star, John Malkovich...

Posted by dpoland at 06:03 PM | Comments (5)

October 06, 2009

BYOB Humpday 1079

Posted by dpoland at 11:21 PM | Comments (25)

Letterman's Monologue

People are talking a lot about Letterman's second apology at the desk last night, but for me, the masterpiece - really, one of the great pieces of writing and delivery ever - is this opening from last night.

He didn't call attention to the fact that every single joke was about him... or that the monologue was at least half its normal length... or that he was brilliantly speaking to it all without either demeaning himself or anyone else.

Posted by dpoland at 02:07 PM | Comments (79)

DP/30 - We Live In Public, dir Ondi Timoner

Posted by dpoland at 02:02 PM | Comments (3)

Can A Doc Idea Be Stolen?

(HOLLYWOOD, Oct. 6, 2009) - - Yesterday filmmaker Regina Kimbell filed a $5 million copyright infringement lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles against Chris Rock, HBO, the domestic and foreign distributor theatrical distributors for soon to be released documentary “Good Hair.”

What is interesting to me about this is the question... can a doc idea be infringed upon?

Obviously, docs are not like feature film scripts or ideas. Beyond what is actually a long tradition of story overlap in the doc world - Is Darwin's Nightmare about to sue Crude which will be sued by Pirate of the Sea which will be sued by Whale Wars? - there is the question of whether the value of a doc idea is ever specific enough to have an inherent value, since documenting life is generally not a scripted activity.

In other words, would "I want to do a superhero movie... and the guy flies... and he wears tight clothes and fights really well" be a pitch that would lead to a claim that would be allowed to go far in a lawsuit against Marvel for infringement?

In this case, the basic claim is that the earlier doc in question, My Nappy Roots, was shown to Rock and his writer/producers in a Paramount screening room and that they stole all the good ideas in the film. However, in the documents, it notes that Rock told then he was already committed to doing the HBO doc when he saw this film. And the list of 13 similarities between Rock's doc and Nappy is pretty silly...

Only one element is an exact match (the interview will Aleila Bundles). And most of them are staple items of any doc.

The big accusation is that Rock pointed at the screen while watching Nappy and exclaimed, "We have to go to India!"

Here is a pdf of the full legal filing if you want to look through it yourself.

Someone must have heard about a similar lawsuit at some point in doc history... but I haven't.

Posted by dpoland at 11:01 AM | Comments (10)

October 05, 2009

Interesting Enough

Posted by dpoland at 11:30 PM | Comments (2)

Sorry, Michael

Box office "actuals" have landed and the biggest overestimater... Capitalism: A Love Story. The studio estimate was $4.85m, the MCN estimate was $4.6m, and reality seems to be... $4.45m.

How significant is the weak Sunday?

Well, putting aside any Twitter Effect bullshit, the stat that's key here is that the expansion to 962 screens actually did less business than Sicko's expansion to 441 screens. (The gross there was $4.5m.)

Again, great for a doc... not so great for a Michael Moore movie.

Sicko never had a better weekend than that expansion, even with two increases in theater count. And given that they are already at 962, I don't expect the film to ever go any wider... and I expect the drops to be modest... but still, in the high 30s and low 40s from here in.

This is one of those cases in which the studio - Overture here - did their job. They bought the ads. They got Michael to do all the press he would do. There just is no proposition in this film that demands that people go out to the movie theater, no matter how much Michael Moore demands that people attend. it joins films like Funny People, The Soloist, The Informant!, and (500) Days of Summer and The Time Traveler's Wife, which actually found the audience that really wanted to see them... but couldn't entice anyone else to join in the enthusiasm. Sometimes, that's just the answer. Sometimes, the niche can't be expanded very much.

I look forward to Michael's future films. I remind him, truth is funnier than fiction. My top suggestion would be to do a deal with HBO for a year, delivering one 1 hour Michael Moore film a quarter. Loosen it up. Gamble a bit. Stop trying to change the world and just think about changing one mind, making one person laugh hard, exposing one terrible truth. There is no one better to do it. But you have to stop being MICHAEL MOORE and get back to be Mike.

Posted by dpoland at 06:24 PM | Comments (22)

Universal & The Definition Of Insanity

Prologue: I have to give Sharon Waxman props up front for running the specific rumor first. I am not a fan of "toldja," especially when it basically follows a politically motivated leak without any real reporting behind it. But I mocked Waxman for overselling. And by Nikki Standards, she did well.

And now...

Interesting.

Let me start by being as clear as i can be. I have no problem with Adam Fogelson or Donna Langley. Both have shown themselves to be smart, skilled, and valuable.

That said... really?

This is Ron Meyer's big move amidst the turmoil? To do almost the same thing he decided to do 3.5 years ago? Last time, he promoted the studio's marketing leader (and yes, he had other responsibilities... yadda yadda) and the platform guy (shades of Jim Gianopulos of Fox). This time, it's The Marketing Guy and The Head of Production being moved up.

You know, God bless 'em, every one and all... but if the firing of Shmuger & Linde signals their failure (even though 2 of their 4 years were the most profitable in studio history, according to the guy firing them), then what does promoting from within signal? Change?

The last time an unpopular president's VP got elected in America? Anyone? Anyone?

Again... I would love to be barking up the wrong tree and apologizing profusely to Donna and Adam because I was so wrong about this instinct and they revolutionized Universal. But...

The thing is, I was never a huge fan of the Shmuger and Linde hire in the first place. Looking back, I was in Bermuda when it happened, so I didn't write much about it at the time, only: "One of the interesting aspects of the Shmuger/Linde hire at Universal is that it marks a directional shift for the studio towards the international, where both men have experience. Yes, they also have a lot of experience on the marketing side and there is an absolute acknowledgment that the marketing minds is a big part of how the movie business works now. But the vision at the studio (where as far as I know, neither man will work in Black Rock as reported in some TradMedia paper last week) is much more Mechanic or Gianopulos than Dawn Steel."

Stacey Snider, as we have since seen at DreamWorks, is more of the movie person. Next in line were Stuber & Parent (he is now producing, as he wished to and she is at MGM, suffering but in charge of a production division, as she wished to be). Donna Langley was their lieutenant. So after Stacey left and Stuber/Parent passed, Donna moving up made as much sense as any other choice when that transition happened.

Shmuger moving was also a natural, corporately. With Stacey gone, he was the most senior person and had expanded his portfolio to more than marketing. Linde was the twist. On some level he empowered Focus by being a parent with a higher level job. On some level, he hurt Focus because he was no longer as hands on in its guidance. But he knew the international market better than anyone else at the overall company and, like Jim G, he was positioned as the guy to re-envision that part of the business.

In this era, Adam Fogelson deserves about the same level of credit as the studio heads do for the studio's successes and failures. Marketing is more important than the product - irritating as that might be to critics and others - when it comes to a studio's success. So while he deservedly carries a lot of credit for hits from Bourne to Knocked Up to Mamma Mia!, he also should shoulder the failure to launch of State of Play, Duplicity, and Land of The Lost.

Pegging Donna Langley's repsonsibles is more complicated because Universal's troubled year is a lot more about the price tag of the choices than it is about the choices themselves. And I only have rumor to go on - which I don't trust enough to repeat - about how she felt about the price of Public Enemies, State of Play, and most significantly, Land of The Lost.

But all that laid out... there is a sense of family at Universal, given that they have survived as many owners as they have had in such a short period with so many people still intact. And Ron Meyer is The Dad. And moving up Shmuger and Linde was a bit of "keep it in the family," which is now being followed by their sacrifice (scary time to be Focus now) and more keeping it in the family.

The question: Is this leadership or treading water in a rising pool of shit?

I would say that the question that every studio considering change - that's most of them these days - faces a similar problem. Where do you find The Next Visionary? Is there someone out there who is going to change the game and change it for the better?

The short answer seems to be... we are not going to find out anytime soon.

Berman and Lesher were both assured of failure going in... both are gone... Brad Grey still has his job.

Bob Iger wants change... so instead of finding a visionary, he buys a few companies he considers visionary and will now hire a manager to oversee the 3 ring circus.

WB... treading water until retirements force their hand.

Fox and Sony... pretty much happy with their lot.

And now, Universal promotes smart execs that are well liked by the company's main product creators, Imagine and Stuber and Platt. A little Disney... a little WB... a little Paramount.

Is there a vision in the room?

I don't know of one.

As I wrote, I would love to be wrong. I would love to be knocked over by the strong, clear voice of Langley and Fogelson and where they see Universal going in late 2011. I can't say it enough... I am good with these people. I am not trying to damn them with either attack or faint praise.

But this is bigger than the individuals... unless there is something there that is bigger in them than I have seen or anticipate.

What I see is keeping the machine going until Ron Meyer can get to his next contract or owner. What I see is going along to get along, handing Schmuger and Linde massive payouts, handing Fogelson and Langley big golden parachutes to make sure that firing them abruptly will be painful to a new owner/overseer, trying to survive without really changing anything much.

Remember, George HW Bush's politics were quite different than Reagan's when they ran against each other. But VP GHWB towed the line and got a presidency of his own out of it.

Maybe this was the sanest choice in the world, as it may be doing the same thing... but fully aware that the results will not be the same because the ownership will not be the same.

Posted by dpoland at 11:05 AM | Comments (2)

DP/30 - A Serious Man

Posted by dpoland at 12:53 AM | Comments (0)

October 04, 2009

A Serious Man Video Review

Posted by dpoland at 07:42 PM | Comments (8)

Foreign Filmmakers Trying To Do America from SNL

I can't say it's my favorite sketch ever. In fact, I can't imagine why they aired it. But as someone who watches a lot of foreigners trying to interpret the US and our filmic colloquialisms, it made me laugh.

Posted by dpoland at 06:02 PM | Comments (4)

The Nikki Story

Tad Friend did okay.

He got a little farther than Carr. He did a lot better than LAT.

Really, it's a more accurate portrayal of Sharon Waxman's unearned and overwhelming arrogance than of Nikki.

Nikki's response is, in many ways, a better reflection of Nikki than the piece. She lies. She spins. She sells. She attacks The New Yorker for giving in to her and being too soft on her (even naming some of her keepers who also allegedly yelled their way out of harm's way) while also giddily noting that "act(ed) like a cunt" towards the editor to get what she wanted out to be out.

So very Nikki. This is why people admire and fear what she has become, but no one wants to wake up in the morning and BE Nikki. As someone said in some movie, I would never stop vomiting.

The "Nikki Whisperer" line is fitting, since watching Nikki is a lot like watching The Dog Whisperer or Supernanny. When you watch these shows, you quickly realize that the handler character - the whisperer - is not primarily handling the animal or the children... they are handling the parents/owners. It is poor parenting that leads to the messes.

Nikki is not the parent/owner. She is the dog/child. She just wants respect and like a child/dog, she doesn't really care how she gets it or how weighty it is. If shitting on the carpet or having a tantrum gets her what she wants, so be it. Hollywood is The Parent that taught her that bad behavior is how to get what you want.

Watching these corrective shows, it is always pretty clear. Once the child/animal is running amuck, the parent/owner is even more troubled. Correcting the problem means acknowledging that they created the problem. Plus, the problem often reflects the limits of the parent, so they see the bad behavior with an odd admiration... "the kid/dog is just like me."

To correct the problem, the parent/owner must overcome their own fears. And that is what Tad Friend ran into, just as Carr before him. As journalists for outlets with rules, it is not their jobs to teach their subjects how to be good parents. It is their job to get as much on the record as they can.

How many times have you wondered, "Why would that person with so many obvious flaws ever go on a reality television show?" You don't have to ask that question often in this town. The powerful in the town never go on our version of reality television, unless they have a very specific purpose and strategy for maximizing the appearance.

Imagine a season of The Surreal Life where the production team has all the background, but none of the celebrities show up. They may be aware that Verne Troyer will drink so much that he will pee on his bedroom wall or that whomever will flash their boobs every time they have a chance or Jeff Conaway will get enraged... but if none of them do it on camera, that information becomes moot.

If Hollywood execs will not go on the record about Nikki, no major traditional outlet will ever print the true ugliness and smallness of Nikki's behavior.

Even in my case, the worst things Nikki ever tried to do to me - that I know of - involved studio people who not only wouldn't confirm for Tad, they thought I was insane to discuss Nikki with Tad at all. And the nasty exchanges Nikki and I have had by e-mail... minor and petty and so what, really.

The people who would need to talk honestly to a journalist trying to get this story right are exactly the people who will never talk to a journalist honestly about Nikki. It's like getting a studio to go on the record saying the trades are under their control. Why would they? What kind of idiot businessperson throws away their tools in the name of "telling the truth?"

But it wasn't as bad as I feared... and at the same time, many steps away from the true story. You know, if Nikki cared about money, she would be a publicist. It's really her natural calling. But she doesn't.

I do believe she kinda hates the people who feed her every single thing she writes... in no small part because they are feeding her. What kind of fools would ever work with her? Not only that, she treats them like shit and the more she does, the more power she seems to have. The more they let her get away with, the more angry she gets with them for letting her.

She is a loud, angry child looking for a parent who will discipline her. It's all there in her response to the piece. She is almost begging to be put out of her misery... to be taken out by someone who can hit as hard and as nastily as she would.

Wrong town.

Posted by dpoland at 10:19 AM | Comments (18)

The Company She Keeps

Where does Crazy Nikki get the giant brass balls to attack Letterman, Les Moonves, and Sumner Redstone for in-house sexual relationships when she knows full well that her loving Viacom B-osses did the same and worse in the last few years... never once mentioned by her.

God, I hate hypocrites... hypocrites that accuse other media of the exact hypocrisy they are perpetrating most of all.

Posted by dpoland at 10:09 AM | Comments (2)

Weekend Estimates by Klady - 10/04/09

Not much to chew on here. Meatballs and the Toy Stories remind us all of why family films are the best business is Hollywood these days... making Disney's move away from them ongoingly curious.

The Hangover got to $275 million... amazing... and its last 5/0 landmark.

Without anything else to do, Paramount's gentle push-along of Paranormal Activity is both impressive and irrelevant at the same time. They are doing a really nice job of bringing out their niche core. But the notion that this film is going to turn into a bigger phenom seems less and less likely each week. People wanted to see Blair Witch because they didn't know what it was. When they hear "it's the next Blair Witch," the response from many people is something to the effect of, "Really? Did they tape this one off of YouTube?"

The per-screen on A Serious Man is fine... tells us nothing... great film, but 6 theaters filled with Jews is not a telling achievement. (i was one of them yesterday)

Posted by dpoland at 09:41 AM | Comments (22)

October 03, 2009

Press Release - Sony Picks Up The Last Station

Or a bylined news story in some places....

SONY PICTURES CLASSICS ACQUIRES MICHAEL HOFFMAN’S
THE LAST STATION

NEW YORK, NY (October 3, 2009)- Sony Pictures Classics announces its acquisition of rights in North America and Latin America to Michael Hoffman’s THE LAST STATION from Los Angeles based The Little Film Company. The film played to great acclaim at the recent Telluride Film Festival.

THE LAST STATION is a German-Russian production, made with the full support of the Tolstoy family and filmed mainly in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. The film was produced by Chris Curling (HANNIBAL RISING), Jens Meurer (RUSSIAN ARK, BLACK BOOK), Bonnie Arnold (TARZAN, TOY STORY). It was executive produced by Andrei Konchalovsky.

The film stars Academy Award ® winner Helen Mirren (THE QUEEN), Christopher Plummer (THE INSIDER, A BEAUTIFUL MIND, and the upcoming SPC release THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS), James McAvoy (ATONEMENT, WANTED), Ann-Marie Duff (THE MAGDALENE SISTERS) and Academy Award ® nominee Paul Giamatti (SIDEWAYS, CINDERELLA MAN).

"With THE LAST STATION, Michael Hoffman has crafted a film that is not only beautifully made but showcases some of the world's greatest actors in roles of a lifetime. The film is also incredibly entertaining and moving and we look forward to working with our friends Jens Meurer, Chris Curling and Robbie Little to bring it to audiences," said Sony Pictures Classics.

"After spending four years of my life making THE LAST STATION, it’s such a relief and a pleasure to be working with talented people you can trust. I love the guys at Sony Pictures Classics. It's a perfect home for our film, “said director Michael Hoffman.

Jens Meurer states, “We (the producers) are very pleased to be working with Sony Classics again, and share high hopes for the film. We were there with them in Telluride and saw how well the film worked with audiences. Sony Classics is the best distributor to take THE LAST STATION places in the US, and also to work closely with Warner Brothers Germany, Optimum in the UK and our other distributors."

“We are delighted that Michael Barker and Tom Bernard will be releasing the film in America. It is the result we have been hoping for, while Michael Hoffman has been making the film with us for last 2 years,” added Chris Curling.

Screenwriter and Director Michael Hoffman (A MIDSUMMER’S NIGHT DREAM, SOAPDISH) adapted Jay Parini‘s highly acclaimed 1990 novel of the same name. Set in 1910 in Russia, THE LAST STATION is a historical drama about the last days of famed Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. When a young intellectual (James McAvoy) arrives at the rural estate of Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer), he finds himself caught up in a power struggle between Tolstoy’s wife, Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren), and the conniving leader of a Utopian society (Paul Giamatti) begun by the writer himself, about how the legacy of Tolstoy’s literary estate will be handled after his death.


ABOUT SONY PICTURES CLASSICS

Michael Barker and Tom Bernard serve as co-presidents of Sony Pictures Classics—an autonomous division of Sony Pictures Entertainment they founded with Marcie Bloom in January 1992, which distributes, produces, and acquires independent films from around the world.

Barker and Bernard’s films are among the most prestigious films of all time. They have produced 24 Academy Award® winners (21 of those at Sony Pictures Classics) and have garnered over 100 Academy Award® nominations (72 at Sony Pictures Classics) including Best Picture nominations for CAPOTE, HOWARDS END, AND CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON.

Over the years, Barker and Bernard fostered relationships with many of the world's finest independent filmmakers including Robert Altman, Ang Lee, Richard Linklater, Guillermo del Toro, Francois Truffaut, David Cronenberg, Jonathan Demme, Woody Allen, Walter Salles, Todd Haynes, Nicole Holofcener, Errol Morris, Zhang Yimou, Wong Kar Wai, Ingmar Bergman, Neil Jordan, Francis Ford Coppola, and David Mamet.

Sony Pictures Classics have recently released TYSON, EVERY LITTLE STEP, WHATEVER WORKS, MOON, IT MIGHT GET LOUD, COCO BEFORE CHANEL, and THE DAMNED UNITED. Their upcoming release slate includes AN EDUCATION, and BROKEN EMBRACES as well as COCO CHANEL AND IGOR STRAVINSKY, THE WHITE RIBBON, WILD GRASS, A PROPHET, BLOOD SIMPLE, IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS, MICMACS, TAMARA DREWE, LEBANON and GET LOW.

Additional honors include “The Honors Award” from the Director's Guild of America, the “Chevalier Order of Arts and Letters” from the French government, the Gotham Industry Lifetime Achievement Award (IFP), the FINDIE Award (IFP/West Spirit Awards), and the GLAAD Media Award. At Sony Corporation’s global management conference, SPC received the “Distinguished Special Recognition” award two years in a row for their successful business operation.


ABOUT SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT

Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) is a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America (SCA), a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Sony Corporation. SPE's global operations encompass motion picture production and distribution; television production and distribution; digital content creation and distribution; worldwide channel investments; home entertainment acquisition and distribution; operation of studio facilities; development of new entertainment products, services, and technologies; and distribution of filmed entertainment in more than 100 countries. Sony Pictures Entertainment can be found at http://www.sonypictures.com.

Posted by dpoland at 08:28 PM | Comments (6)

A Little About Letterman

I worked for Letterman... well, for the show... in my childhood, more than 20 years ago. I played softball with the guy. I was in those offices for months after spending more than a year in other 30 Rock offices.

When we shot a short film in the apartment that Letterman had shared with Merrill Markoe - we were told this, as they worried about tape on the walls - he had already moved on to another relationship... someone else who was on staff at the time.

This was Letterman's M.O. I have never heard about anything bad happening to any of the women he was involved with over the years. The ones from the NBC years all seemed to end up with rather lofty opportunities, to be honest. If you were on the outs, you were on the outs. Dave was not known for being forgiving. But the people he kept close always were very well treated. And they, in turn, showed loyalty by not making his personal life and foibles into Page Six gossip.

Women, in particular, were given support by Dave. Every time I see Barbara Gaines at the producer's desk on stage - a spot that was held by the Boys Club Bob Morton back at NBC - the word "loyalty" and "perspective" hit me.

Also consider that Letterman using actual staff for comedy bits - Biff Henderson is really the stage manager, really a great guy, and in that job for over two decades - is a way of pumping up paychecks. He has staff that adds tens of thousands of dollars a year by making on-air appearances... a guy like Biff, probably over $100k.

Is it embarrassing that a man of his power stays so close to home for virtually everything in his life? I guess so. But when Letterman says he is a quivering mass of Lutheran guilt, he's not just kidding. He is that guy. He's very wealthy now. He has toys for days, including a racing group. But over 27 years on the air, Letterman - by my understanding - has about as many "romantic" relationships as Johnny Carson did in a similar period... well, about as many as Johnny married.

With all the Polanski in the air, I have heard a shocking number of media and people who have watched media talking about women coming back to sue Letterman for harassment or whatever. And yes, bosses sleeping with staff can be a very serious issue. But while Letterman is an odd man, it is hard to think of him as a bad man in that way. No one likes breaking up... but I don't see any of the women coming back at Letterman in any negative way.

As for the blackmailer, it seems to be a case of the next somewhat-too-old-for-the-woman-in-this-non-existent-"love triangle" guy using her keen awareness of Letterman's misery at living as a public person, aside from on an hour of TV five nights a week, as a weapon. But he obviously miscalculated. He probably should have finished the conversation with his then-girlfriend and realized that however shy Letterman might be, he is probably pretty comfortable that his "ex-es" won't be heading onto CNN to tell their stories... not even Merrill Markoe, who has spoken a little publicly about the relationship in the past. He just doesn't generate that kind of disloyalty in people, with very few exceptions.

Posted by dpoland at 11:50 AM | Comments (19)

Friday Estimates by Klady - 1039

The only real surprise here - and I mean in a gut check way, not a "the tracking was off" way - is Whip It not finding an audience. I mean... worse than The Invention of Lying... really?

This may well be a case of me being the Searchlight bubble on this. I saw the film in Toronto. I enjoyed it. (Interestingly to me, even Tony Scott's iffy lead on his review in the NYT ended up pretty much were I am... acknowledging that the movie achieves its goals, even if they are not his faves.) And it seems to me to be a movie that women from 8 to 28 would really, really like... perhaps even the over 28s.

Oh well.

Screen Gems did its normal good job of pushing out genre to its core. Zombieland will open to almost double Shaun of the Dead's entire domestic gross, reminding us of Elvis' Law: A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Action Please.

Capitalism: A Love Story opened wider to slightly more than Sicko... on more than double the screens. To be fair, the exclusive shows - on 4 screens instead of Sicko's - put $400k more in the bank going into the expansion weekend. The core is there. The sample from this weekend will determine how broadly the film plays. My guess remains a domestic total in the high teens, which is massive for docs, but may well be the weakest Moore performance in the last decade.

Posted by dpoland at 10:50 AM | Comments (74)

October 02, 2009

Disney Doing As Expected

September 22, 2009 - Will Disney Even Replace Dick Cook?

And Miramax, for anyone who's been paying attention, has been folded into big Disney, still under Dan Battsek, for nearly a year already. They had 8 theatrical releases last year, 2 of which never got past 202 screens. They will have 5 theatrical releases this year, only 2 of which got past 200 screens, with only Everybody's Fine left to be released this year.

Dumping Miramax, which has been the rumor for over a year, makes no sense in this market. Disney and Battsek can add nicely to the bottom like picking up DVD library titles, one or two of which might end up popping theatrically, in addition to their couple invested productions a year.

Screaming and elbowing for position will take place elsewhere. Zzzzzz....

Posted by dpoland at 01:39 PM | Comments (8)

Box Office Hell - 10/2/09

Posted by dpoland at 01:24 PM | Comments (79)

24 Weeks To Oscar....

Add, 10:30p Friday - Pushing out the column this week, I overlooked one title that I really do think is a serious contender for Best Picture now... and that is Inglourious Basterds (the chart has now been corrected). It is not the film I would normally expect to get in and I discounted the likelihood around release. But with Toronto flopping as an award parade, a quality movie-movie that many people really, really enjoy - not unlike The Departed - becomes more and more likely to make the cut.

I wish I could say Where The Wild Things Are is in that same position of potential, but while the film is gorgeous and powerfully built below the conscious surface, I suspect that a film that will be a classic in future will not be a film that plays strongly and clearly enough right now for the over-50 set. So, the film may turn out - like Antichrist and The White Ribbon - to be one of the films that sticks for the longest time from 2009, I don't see Oscar written all over it.

=======

What is clear is that there is plenty of room to fight for a slot at this point. Of my Top 12 – which is really my entire top group at this point – only three of the films are unseen as of this writing (Nine, Invictus, and Avatar). In addition, there are a couple of completely blind items, like Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol and Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones. Traditionally, films like Sherlock Holmes, The Blind Side, and It’s Complicated are commercial films and not Oscar films… but there is always room for a pop.

What finally smashed me in the face up in Toronto was that with 10 Best Picture nominees and only five in each of the acting slots, it could get pretty weird. Nine and Precious are actress fests. Invictus, A Serious Man, A Single Man, and The Hurt Locker are actor parties. But at the same time, you have to assume an Oscar nomination for Daniel Day Lewis in Nine and for Julianne Moore in A Single Man. How many of the 8 star actresses can be nominated for Nine?

The full column...

The whole chart...

Posted by dpoland at 01:05 PM | Comments (53)

Press Release - Petflix!

Petflix!
-Statewide Non-Profit Hosts Connecticut's 1st Pet-Themed Film Festival, Calls for Video Entries-

(Wallingford, CT)- September 28, 2009- Benji, Lassie and Morris the Cat…now your pet can be added to this list of famous canines and felines when Soul Friends, Inc, a statewide nonprofit psychotherapy and educational organization that helps at risk children with interactive activities including therapy animals, premieres Connecticut’s first pet-themed film festival on Saturday, November 21st at Showcase Cinemas in North Haven from 10 a.m.- noon. Specifically, the charity is calling for submissions of short films that demonstrate how animals help people feel better.

“We regularly experience the healing power of animals in our daily work with children and adolescents,” said Kate Nicoll, MSW, LCSW, executive director of Soul Friends, Inc.. “By hosting this mainstream inaugural film festival, we hope to show the entire state of Connecticut what our clients have already learned…life is more enriching interacting with animals!”

Posted by dpoland at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)

Press Release - Dan Glickman Is Good For The Jews

Dan Glickman, Head of the Motion Picture Association of America, Receives NJDC’s Hubert H. Humphrey Humanitarian Award

WASHINGTON, DC - The National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC), the national voice for Jewish Democrats, honored Dan Glickman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA), with the Hubert H. Humphrey Humanitarian Award last night at a reception in Washington, DC. NJDC was joined by special guest and keynote speaker, the Honorable Tom Vilsack,and other elected officials and trade representatives.

The Hubert H. Humphrey Humanitarian Award has been awarded to individuals for their extraordinary leadership on issues important to our community and society. Past honorees have included Senator Hillary Clinton (2004), President Bill Clinton (2002), and Vice President Al Gore (2000).

As Chairman and CEO of MPAA, Glickman represents the U.S. filmed entertainment industry to governments around the world. Prior to heading the MPAA, Glickman served as the Secretary of Agriculture, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and led the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's JFK School of Government. Glickman is also a member of NJDC.

“Dan has spent his entire career making America a better nation for all - from alleviating hunger to working toward fairness and equality in civil rights. Dan’s great accomplishments and leadership fully embody the values of the Hubert H. Humphrey Humanitarian Award,” said Marc R. Stanley, Chairman of NJDC.

In presenting the award to Glickman, the Honorable Tom Vilsack said, “Hubert H. Humphrey set an extraordinarily high bar for service as a champion for social welfare and civil rights at home and abroad. For decades Dan Glickman has been the embodiment of this high bar set for public and private service and I am proud to honor his efforts to make America and the world a safer, more livable and better place.”

Glickman noted, “[i]t is my great honor to receive the National Jewish Democratic Council’s Hubert H. Humphrey Humanitarian Award from an organization that exemplifies the promotion of our nation’s common good. Winston Churchill once wrote, ‘We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.’ As he suggests, the service of others is both a responsibility and a joy we maintain as members of our communities and citizens of the world. Throughout my career I have been privileged to work with many talented people towards this aim and I am honored the NJDC has recognized this effort.”

Posted by dpoland at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2009

2(012) Much?

Before we got the 2 top stories on the "news" tonight - letterman's blackmail and jackson's autopsy - there was a Comcast sponsored look at Roland Emmerich's 2012.

Remember when I said that Speed Racer would be influential? I never expected this to be the result.

Blowing up The White House isn't enough anymore... now you have to blow up EVERYTHING and then drive or fly through it to within an inch of being hit. Silly.

But will America buy it? Possible.

Posted by dpoland at 11:04 PM | Comments (43)

Do The Gossip Dance!

I am so very sick of all this...

The Comcast and MGM stories... both of which are likely to turn out to be a non-stories yet again... offer a pretty good picture about how f-ed up things are in the gossip/journo circle jerk.

The divas have it wrong... but they had wrong first... and that's all that seems to matter.

Sigh...

Posted by dpoland at 04:56 PM | Comments (5)

Fox Takes Its First Shot At Redbox (in defense)

Here is Fox's first major filing in its defense against Redbox Redbox Vs Fox Home Entertainment (pdf).

here is the official statement by Fox: STATEMENT REGARDING TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENTERTAINMENT’S OPENING BRIEF IN SUPPORT OF MOTION TO DISMISS REDBOX’S CLAIM

Los Angeles, October 1, 2009 --“Redbox’s legal claims are fatally flawed. Fox’s filing today makes clear that, in the end, the case is all about Redbox’s refusal to make a business deal on general terms similar to those paid by others in this industry. Instead, Redbox has insisted that Fox sell DVDs to them through distributors, on the date they demand, at the price they want to pay. Unable to get the terms it wanted at the bargaining table, Redbox instead decided to file this mertiless lawsuit.”

That does a pretty good job of making the Fox argument.

I'm looking through all 40 pages, but it looks pretty basic... either you think Fox is free to make whatever deal it wants with Redbox or any other rental company or you think Redbox has the right to whatever deal they are getting from other studios. But I will add more if I find big points in the detail...

ADD - 3:43p - Reading Fox's argument, it makes Redbox's claims seem laughable. However, this is Fox's motion, not Redbox's. So for me to assess Redbox's position completely based on Fox's claim alone would be unfair. So I'm not going to get into any detail.

I will just summarize and say that Fox's take is that Redbox was getting DVDs through a distributor, paying the going rate and not getting any more scrutinized than a mom & pop, and that in 2009, they saw the growth in Redbox's business and decided they needed to change the game. According to Fox, they offered Redbox a deal to provide them directly, as they do with Blockbuster and Netflix. They couldn't agree on price, so Fox came up with the window-preserving idea of putting a 30-day delay on new Fox DVD product. Redbox responded by suing, looking to go back to their old system of buying through the wholesale distributors without the studio paying them any special attention.

Fox also uses earlier litigation and subsequent rulings between Redbox and Universal to slap down a lot of the arguments Redbox presents here.

I have never heard Redbox arguing much more than what sounds like growing pains from here... victims fo their success and a tightening of the overall DVD market... aka the margins now matter to studios again.

So there you have it... will love to hear your feedback...

Posted by dpoland at 03:24 PM | Comments (2)

Down The Road...

We have been going through a lot of loss around Movie City News and our extended family lately.

Last night, Michael Wilmington lost his mother. Any of you who know Michael, even a little, know how committed he was to this woman. It was an old-fashioned kind of parent/child relationship. Loyal through everything. He writes about it so beautifully in his column this week... about love and loss... and respect... and honor.

We are honored to be associated with Michael Wilmington. He has been loyal as an employee, here to do his best under whatever circumstances, week after week since he came on board last year. We also consider him one of the best film critics in the world today.

MCN will turn 7 years old in a couple of weeks. From pretty much the start, Len Klady and Gary Dretzka have been pumping out content, professionally and consistently. Len has been there through the loss of both of his parents and a sister in the last year. Gary has been through adversity as well, as Old Media has slipped deeper into its despair. But he's always there for us.

Ray Pride joined us soon after and has become a massive daily contributor as our Headlines Editor. He was physically assaulted on the streets of Greece a few months ago... but you, as readers, would never know.

We just got through a tough Toronto, the second festival after the loss of Dusty Cohl, with our Kim Voynar being taken ill. Her first demand of the Emergency Room staff was to get her some wi-fi so she could promptly review the movies she managed to see at TIFF before she collapsed in our condo on that first Friday of the fest. (I refused to bring her a laptop for a few days, since even if the hospital said, "no," she would find a way to work around the IV pole.)

And while we were in Toronto, a member of my loosely extended family, the daughter of my friend, Paul Mazursky, Meg, passed away at just 52 years of age. At her memorial service, filled with friends, famous and otherwise, her family celebrated her life. The loss was in the room. But the gift of her life overwhelmed it. As it must.

And now, we feel the sadness of Michael's loss.

I finally saw The Road last night. And I am stunned by Variety's Hollywood-thinking dismissal of a minor masterpiece and the sad fools who follow the lead of anything that still smells of the media might they remember from the past. "This "Road" leads nowhere," glibly reads the opening jab. But in that line, Todd McCarthy actually understands this film in a way that he cannot - or more likely, chooses not to - understand.

We are all on the road. People believe differently about what lies at the end of that road. But for me, the movie reminds us of what we all too quickly forget. We are here now. We have what we have. We can lose anything at any time... even our lives. Yet, we choose to live. And if we choose to live, the only thing that lives on beyond the road... the only thing we can be sure of... is love.

I am about to turn 45. My first child, my son, is now considered a viable individual being, though we certainly look forward to him spending another 3 months growing inside the womb, as intended by nature. A few weeks ago, my family lost its oldest living member, Mildred Billig, nee' Poland... she claimed to be 93, but we're pretty sure she was really 96. He parents both died in their 50s, before I was born.

The road lies in front of us all. And life teaches us, over and over, that life is not about where the road ends, but about how we travel that road.

Bless your memories, Mrs. Wilmington, Mr & Mrs Klady, Len's sister, Meg Mazursky, Aunt Mildred, Dusty... bless the memory of Cirrah, whose loss to my MCN partner, Laura Rooney, is no small thing just because Cirrah was an animal and not a human... bless your health, Kim... bless us all. May we all have the strength to look with love to the past and with hope to the future. If you believe in a higher power, what better plan could he/she/it have for us? What else could be our purpose other than to be our purpose?

Onward...

Posted by dpoland at 01:08 PM | Comments (11)

BYOB Thursday - Welcome To October

Posted by dpoland at 10:33 AM | Comments (48)

Zenovich Responds To Marcia Clark's Story

Oct. 1, 2009

Dear Editors:

The following is a statement from filmmaker Marina Zenovich, director and producer of the Emmy® Award-winning HBO Documentary Film ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED.

“I am perplexed by the timing of David Wells’ statement to the press that he lied in his interview with me for the documentary ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED. Since June of 2008, the film has been quite visible on U.S. television via HBO, in theaters and on DVD, so it is odd that David Wells has not brought this issue to my attention before.

“For the record, on the day I filmed Mr. Wells at the Malibu Courthouse, February 11, 2005, he gave me a one-hour interview. He signed a release like all my other interviewees, giving me permission to use his interview in the documentary worldwide. At no time did I tell him that the film would not air in the United States.

“Mr. Wells was always friendly and open with me. At no point in the four years since our interview has he ever raised any issues about its content. In fact, in a July 2008 story in The New York Times, Mr. Wells corroborated the account of events that he gave in my film.

“I am astonished that he has now changed his story. It is a sad day for documentary filmmakers when something like this happens.”

=======================

This is in response to yesterday's Daily Beast story by Marcia Cross.

I think it is perfectly reasonable for Ms. Z to respond with her perspective on Mr W. saying he lied to her. I think that it may well be the case that he is lying now... which Ms C comments on smartly in her piece. The lie he is now alleging makes no sense. Why would he have told it, not matter what he thought of the distribution of the film?

That said, the response hit that place that pisses people off - or at least me - when she shifted gears in the last sentence to, "It is a sad day for documentary filmmakers when something like this happens.”

Oh.... BULLSHIT.

Why has it become so standard rhetorically to spin a "me" situation into an "us" event? Nothing bad happened to "documentary filmmakers" with this. And really, nothing particularly bad happened to the case. Right now, it is 100% an extradition. When Polanski gets here, the disposition of the rape case will be determined.

You know what a sad day for documentary filmmakers is? When good films get no attention.

You know what's not a sad day for documentary filmmakers? When a good film that is extremely one-sided in its approach gets even more attention that will draw even more eyeballs to it, even if it chooses sides.

Once again, there is this very odd need to turn the story of a man and a girl into something other than what it was... a rape and run... with extenuating circumstances for which the man seems to have some legit complaints, but for which he also has some responsibility, as he clearly never thought he deserved punishment or that he does now and made this clear to the court with his behavior.

Posted by dpoland at 10:19 AM | Comments (5)