Welcome to the first idiotic campaign scam of McCain v Obama.

Does anyone really think that in the first interview of Obama's presumed run in the general election, he tried to craft a backdoor way of saying, "McCain is old?" Or was it just a reasonable response to a guy saying that he was going to be above the fray inferring that Obama was soft on Hamas?

Funny... the Obama camapign didn't come out complaining that McCain was secretly trying to tie him to Osama and other scary A-rabs.

Meanwhile, the Hillary story becomes clear, as Slate explains that she has only until the Dem Convention to pay herself back her campaign loans... and that the Obama campaign really can't directy give her campaign more than a quarter million dollars to that end or any other. So the game is clear... as long as she can raise more than she is spending in the campaign, she will stay in. If her support dries up so that the million dollar a week machine starts building debt again, she will likely get out.

Okay... a quiet, non-political weekend to come.

Yay.

Interesting weekend.

By any previous metric, other than the first Spider-Man, Iron Man will be at $40m or lower, but none of the predictors are near that number and one has the film dropping just 40%, which would be a Spider-Man-like triumph of a second weekend.

On the flip side, tracking has Speed Racer in the low 30's, but tracking is notorious for missing kids. The question on the film is whether parents will let little kids see the film or if they are scared of the Wachowski of it all. The reviews, screaming hyperactivity, will not inspire many parents to want to spend the time with their kids in the theater, even if it seems clear that the kids will love the film. Will they hold them off and take them to Narnia next weekend, even if they are begging?

May 8, 2008

We’ve got some exciting news for this fall: our first Blu-ray discs are coming! We’ve picked a little over a dozen titles from the collection for Blu-ray treatment, and we’ll begin rolling them out in October. These new editions will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and they will be priced to match our standard-def editions.

Here’s what’s in the pipeline:

The Third Man
Bottle Rocket
Chungking Express
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Last Emperor
El Norte
The 400 Blows
Gimme Shelter
The Complete Monterey Pop
Contempt
Walkabout
For All Mankind
The Wages of Fear

Alongside our DVD and Blu-ray box sets of The Last Emperor, we’ll also be putting out the theatrical version as a stand-alone release in both formats, priced at $39.95. Our Blu-ray release of Walkabout will be an all-new edition, featuring new supplements as well as a new transfer; we will also release an updated anamorphic DVD of Nicolas Roeg’s outback masterpiece at the same time.

Enjoy spring!

When Picturehouse and Warner Indie shut down, a part of my job is to see what happened with clear eyes. But I also know and have worked with and have drunk with a bunch of people at both companies. I am also quite conscious that the "victims" of these kinds of shutdowns are not the people whose names everyone who reads Variety or clicks on MCN thrice daily, but the people who float through this business, trying to find their place, doing good work, putting their best feet forward.

Still, when I read the word "tragedy" used in the first sentence of indieWIRE's analysis of the day, it trips my gag reflex. And when Nikki Finke feels compelled to rewrite her blase' I-didn’t-get-the-release-first-so-I-can’t-toldja-so-I-don't-much-care comment on the shutdown after commenters blast her for being herself, after laughing, I feel a bit of empathy to her.

There were some very, very, very smart people at Picturehouse and WIP. And both companies, simply put, were clear failures in the goals set forth by their existence.

I really don't want to kick people when they are down. And as I wrote in depth when Paramount Classics was being disassembled, both company’s suffered greatly by the limitations put on them by the lack of vision shown by the corporations funding them. While Searchlight and Focus and Vantage and Miramax were busy playing in the playground of movies costing over $20 million – some in the 50s and higher – Picturehouse really never made a movie of their own and never showed a clear vision as they handled an unbalanced mixture of HBO Films releases and pick-ups, and WIP was so spread out conceptually, flying from movie star movies like Good Night, And Good Luck and The Jacket and In The Valley of Elah to tiny films like Eros and The Science of Sleep and Introducing The Dwights.

So neither company was allowed to fly… but neither ever found a focus the way Sony Classics has either. SPC reminds us that you can make a nice little business out of singles, doubles, and an annual home run or two, plus a lot of smart DVD plays. You would never see SPC with a year with a trio like March of The Penguins, Paradise Now, and Good Night, And Good Luck. That’s not in the company’s DNA. But they don’t have misses with those groupings of films either. $3 million - $5 million domestic for movies like The Counterfeiters, Persepolis, and The Band’s Visit’s are home runs for SPC. The company does exactly what they and Sony both want with their $60 million grossing years (sometimes more, sometimes less), strong DVD, and a smattering of attention-getting prestige movies.

So is it really tragic for these companies to go away?

For the individuals, it is. And I feel for them. Big time. Especially for the support teams, much more so than for anyone who has been mentioned in any of these stories, since while temporarily stung and humiliated, they will all come out fine.

More significantly, I feel far more deeply for the true indies out there that are squirming like a hyperactive 4-year-old catching a look at a anal thermometer in the hand of their shaky great-grandma’s hand to find a way to make enough money to keep their businesses going.

A big part of the pain of the indies is that the studios ate the category with all these “specialized” companies. You have Mark Frickin’ Cuban, who has his own chain of movie theaters, saying that it is nearly impossible to make theatrical distribution work for small movies. Yes, on some level it’s an abdication of his responsibilities to the industry he bought into. But that is how tense things are.

So am I genuinely sad for the good people of these two companies? Yes. Will I make some phone calls for a few of them when they write, looking for new jobs? Yes. But is losing two companies that put out less than 10 films a year and grossed less than $50 million a year total each on average, even with the financial backing – however lame – of major studios? Not a tragedy… just a reasonable business choice from businessmen who were not terribly smart or reasonable when they launched these divisions in the first place.

"It's too loud!"

"It's too fast!"

"It's too long!"

"Too many colors!"

I am sympathetic to complaints about the visual intensity of this film. Seeing the film in IMAX last night was a bit of sensory overload. Very intense. And exhausting. (And in many ways glorious.)

But it sounds, over and over, like "Those kids and their texting!" or "Those kids and their crazy rap music!" or "Those kids and their special effects movies!"

But I'm sure that's just me... I'm sure that the target for this movie was always people over 40 who prefer their action movies slow and plodding and looking simiilar to their idea of themselves.

Watching the original cartoon on DVD the other day, I was reminded how much imagination we, as an audience, had to bring to that cheap animation... and I wondered whether any of us could muster it again, 30+ years and many thousands of movies later. Maybe not.

And this last one has a rather different feel about now...

He self-obits.

It is a minor surprise, as there was a sense that there was strong support for Polly Cohen in the WB hierarchy. My guess is that T-W asked Robinov to give a financial upside to keeping WIP going... and Robinov couldn't.

There really isn't much room left for any more Dependent blood to be shed in the industry.

Searchlight is, obviously, safe... though Atomic could disappear completely in time.
Focus is safe at U, though Rogue is iffy.
Par Vantage is doing better than the main studio.
Miramax is doing great.
Sony Classics is more than solid.

The downside of 2 more Dependents going down is that these five have more leverage than ever. That could be good too. But the studios have made their "indie" arms so broadly commercial, even when doing great work, that they all want their Junos and Little Miss Sunshines every year. It's not a shock that two of last year's Oscar nominees were co-funded by two Dependents (Blood and No Country). These movies are costing more than we think of as indie prices now. In fact, Juno was the only one of the four American-made indies that qualified for Indie Spirit Awards... even with a $22 million budget top.

The hope is that two fewer Dependents mean that a few more arthouse screens will open up for true indies, as screens have been harder and harder to get against the big push of the Dependents.

But don't count on it.

The prayer is that these Dependents - other than the more acquisition-minded and conservative Sony Classics - make movies only over $20 million, leaving the under-$20m quality business some room, leading to a few big hits, leading to a better business future for true indies. But it is, in reality, a prayer.

My condolences to the WIP and Picturehouse teams. The biggest question is where Laura Kim will land next.

I'd be willing to bet on Vantage, where the movies are good, Megan Colligan is strong enough to have another respected voice on board without being intimidated, and Lesher luvs a high profile hire.

She would probably be happiest at Miramax, where the chief is a gentle one and this hire would allow him to bring more of the publicity effort in-house.

The Searchlight and Focus machines are pretty much set. And Sony Classics has a pretty settled-in structure of independent publicists on both coasts, so consistent as to feel in-house.

I would expect Bob Berney to land with an already-funded aspiring indie, as launching his own right now is not financially viable. He would be a great asset to any of them and make funders happy by dint of his name alone.

Welcome back to the bosom of WB, Ms. Cohen.

BTW (add 11:58a) - The evolution of this from a Picturehouse takeover to a shared-power arrangement to a double firing is pretty much exactly how things went with New Line.

Shaye and Lynne thought they were okay... then it was a 70% staff cut... then they were killed... then they cut another 15% of the staff.

There is a story in there somewhere. It feels as though Robinov has an idea, Horn adjusts it to something more realistic, then the T-W people look at it and go, "Are you guys kidding? Why can't you just cut the f-ing cord?"

And one final note... I fully expect New Line to be the WB bastard son for the next couple of years, as Toby rides herd over the last few projects and can't get much money from Daddy. But as things turn in this business, don't be surprised if after a couple of years of flailing around, they reinvigorate the label with whoever is running the strongest true indie at the time and earnestly take a shot at the Dimension business, which is not great right now, but will cycle around as it always does.

It would also seem that the legacy she is hoping to use to bring her back to respectability in Dem quarters who were disgusted by her campaign smears is to be the hero of Michigan and Florida.

These seem to be the two prongs.

I am watching CNN and MSNBC and Fox News and I am AMAZED at the unwillingness of these people to see what is so obvious in Hillary Clinton's behavior.

She is NOT attacking Obama.

She is NOT pushing heavy rhetoric.

And she IS selling the line that she is still in the race because the campaign needs money and it is clear that her camp has not determined how to exit gracefully.

But the media is still pushing her as fighting. And it's really kinda cruel.

Yes, it is a little irritating to me when she says anything but, "It's over... thanks for the fish." But she is doing the right thing right now... really. It is completely fair to expect her to have a few days to decide exactly how she moves along, because they have been so focused on scratching their way to the lead for the last two months that this is not an easy, quick call. It's complex, even if inevitable. It's not the same as a results night drop-out after Iowa.

She's doing the right thing for the first time in months... and the media is treating her like she's still in ranting & raving mode.

Enough. A little grace... please!!!

The actors are real, including the scene-stealing monkey, Chim-Chim. But very little else, except the pancakes, is. And while the racing scenes – which is probably most of what you’ve seen, if you haven’t yet seen the film – are exciting and brain-straining and have what, to me, is the desired movie effect… they have you shifting with the vehicles in your movie seats… it is the more intimate sequences that are at the heart of Speed Racer.

Go Speed Racer

And as much as last night's Clinton speech felt like a lap around the stadium to acknowledge and be acknowledged, it was this morning's speech in West Virginia that marked the clear end of the Clinton campaign.

There was no mention of Obama at all. There were none of the big narrative hooks of the last two months of campaigning. And for about half the speech, there was not even any specificity about who should be implementing the ideas she was gently advocating.

But even beyond the speech was the body language. She had the emotional slump of a sports team playing out the string late in the season when the playoffs are well out of reach. Of course, she is capable of rising above the failure of her candidacy, like great athletes that play hard even when all they can do is win the one game they are playing. But she’s clearly gone into second place mode.

The key revelation of the morning is Clinton’s $6.5 million loan to her campaign… which now becomes part of the $11.5 million in debt that her campaign has to pay her back. Can she generate enough money from the position she is now in to both pay for a campaign and to cut into that debt? An even bigger question… can she generate enough money from this passive position to pay for her campaign without going further into personal debt?

The Clintons are very wealthy, but they have now invested about 20% of their personal wealth into her campaign. That leaves them with a lot of money, but rich people don’t stay rich by siphoning off chunks of their after-tax income with no possible return. And the very real question of whether Bill Clinton will be the cash cow he has been comes into play as his role as The Most Powerful Democrat is usurped by Obama. No one is sending The Clintons back to Arkansas to live in a trailer. But they have to be feeling that pain now.

And like Hussein hiding in a hole in a farm, it is a little pathetic… and creates sympathy even from someone who has been as enraged by the behavior of this campaign in recent months.

I expect to get irritated in the days to come with the media again, as they shift from beating the drum for all things negative about Obama in the guise of “it’s what the Republicans will do in the fall” to finding out and pushing into the light every little pain of the failed Clinton campaign, as it fades. I expect one big issue to be about her fundraising to fund a debt.

Another will be how she dances with Obama. In the old days, a campaign with a lot of money, like Obama’s, would pay some of the opponent’s debt as part of the “exit settlement.” But that would come under enormous scrutiny in this every-second media age. She started to make the case for a VP slot today, citing her constituency, with whom Obama has had a hard time. If she is the VP candidate, him paying down her debt would not be as much of an issue.

One private pundit said this week, “Obama’s first Profile in Courage will be saying, ‘No’ to Hillary as VP.”

We shall see.

My favorite moments last night, aside from the great speech by Obama - which reminded me once again that he now has an advantage in that McCain can’t sell the “it’s just words” crap with the passion that Clinton did, McCain's inherent decency working against him in a bit of irony – was watching the guys on FoxNews sit there deflated and almost speechless at times.

Clinton lost last night. It's over. The media is finally beyond the willingness to rationalize that she can overtake Obama. And the choice of when to officially concede will be negotiated, not won. But the biggest loser? The Republican Party.

And wasn’t that always the point?

After gossip reports about Redstone meeting with Cruise, now The Public Statement.

As I wrote a while back, the main reasons this is in play are that, 1) The M:I3 franchise is a comfortable, secure place for Cruise and he must know that if he hires the right people this time out (dumping Carnahan was a mistake last time), he can build it back up, and 2) Redstone must feel that he can get much, much, much better terms from Cruise this time out, not only doing the "let's get our money out first" deal that the studio has made with both Marvel and LucasFilm/Amblin this summer, but a better deal than either of those after breakeven. Cruise doesn't need the money personally... he needs the hit... even if Valkyrie turns out to be a success.

Finding a franchise situation where Paramount has the upper hand in the negotiations has not been easy. So expect this deal to get done... and expect it to be announced as a response to the DreamWorks exit conversation starts getting louder again in the fall.