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October 30, 1997

Countdown to Boogie Nights Minus 1

Boogie Nights is ready to bring porn to a cable network near you. New Line is shopping a late-night series that would bring the antics of Dirk, Amber, Rollergirl and Buck into your house every week. HBO was the first cable net to produce original sitcoms with "Dream On," the show that had almost every gorgeous up-and-coming actress in Hollywood sleeping with a short, average-looking book editor within 10 minutes of meeting him. In Boogie Nights: The Slut-Com, it won't take 10 minutes. Watch Dirk as he measures his new apartment in the nude! Will Amber ever get her hair really clean? See Rollergirl face off against Suzanne Somers in a Thighmaster competition! Watch Buck read and use multi-syllabic words! (Someone has to be politically correct!)

Boogie Nights burnt up the box office charts in limited release last weekend, but from every second week, a pattern emerges. In Los Angeles, the film was dropping quickly in the big multi-plexes, while still growing in the smaller venues. Of course, even while dropping, the numbers were pretty damned good. In New York, there wasn't much change on the Westside and downtown, but there was a drop on the Eastside. This is the first indication that Boogie Nights may have a hard time with the mainstream in the long run. But in the short run, it still looks solid as a... well, just solid.

Boogie Nights doesn't have the exclusive on bare bodies. The Full Monty passed Four Weddings and a Funeral this weekend as the most popular British film ever in the U.K. It took Monty just eight weeks to pass the $45 million that Weddings took 22 weeks to acquire. The Pantless Ones have taken just over $25 million here in the US. But England's dance with flesh is far from over. The Spice Girls movie, Spice World, is due on U.K. screens before the end of the year. It's enough to make you drink warm beer.

Tomorrow, Boogie Nights leads the weekend preview . Meanwhile, check out the disco dancing on Rough Cut weekly.

Email is fun. And this week I tell you why I love L.A. Let me count the ways on The Whole Pictures in one!

October 29, 1997

Countdown to Boogie Nights Day 2

Boogie Nights makes porn stars look far too pathetic according to '70s artistes du penetration Bobby Astyr and Candida Royalle, as quoted in the New York Daily News. However, they say, the slick producers, bad dialogue and poor production values are right on target. So, the 19-year-old from Iowa who's getting paid $1,000 by a guy with leather pants and a gold chain to have sex with three men while saying "Oh baby!" six or seven hundred times in front of cheap wood paneling isn't pathetic. The lighting of the scene is what's pathetic. OK. Warning: Objectification may appear closer in real life than in the rear-view mirror.

Boogie Nights star Mark Wahlberg's price is going up. Way up. Sources say Wahlberg will pull down almost $2 million to team up with Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat (star of The Killer and the upcoming The Replacement Killers) in The Corrupter, for Boogie studio New Line Cinema. In the thriller, Walberg plays the good-guy partner to Chow's rogue cop. Then the two have sex on screen with a family of ... Oops. Wrong movie.

Boogie Nights' home studio, New Line, also has the next Mike Figgis movie, One Night Stand, coming to screens soon. At the recent junket for the film, Stand star Wesley Snipes edged around some inside info without giving too much away. First, he made funny noises while talking about his upcoming Blade, which he produced and stars in, which those of us in the room assumed were sounds of excitement. Little did we know that the night before, Snipes had suffered through a disastrous screening of the film, as related by a screening attendee who wrote into the Ain't It Cool Web site. Then, he said that the film he'd really like to do is the Miles Davis story. Two days later, producer Marvin Worth (Malcolm X, Lenny) announces that he's acquired the rights to make Davis' life story for Sony. I wonder who'll be playing Miles. Hmmm.

Tomorrow, Boogie Nights TV. Talk about your prime time!

Connect with email, read The Whole Picture, or carve a pumpkin. It's up to you!


October 28, 1997

Countdown to Boogie Nights Day 3

Boogie fever is catching on other film sets. At least according to Netizens. While the mainstream media may sit back and wait for a final print of John McNaughton's new movie, Wild Things, the twin terrors of the URLs, Matt Drudge and Harry Knowles are already all over it. The news? Kevin Bacon shows his penis! Drudge ran a story, giving his column inches exclusively to Bacon's column inches, quoting a Variety source making the industry connection to Boogie Nights and saying "Does (Bacon) really want to draw comparisons between his and Dirk Diggler's ? ..."

Knowles and one of his test screening sneakers offer a fuller view of Wild Things, which got a thumbs down. "First off, let me put to rest the question which most of you male types will be dying to know: NEVE IS NOT NAKED IN THIS FILM." Pretty much my priority in every film. My new book, "Who's NOT Naked!" will soon be available in bookstores everywhere. Knowles' mole continues, "Words fail me for what we see next. Through the steam, we see a naked body from behind. Yes folks, that's right, it's Bacon doing his token, Hollywood, 'bare-ass' shot. But does it end there? No, I'm sorry to say, not when you are Kevin Bacon, executive producer of Wild Things. Kevin has seen Boogie Nights and he knows how to create a 'buzz' about his film. He turns toward the camera a la Dirk Diggler revealing, to a shocked audience, his manhood. Unlike Dirk, this shot was all Kevin. The horror, the horror..."

This is not why the studios test screen movies. But according to Boogie Nights director, Paul Thomas Anderson, they shouldn't be testing at all. "Test screenings are the most asinine, ridiculous thing that ever happened to movies. That's a grand, sweeping comment, but it's true. It's fucking ridiculous. On Boogie Nights, I went, but I didn't get anything out of it. Test screenings are a fucking waste of time and massive amounts of money. They cost a lot of money. And it's not a test because it doesn't hold up to any scientific standards. People don't get to see movies for free. They pay $7.50 to see a movie. People know what they are going to see when they go see a movie, so the process of recruiting is totally biased from the get go. People will easily walk out if they don't pay $7.50 for something. If people think they are coming to see a sort of raucous exposé of the porn industry, they are probably gong to be disappointed. If they don't know that it's two hours and 37 minutes long, they are going to fucking be bored. They are going to say, 'I have dinner plans.'"

Tommorrow, Is It Real? Or Is It Boogie Nights?

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October 09, 1997

Catholics Protest Black Out, King & I, Grizzly Mountain

Roman Catholics in Chile are organizing a boycott against film festival screenings of Abel Ferrara's Black Out because of its explicit lesbian sex scenes featuring German Uber-model Claudia Schiffer. Jewish-American groups are also upset that the film helps us imagine the nausea-provoking, reality (I guess) of the sexual relationship between Schiffer and David Copperfield (nee' Kotkin). Oy!

"Shall Ve Kill? (dum-dum-dum) Shall ve blow them to bits-kies? Shall ve bomb? (dum-dum-dum) Ve can haff lots of fun, ya, if ve only had a gun-ya. Shall ve kill? Shall ve kill? Shall ve kill?" For those of you whose parents never took you to dinner theater, that's "Shall We Dance" from the musical The King & I, as performed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. "Huh?," you say? The rumor around Broadway is that the Austrian Alp is going to be hitting the boards in a Broadway revival of the show that made Yul Brenner's head famous. Another hit: "Getting to Broadway, trying to sing songs in English. Getting no retakes, working almost for free. Getting to Broadway, playing a lost King, It's nat'ral, Cause I am actual', A Kennedy."

Dan Haggerty is back in Grizzly Mountain, which hits theaters on Oct. 17. Well, part of him. In a story more grizzly than his most famous character's name, or his beard after three bowls of vegetable soup, Dan explains where he's been. "Three and one-half years ago, I'm on my motorcycle and I'm 1,000 feet from pulling into the driveway when in front of me a van makes a u-turn. Next thing I knew, I'm wedged underneath the van, and it tore both of my legs off, and broke my hips." Ouch! Haggerty credits his recovery to 50,000 pieces of fan mail, including a note from the Pope. In the great Hollywood tradition, divorce is the ultimate punchline. "I'd rather this pain then the pain I went through married to my first wife." Ba-dum-dum! Take my legs, please!

Don't forget to email me when something hits your hot button.

October 04, 1997

Polanski, Titanic Release Date

Director Roman Polanski, who has been in exile in France for 20 years to avoid jail time for his sexual encounter with a 13-year-old girl in Jack Nicholson's backyard, is rumored to have cut a deal to return to Hollywood. Another great achievement for Los Angeles D.A. Gil Garcetti. Polanski is probably anxious to return to Hollywood before Natalie Portman turns 18.

Another million dollar deal for a classic idea. Former "Mad TV" writer, Stuart Blumberg, sold Columbia Pictures Keeping the Faith, a "romantic drama" about a long-term friendship between a rabbi and a Catholic priest that becomes strained when both men fall in love with the same woman. Drama? All that description makes me think of a joke starting, "A rabbi and a priest walk into a..." Email us your best priest/rabbi jokes and maybe they'll end up in The Hot Button.

Traditionally, the success of big-budget movies on American soil has led the way to foreign box office gold. But 20th Century Fox has held its breath long enough on Titanic, the long-delayed Jim Cameron epic. Scheduled to premiere in the U.S. on December 19 under the Paramount banner (they split rights), Fox has decided to launch Titanic at the Tokyo International Film Festival on November 1. Japan has been a solid audience for Cameron, so if they don't like it, expect to find Fox execs looking for a spot under Godzilla's foot (or hanging from George Lucas' shirttails).

As Janeane Garofalo left the theater during her star turn in The Matchmaker, she said, "I saw my pie face up there and the crow's feet. Have you ever seen your face blown up 10 feet tall? I can't take it." If she can't take that, she should stay off the Web. Inspired by Chris Brandon's Site-ing of last Wednesday, I took a trip to GarofaloLand. My favorite sight was this letter on a Janeanne-loving site. James Ricardo (no relation to Ricky) from Torrance, CA, wrote: "I love Janeane. She is way prettier than Uma Thurman or Lisa or Mira in Romy and Michele. Though my guess is she isn't that good in bed. She seems very much a missionary style-type chick. Long Live Janeane! Bow down to her cute, fat, hairy little legs!!" How could I ever top that?

Come back Monday for a box office round up.