MCN Columnists
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Saturday, October 25th, 1997 - Comments Off on Weekend, 25 October 1997
Be Sociable, Share!

Weekend, 25 October 1997

A neck snapper at this weekend’s box office. After what seemed like some impressive marketing gains by Sony, audiences answered Gattaca with “What-aca?!” while continuing to reward simple, straight-forward genre fare with mondo box office.
Both I Know What You Did Last Summer (first with $13.1 million) and The Devil’s Advocate (second with $10.3 million) dropped less that 18% in their second weeks, just as killer thriller Kiss The Girls (third with $5.2 million) did in it’s second outing two weeks ago. Very, very impressive. All three films are heading over the $50 million mark, though Sony will probably continue to be it’s own worst enemy, with the November 7th opening of Starship Troopers looking to be the main roadblock on IKWYDLS’s highway of cash.
Seven Years In Tibet continues a forgettable journey, adding $4.8 million for fourth. The aforementioned Gattaca could arrange only $4.4 million for fifth. Guess Uma isn’t as perfect as we thought. Fairytale: A Weak Opening took in $3.4 million for sixth, though this film may be 1997’s A Little Princess – much loved/little seen. In & Out stays in the money with $2.86 million for seventh and Soul Food adds to it’s hidden fortune with another $2.2 million for eighth.
My personal horror show, I Know You Had A Hit Last Summer, featuring actors who can’t quite step up to the hype, features A Life Less Ordinary this week, which despite Obi-Wan McGregor, My Best Mask’s Cameron Diaz and the makers of Heroinspotting couldn’t muster more than $2.1 million for ninth. L.A. Confidential stays on the QT with a hush-hush $2 million. Quietly lurking over next weekend’s box office chart is Boogie Nights, which expanded out to 124 screens for $1.9 million and a truly exploitive per screen average of over $15,000. Next week, the film goes wide in an otherwise soft weekend and should take the top spot.
The Hot Button gets you ready to Boogie every day this week. Push the E-mail button.

Be Sociable, Share!

Comments Off on Weekend, 25 October 1997

Comments are closed.

Pride

Comments Most Recent Archives

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon