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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Wednesday, January 14th, 1998 - Comments Off on Titanic Box Office
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Titanic Box Office

Lots of e-mail over my ongoing questioning of Titanic’s box office reporting. It is mostly made up of people who are ticked off at me. Like this one from Lars: “If you headed over to you local multiplex showing Titanic, maybe then you would finally “get” it. I saw Titanic Saturday at a local theater, and all of Saturday was sold out at 3pm. The same with other theaters in my area. So stop hinting about your Titanic box-office conspiracy (which you have done now for the last three weeks) and actually go out to talk to theater managers showing Titanic, and they will tell you. It’s a phenomenon.”
Similar sentiments form Dimitri, who offers, “I respect you, but I think you’re out of touch with the audience’s wavelength on this one. It’s like on week two, where you started insinuating a Scream 2 miscalculation would come to play, which never happened. And now that you’ve gone on record as having disliked it in the end, you seem to have a personal investment in seeing it fail or otherwise have something stink up a genuine phenomenon.”
Gilbert, however, thinks I’m being a little too kind: “I totally agree with your point about Titanic‘s box office numbers. It just seems impossible!! (Last weekend) there was hard rain in L.A and a snow storm in N.Y and don’t even talk about the “holiday factor.” Those figures are hard to believe.”
My response? This is no vendetta. I do like this movie. I just don’t love it. My issues with the box office figures are historical. The Lost World‘s $90 million opening weekend is nothing compared to Titanic’s record four consecutive weeks over $20 million, headed (at its current rate) to at least six consecutive weeks, despite many less showings each weekend than any comparable box office smash. In each of its four weekends, the film has added a new quirk to box office history. First, it went up in its second week. In week three, it made at least $8 million every weekday. This week, it experienced no Friday drop-off, despite having half the day’s shows during business hours in a non-holiday week. Next week, who knows? I can’t imagine any more surprises. So, this should be the end of my Titanic rant as you know it. Thanks for the letters and keep them coming, for better or for worse.

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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