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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Wednesday, February 11th, 1998 - Comments Off on Ranting and Raving – Mostly About Titanic
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Ranting and Raving – Mostly About Titanic

With 14 Oscar nominations for Titanic, I’ve begun to reflect on this rush of magazine pieces about how Titanic will change the movies you see. I’m pretty sure that I can sum up the answer in two words. It won’t. Teen romances were already relaunched by William Shakespeare‘s Romeo and Juliet a year ago. And unless you’re going to remake The Hindenburg, there is no epic to be made that is in any way analogous to Titanic. There’s no trend for Titanic to set. It’s a singular event.
As far as Titanic launching more $250 million-plus budgets, fugeddaboudit. There’s only one director alive other than James Cameron who could have steered Titanic to the theaters, and his name is Steven Spielberg. That hasn’t changed. And don’t expect a guy like Spielberg, who is as image-sensitive as he is brilliant, to be going down into those murky waters. No. Titanic was made because Fox wanted Cameron to be in their stable. The same reason Paramount got involved. Now, everyone will make money and, as a result, Cameron won’t be jumping through hoops to get his next picture off the ground for Fox. So that might effect you. Cameron deprivation. Catch it!
The only real effect could be on the distribution side. Titanic may or may not pass Jurassic Park as the highest-grossing movie of all time, but it will certainly be the all-time biggest money-maker for theater owners. Normally, studios get between 60 and 70 percent on the take on opening weekends, with the percentage dropping to about 50 percent after a few weeks. But as Hollywood has gone into “All Blockbuster, All The Time” mode, the massive opening weekends have inspired studios to demand huge percentages of the opening-weekend gross, so a movie like The Lost World gobbles up 90 percent of all the revenue for the studio in Week One. Exhibitors enjoyed the massive $90 million Lost World opening in popcorn sales, but by the time they had a real stake in the financial bounty, three weekends later, the film managed only a $12.5 million weekend.
Titanic, on the other hand, has played right into exhibitors’ hands. The two films totaled almost the same over their first five weekends: The Lost World made $158 million, Titanic, $162 million). Yet Titanic, because of its consistent weekend pull of between $28 and $36 million, made exhibitors $63 million, while The Lost World was good for only about $39 million. On top of that, Titanic has played much better on weekdays, even on work days. Distribution chiefs at every studio are no doubt scrambling to figure out how to use this long run of Titanic success as an excuse to keep a higher percentage of revenue for a longer period of time. So, keep an eye out for the $5 tub of popcorn, coming soon to a theater near you. And thank Titanic.
READERS OF THE DAY: It took four readers to pick the Oscars. No one got everything. Everyone got the four Best Picture nods. And no one (no one!) got director Peter Cattaneo for The Full Monty. Check in tomorrow for the whole story.

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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