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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, July 2nd, 1998 - Comments Off on Armageddon
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Armageddon

Disney’s Armageddon premiere at Cape Canaveral was apparently a mixed bag of excess and screw-ups on Monday night. (I wasn’t there. If you want an extensively-detailed, first-hand account, try Harry’s excited report. Ironically enough, the evening after the There’s Something About Mary junket ended up being more fun, more human and more real than any “event” I’ve ever attended, so no regrets here.) Turns out Bruce Willis did show up, though he was in photo-opportunity-only mode. Also turns out the electricity in the air was literal, and camera crews from all over the world had a hard time getting clean video from the premiere. Oh well, Disney only dropped about $5 million on the purely promotional event, so no biggie. (tee-hee)
Also coming out of the event and the entire Armageddon hype machine was a great (not exaggerating) story by The Wall Street Journal (the one truly journalistic entertainment media outlet, and the only one I ever hope to match for insight) on Tuesday’s front page. Unfortunately, because the WSJ is a paid site, I can’t link you to the story, but it spoke to the hype. It spoke to the origins of the film (Disney’s Joe Roth bought the title Armageddon from big-budget schlockmeister Joel Silver in exchange for the titles Conspiracy Theory and Father’s Day). It spoke to the enormous ad budget for the film (more than $50 million), plus the internal issues over how to view it (pure action or young love story?) because they need women to attend the shoot-’em-up in order to do truly massive numbers. Exceptionally good coverage. Go to the dentist, go to the doctor or go to a library, but check it out. (And thanks to readers who wrote to point out the article. Read it in the airport Tuesday morning with a Fox exec who got a lot of laughs out of it… particularly given Dr. Dolittle‘s rather low-hype $29 million weekend.)
ON GOOFY STREET: In other very happy Disney news (that was irony, Mike!), Disney stock fell 7.2 percent Tuesday when Wall Street types put the evil eye on the company’s investment ratings and earnings estimates. Why? Had nothing to do with Armageddon, Mulan or the fact that the company was once in business with Pauly Shore. It was soft overseas consumer merchandise sales and home video sales that caused the 8 and one-eighth point drop. It was the biggest one-day drop since 1989. And ironically, with as massive a company as Disney is now, even a $120 million five-day opening for Armageddon (not that I predict that) wouldn’t increase the stock price by that much.
JUST WONDERING: In other financial news, News. Corp, parent of 20th Century Fox is taking 20 percent of the entertainment side of the corporation public to the tune of about $4 to $5 billion. Do you think this has anything to do with Rupert Murdoch‘s on-again, off-again divorce?
YOU SAY YOU WANT A DEVOLUTION: Warner Bros. continues to evolve, but into what? Word has it that they are talking to The X-Files movie director Rob Bowman about helming the stalled Arnold Schwarzenegger project, I Am Legend, replacing the previously attached director, Ridley Scott. I know I’ll get mail from X-philes (and again, I liked The X-Files movie, I just didn’t love it), but Ridley Scott to Rob Bowman is like Reggie Jackson to Cecil Fielder. Or for the non-sports-enthusiasts, like Jerry Lewis to Carrot Top or from Da Vinci to Warhol or from The Beatles to Oasis. Neither sucks. Both are popular. But one is a worldbeater and the other is a high quality craftsman. Getting gun shy about spending won’t help Warner Bros. Either make smaller movies or spend the dollars. Don’t try to make big movies on small dollars. That will make current employees legend. Unemployed legends of failure.
JURASSIC PARK 3: THE LOST INTEREST: Universal is going forward to the past with a third installment of Jurassic Park without Spielberg at the helm, but with Steve and Michael Crichton developing the story. (Can you say “three dinosaurs?”) Keep in mind that the third Jaws film was in 3-D. Could this become the trend? (The tagline for The Lost World, given Spielberg’s only emotionally unenthusiastic work of his career, should have been “This time, it’s impersonal!”) Look for the Jeff Goldblum character to be played by a body double a la Captain Pike from Star Trek, unrecognizable in a “yes/no” chair after stuttering himself into a series of debilitating strokes. Watch in horror as his red light flashes repeatedly when the Malcolm McDowell character and the Dennis Hopper character try to outevil one another by torturing a baby raptor in the raptor nest with Mama Raptor (voiced by Shelley Long) is on her way home. (Did I get the idea across that I don’t think this is the best idea?)
BOX OFFICE OOPS: I gave a little too much credit to New Line’s marketing campaign for Gone With the Wind last week. The film was only on eight screens, so its $82,386 gross would have to be considered “really good,” not “really disappointing.” My bad.
READER OF THE DAY: Tim C. wrote: “Hope you saw The Wall Street Journal’s page-one story yesterday about Armageddon, which explains that awful Armageddon ‘Wow’/Ron Brewington ad. Apparently, from the start, Disney’s been planning on getting a one-word blurb from one of the quote whores, ‘preferably with an O in the middle,’ so that they could use the comet logo to fill in the ‘O.’ Brewington explains that Disney called him up to ask him what he thought of the film, and he replied, ‘Wow! What a great film!’ Which I’m sure is exactly how things happened… (Other possibles for a short blurb with an ‘O’ in the middle: ‘Good!,’ ‘God!,’ ‘Ow!,’ ‘Pop!,’ ‘Doh!,’ ‘How?,’ ‘Mom!’ and, of course, ‘Ron!’)”

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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