By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Big picture this: Goldstein sez movies done, calls it quits
Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded by fierce warriors. “Well, what are we going to do,” Lone asks Tonto. Tonto reflects, raises an eyebrow: “What we, white man?” In LA Times, Patrick Goldstein big-pictures his desire to shift to another beat, in an apocalypse-POW! piece that his editors subhed, the era of moviegoing as a mass audience ritual is slowly but inexorably drawing to a close. “New technology is also accelerating word of mouth. Thanks to instant messaging and BlackBerries, bad buzz about a bad movie hits the streets fast enough to stop suckers from lining up to see a new stinker. Even worse, the people who run studios are living in such cocoons that they’ve become wildly out of touch with reality.” That, Goldstein suggests, is the only reason anyone at Sony could have gotten behind Bewitched. “Or why any of the studio’s highly paid executives didn’t wonder why it should shoehorn an obscure family movie into the one-week window between the Disney-powered Chicken Little and the latest Harry Potter juggernaut, especially when the movie, Zathura, has a title that sounds like it should be followed by the warning “side effects may include leakage or sexual dysfunction.” …
“The ultimate perk of being a studio chief is [getting] your own screening room, which puts only more distance between you and the rabble… Too often studio people have the same ideas about the same things, a groupthink that has led to them anointing one Hot New Thing after another, from Josh Hartnett to Brittany Murphy to Kate Hudson to Colin Farrell, who’ve yet to connect with rank ‘n file filmgoers.” [More KA-blooey at the link; and no, it’s only his tone that seems to be calling it quits.]