While I admit Sharon Waxman is kind of hot when she indulges her lifestyle-reporting fetish (especially twice in four days), nothing is really sexier than one of her good old-fashioned Today-In-Box-Office-Calamity stories. And in today’s long-overdue Summer ’06 survey, the mood is upbeat and the figures are encouraging: Revenues and attendance exceed levels achieved by this time last year, reflecting a develeopment and marketing atmospshere in which “Hollywood is trying harder.”
Perhaps reflecting the success of blockbuster sequels and franchise revivals, Waxman indicates a studio climate equally devoted to rehashing last year’s stale, obvious platitudes:

With young men becoming less reliable, finding a broader audience is necessary, some say in Hollywood. Jeff Blake, vice chairman for Sony Pictures Entertainment, said: “I think for a long while everyone was dining on the fact that young males were pretty much available every single weekend. It’s a matter of which film they choose.

“It was almost as if we lived in a world where this group would go to the multiplex every week and choose what they see. Now they don’t necessarily go to the multiplex every week, and we have to convince them we have something exciting for them to see.”

Mr. Blake pointed out that excitement among moviegoers was “infectious,” as people drawn to theaters by one film are often snared by an attractive trailer for another.

“When you make movies people want to see, they flock to them,” said Bruce Snyder, president for distribution for Fox. “And you have to speak about one movie at a time. That’s so key.”

So key. Give that man a bonus. And Waxman, too, while you are at it.
Anyhow, do not fret: The Times featured actual news yesterday as well. Take David Halbfinger’s piece exploring the dynamics of Oliver Stone’s upcoming World Trade Center–a sober, not-patronizing glimpse behind the scenes that reveals the first inkling (to me, anyhow) of a big-budget 9/11 film that might be worth viewing:

There are many people of course who have been driven a little crazy for other reasons by some of Mr. Stone’s more controversial films, JFK, Natural Born Killers and Nixon chief among them. But in several interviews, sounding variously weary, wounded and either self-deprecating or defensive, Mr. Stone spoke as if his days of deliberate provocation were behind him.

“I stopped,” he says simply. “I stopped.”

He said he just wants to depict the plain facts of what happened on Sept. 11. “It seems to me that the event was mythologized by both political sides, into something that they used for political gain,” he says. “And I think one of the benefits of this movie is that it reminds us of what actually happened that day, in a very realistic sense.”

“We show people being killed, and we show people who are not killed, and the fine line that divides them,” he continues. “How many men saved those two lives? Hundreds. These guys went into that twisted mass, and it very clearly could’ve fallen down on them, and struggled all night for hours to get them out.”

Halbfinger also has a brief insight into Maggie Gyllenhaal’s continued involvement after last year’s Tribeca meltdown, a closer look at the Hollywood-style indignities screenwriter Andrea Berloff sought to avoid (despite their roots in stranger-than-fiction factuality) and, finally, a self-effacing kicker that even I, a tried-and-true skeptic, have a hard time disbelieving:

“It’s not about the World Trade Center, really. It’s about any man or woman faced with the end of their lives, and how they survive,” Mr. Stone says. “I did it for a reason. I did it because emotionally it hit me. I loved the simplicity and modesty of this movie.

“I hope the movie does well,” he adds, “even if they say ‘in spite of Oliver Stone.’ “

Oh, all right, Ollie. Just for leaving out “the DNA of our times,” I’ll go.
(Photo: Francois Duhamel/Paramount Pictures)

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