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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, September 21st, 2007 - 9 Comments »
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Box Office Hell

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9 Comments »

9 Responses to “Box Office Hell”

  1. waterbucket says:
    September 21, 2007 at 3:43 pm

    I don’t understand how anyone would ever predict a number like 22.8 or 5.9. Why don’t they just round up or down? It’s not like their margin of error is very small. Each week, they’re all off by at least a couple mil.

  2. IOIOIOI says:
    September 21, 2007 at 8:45 pm

    Water; I reckon it has to do with averages based off of other films as well as the time of year among other factours. It may be a duck shoot, but it’s not like they are not aided by some quanitative data. Also… it’s cooler to go with 12.9 then 13 million. Do not ask me why. It just is.

  3. EDouglas says:
    September 22, 2007 at 4:47 am

    I’m not sure why it matters to you so much, waterbucket. There are a lot of factors that go into my predictions and one of them is that… seriously, when has a movie ever made exactly $22,000,000 or $12,000,000? Almost never. And I’ll tell you the same thing that someone told me before I started doing the weekend predictions every week (which I might add, continue to be the first predictions posted by anyone every single week)… if you think you can do better, you’re welcome to try. Predicting weekend box office is often a thankless gig where no one ever says anything when you’re dead-on yet everyone is always jumping on you whenever they disagree.

  4. waterbucket says:
    September 22, 2007 at 5:40 am

    I’m not belittling your job of box office predicting at all. Because I wouldn’t know what the hell the formula should be to do it and frankly, I don’t really worry that much about how rich the studios will be this year.
    My complaint is regarding the mathematical presentation of the predictions. Of course no film will gross exactly 22 mil just like no candidate will win exactly with 52% of the vote and the number of candy in a jar at the fair is never exactly 180. But when you make predictions with such large margins of error, you can’t present it like Present Bush has an approval rating 44.34 plus or minus 4%. It doesn’t make any sense. And since everybody is likely to be off by at least a couple of mil for the top movies at the box office, they should all round up their predictions since a 0.1 mil in the prediction doesn’t matter if the margin of error is as large as 3 or 4 mil.

  5. Cadavra says:
    September 22, 2007 at 11:05 am

    You might as well ask why gas is $2.89 and 9/10th instead of simply $2.90.

  6. waterbucket says:
    September 22, 2007 at 11:55 am

    That doesn’t make any sense. If you want to argue statistics then at least show some effort.

  7. Cadavra says:
    September 22, 2007 at 4:24 pm

    Ummm…I was agreeing with you.

  8. waterbucket says:
    September 22, 2007 at 9:48 pm

    Ok….thanks? =)

  9. KamikazeCamelV2.0 says:
    September 23, 2007 at 12:47 am

    You could say that more films have grossed $12.4 mil than $12mil exactly so why not?

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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