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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Team Rudin's Ventriloquist Act

God… I hate feeling like I have no choice but to address Crazy Nikki. But here we are… Nikki is the gossip columnist of the moment and here she goes, taking her source’s side, 100%, and as always, going so far off the deep end that she is exposing the source to ridicule for not being able to control their pet monkey.
Today, it is about The Reader.
I don’t know if it’s 42 West or Rudin’s office itself that is publishing its list of grievances in the guise of Nikki “reporting” the story (aka “opening her e-mail”), but when Nikki is “in possession of plaintive emails from Daldry, and angry letters from entertainment law pitbulls,” you know that she is passing along something that someone else is selling.
(Isn’t it ironic that on the same day she is “reporting” this and attacking Harvey, she continues to suck up to her bosses at Paramount, who have done no wrong by her assessment, in years?)
The tricky part is that all of this is interesting. Nikki, pretending to be unbiased, does deliver the lunchtime rage of one very self-interested side of the story. It’s not journalism. It’s gossip, as all of this inside baseball tends to be. But there is a value to it.
It occurs to me that all of media, online and off, is becoming a place where you not only have to read what is printed, but you have to very seriously consider where the information is really coming from and what the motives of both the sources and the outlets involved are. God knows, this is a big part of the media story this election cycle.
Anyway…
Take a look at Nikki’s thing.
I’ll offer a couple of notes here…
1) “The Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s delivery date of November 7th” doesn’t exist. Movies are screened for the HFPA well after November 7 every year. I think she is referring to the joke known as The NBR.
2) Nikki parroting the dismissal that “Hollywood trades were also suckered by Weinstein’s other spin that Rudin… didn’t want his actors or his pictures competing against themselves. But that’s a ridiculous argument,” is, in fact, ridiculous.
This is spin from the Rudin camp, which would like people to believe that they are not concerned that The Reader will pull focus from Revolutionary Road. However, it is 100% true that they are ALL worried that The Reader will pull focus from Rev Road. That has been the story for months now. It does not mean that Rudin or anyone else thinks that The Reader itself is a behemoth that will crush Rev Road’s chances. But it muddies the water… and not just the public view of it.
First, let’s just look at the calendar. Scott Rudin seems to have at least 2 “Oscar movies” every year. But he doesn’t let his BP candidates release on top of one another. Last year, it was No Country For Old Men in early November and There Will Be Blood at Christmas. Second tier chasers The Darjeeling Limited and Margot at the Wedding were, respectively, launched in September and dumped (never more than 80 screens) in November. The year before, it was The Queen vs Notes on a Scandal… September and December.
No one wants to fight themselves head on, at the box office or in awards season. Had the plan been to release The Reader in December, Rudin would have surely pushed to have Sam Mendes – who is only still adjusting Rev Road because he started shooting This Must Be The Place in April, a date by which he had expected to be finished on Rev Road – to have Rev Road ready for an October release. It’s not exactly brain surgery. The only self-competing experience that comes close to this for Rudin was The Royal Tenenbaums and Iris, opening on the same day in 2001… but Royal went wider quickly and Iris was really a qualifiing run, not cracking 40 screens until March of 2002.
The other Rev Road/Reader release problem is that it represents, from the day Rudin & Weinstein teamed, a combination of behind the scenes marketing and publicity talent that is conflicted, both in terms of the immediate issue of release, as well as the long relationships in town. Rudin’s point people are at 42 West, a company driven greatly by people who used to work for Harvey… and who carry the scars of that history. They did a lot of great things together. But the end was bitter. Moreover, Harvey’s ongoing team is spread around town, as he didn’t have a lot to push this season, so they have other obligations, some exclusively. On top of that is the Kate Winslet problem.
Doubt really is on a different track altogether. Miramax’s relationship and enormous awards success working with 42 West is every bit as well established as the relationship with Rudin, who also produced this movie. There is a built-in conflict there. But unlike the Paramount Vantage situation, there is a lot less cross-over between the film’s teams.
3) ”Instead, this conflict has everything to do with Weinstein and little to do with Rudin.”
Yes. Wrote that a week ago. Not news.
But that doesn’t mean that Rudin & Co are now trying to bury Harvey in response to the choice to do exactly what Rudin did not want him to do.
And if you believe that it was about Daldry’s post schedule, I have some shares in Lehman Bros to sell you.
4) “Insiders insist to me that Harvey’s desperation to release The Reader this year is because of The Weinstein Co’s money woes. One of my sources heard Harvey say that if he can’t afford to hold The Reader and, if he can’t get it out this Christmas, then he’ll dump it in February.”
Thanks for reading The Hot Blog, Nikki.
5) ”Yet puzzled insiders tell me three other film companies want to buy the pic and release it properly in 2009.”
Uh… bullshit.
Three other companies want to buy the nearly-complete picture without having seen it?
More like Scott Rudin has gotten Dan Battsek and/or Peter Rice and/or Chris McGurk to say that they are interested in floating the budget and interest costs to have what seems to be an interesting film for next year’s Oscar race. Rice, in particular, is about to make a killing on WB dumping Slumdog Millionaire into his lap at a deep discount after he passed on making the film because he felt the budget was too high. Cleaning up messes can be a winning position for studios who have the deep pockets to do it. But it’s not like there’s a bidding war out there for The Reader.
And when has Harvey Weinstein ever sold a movie that he liked, aside from the movies that Disney wouldn’t releasse?
I mean, this is a lame one to throw out there.
6) “Insiders have told me that Rudin and Daldry and Winslet were all threatening The Weinstein Co not to support the film. That would have been a TKO for Harvey’s Academy Award dreams.”
Thanks again for reading, Nikki.
The bottom line here is that Harvey Weinstein got done what he needed to get done. He couldn’t afford to take the loss by dumping the movie – which February would have been – and he can’t afford to pay interest for another year. So he’s throwing a quarter of his additional costs of waiting onto the fire to get the post finished without a war.
He still won’t have Winslet working for his movie. He is still fighting off not only Rev Road, but Ed Zwick’s Defiance as well (another Par Vantage release).
Scott Rudin, a very sharp cookie, is using Nikki to bludgeon Harvey… he’s hoping, to movie death. Unfortunately, Nikki doesn’t know the beat well enough to know when she’s overshooting reality.
And truth told, not that many others do either. But I can tell you… everyone who knows the players and the situation do know. And starting with the crazy “Rudin Wins” headline yesterday, they knew someone had fallen down the rabbit hole.
Go ask Nikki… when she was just small.

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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