The Hot Blog Archive for March, 2005

Send Me Some Peanuts & Crack…er Jack

Badnewsbears

NewParamount can smell a burgeoning success with The Bad News Bears… so instead of just sending out the trailer, they added a little something to make sure we don’t care if we ever get back. Is it root, root, root for the movie?

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DEEP THROAT'S b/o numbers

A COMMENTER INSPIRES A NEW ENTRY…

Dave – did you comment on this followup article about DEEP THROAT’S b/o numbers by Fenton and Co? Personally I’m siding with Michael Hiltzik on this one. Fenton and Co take some singular data and then apply it as a universal rule. Bean counters, these guys aint.

The Fenton & Barbato Letter

Posted by: jeffrey boam’s doctor | March 8, 2005 12:21 PM

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Props Where Props Are Deserved

I have been a hard ass in the past regarding the New York Times’ coverage of the industry. And I don’t think I’ve been too harsh.

However, the package the put together on the Sony transition to Howard Stringer in Tuesday paper was masterful.

Even more impressive has been the last two days at the Wall Street Journal, where perspective stories on Chinese piracy managed to break news. And they also broke the story of Mel Gibson returning money to churches that were charged a screening fee by Regal Cinemas for preview screenings of The Passion of The Christ that were supposed to be free.

And on top of that, they did coverage of the Sony story that was as good and often better than the New York Times coverage.

The L.A. Times Tuesday edition won’t go online until Midnight pst, but the company town paper had their ass kicked and kicked badly on this story. The L.A. Times itself does not have the resources that the NY Times and WSJ have in Asia… but as part of The Tribune Company, shouldn’t they?

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Ken Tucker On Gunner Palace

New York Magazine is now at the bottom of the list of silly publications that think anyone can be a film critic after replacing their celebrated critic, Peter Reiner, not with a gender or race motivated hire, but with another white middle aged man whose primary value was that he was less qualified for the job.

But Ken Tucker embraced the worst of all criticism with his review of Gunner Palace last week, going into full Alice in Wonderland mode. You see, because filmmakers Michael Tucker and Petra Eperstein showed the truth of what they found (subsequently confirmed in military screening after military screening) and did not make a film about how evil the Bush Administration is, Tucker felt the film was a failure. Films are much better with the political context in which he believes, apparently, assuring that audiences don’t have to waste their time thinking for themselves.

For me, this is as close as you get to evil in film criticism. Quote whores are meaningless in comparison. Any critic whose take on their beat is “this better fit my world view or not only will I say I don’t like it, but I will pillory the filmmakers as irresponsible fools.” To hide that position behind the critical veil of “bad filmmaking” is really low.

Of course, when confronted about this by actual soldiers who disagree and took offense, both at the characterization of the film and of the soldiers in the film, Tucker finally responds by trying to weasel out of what he said. You see, he claims, the view of the soldiers that he found so distasteful is not a reflection of how he perceives reality, but of how the filmmakers made the soldiers appear. It’s not that this snob, who then deigns to explain that another doc is much more accurate when as far as I know he has no point of reference for that determination other than his opinion, just finds the rank and file of the army distasteful… that he is uncomfortable with the realities of who is fighting for his country in Iraq. It is someone else’s fault. And of course, it is all George Bush’s fault… all negativity must be all Bush’s or it is bad negativity.

The last time I experienced something this infuriatingly stupid in this way was a decade ago when I saw one of Michael Moore’s first films, Blood In The Face, which showed American Neo-Nazis’ daily lives and half the Sundance audience of Facist Liberals (a specific group) raged at the filmmakers for not being clear enough that Nazis were bad. They didn’t trust other audiences – they were smart enough to get it, but those people… – to figure it out for themselves. So they would prefer silencing truth to risking the nightmare of letting people make up their own minds.

I seem to remember liking Ken Tucker at EW… nice guy… but I don’t like or respect this kind of thinking and I am embarrassed for our profession. We are, I thought, supposed to be in the work of considering the work with both objective and subjective tools. And this is, for Mr. Tucker, a clear failure.

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David Poland & Associates Says…

I can’t reveal my secret formula, but 7 minutes into the Tivo of “The Starlet,” there are only three of the girls that have any chance to win the thing… I have a 92.736% accuracy rate on this, but I can’t explain what that means.

It’s Andria, Mercedes & Cecile.

And the Neva girl… the one who says she’ll do anything to make it… she’ll be the first to have anal sex in the parking lot behind the Sunset Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf with a guy who has a card that says “producer” and keeps calling her “Neve.”

Updated At The End Of The Show: Andria is already gone. Mercedes is now 75% to win the show.

It’s funny… a show like this is probably the most easy to judge of any reality show I have ever seen. It is so clear that most of the girls just don’t have it in them to be starlets. There are more than a couple who can be working actors on TV. But half of these girls could not act their way out from under a…. well, they can’t act.

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Wow!

Every once in a while, a new spin/scam on Hollywood emerges… and this weekend, we saw one come to life on our very own Hot Blog. I think it deserves its own section. (sunlight.. disinfectant… etc)

There is a company called Michael Adams & Associates that is attempting to claim that they can consult a script to profitability. They have a formula!!!

Besides being an extraordinary bucket of gobbledygook full of non-statistical statiscial analysis, they run the very popular scam of “forecasting” after movies are in theaters…

“The Motion Picture Performance Index forecasts are released on this site before 6 am, Pacific Standard Time on the day after the wide-release opening of any film playing in a minimum of 500 theaters in the United States.

Forecasts are available on this website BEFORE studios can publish box-office dollar revenues on each new film, insuring that forecasts come from our product playability data and not from studio box-office reports.”

Did anyone tell these guys that studios don’t “publish” Friday numbers, though tracking of estimated grosses starts coming in around noon p.s.t. and continues all afternoon?

They explain…

“MAA forecasts are generated through discrete reviews of script construction, story line and the expected casting, plus an analysis of the inherent production component formulations, and a calculation of income possibilities BEFORE the film goes into pre-production.

Though compatible with other methodologies, MAA forecasts are not generated by random audience research, celebrity polls, pre-production test marketing, comparative dollar forecasting, or genre-oriented
projection models. We do not use pre-screening data or other methods which are used too late to eliminate production errors.

MAA uses 1. cinematic archetypal performance modeling, 2. proprietary psychometric algorithms for numerical valuations, and 3. graphic audience response technology to predict playability and build the successful word-of-mouth that generates domestic audience attendance and world-wide profits as well.”

Then they claim:

“The current forecasting ability of the MP4I™ is 92.96% accurate year to date.”

In other words, they missed 7% already, despite not predicting – and this is a killer – whether a film will go into profit via the domestic box office ONLY until after grosses come in from Friday afternoon… numbers which will give you 90% accurate weekend numbers and can be built out into a long-range estimate from there. Of course, we’re only into the first weekend of March, so none of the films being tracked are even out of domestic release yet.

But this is not all…

I stand by this… anyone who tries to determine the fiscal success or failure of a film based on a screenplay alone is either a charlatan or a moron. It is trecherous to try to speak to fiscal success based on a finished picture most of the time! But a screenplay? And worse, do these guys have any idea what draft of the screenplay they are reading?

Moreover… no one in the film world calculates profitability based on domestic box office alone anymore… no one. Even if you did just stick to domestic numbers, these guys take no account of foreign territory pre-sales or investments… it would seem because they don’t quite understand that they exist.

AND they are guessing at budgets with remarkable inaccuracy.

But otherwise… this is a great deal.

These guys have been posting on the blog for a while… seem like nice enough, smart enough people. But this “consulting business” would be the dictionary definition of “showbiz bullshit.”

Michael Adams may not know this, but there are guys and gals at every studio and every film finance company that calculates the elements on every film before green lights too. There are people who are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year because they understand the real value of talent in international markets… and they still are wrong all the time. And every studio has what are called “ultimates,” which are predictive of total revenue from their films, which start before production and are adjusted as circumstances warrent. But these estimates are remarkably accurate… even when they are negative about the product.

When I looked at the site, I thought perhaps it was satire. But it takes itself way too seriously for that, it seems.

Hollywood. Go figure.

Your disagreement is welcome. Your laughter is expected.

But I offer this to Michael Adams & Assoc… I will commit my resources to a weekly look at the forecasting of this wannabe business. I have only one rule… forecasts by 11p Thursday night. I will gather and publish these predicitions. I will be your vessel… and if you are for real, it’ll be great for you… and if you aren’t, it’s back to Starbucks in record time.

30 Comments »

Early Box Office Analysis

Early Box Office Analysis

It will be hailed as a surprise on Sunday night, but anyone who was really paying attention could see The Pacifier coming a mile away. Genre, genre, genre… and this is a high concept idea in a market that hasn’t seen a good, commercial kids’ film since Lemony Snicket. This is a market so hungry that Racing Stripes did almost $50 million. How big with the Saturday bump be here? It looks like The Pacifier could pass Constantine’s $29 million start.

Even if you don’t count Vin Diesel as multi-cultural, at the end of the day the Jan-Feb winter slot will be dominated by non-Caucasian stars, with Hitch, Are We There Yet? , and Coach Carter currently as the Top Three releases of these two months. (I expect that The Pacifier will become the #2 film of the season.) Diary of A Mad Black Woman will likely be the #7 film of the season… and if you add The Pacifier, that’s five of the top seven in this period being very successful and of color. Suddenly, the pressure on the Sundance pick-up Hustle & Flow to gross at least $50 million becomes real.

Meanwhile, Be Cool is doing about the right amount, projecting out to about $20 million for the three-day. Get Shorty opened to $12.7 million in 1995, when there was more heat around Travolta. This opening will be roughly analogous to the Ladder 49 opening in October, which was Travolta’s best launch in five years and third best of his career. So, Travolta may be a bit more valuable now than he has been recently… and you still need “the movie” to get people to show up in even bigger numbers. It would be fascinating to look at the exit polling to see how many people showed up for The Rock playing gay and/or Vince Vaughn playing “wigger” this weekend… and if anyone showed up for the story.

Last weekend’s phenom, Diary of A Mad Black Woman, looks to drop about 55%, though there is some room to better that mark with Sunday unaffected by the Oscars. Of course, if you believe Chris Rock about black men and the Oscars…

Oscar winner Million Dollar Baby looks to up its income by about 10%, which is not back considering that we’re over a month into wide release. It is looking like Eastwood’s opus could end up being the first Best Picture film to cross the $100 million barrier, though if Miramax is committed to the notion of it, The Aviator will get there as well.

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The Most Influential Super Bowl Ad Since Apple's Mac Revolution?

What hath the FedEx/Kinko’s Dancing Burt ad wrought?

First, New Line did a Son of The Mask ad hat ran through the things that a great family movie needed.

Now, the new Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy trailer is essentially another knock-off of the idea… “here are the things that go into a movie trailer.”

I’m not really objecting… but it is amazing how powerful that idea was and how movie poeple jumped all over it so quickly.

CLARIFICATION – A reader writes: “The Ad Production company that did the Hitchhiker’s trailer started working on that trailer in November or December, long before that Kinkos ad. It’s based on the book. The “Guide” in the book gives definitions to things. That’s why fans of the book are so crazy for that trailer.”

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Who Will Denise Richards Next Marry?

Following the “Charlie Sheen’s ex” formula (which would also explain why a woman would leave the father of her children mid-pregnancy)….

She’s too big for Tom Cruise.

Kevin Spacey might not be rich or kind enough.

Vin Diesel, maybe?

Or she could just head up to Ojai, lose the ‘plants, and settle in with some reclusive billionaire that wants her to grow out her armpit hair.

It’s not easy being a Sheen ex.

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Are You Feeling The Oscar Hangover?

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Jackson Suing New Line

How much money needs to be in play for this suit to actually be taking place out in the public eye?

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How Much Disclosure?

The LA Times nailed Zorianna Kit for attacking Brad Grey as a journalist without disclosing that her husband, a producer, had lost a lawsuit to him in recent years.

That does seem to be a clear conflict… even if her comments were not inaccurate.

And of course, we have to look at why the L.A. Times is running that story today.

But what do you think? All entertainment writers have a lot of relationships. Can Zorianna Kit never mention Paramount again because her husband once had a beef with the film chief? And what of positive relationships?

How much disclosure works for you? Or do you care at all?

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The Hot Blog

Quote Unquotesee all »

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