Exits

MPAA chief Dan Glickman is heading out the door next year, having survived be the The Guy After Jack. (That’s Jack Valenti, if you aren’t playing inside baseball.)
Dan is a good man and a smart man and not Jack. And that is the issue facing the major studios – they are, in fact, the MPAA – as they look to fill the slot again. The industry has been lacking for a mouthy spokesparent, a role Valenti played to the hilt. Valenti also had the authority, by nature and by the length of tenure, to push back against the moguls a bit.
The role of lobbyist is important. And the industry needs a pro who knows his or her way around Washington. But I think it really needs that big voice, to fight the fight when the media starts defining the story and the studios themselves don’t want to put their necks on the line.
==========
Kevin McCormick is out of his slot at WB. Not a shock. But not insignificant. Robinov continues to build his power base for when Alan Horn retires.
This is also clears McCormick to head into a top slot elsewhere – and God knows, others are looking – come the new year.

Spike Jonze Goes The Full Kanye

And The Paranomral Gimmicks Just Keep Comin'…

Gerard Butler Leads Q-300 in "Don Abs, Do Tell"

Hi there… I want to ask you guys a big favour…

From the inbox –
Hi there…
I want to ask you guys a big favour…
It would be awesome if you could place an article about me scooping for the new TARZAN movie directed by Stephen Sommers!
David Bentley from the COVENTRY TELEGRAPH also placed an article about me to be considered for the TARZAN MOVIE….
I would highly appreciate it if you could do something like that…I can send you some more photos if you like…
Here is some more information about myself.
Well like I said before I’m a highly self motivated 22- year old bodybuilder and actor.
I’m a huge TARZAN fan ( the walls of my room mostly consists out of Tarzan posters and movie stars) and I live and breathe movies…which is why my dream is to one day move to America/USA and become an actor (movie star) there… as California is the film/entertainment capital of the world.
I’ve been to the UK(London) for a year to gain life experience and enjoyed it there very much, but still I find the USA my final destination.
I’m currently staying in George, South Africa, in the garden route, which is between Capetown and Port Elizabeth.
Honestly I dont have that much film experience (I’ve been working with an Israeli fim company to do a comercial shot at Mosselbay, South Africa/ I’ve done some stage acting as well) but I believe that THE WILL TO WIN IS MORE CRUCIAL THAN THE SKILL TO WIN… and anything that I dont know by now I’m willing to learn very fast…
Though I’m outside the STATES it would be an honour to be part of this new TARZAN movie thats now in production by STEPHEN SOMMERS at WARNER BROS.
I’m an outdoor type of guy, and like to do a lot of challenging things such as: horse riding/ canoeing /target shooting/ hunting/ swimming/ working out/ mountain climbing/ cycling and anything that is physiqly demanding.
My personality is very open. I’m an extrovert and an outgoing kind of person.I worked a few years at a local gym where you are constantly working with people which is awesome.
BodyBuilding is my other passion which is a healthy sport and has tought me a lot of dedication and discepline. I have done quite a few local bodybuilding competions and placed always in the top 6. It would be awesome to compete in the USA shows someday…
Finally I have a great family and a twin brother who has basically the same interests as me such as bodybuilding and movies.
Thats about it for now….and thanks for the oppertunity to be in contact with you guys.
Hope to hear from you soon…
REGARDS
DEWET DU TOIT

Weekend Estimates by Klady – October 18

Dumb overguessing based on Friday’s WTWTA numbers happened. And I think it is 100% safe to say that no one has the slightest f-ing idea what Sunday is really going to look like. Will more families show up? Fewer? You know when we’ll know? When they show up at the movies and buy tickets. In the meanwhile, I think WB is playing this conservative, knowing they have the #1 movie and with no interest in being embarrassed by overestimating.
$21m+ is a very strong start for Gerry Butler and Law Abiding Citizen. Inglourious Basterds, Obsessed, Taken, and The Taking of Pelham 123 are really the only better openings this year in this genre range. It’s not world beating, but really nothing to sneeze at either.
Screan Gems’ The Stepfather suffered from opening opposite LAC. They should have moved the date.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is Sony’s first $100m domestic animated movie. Major landmark. Slowly, they are building a strong rep with movies that have been consistently well reviewed and well liked.
Capitalism: A Love Story is on its way to grossing half of what Sicko grossed. Better days for Michael Moore in future, I hope… but this movie deserved its fate. Weak tea.
And a business note, since Patrick Goldstein’s overzealous drum beating on C:ALS reminded me… he wonders why Paramount is releasing the GI Joe DVD in November. It’s called Christmas, dummy. In years past, they could release a DVD like that at any time of year an expect big numbers. Now, they need to go where the money is. And they want Transformers 2 and GI Joe to be the 2 DVDs that the parent of every male kid feels compelled to buy for Christmas or even earlier. But Christmas buying starts the week before Thanksgiving these days. If they are not in the Wal-Marts and Toys-R-Us-es in November, something else will be bought. Yes… they are cash flow desperate over there. But this is a smart and obvious move and no sane person expects them to make a habit of a shortened DVD window.

Review – Where The Wild Things Are

There are occasional reminders why, amidst all the bullshit that flies in my profession these days, I still write about movies. Today, that reminder is Where The Wild Things Are.
Simply put, it is the great film about divorce and its effect on children of this generation. The last English-language film that hit the subject so cleanly and skillfully was Alan Parker

Where The Wild Things Aren't

Good morning, San Francisco.
Thanks to jet lag, it was an early breakfast at Miller’s (love that place) and the chance to get in the secod screening of Where The Wild Things Are that I have wanted to see before writing about the film, all before noon. (I know some people live like this all the time, but morning has become exotic to me over the years.)
So, off I went to the 10a show at the AMC. But wait… it is a “sensory enhanced” show. Ah. Huh?
It turns out that they have matinees sometimes specifically intended for autistic and otherwise sensorlly disabled kids. And guess what… I am not welcome. One father of a very sweet young lady who greeted me on line with a grab of my arm and a smile suggeted I just tell the ticket kid that I was autistic. I decided neither to fake it or to suggest he poll Hot Blog readers for confirmation.
Google Maps generously sent my through a half mile of homelessness, drugs, and rocked out rollers on the sidewalk down Ellis. It was both umcomfortble and a great reminder of how that contingent has become an accepted part of life in this city, just blocks from the most expensive hotels and retail stores in America.
Another reminder came at the doors of The Metreon, where 3 guards kept would-be ticket buyers at bay, the idea of the public entering this mall 15 minutes earlier than 10:30 apparently being a threat that would not be tolerated.
In any case… I am at an IMAX screen… a real one.. a real nice one… and looking forward to another look at this film, that like Fantastic Mr Fox, comes from a genius of children’s literature, unafraid of challenging children to think like… well… children. It is we adults who harbor all the fear in the world… and cause all the unnatural reasons for it.
So now, safe in my $12 non-3D seat, I will sit back, relax, and open myself to Max’s world… which can never come close to the surreal experience of highs and lows that this beautiful morning in this beautiful city has already offered…

Klady's Friday Estimates For Wild Things

Where The Wild Things Are is still getting mixed reviews, from raves to anguish and a lot of “I liked it, but it lost me somewhere” in between. This number reflects, however, the DaVinci Code of it all… the book is one of the most important children’s books in history and the images in the advertising will make any child – especially boys – anxious to get the the theater even faster than GI Joe.
An apology of sorts to Paramount on Paranormal Activity. I still think the media has lost its collective mind in overhyping this thing. I guess we have nothing else better to do. But it looks like they are now heading towards a competition with Cloverfield in terms of box office and not Snakes On A Plane. Smart, focused effort… very Searchlight… very Megan Colligan (and her talented team)… wonder whether Sumner is now thinking about whether she should have Brad Grey’s job… Brad should be very happy that they notion that was floated repeatedly over the summer of blaming/firing marketing after he blamed/fired Lesher didn’t come to fruition… in classic style, the marketing department shows how much smarter it is than production, selling a nothing little gimmick film into profits while the monster films of the leadership return weakly on their massive investments.

Good Night. Good Morning.

BYOB Weekend – Oct 16, 2009

Voynaristic Baits Polanski With Hard Candy

20+ years after Polanski seduced a 13-year-old with the promise of fame, augmented by champagne and a half-quaalude, Hard Candy’s photographer mixes a drink for a 14-year-old girl. She stammers something about how kids her age have been warned never to accept a drink fixed by someone else, dumps out the drinks he made, and makes a pair of fresh screwdrivers. When he wakes up strapped to a chair, Hayley’s baby-faced innocence is replaced by a hard, calculating stare. That rule about not accepting drinks made by someone else, she notes mockingly, doesn’t just apply to kids.
Roman Polanski’s lucky he’ll be dealing with the court system and not an avenging angel of raped and murdered girls in the innocent guise of a pixie haircut, open smile and red hoodie.

Priced To Death…

Back at LAX… I missed the place in the last 15 hours…
Anyway… I am not shy about paying for stuff while travelling. There is value in comfort. But when I stuck the NY Times and NY Post on the counter and then noticed the $2 price for each, my “no thanks” sensor went off.
It’s not like years past, when a NY paper was an exotic, so a high price was about me paying for overnight shipping and delivery so I could read the early edition and wouldn’t get another choice. These papers are now printed here and of the cost of production is not the same as home, it’s very close.
Maybe I was paying $2 for my daily Times last time I was in NY, in June, and it just didn’t register. But now it has.
It’s almost as though they want me to read it online… for free. $75 a month for one newspaper, figuring Sundays. That’s almost a monthly cable/satellite bill with premium channels.
I don’t want to be too dramatic. $900 a year will not leave most NYT readers sweating the mortgage. But it suggests that we could be heading to the reading of print being a choice of economic class in a more overt way. And soon enough, even at $150 a year for m-f only, with a delivery discount, how many businesses will kill off their multiple subscriptions?
Sigh…

DP/30 – An Education x2

Never Quite That Simple…

Returning to LA on Thursday night after a week in London, I did the rounds of all the sites, looking to see if anything much was happening. Not much was.
But Patrick Goldstein’s endless urge to slam “a bunch of bloggers and entertainment writers” in general, and in this case, using the London junket for The Fantastic Mr. Fox – which is what inspired and covered some of the cost of my aforementioned week in the city – as his excuse. His “issue” was that the production conflict between Wes Anderson and the animators who did the heavy-lifting on the film that the increasingly gossipy LA Times covered in a story last week. The question of this conflict was not addressed to Wes in a way that Patrick considers appropriate.
The problems with this are myriad.
First, Patrick has no idea what the content coming out of that trip is. He is using one blog entry by Jeffrey Wells as his basis for a general slamming of everyone on that trip. (How would he have felt had the LA Times paid for him to be there… as they do when business side writers like John Horn cover the very important – suck down the sarcasm – Maui Film Festival, a very nice event that has no business significance that can’t be seen from a desk in Los Angeles?)
Second, he is acting like junkets don’t happen om 50 weekends of the year and that the LA Times and every traditional media outlet that chooses to afford to be access them do just that, with all the upside and downside that all junkets have.
Third, while slamming Wells and presumably everyone else who he wants to see as lower on the food chain than he – however inaccurately – he does zero reporting in order to understand what the complete picture of what he is writing about is… in other words, he is every bit as much of a one-trick pony as he wants to accuse others of being.
But the biggest problem I have with this is at the core. There is an entire world of journalism out there and not all of it is about the same thing. Ironically, I brought up a conversation about this with other journos over the course of the 2-day junket. Even the LA Times has writers who are looking to break business-side news on films while another is covering the artistry while another is doing a review.
It is not every writer’s job to be investigative… as a suck-up/attack-dog like Patrick must know as he rolls out his Rolodex into self-serving insights from movie friends on his blog on a weekly basis.
This brings up the other Big Lie in Patrick’s piece, which is the notion that his bias is news-focused and not a personal position extended into an allegedly objective story.
Particularly in this case, where Chris Lee and his editors decided to hype one minor piece of insight into a piece of headline-stealing Newssip. Three members of the production team offered that they were uncomfortable with Anderson’s way of doing the work, essentially upset that he did not live on the stage where they produced the stop-motion over the course of a couple of years. One of the three openly acknowledges that part of the discomfort is that Anderson asked him to do things differently than has been done before. The LA Times chose to judge this rather than report this…
“Despite a near-total ignorance of stop-motion production design, Anderson instructed Emmy-winning art director Nelson Lowry to steer clear of certain visual tropes that have come to characterize modern animation — to basically turn his back on modern technology that would have made the animation process easier.”
Wait… did the paper just attack a director for “steer(ing) clear of certain visual tropes that have come to characterize modern animation?” Is that a BAD thing?
This is now a daily issue in how we all cover the film industry. Nikki Finke is the drag queen of it, her act being a brilliant approximation of the woman in Showgirls who has a lever that shows her boobs as a punch line for every bad joke she tells on the stage of Cheetahs. It’s all about the whoopi cushion fart that makes everyone laugh and very rarely about any real insight. The disease – which was always there, but much more mild – keeps spreading and getting more virulent as writers and editors compete for attention and status as “important,” whether it is the LA Times or an independent blogger.
This year, it’s GI Joe and Bruno and Star Trek and Julie & Julia and Up and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 and Funny People and Watchmen and right now, Paranormal Activity, and more… and Avatar to come.
Media is compelled to tell the story BEFORE the story. And it has made for some horrible work which is as often driven by predetermined, unsupported bias as by actual news or even good gossip.
For the last few years, every Pixar movie was going to underperform in the view of some movie-ignorant Wall Street analyst, and every time, the media has followed like sheep. NY-based Old Media writers for whom Nora Ephron is a god, hyped her film beyond its ability to deliver as a film… but then the film got written off at the box office prematurely, somewhat in response. Bruno is a $45m movie that made $137m worldwide, but you would never know that from a media made uncomfortable by a film about the very idiotic hype that we bump out as a group every day. Star Trek is a film people like, but will not be profitable… shhhhhh. And on and on.
When is the last time an event like Avatar‘s sneak peek screenings happened in the film world? Answer: Never. But if you read the media, constantly jostling for position, you would think that Paranormal Activity, with $12.5 million in the bank, likely on the way to two or three times that, is The Story of The Year and Avatar is a minor afterthought, almost a failure already. It’s insanity. And it’s not about news value. It’s about ego.
We’re in the middle of it with Where The Wild Things Are right now, as the film turns the corner with rave reviews and potentially very strong box office. But still, people like Patrick – using Anne Thompson as a springboard – are still finger-wagging because it took so long to become the film that Spike Jonze wanted to make. Is this position straight reporting or newssip with a built-in bias because of how Anne or Patrick or whomever feels about the film?
For me, the answer to the Fantastic Fox newssip – which I was completely aware of before I left for England, more than a week before sitting down with Wes and Bill Murray – was to be found in the film itself. Was there evidence of a stylistic conflict in the film itself? Was there any indication – not offered in the LAT story – that there was a business problem for Fox in how Anderson did his work?
The answer is “no.”
From start to finish, there is no question about who made this film. It is Wes Anderson is every way. In fact, it is perhaps the most notable thing about the film is how clearly this is his film. Even George Clooney, not saying much of anything at the overflow press conference loaded with print media journalists from major outlets asking some of the worst questions you will ever hear (George’s martial status being asked about in one out of every three queries), talked about going into the project wondering who the film was being made for… the eternal Wes Anderson question. And the answer that keeps making itself clear is that they are made for Wes the way Wes chooses to make them with the people Wes chooses to work with.
Remember when we used to get excited when artists got big, “dumb” studios to pay for their art… to make the movies they wanted to make and not some processed version of what they wanted to make? Remember when that was seen as good and not as an excuse for an attack piece?
In Newssip World, the artist is forever under attack because anything that is not formulaic… anything that sticks out… is fodder for hacks who are looking to make noise for themselves.
Please note: I am not calling Chris Lee a hack because of this story. I blame his editors, who have embarrassed him by directing his story towards the negative. And I am not defending Wes Anderson as a matter of “the artist is always right.” This is an equally foolish stance. Anyone with eyes and ears can see that he is an odd guy. Maybe he is a pain in the ass. Maybe his style cost Fox millions in overruns. But if there is a serious story about his method of working on this film being a serious problem, it is not in Chris Lee’s piece.
So… is it the responsibility of serious journalists – or even junket goofs, most of whom are old media print writers and television folks – to make LAT’s bit of newssip the central theme of our coverage?
Of course not.
It is very important to note that even in the LAT piece, Wes Anderson is not shy about speaking about his method in working on this film. You would think, with all the negative energy, that he is just making excuses. And indeed, he may have been spring-loaded to discuss more process because of the LAT piece’s negativity. But he is a filmmaker who seems ready – anxious, even – to get into the discussion of his process. If you have seen a single piece of hype for this film that sells the idea that Wes was on the set, manipulating the puppets, it will be news to me.
I should also point out, I have no love or admiration for the junket process as it works now. It is a machine and not in any way a call for serious discussion or insight. But it should also be noted that the posters for the film have quotes from Esquire, Empire, Elle, and Rolling Stone that were obviously squeezed out long before any junketeer or blogger got on the plane to London. What is broken about this system is worth discussing. But it is not what Patrick Goldstein wants to talk about.
Patrick has a disease that is very popular across the e-media spectrum these days… I-itis. As in, if I (or my paper) covered it in this way, that angle on the story is the important one, it must be seen as news, and it must be The Story.
But this is a load.
“But we broke it… it matters… the story is this bit of minutiae that we OWN… anyone simply addressing the work and not making about something negative is BAD… waaaaaaaaaaaa…”
And while I can’t speak to Wells’ work, as I don’t and won’t read it, my sense of the experience is that Anderson addressed the issue – as he does in the very same LAT piece, which could easily of spun positive with exactly the same quotes, if it so chose – over and over and over again.
It is process, not result. And process CAN matter. But as I have been publicly saying for over a decade now, deconstructing process without using the work itself as a touchstone is idiotic. It’s terrible journalism. And it adds nothing of importance to the conversation.
Many of us blur the lines these days. It would be unfair for me, as one of the first to become a hybrid of business journalist, critic, advocate, and yes, sometime gossip, to claim that there is an easy, clear standard by which we all should live. But in the film world, we are, often, covering art. And when we wear our journalist hats, our opinions about the art are the least important part of anything that touches on news about the art or artists. We forget this. It is, sadly, all about us too much of the time. This is not an excuse for the self-indulgence of everyone who claims to be an artist. The artists certainly can be massive egotists and often make work that stinks.
But if WHORE and HARDASS are the only two options, we do the arts a massive disservice. Worse, we are lying to ourselves… and our readers.
Really, this is the endless arrogance of Old Media, back when one outlet or one writer (backed by unseen editors) defined most stories. And now, guys like Patrick want to have it both ways, slamming Jeff Wells for not asking the question he thinks he would ask (from the comfort of his desktop) in an entry surrounded by outright suck-ups to Ken Levine and Toby Emmerich.
Do better. All of us. Do better.