Keanu, Vera & Jimmy Get A Spark Of Life

I’m not quite sure what kind of theatrical distribution the deal for Henry’s Crime will actually bring. But we’ll see. Lots of brand new distribution companies in the marketplace.

Here is the DP/30 with the cast…

Black Swan, actor Barbara Hershey

DP/30 Blast from The Past: Hans Zimmer

Wednesday

A new day.

Death reminded us about living, about what we carry with us, and what we will all have to deal with letting go some day.

This morning, I put some DP/30 in the oven, I’ve read with the kid, and now, I’m going to take some time to say “hi” to friends ans listen to their old shopworn jokes with an appreciative smile before I dive back into the mire.

More time for the people who do “get it,” less for those who don’t… just because you can fill all your time with the empty stuff and that only leads to regret.

Onward…

Black Swan, actor Vincent Cassel

Winter’s Bone, actor John Hawkes

Ronni Chasen, RIP

I don’t really have the words for this right now.

Ronni was a friend and a colleague. She was old school, but forever young in spirit.

Apparently, she was murdered.

It’s not hard to imagine Ronni fighting off some would-be assailant. She was a tough little perfectly coiffed woman.

People in offices all over Hollywood are mourning the loss of a friend, a character, and a consummate pro this morning.

She is already being missed.

ADD – A couple of notes. If you want to honor Ronni, editors out there, stop putting her age in the your headlines or leads. It was about the last thing she would want people thinking about when thinking about her.

And I haven’t seen noted that she leaves behind her older brother, Larry Cohen, famed genre filmmaker.

Fair Game, director Doug Liman

Black Swan, actor Mila Kunis

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These are the people you should web portal here follow and be inspired by.

Media Evolution Is Less Fun Than Intellegent Design

Sorry to be missing in action… the good part is that you’ll have enough Black Swan action this week to choke on… the bad news (or maybe it’s the good news?) is that I have been recharging the batteries.

Besides the work load lately, I must admit that I am profoundly exhausted by the endless parade of meaninglessness being pumped through our little media world, day and night, so incredibly self-reflective but utterly lacking in any perspective besides an ugly, desperate need for attention. If you’re saying, “Pot meet Kettle,” I get that. But it’s not the same.

I guess the version of this over the weekend that was most striking was an Exclusive that Jane Lynch would be in the next Muppet movie and then an EXCL (because it was such an important item that spelling out the whole word would just slow things down) that she hadn’t been asked. Of course, both “exclusives” were a function of someone asking a question at some roundtable and behaving as though casting news is really, really important.

Or maybe it’s the lazy and thoughtless way internal memos are now used as fodder to make a story out of nothing. Should people who work for Disney really be breaking the law of the State of California while driving, putting themselves and others in harms way? Is Disney wrong in any way for taking a firm position about not doing it? Is it possible that the studio took an extreme position on digital paper because employees don’t take it seriously, which is why a memo doesn’t need to go out telling people they will be fired if they murder someone, a much more serious offense, but also against the law.

But the bigger point… this internal memo is not really news, unless you’re doing a real story on how studios deal with their employees when their employees break the law. It’s water cooler chatter. And that is now what “journalism” has been reduced to, on Evil Blogs or Mainstream Dailies.

And i guess that my conclusion is… casting news is almost never really, really important. Who is penetrating who in their set trailer… not really important. Who washes their hands after peeing in a studio restroom… not really important. And if you want to write about who is switching from which agency to the other agency, please do it quietly, because a grand total of 37 people actually give a shit.

And yeah, you can say the same thing about Oscar. And yes, people are too wrapped up in it. And it gets silly. But at least the general notion is celebrating something people with some degree of taste like and wish to honor, not tearing down people or turning artistic intent into mush by analyzing each stroke of the brush before the brush even gets sullied by the first glob of paint.

I couldn’t really have had a nicer day dealing with a movie than I did on Saturday. As it turns out, pretty much everyone in and involved with Black Swan values their privacy in a real way and has some perspective on the madness. Yet, here they are, making a movie that is truly outrageous and smart and demanding and funny and impactful. And yes, they want attention to be paid. But while it seemed like every one of them could go diva on paper, not one was disconnected or uninterested in being engaged. (Whether I took them someplace worth going will be your judgment).

And then I emerge from the bubble of surprising calm and am slapped in the face with the full array of hungry, desperate media madness. Yet I feel silly caring because it’s all so so-what… but then I realize that that’s virtually all there is. It’s gotten to the point where pointing out any one idiotic story seems unkind to the “journalist” involved because it singles out one act of stupidity when there are so very many every day now.

We are hanging on to a past that cannot come back… and we’re barreling in a future without using our best judgment or making much of an effort to understand what you, as consumers of news, might want more than 90 seconds from now. We’re the Daily Beast, losing 8 figures a year, pretending it’s a heroic event to take over a bankrupt Traditional Media outlet that was sold for $1 in August and is now being re-leveraged just 3 months later as Barry Diller and The #2 Tina try desperately to figure out how to spend money like they did in the Good Ol’ Days putting out the kind of product that was profitable a decade ago and not lose money every month.

And to the media, this is BIG news.

Are we just all stupid now?

I have been in movie journalism for almost 20 years now and I said when I started and I still say, “There is virtually no journalism in movie journalism.” It crops up now and again, but almost every EXCLUSIVE you read is placed there by interested parties and when The Hollywood Reporter goes all cesspool and reports the sex lives of the studio executives as news right NOW because someone else will break it if it becomes actual news in a week or three, it’s a bunch of nasty gossip and not anything close to serious reporting, even if the person writing it up is a serious person at times.

It doesn’t even matter any more if you think you know something about a subject. Just start typing.

I guess, in some ways, I am now where the Traditional Media types were when many of us arrived via internet and were suddenly drawing attention away from their exclusive party of know-it-alldom. But it feels different to me because it feels, right now, like everyone on every level has thrown in the towel and wants to be all things to all people.

I mean, The Hollywood Reporter really is the porn star who specializes in anal, but is using the money to continuing studying Philosophy at UCLA (at least until she gets bored with people who know more than she does teaching her and jettisons them for a bedroom with a Bel Air view). Nikki Finke really is Broderick Crawford in Born Yesterday, hiring a bunch of Bill Holdens to make herself look legit and not just successful in acquiring power through thuggery, never realizing that it would crystallize the view of her own limitations. indieWIRE is the classic story of a successful ethnic restaurant that struggled to make it, finally got to be a stable business, but couldn’t help itself when it found a rich guy who wanted to pay for them to expand into the giant space next door, suddenly making the restaurant feel half-empty, which made the whole thing less attractive to those who loved its earlier intimacy and spunk. Variety decided to go exclusive… and are now realizing that they have nothing to sell that is remotely exclusive. The New York Times has become the least focused, least motivated major outlet covering the beat, basically fielding calls and filling out stories with quotes from the self-interested… which is better, I guess, than pretending the information was a product of reporting. And The Los Angeles Times is like a George Romero movie, mostly corpses, but with occasionally zombies rising up… but moving really slow and eventually getting shot in the head. (And ironically, has the most experience and real reporting talent on staff… that is kept inert… perhaps the greatest single mystery in movie journalism.)

And you want to know about the web? Let’s just say, as nasty as the paragraph was, there will be some web sites that are really upset that they were not included…. because they don’t care what one says about them or even what whorish messes they are, so long as they get links and mentions.

I guess what I’m saying is that I am overwhelmed by the noise these days. It’s almost all sugar cereal with the sprinkle of vitamins on it so they can say it’s nutritious in the commercials.

Fifteen years ago, I felt like I knew what I could do to try to contribute to raising the level of the conversation. Maybe I succeeded, maybe I failed… most likely, both. But I have always tried to work to my highest intelligence. I have never prioritized popularity. I was lucky to find some.

But right now, I don’t know. What can someone who has a small bully pulpit do to move things in a more productive, more respectful, more movie-loving direction? How can anything matter when everything seems so important that it is so profoundly meaningless?

As it turns out… here is a bit of carefully considered perspective from Ms. Natalie Portman, considering the nature of acting and the nature of how people engage with media these days…

Fattening Up For The Coming Media Ice Age

A quick thought…

The least talked about strategy in the current media environment is deep-pocketed media players – many of them newly on the field – quite intentionally putting on a layer of fat in anticipation of the Ice Age… or simply, the shakeout, if you will… that we are probably a year or two away from experiencing in New Media, which now also includes ALL Traditional Media.

But It’s not just news-type media. I mean, everything. Movies, television, internet, news, books, and on and on.

The filmed entertainment business (which includes TV) is still looking at a further correction, in my opinion, of the overall business being shrunk by another 10% – 20%. But even when that is done, technology and the short-sighted response to it, is likely to be the cataclysmic event in which we see massive changes… 1969 all over again. But as you all know, the industry survived the end of the old studio system and changed. Corporations bought in. Then, Home Entertainment changed it all again.

The machine will sustain its core. While one can say that, all things considered, the film business is still putting on a show in the barn, the changes to the studios, movie theaters, home entertainment, international theatrical, etc, are all massively different… even though a projector is still shining pictures on a screen.

It makes one wonder whether MGM’s creditors screwed up by going the Spyglass route. Thing is, Spyglass may be incredibly successful making movies for the next few years. There may be a slight upturn in valuations of libraries. But the billions in losses that are directly connected to nothing but the devaluation of film libraries at the end of the DVD wave are never being recovered. I believe it will get worse… and be incredibly wonderful for consumers of existing content.

The Spyglass choice – to ride it out and hope things will get better – is not the fattening up for the winter choice that Lionsgate would have been. Yes, the whole thing may have been eaten by Carl Icahn before there was a chance of turning it all around. Boo, Icahn! But if it doesn’t turn around – and if the Ice Age comes, as I think it will, it ain’t turning around – they will have to take even more losses, even in the face of Spyglass success.

But if they had merged with Lionsgate – and Icahn wanted a real merger, with him owning 50.1% – that would have been the FATTEST library in the world. And when the Ice thawed, they would be assured of a dominant position simply by being massive… something that Lionsgate has failed to make work, at least in the eyes of Wall Street, for a long time now, as they have built their library into a behemoth, had success with film, and still have never gotten the stock price up high enough to get bought out for the price they dream of getting.

On the other hand, Netflix is preparing for the Ice Age. When the freeze comes, they want to be one of the companies big enough and strong enough to survive. There is enormous mythology around this company, which did invent and execute one idea brilliantly. But owning digital delivery is a lot more complicated and unlikely. But if they can get fat enough when it all goes to hell in a hand basket, the theory is, they will have to survive and their fattiness will go from being a drain on the bottom line – which it will be in the next couple of years – to being a mighty asset that draws the product to them like moths to a the last flickering candle on earth.

Likewise, The Daily Beast eating Newsweek… all about the fat content. Newsweek is not worth much on paper, but the brand still draws eyeballs and perceived legitimacy. And for all the drool spilled over Tina Brown, turning 57 next week, she has not been able to create a financial winner on the web. (It’s okay… almost no one has… and HuffPo, often cited as the exception, wildly exaggerates their fiscal situation.) Hooking up with Newsweek will not fix this. But it will make the Beast brand fatter. And, so the theory goes, when the Ice Age comes, they will be so well branded that Diller will write off the losses and whatever the truly successful web effort called BeastWeek is going to be will emerge only then.

Of course, the next question is, how much ice will there be before NYT or News Corp buys Tribune for $1? Tick, tick, tick…

BYOB Monday

I started writing a little something on this BYOB… and then it became something else… soon to land…

Weekend Estimates by MegaUnstoppbale Klady

Not sure if there’s much to add to the Friday conversation…

Friday Estimates by Unstoppable Klady

I guess the November opening comparison that Fox would like for Unstoppable is Mrs. Doubtfire, which opened to $20.5m domestic and ended up at $220 million. Not likely. However, easy to imagine this weekend ending up as high at $25m – which would be Denzel’s 4th highest opening with 15 $15m+ openings – and like the train in the movie, speeding up. That may mean low-teen drops. $131 million would be Denzel’s top domestic gross… and that might be doable with this film, exactly because people who haven’t seen the film and are reading this and all the other raves and saying, “Seriously? A movie about a train going fast? I have to see that?” But the word of mouth should be pretty consistent… it’s a great ride… a movie movie… calorie content through the roof, nutritional value almost nothing… it’s the Cap’n Crunch w/ Crunch Berries & Chocolate Sauce of movies.

Skyline proves that you can blow up some of the people, some of the time, but not all of the people, all of the time. Still, $11.5 million is less disastrous than some might have expected. (It’s also less than many predicted.)

Morning Glory will be fortunate to open to Leap Year numbers. It’s hard to be sure just where Paramount went wrong on this one, but here are a few guesses. 1. Horrible Outdoor. “What’s the story, Morning Glory” is cute, but if you’re going there, you need to do the TV spots with the song from Bye, Bye Birdie and make something out of the phrase. Catchy is not enough. It was memorable, but told us nothing about the movie, except who was in it. 2. The Story Kept Changing In The Materials. What is it? Gruff Older Talent vs Up-N-Comer or classic rom-com? Pick! 3. The Movie Couldn’t Decide Either. As I wrote in my review, I think Diane Keaton confused the issue, having nothing to do with her talent or star power. She is a major actor in a minor role and I think that both overshadowed the core of the film, McAdams + Ford, and also felt unclear in the marketing.

Or maybe it was something else…

Red is having its first normal drop… but will still flirt with $80m by the end of the weekend and will be Summit’s #1 non-Twilight film, if not on Sunday, before mid-week.

Tabloid, director Errol Morris

DP/30 Testosterone Week comes to a close, not with the Biutiful boys, who should post on Monday after I work out a technical issue, but with the legendary Errol Morris, who was confronted by the subject of his new doc at a screening just this last weekend. Next week, it’s DP/30 Double Dip Week, with 2, count ’em 2, half hours premiering each weekday!