The Hot Button by David Poland

Thursday, 8 April 1999

THE 'NET STRIKES BACK: No, not at Star Wars. This is going to be a blind item. I almost never write blind items. I think they are generally so gossipy and stupid that they aren't worth printing. That said, I do not want to embarrass anyone involved anymore than they are already embarrassed. So, the story. A young Internet movie writer gets dumped off the screening list by Studio X. Why? He is told there is an MPAA list of accredited reporters that the studio has decided to stick to in choosing who makes their screening list. There apparently is such a list, but I sure never heard of it. So, some back and forth goes on and the writer gets an e-mail from someone at Studio X that mistakenly has an old e-mail in the e-mail chain attached, which reads in part, "Let's not encourage this loser." Ouch.
Said writer writes to me and a number of other on-liners for comfort and/or action. I decide to make a quiet call on his behalf, but before I have a chance, Big Gun Critic shoots off a note to the offending e-mailer redefining the role of loser to be "the kind of person who calls other people 'losers,' and then mistakenly sends the e-mail to the insulted party, after having manufactured a fictitious 'MPAA accreditation' requirement, which as far as I know does not exist." Bigger ouch. Bravo to the Big Gun Critic (you know who you are) and a little sympathy for the publicist who stepped on someone small and got stepped on by someone big. This is the kind of error of ego that gets people fired. I hope she goes way out of her way to take care of our young friend. He is obviously resourceful enough that he's going to be around a long while. Besides, in this business, lessons of humility that don't draw blood are hard to come by.
EN-FORCE-ING THE RULES: Great story by Andrew Hindes and Chris Petrikin of Daily Variety on Lucasfilm's demands on exhibitors for Star Wars: Episode One -- The Phantom Menace. I'm about to go over some of the demands, but make no mistake, I don't think these demands are unfair. Not in today's climate. If Warner Bros. tried to get them for The Wild, Wild West, that would be inappropriate. But I don't think there is an exhibitor out there who is going to get hurt by these demands. And Lucasfilm is insuring your moviegoing experience. OK, so the minimum run is either eight or 12 weeks, depending on the market. Every theater that gets the movie in a zone where there is more than one theater will have to run the film on at least three screens. (But who knows, Lucasfilm may choose a zone or two where they favor a single-screen house over the multi-plexes. I'm just telling you their rules.) One of those three screens will have to be the biggest in the multi and the movie can't be switched to other screens in the multi during the minimum run. No interlocking, which means one print per screen for better quality. (This will actually cost Lucasfilm more money in prints, so no one can really complain there.) On the downside, Star Wars will be a "Special Engagement," meaning no passes, for the first eight weeks.
But here is the really good stuff for us. No onscreen advertising for the first two weeks at any theater. No more than eight minutes of trailers (that's two trailers on top of Fox's two-and-a-half minutes of attached trailers.) And the whole shebang can start at 12:01 a.m., just one minute after Wednesday the 19th becomes a new day on the clock. So all those ticket-line sitters are going to be seeing a midnight show. May the force be with them.
COLUMN THIS: It seems unfair to praise Variety and then rip The Hollywood Reporter, but the Reporter's decision to make their columnists available on the 'Net is backfiring in this venue. Reading the Martin Grove column on how Goodbye, Lover "just fell together" and how they assembled a "dream team" made me laugh out loud even before reading the bizarre flack-intensive story. I don't even think Warner Bros. would have the guts to try to make this film, which has been sitting in a can for eons, look like a masterpiece of good fortune. I still haven't seen it because of my absurd schedule this last month and I hear that it's better than the shelving would indicate, but it's not a story of good fortune. Give me a break!
HELLO BOYS!: I love Mel Brooks. And I am sad that the film business has kind of passed him by. So, you can imagine that I was thrilled to hear that his 1968 classic, The Producers, (probably his best film ever) is going to Broadway. It should translate perfectly. If you haven't seen this movie, you haven't seen one of the best comedies ever made. Gene Wilder is brilliant, playing a man as brittle as a dry leaf. Zero Mostel is, as some Broadway critic once called him, a force of nature. And the turns by Kenneth Mars, Dick Shawn and Christopher Hewett (who went on to be TV's "Mr. Belvedere") were sheer genius. Brooks also loaded the film with early looks at faces you would come to know really well, including Renée Taylor, Barney Martin, William Hickey and Bill Macy (the one from "Maude," not the one from Fargo). Rent it tonight. And start answering your phone, "Bialystock and Bloom!"
DUCK, DUCK, LOSE: Earlier this week, Judge Edward Rafeedie decided that The Mighty Ducks screenwriter/creator Steven Brill's claim against Disney for part of the Mighty Ducks hockey team profits has enough merit to proceed to trial. Or at least not to dismiss the suit right now. The Hot Button has taken a position on this suit before (THB 12/17) and a very intelligent reader took the other side of the issue (THB 12/22). So, why go back over the same old same old, except to say this may be the stupidest lawsuit in show biz history unless Disney hasn't offered Brill $1 million to go away. In that case, they asked for it. But if he really thinks he deserves more than that, he's delusional. And if they settled at that figure, he could call himself The $1,000,000 Duck. (Then, Dean Jones will sue.)
NEXT!: I've been leading the charge for Sony to hire the Brothers Wachowski to blast the Spider-Man franchise into orbit. But first, the boys will make rumors of a deal to hook up with George Romero for a movie come true. The film will be called Carnivore, mined from a pre-Joel Silver Wachowski Brothers script. Much as I would like to see them doing something massive, I think this choice shows not only their urge to do what they want, but their honor in sticking by their partners, even when they haven't signed on the dotted line and could probably get much more money on assignment from a major studio. The studio that is behind this, Trimark, will clearly be sitting on their biggest potential hit ever. And remember, there is no spoon.
DEAD MEN DON'T CASH CHECKS: The California Senate did something really important on Monday. They protected dead celebrities. I mean, dead celebrities are much discriminated against. They need as much protection as they can get. Look at the celebrity family member who led the charge. Fred Astaire's widow, Robyn, sued a company for putting out a tape called "Fred Astaire Teaches You to Dirty Dance." The fact that she later sold her husband's image to Dirt Devil for a series of ads shouldn't dissuade you from the idea that what she really cares about is his memory, not the cash. The bill was reported by Variety to be supported by "80 Hollywood celebs." No word on how many of those 80 were still breathing.
MAKING IT: People keep on asking me whether Battlefield Earth is really happening. Apparently so. The Hollywood Reporter reports that Saving Private Ryan's Barry Pepper is about to sign on to defend the planet against bad guy John Travolta in the big-budget film. So, I guess the answer is, "yes."
DOING THE RIGHT THING: Kudos to Steven Spielberg, who has joined the effort to raise funds for USC's Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts. Spielberg dropped $500,000 into the bucket, which George Lucas coughed up $1.5 million into just last week. (THB 3/27-28, No. 1) Meanwhile, don't worry that Steve is running out of cash. He brought in enough earlier this year to kick off the Steven Spielberg Scoring Sound Stage. Of course, if Bill Clinton really comes to work for DreamWorks, that name could become dangerously ironic.
READER OF THE DAY: "Hi. My name is Ben. This is about the sex and violence question you tagged at the bottom of your column on Monday. Well, since it's the market of opinions on the Internet, and the thousand monkeys didn't produce any great work, then I ask this question: what happened to the fun violence of the movies? That good, bad guy is being punished. Isn't it cool violence in Dirty Harry where you wanted leg-stomping, bullet-firing, meat-torn-out chunks of people? Have we all become so guilty and so sanitized in our world that a piece of glorified violence in a work of fiction is no longer allowed? I mean, this ties into that whole, does violence affect kids thing... and anyone with just a tiny bit of brain motivation can actually figure it out that the violence on television these days isn't doing it. All the fade away, off camera, special effects stuff. Kids aren't popping each other because Keanu has a big gun, or Arnold says, 'I'll be back.' There are real issues at the core of it here. (And not the smallest of it is some dumb hick parent giving their 10-year-old kid a rifle for X-mas and saying, 'Well, boy, it's time to go out and shoot something.'"
"Movies have lost their edges. They've become round. They've become these special effects things, where all the guilty pleasure can be found in some computer-generated explosion. It's not really the story anymore (and here I am only talking about action films) or the good guy or the resolution. It's about the effects. The geeks jerk off to it and people whisper about the costs, but you know something, it isn't fun. Take Blade for an example. Wesley (Snipes) kills a vampire -- oh, look, it disintegrates in a nicely computer-generated effect which isn't really shocking at all. Wow. If I, like, was a complete idiot that might impress me. But no, bring on the corpses, bring on the blood. I mean, make it earn its rating! (Which is another thing to rave about on an entirely other subject.) Bring back the violence. The violence where everyone laughed and cheered when the bad guys were shot and killed and tortured. Don't give me that desensitized nonsense. I know it's not real and so does every other person on the planet who will pay 12 bucks and go into a cinema.
"Wow. You know, that felt good... Ben."

E ME: So, what do you think? Is the world of movies too short on good old-fashioned violence? And what about the size of Keanu's gun?