6 July 1999

THE UGLY: Personally, I feel no need to attack the Scientologists. Make fun of them, perhaps. But I make fun of the Pope sometimes too. There are all kinds of cliques in this city, and until some star claims publicly that the Scientologist organization stole from him/her or did some damage, I'm not taking up a cudgel against them. That said, when Variety dumped Dan Cox's story on the influence of the group in Hollywood no one associated with that kind of journalism beamed with pride. It is rare enough that Variety ever actually tries to investigate anything. So when this investigation gets lost and Peter Bart adds insult to injury by lying (Dan Cox's reported words) about why the piece died, no one wins. You can read MSNBC gossip Jeannette Walls, who talked to Cox, here) and she has a link to the Bart version at the end of this story.

THE CHAT: I wish I knew what to tell you. We should have Mini-Me, Verne Troyer, back this week, but I don't know on what day yet. One thing is for sure. Beat Box Betty will be back again this Thursday to answer all of your movie question. In the meantime, if you want to know more about her, check out www.beatboxbetty.com. And keep watching this space for updates.

JUST WONDERING: Are all of you who were complaining about Star Wars Fever feeling a lot better now, just a month or so later?

HAPPY TRAILERS TO YOU: There's a new American Pie trailer out there and it is a giant step backward. Besides doing its best to give away some jokes that should not be given away, it lays too much on specific jokes that test audiences have liked and forgets to tell the basic story of the movie. I also found the old Inspector Gadget trailer playing somewhere. Big mistake. The trailer for The Wood made me wonder why MTV had chosen this film, and I felt, cynically, that perhaps this film was their homage to the hard core Yo! MTV Raps audience that helped change the face of the network.

BAD AD WATCH: It seems like more and more non-critics are being quoted in the paper. Is Jeanne Wolf a critic? I don't think that's what she'd call herself. But there she is fronting The General's Daughter and Big Daddy. Liz Smith is certainly no critic at all, but she still leads the quote team for The Mummy and is the Oscar tout for Tea With Mussolini. And what are they putting in the water at CBS-TV. Three, count them, three of the six quotes for Wild Wild West are from CBS employees.

READER OF THE DAY: From Vicki: "I read your article with interest about bad buzz and I started to write my thoughts on it but then decided to wait until I had seen the latest victim of bad buzz, Wild Wild West (hereafter known as WWW). I enjoyed it and thought it was very funny. I especially loved the little inside jokes from the most obvious, the RCA reference, to the less obvious, the Amblin logo, to the "maybe I'm reading too much into this" reference to Lawrence Kasdan (the name Kasdan something on the side of a building in the town that got destroyed). Was it a great movie like The Godfather or Citizen Kane? No. It was a popcorn movie. Will Smith is a very amiable star whose movies I always enjoy.

Did this movie or any other movie deserve the bad buzz it received (I kept waiting for the media to call it 'Westworld' or some other appropriate permutation of Waterworld as they tend to do with any production that is deemed to be going astronomically over budget)? I don't think so. And so what if it cost $5 million or $250 million. I still pay the same amount to see it. So why sabotage a movie like that. Granted there are some movies that I have seen that totally deserved the reviews that they've received, like Pushing Tin (which I thought was totally disjointed, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what purpose this movie served or what message it was trying to convey other than frightening to death anyone who was going to fly a plane after they saw this movie---I bet this was not offered as an In-Flight movie). But I digress.

If the people who "leak" the bad buzz are rivals from another studio, disgruntled former employees or current employees who stand to gain from the failure, then I find that rather sad. But what I find just as bad, if not worse, is the amount of people who take this information at face value and view it as fact. I personally don't take the tidbits that you can find anywhere on the Internet these days. If I want to see a movie, I will go see it and judge it for myself. I don't want spoilers and I am appalled when "reviewers" feel the need to ruin the experience for me by giving away plot points, I wonder how a movie like The Crying Game would do today when everyone feels the need to give things away. I saw Star Wars: The Phantom Menace without the benefit of knowing what was going to happen other than who was in the movie. One of my best experiences at the movies was when I was living in Holland. The people I was working for had just been to Washington and brought the kids back some E.T. shoe laces. Their mother told me it was the hottest thing at the movies and was really big. I bought tickets to see it the first Sunday it opened (my only day off) at a theater in The Hague near The Peace Palace (with stadium seating mind you-what takes Americans so long to figure out a good thing). The only ads that were shown in the market place was where you could see the two fingers touching. I wonder how E.T. would do in today's world of instant information, I still think it would do well as it is a very good movie.

I love movies. I love good movies and there are even a few movies that many would feel are awful, that I love. I will always see movies. I even have A LOT of DVD's and Laser Discs. I work in cable television because I love movies (I get free cable which includes all the movie channels and then some). My former job was promoting Pay-Per-View at another cable company. But I wish people would refrain from tearing each other and each others productions down, and just let us, the movie going public that funds these productions, to enjoy movies."

E ME: A good 4th of July letter, I thought. Now that you're back at work, wasting valuable work time reading me, how was your weekend? Mine was good, though I didn't return a lot of mail, so if you haven't heard back from me, a response could soon be on its way. But you have to write to get a response, right?