Weekend, 31 July 1999

NEWS BY THE NUMBERS

10. MPAA BASH : Officially joining the MPAA Watchdog Committee is South Park co-dude Matt Stone, who wrote a "guest column" for Variety and made a lot of sense. Stone smartly got to the point in mentioning that the MPAA works for the studios, which explains a lot. But I will point out now that I don't quite agree with his final idea. He writes: "3) Drop the NC-17 rating altogether. Anything deemed unsuitable for people under 17 should be rated R. With the added labeling, parents can make educated decisions about content. And no filmmaker would have to cut anything, ever." Nice thought, but for everything Jack Valenti is wrong about, he's right in worrying that the state-by-state censoring of movies would return without a high watermark. And where is the line between Eyes Wide Shut's multi-partner scenes without showing the genitals and Thighs Wide Shut's graphic sex? Would Eyes be "R- Extreme Sex, But Not That Extreme"? We need to make business allowances as well. I know it's unpopular to allow business to interfere in the art, but in the real world, strong rules mean more freedom. It's when the rules are too loose, as is now the case with R and NC-17, that there is room for tyranny. So, I like Matt's idea here in concept, but I don't think it can be executed to his fullest vision. Then, he closes with a completely true fact: "No substantive change will ever come from within the MPAA. The system already works for them. Any changes will only come from the two groups the MPAA ignores: the artists and the public." Critics and journalists can only raise the ideas. Only a public outcry or a cry from within the industry will ever change anything.

9. The Blair Witch Project is reaping its first big rewards of success even before it goes wide-ish. Artisan made a deal with FX, Fox's cable net, to run the movie in 2002 (after the video and pay-cable releases) for what is reported to be 15 percent of the domestic gross. While there is talk about whether FX put a top on that figure (denied by Artisan), there is little talk about a bottom. Blair Witch hype has become an inflationary business. Even the reporters are being seduced into worrying only about what happens when this film breaks the $60 million mark. What if it doesn't? This is going up on the site after the Friday night release, so maybe I'll look goofy here, but Blair Witch may not be the national sensation that everyone expects it to be. And $50 million for the film would be a sensational number all by itself. I'm not saying that it can't hit the heights, but when you just don't know (and we don't), I tend to lean toward moderation. The last time a studio executive went on the record predicting grosses, it was Tom Sherak at Fox, getting caught up in the Star Wars hype. Its totals are coming out about right, but on opening weekend, people lost their minds. And so, we shall soon find out if Amir Malin, president of Artisan, lost his by predicting that the film will gross $60 million. One also has to ask, why FX? When I first saw the story, I was upset because I don't get FX on my satellite. But that's changing too, as FX joins the DirecTV family on August 17. Nonetheless, you kind of figure that USA, SCI-FI or TNT could do a little more with the promotion and get a bigger number with Blair Witch. I don't know about TNT (probably too intense and gritty for our Hollywood-style air), but do you think that Amir, formerly of October Films, is holding a little grudge against Barry Diller and his networks? You think? Maybe?

8. An orthodox group in Israel is concerned that Tarzan is running around ads wearing only a loincloth. They are hoping that Disney will draw the guy a pair of shorts. Eight days after the posters went up, they probably could have just circumcised the Ape Man and solved the problem. Now they won't be satisfied until he's swinging through Africa with a black wool hat and a coat. Wait! I'm getting an idea. "He was lost in the Fairfax District as a child when his mother abandoned him in order to get a prime spot in the "Price Is Right" line. Raised by Hassidic Jews, he was happy and healthy. But then, goyisha Jane came into the deli and he knew that he had found his own. He was a W.A.S.P. But what of the anti-Semites out to get his "parents"? How could he protect Abba and Eema from the comfort of Bel Air? Tarzan, The Jew Boy. Coming soon, from DreamWorks Animation."

7. What do you do when you can't sell something the conventional way? Take it to the 'Net! A writer named Cory Dunham tried to sell development rights to his book, Fighting For The First Amendment, on eBay this week. There were no takers, but then again, there was a $250,000 floor, so the only people who might spend that much on an eBay auction have probably seen this offer before. In the meantime, the value of the experience for Dunham is that he probably now has a more valuable commodity than his book in the story of being the first guy to try to sell the development rights to the book on eBay.

6. I'm not completely sure what to make of Universal's gamesmanship on the release of Ang Lee's Ride With The Devil. Perhaps it is the smart play of a company that understands that major studio marketing departments are not best equipped to promote art films. But perhaps it's a studio that is giving up on a $35 million film that it doesn't really think can earn back its money, so they are playing the Academy Award run card because it's the only one they have. Or maybe it's that the studio is already concentrating on two films with serious Oscar® potential (Man on the Moon and The Hurricane) and one that needs very special handling, the long-delayed Snow Falling on Cedars. Whatever the truth, it is an interesting point that Elizabeth, the film that Gramercy (now USA Films) president Russell Schwartz ran through the Oscar gauntlet last year, grossed less than $50 million worldwide or less than Ride With The Devil needs to break even.

5. When I saw the story of a former secretary (funny how they become secretaries instead of assistants when they sue) suing over rather odd forms of sexual harassment, I immediately assumed that it was a boss-banging former friend of mine who would daydream of harassment lawsuits like kids dream of ice cream. It wasn't her, but I still was able to connect. It seems that she was harassed by a RealVideo file involving bestiality. A RealVideo file that a colleague sent my way many months ago. It arrived a little before the footage of the circus employee who did an intestinal exam of an elephant with his head. The scary part is that 23-year-old Kelly Thompson was on the job for less than 8 months and is asking for $3.5 million for her suffering. She's already turned down an $850,000 settlement. I'm getting a lawyer. Sorry, colleague. This is too much money to resist.

4. This was the week of mondo studio hype, all of it business and all of it smelling a bit of desperation. The hardcore reality is that MGM, DreamWorks, Sony, and Warner Bros. are all in play. Not for sale, necessarily, but in transitions into the unknown. Three of the studios spin actions will be detailed in the next three buttons. The Sony spin was detailed in THB 7/30's "The Ugly" and was all about placing blame on the one failure that doesn't have any influence on the studio's future. People often want me to separate the art and the business, but the line keeps getting blurrier and blurrier. Reality is a confusing place sometimes.

3. I already wrote about the infamous MGM conference call (THB 7/29) during which Chris McGurk dangled dormant studio franchises Rocky and The Pink Panther in front of anxious investors and threw Francis Coppola in the pot (as a potential UA topper) to boot. The weird thing is that the media treated the story like a Chinese snake and kept on expanding it and expanding it until Sly Stallone was signed to write and direct McGurk's $30 million or less vision of a new series. Bzzt! Whatever informal conversations had been held died when the media got involved. Stallone's "people" denied his involvement and McGurk got a pie thrown in his face very publicly. He almost had them. Just went a step too far, as writers would have assumed that Stallone might be involved, he'd still be potentially involved and the spin wouldn't have spun on McGurk.

2. The Hollywood Reporter reports the seeds of a plan for the next form of Warner Bros. leadership. Sources are floating a combination of current Warner Bros. president and chief operating officer Barry Meyer and Castle Rock Entertainment chairman and CEO Alan Horn as the team at the top. The question is "why?" The reign of "non-movie people" in top studio jobs is a long debated issue. It has worked pretty well at Fox, where business has reigned with some real openness to creativity, not quite as well at Paramount, where Sherry Lansing has been dominated by her business-side partners, and not well at all at Universal, where businessmen are all that are left. As I've written before, Ted Turner has not proven to be the best parent to movie studios in the past. Can it work at Warner Bros.? I don't know. But as I've also written before, there are limited options out there right now. We'll see.

1. DreamBlin or AmbWorks? The other shoe dropped on Thursday at DreamWorks and it did everything but squish Jeffrey Katzenberg. David Geffen will keep trying to build DreamWorks Records, but Jeffrey Katzenberg went back to working for a living and will now report to Steven Spielberg, Walter Parkes and Laurie McDonald. Anyone who had any doubts that the company was within an inch of evaporating has got be shaking their head today. The company has effectively become what it has been in practice, DreamWorks SKSGS. This move allows Katzenberg to save some face and to operate a studio with people he actually likes rather than trying to be a hero at Warner Bros., or competing with Barry Diller's ownership position around Universal, or wielding an unpopular ax at a post-Calley Sony. (The latter could still happen down the road.) But dear God, this is a stunning move. And I doubt seriously that this structure will still exist in two years.

READER OF THE DAY : From Not Mac SE: "If you're in the mood for counter-programming, I have a very strong recommendation: Goran Paskaljevic's Cabaret Balkan (AKA The Powder Keg). This is a dark and cruel comedy; it is often very funny, but it's also the most harrowing movie I've seen in a long time. It's a series of somewhat interrelated vignettes taking place over one night in Belgrade, and most of them end with some appalling and irrational action. I guess turmoil breeds good art, since this is the third terrific film from Yugoslavia that I've seen in the last two years. (The others were Underground and Black Cat, White Cat, the commercial release of which is now scheduled for the fall).

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