Weekend, 30-31 October 1999

NEWS BY THE NUMBERS

10. Top Of The Popcorn Chain: Bill Kartozian has been a good leader for NATO (National Association of Theater Owners) over the last 11 years. But when he stepped down, the choice of his replacement stepped up a notch in Washington firepower. The new guy is John Fithian, a powerful Washington lobbyist. No, that doesn't mean that lobbies in theaters will be nicer. It means that NATO understands that its role has become about handling Washington first and about dealing with the latest butter substitute less and less. Meanwhile, Jack "The Bulldog" Valenti still leads the charge.

9. Busting Up: Word is that Heather Graham has joined Artists Management Group, thus having no choice but to leave CAA, which has rules about talent attaching to the agency's former boss man. That choice seems to get pricier every day and plays right into Ovitz' hands. But much as I hate to defend any agent or agency, one has to wonder what scent Heather is following in this decision. In her run with CAA and managers at First Artists Associates, Graham, who I'm betting was signed by CAA just after Drugstore Cowboy, was walked to the top of the arthouse food chain in 14 movies over 6 years, ranging from I Love You To Death to her "I'm not ready to get naked on screen" role in Diggstown to Six Degrees of Separation (the movie that made Will Smith happen as a movie actor) to her coronation as Arthouse Queen in Swingers. Since then, her enthusiasm for playing "the 'it' girl" has taken her mainstream and every male actor in town would be happy to have her bounce onto his set. So what does she want? Has Ed Burns convinced her that it's time to get serious again? Normally, for him, that's meant making a movie with his girlfriend. But this girlfriend is the first he's had who is exponentially more popular than he is. But not, I guess, popular enough to get him financed. Does she want a Scorsese movie? Is that it? I doubt that Scorsese would ever choose to veto her based on his agency's wishes. Nor would any great director who she might be yearning to be taken seriously by. Perhaps she's yearning for what the Yorns "did" for Jim Carrey. Problem is, a studio would invest in Carrey reading a phone book if it would create a relationship that would get him to make his next face-making movie with them. Not so with young Ms. Graham. I do think that H.G. has a lot of talent, besides her figure, don't get me wrong. But when the world can't look you in the eye, especially after you have chosen a series of roles that encourage us to look lower, transitioning back to Actress takes some time. And I doubt that switching agents will do the trick.

8. Beating Up The Competition: I hate to give any more words to the generally irritating Edward Margulies, but this week, his column has seemed to take a turn for the gay by running not only one lead about gay movies, but then a second front page story about the same gay-themed movie. I don't think it makes me homophobic to suggest that Margulies might choose to concentrate on something other than promoting his friends' movies in his column, gay, straight or sexual mulatto. Either way, with all due respect to a nice guy who looks great in tights, any movie starring Dean Cain is not a big story. Meanwhile, across dress, I mean, town, Jeff Wells' was making inroads for the Misogyny Society Of Hollywood. That may be a little unfair because Jeff is equally as demanding of his male stars, spending more time worrying about Tom Hanks' jowls than his acting. Come on, guys! You are lowering the bar every time you pull this kind of crap. I'm not saying that I'm not without my frivolities. They do turn up. But I have 14,000 words a week to make up for my 1000 worth of junk. (This button perhaps included.) But the laundry that really needs washing stays in my hamper. I just can't wait to be famous enough to have Margulies go Page One with my sex life and to have Wells write about my weight.

7. Add Knowles: Speaking of really famous, I am looking forward to seeing Harry Knowles' return appearance on Roger Ebert & The Movies this weekend. I hope that the backbiters don't lose control this time, attacking Harry unfairly as they did after his first appearance. Hmmm...maybe I really should be insulted that no one has abused me. In any case, I expect a rollicking good time on the show because they have a couple of great movies to review and there is little doubt that Roger really likes Harry and what Harry does a whole lot. So tune in as Internet Month continues at REATM (three weekends in a row, staring with ZDTV Internet Tonight's Michaela Pereira). Top of the world, ma!

6. Play Ball!: Bob Daly, half of the DalySemel team that was recently dumped at Warner Bros. after years of big budgets and only moderate results has taken a stake in the Los Angeles Dodgers, owned primarily by Fox. Daly will become the titular head of the organization a la George Steinbrenner with only about a 10 percent stake of the team. Daly is a longtime baseball fan and should fit in comfortably around the old boys club of baseball owners. And going into business with Fox feels more than a little bit ironic. After all, Warner Bros. did all it could, obviously unintentionally, to help Fox into the role of leading the film business over the last five years or so. Now Daly is part of the Fox family. Will the move to Rupert's team please or piss off our very own Ted Turner? Probably neither. Unless the Dodgers beat the Braves next year.

5. Counting Screams: According to Reuter's poll, Frankenstein's Monster is the most popular figure in horror, picked by 22.5 percent of those asked as their top scream machine. Freddy Krueger came in second with 21.2 percent, Count Dracula was third with 15.6 percent. Michael Myers managed 9 percent, not for his chest and teeth in The Spy Who Shagged Me, but for terrorizing Haddonfield and launching Jamie Lee Curtis' acting career. (Cheap joke. I like Jamie Lee Curtis -- even if she can't stand my radio partner, George Pennacchio). And in fifth place, the one, the only, Jason Voorhees with 6.3 percent. Of note, the biggest percentage of the vote went to other unspecified villains to the tune of 25.4 percent. Whose names do you think were included in that group?

4. Life's A Witch: Wondering how The Blair Witch Project would play in the rest of the world? Well, the answer in the U.K. is "boffo." $1.2 million on 36 screens, a release record for a non-exclusive release over there. And Pathe will take the film full out this weekend. And I have to tell you, I'm already getting Britmail asking about what happens at the end and if the movie is real. Meanwhile, here in The Colonies, the video and DVD release of Blair is racking up the bucks, generating $6.2 million in video rentals and added another $3.9 million in DVD rentals. Scary!

3. F**k Is Nothing Without U: The Irish censor was a much talked about issue over the last few days. Well, now, the British Board of Film Classification wants your input, if you are a UKer, in determining just how stiff or soft the PG, 15, 18 and R18 categories should be, especially in the realm of sex. The director of the BBCFC was quoted in The Hollywood Reporter as saying, "There is still some debate about whether adults should be able to simply choose what they watch, but people accept that children should be protected, and that is what the different categories of classification are designed to do." He then added, only in my head, "I love the smell of porno in the morning. It smells like...well, you know what it smells like."

2. Le Oscar: The Oscar hum has begun across the globe. Variety reports that a few countries have already made their choices to complete in the Best Foreign-Language Film category. From France, East, West. From Czechoslovakia, Return of the Idiot. From the Netherlands, Scratches in the Table. From Hungary, A Lantern in Budapest. And from Brazil, Orfeu. As far as I know, only East, West and Orfeu have been available, as of this time, for viewing in North America. Both have been at domestic festivals.

1. He Will Be Missed: Reader Dave Clayton eulogizes Abe Polonsky as well or better than I could. And so he shall: "You may have seen the notice in today's LA Times of the passing of Abraham Polonsky. At the very least, Polonsky seems to me to have been one of the great unrealized hopes of the movie industry to be crushed by the witch hunts of the 1950s. On the basis of Force of Evil alone, there is every reason to believe Polonsky would have been one of the major creative forces of the postwar American cinema--perhaps he would have eclipsed Elia Kazan, whose style and subject matter in that period were very similar to Polonsky's. I saw Tell Them Willie Is Here when it first came out and found it interesting. But I had the luck to see Force of Evil a bit later in a theatrical showing--in Frankfurt am Main of all places--and I was absolutely dumbstruck by it. The later movie is a respectable piece of work but it shows the artistic sclerosis of man who had not been behind the camera for two decades. In spite of his conservative political views, Andrew Sarris, to his credit, has never failed to give Polonsky's one real masterpiece the praise it deserves. I never met Polonsky nor spoke with anyone who knew him but he must have had an incredible sense of humor. In the early 1960s, Film Quarterly ran an interview with him and at the conclusion the interviewer--it may have been William S. Pechter--asked him how a director like Edward Dymtryk, who had been a leftist, could end up directing The Caine Mutiny. Polonsky replied, "Maybe he thought it was capitalist realism." May his soul rest in peace."

READER OF THE DAY: And now for the tradiitonal ROTD set. This e-mail came form the SET: "I followed your link to Margulies, but I couldn't ignore the gay screed, since I too have been dismayed by the tiresomeness of most recent gay film. However, I found one delicious exception, Thom Fitzgerald's Beefcake, the only gay movie I've seen lately that's smarter than it seems.

I've called it a gay movie, but it's quite different from the movies that target gay audiences by focusing on gay sexual activity or relationships. In Beefcake, there's only a little gay sex, which is depicted quite obliquely, but it's really the sensibility of the film that's gay to the core. There's plenty for a straight audience to enjoy in the film, but there's no way to fully appreciate this movie unless you believe first and foremost that naked men are fun. That's the primary aesthetic notion behind the physique magazines of the '50s that the film celebrates, and that's exactly the spirit in which the director films the dramatized sequences that are interwoven with the archival material. (Some critics have faulted these scenes as being amatuerish, but I think they've missed the joke. It seemed to me that the filmmaker wanted his movie to be a fantasy of '50s innocence in the same way that the physique photographers created their sublimely silly fantasies of cowboys or sailors. So anachronisms like displaying a 50-starred American flag in a scene set in the early '50s have the same effect as a guy sporting a Marine Corps tattoo while posed as a gladiator. In some ways, Fitzgerald is making a naked Pleasantville, and in both films, we're given every opportunity to recognize the rather less benign subtext beneath the imagery of innocence, though there's a lot less italicizing in Beefcake. I hope this movie gets the chance to reach an audience that will definitely eat it up."

And this from Mister: "You know, something had been bugging me since the last time you linked to Ed's column, and I finally figured out what it was: his uncanny resemblance to "Jackie Harvey", The Onion's own mock talk columnist. While they don't have any of his columns in the archives, they do have one from last week...it's not all about movies, but the picture is almost exactly the same pose as Ed's, and it's just hilarious stuff, a really on-target dismantling of media gossip columns.".

E ME: Who's your favorite monster? I mean, besides Wells & Margulies. And help the U.K. draw the line. In as brief a description as you can muster, where should the line be for showing sex in movies? What should you be able to see at 8, 12, 15 and 18?