Weekend, 22-23 July 2000

NEWS BY THE NUMBERS

10. You're The Tops: When I saw in The Hollywood Reporter that Mission: Impossible 2 just broke into the Top 50 Films of All-Time list, I was a little shocked, since the film has been over $200 million for awhile. When I was a kid…oy! Thankfully, I guess, there are still only 30 films that have passed the $200 million mark domestically. That's about the number that had ever passed $50 million domestically when I started tracking box office, about 20 years ago. (Just made myself sick, writing that.) One funny thing on the list of top earners is that the films that are just under $200 million are all from the days when $197.2 million for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) was real money. That would never happen these days. The movie just above Indy 3 is the example that proves the rule, as Armageddon's jaunt just over the $200 million mark ($201.6) was as much p.r. as b.o. The list that I read about was a worldwide box office list, so the numbers are a bit higher, with the Top 50 number hitting just above $355 million these days. And as a sign of the times, Gladiator beat M: I-2 onto the Worldwide list, generating $379 million, despite being behind the Tom Cruise flick here at home.

9. The Balls!: Liz Smith's column seems to have found a new edge in recent months, reaching beyond the puff pieces that made her column almost unreadable for the last couple of years. The most recent smackdown is aimed at Marlon Brando, who has been reported to be shooting his latest Canada-located movie (the last one ended up going straight to cable) without any pants on…or naked from the waist down, depending on how much graphic imagery your stomach can take. The goal is, apparently, to force the filmmakers to keep that imagery from you, forcing them to shoot him in shots that focus on his upper body only, hiding some of his girth. The movie is The Score and it co-stars Robert De Niro, Edward Norton and Angela Bassett. Norton may stand to learn the most from this experience. After all, Brando was once the studly Hollywood cocksman, much as Norton is now. No doubt, Brando would have been all over Salma Hayek, though in his day, she would be accepting Oscars for him barefoot and pretending only to speak Spanish. Will Norton end up going the DeNiro route or the Brando/Welles route with his future? Good question.

8. You Sing It, Sistah: In London, a gay neighborhood theater has made a killing by turning The Sound of Music into a Rocky Horror-like event, with an audience sing-along, people dressing in costume and so on. The idea evolved somewhat organically and The Sound of Music was made for gay camp, from the nuns to the cute, blonde Nazi-boy romance, the film walks the edge of silly, brilliantly, throughout. Disney, never a company to let an opportunity slip by, must have read about this phenomena and decided to do their own version of A Night at the Interactive Movies. In August, they'll premiere a sing-a-long version of Mary Poppins at their Los Angeles theater, the El Capitan, complete with on-screen lyrics and midnight shows. Now, I'm not saying that the only real audience for this is gay men…especially when I know that a good friend of mine who isn't gay, but who is very nostalgic, already ordered tickets. But it will be interesting to see how folks who haven't still got chimney sweep outfits from their childhoods show up for a cult event that's been so carefully planned.

7. Pretty Man: What's up with Eric Roberts? Earlier this week, he appeared on the "Late Late Show" in drag as Andy Dick's girlfriend. Then, he turned up unannounced in John Waters' Cecil B. DeMented as the angry ex-husband of Melanie Griffith's Honey Whitlock. He's not just for crappy movies anymore.

6. Journal of a Madman: A great piece on Peter Hoffman in the Wall Street Journal. Martin Peers does a really nice job of tracking the history and business techniques of the man who seems to be the precursor to any really good Hollywood bankruptcy. But oh, what a beautiful light he makes as his companies flame out. Anyway, to read the piece, you need to pay for your WSJ subscription and search "Peter Hoffman."

5. More Journalling: Meanwhile, Tom King's "Hollywood Journal" at the WSJ is now skating into the worst of bad columnist habits…making conversations with friends into a column. I empathize, as the fact that I'm even acknowledging his "Would you see it again?" column is a symptom of the slow news month for movies. But still, a bunch of tuned-in New Yorkers and some reader mail defining the re-watchability of the summer movies? Please. Meanwhile, Bruce Orwall and John Lippman, who have become my most favored reads on the industry these days, have a piece on the failure of tracking. This is not their greatest work. It is, as always, smart and loaded with perspective. But the questions weren't quite tough enough this time out for my tastes. "Why does tracking really matter?" requires the follow-up, "If it doesn't really work, why are you still doing it?" In both the L.A. Times and this WSJ piece, Terry Press has become the outspoken defender of tracking and NRG. God bless her, she is a maverick most of the time and on this, she seems stuck in the mud. I don't get it. But at least the question is in play in the Journal, the business paper of record. And once again, this is why I love the Wall Street Journal and why I hated their Oscar® dalliance so much.

4. Love is in the Plane: It has become a little rare that Ain't It Cool News actually has any usable news. But sure enough, Moriarty is the first to write an exposé about Courtney Love's exit from John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars, saying that it wasn't really a twisted ankle that felled her. No doubt, Entertainment Weekly will be all over this next week. But when it comes to a genre film like this and Love's publicists, PMK, a site like Ain't It Cool actually has the upper hand in digging the dirt. Moriarty clearly has been told by Carpenter or a direct connection to him that they really, really wanted Love to be in this movie. And now, he is told that they decided they really, really didn't think it was going to work out, based on her work in rehearsals, as cited by Ain't It Cool, "...wrought with tension as it became clear the casting wasn't going to work." I'm not saying that the pain that Moriarty suggests that Carpenter & Co. were suffering upon realizing that they were in a bad marriage isn't real. But it also sounds like spin designed to take all us Nosy Nellies by the hand and to lead us up to the land of "We're firing her in the nicest possible way."

"The Top Three & ROTD"