31 January 2001

SAG AWARDS: Yawn. The only interesting part of the SAG Award nominations was the strength of Billy Elliot, acting nominations for Jeff Bridges and Gary Oldman in The Contender, and the disappearance of "for-ners" like Javier Bardem, Bjork and Zhang Ziyi. I guess they aren't union members.

STILL TICKING: Can you believe that the legal case over the missing Oscars of 2000 is still dragging along? The latest episode has Willie Fulgear's brother, John Willie Harris, refusing to cop a plea that would put him in jail for six months. Quick! Who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar last year? No peeking! Maybe they should put John Willie in Oscar jail.

NEW YORKER MESS: I was a bit stunned by the James Surowiecki piece in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago, which blamed theater owners for the current financial nightmare that they are going through. Word is that as many as 25 percent of this nation's screens will close in the next year. 25 percent! And Surowieki sees the light at the end of the tunnel. Variable movie pricing. Unfortunately, this is still one of the least viable options in the world of impossible options for movie exhibitors. Why? Because Surowiecki seems sorely lacking in understanding about the most basic reality of exhibition… the movie theater owners don't have the right to do whatever they want whenever they want to! (Did I say, "duh!" again?)

The reason why Sugar and Spice will still be a "Special Engagement" next weekend and won't accept discount passes is not because the movie theater owner is trying to be greedy or to keep people from filling his theater. The reason is because his contract with New Line demands no discounts the first two weekends, and a certain size theater, and a certain kind of placement in the print ads, and a certain number of shows each day and on and on and on.

But let's take a look at the next level, assuming (ridiculously) that the studios allow the theater owners to vary "retail" prices on the movies that are in first-run based on various criteria. What are the criteria? In weekend four of Charlie's Angels, the film was doing $231 per-screen better than the second weekend of The 6^th Day. So, does Sony agree to let theaters charge $1 less for The 6^th Day to prime the pump? Let's ask the questions… will $1 mean anything in a person's decision to choose one movie over the other? How deep does the discount have to be? And why does Sony want to get more people to see a movie for less money? Why would they thin their audience for the video/DVD release? And what about Arnold Schwarzenegger? Wouldn't his contract start indicating when he could be put on the discount rack? Wouldn't discounting devalue his status as a star?

Gary Oldman was in The Contender, an indie that his name got financing for and which was picked up by DreamWorks. He expected the movie to be sold using his image and was enraged when it was not. That's Gary Oldman on a $10 million film. Are you really expecting Kevin Costner to take a critical hit on a movie like The Postman and then to allow the studio to embarrass him more by discounting the film? And with 70 percent or more of the income to a studio film coming from foreign box office and the ancillary markets, what does a domestic discounting mean to the bottom line when it happens before the movie even launches into these other markets?

But at the core, again, is the bizarre notion that theater owners have any control of the market variables with the movies they project. More than ever, exhibition is a popcorn business. While body count can help theater owners, the people who provide the movies would prefer to increase the cost of films, presuming that people would still come, and to make the same amount of cash in domestic distribution with fewer people seeing the film, this pumping the other revenue streams. And if the exhibitors go out of business in the meanwhile? Well, see you at the Warner Bros. theater near you.

READER OF THE DAY: I've decided to give one of the longest lasting Hot Button readers in the first ROTD slot here at davidpoland.com. (God, every time I say it, I laugh at myself.) Steve hasn't made a ROTD appearance in a long while. But the change brought him out of the woodwork. And here he is:

"Hello ,David: I am always reading your column everyday. You might wonder where I had been last year. Well, I started to work for Dot-Com media since Dec. 1999, its called Chinatimes.Com. Unfortunately, NASDAQ changed everything, I could not get what I wanted, in other words, I could not be Taiwan's David Poland. So I quit the job.

After the lay-off, even though this company is still over there, I have to admit it was the best job that I ever had and loved most. I spend more time to miss the period I ever had once in my life. Very sorry to hear your story, I guess we can blame it to the merger of AOL and Time Warner. I hope TNT will not shut down RoughCut.com, because I always add your work to my bookmark, whenever you made me as 'Reader of the Day'. I still try to get the idea of making money by Internet for my ex-boss."

And this bit of perspective from Brian "who just saw Mission To Mars for the third time":

"David Hasselhoff: Those bastards just pulled a U-571 maneuver, they took out the USS Roughcut's communication tower! Captain Poland, you must have at least one more torpedo in the tube.

Now, who in the hell is going to write about boobs on the internet? Will Vanity Fair, Premiere, Film Comment, Movieline or whoever hires you as a freelancer allow: "ah yes, Katie Holmes and her breasts..." or "..Jennifer Love Hewitt and her breasts."? I don't think so, this is worse than Ben Affleck having a movie career.

Oh boy, the memories, remember when Rebecca Gayheart was in your hotel room with that other chick doing a "chat". How about that painful Yahoo Chat during the Academy Awards or your webcast of the SAG or Golden Globes (or whatever the title) that one year. Remember those ShoWest Awards and seeing the Phantom Menace Trailer? How about you seeing Episode 1 before everyone else and then liking it, only to change your opinion in later columns. I remember the sentence "Episode II...this time it will not suck." Another memorable sentence: "Jonathan Frakes career is in the toilet" (said after seeing Star Trek Insurrection, something about him not "framing a picture right"). I remember you pimping the movie Ravenous, only to leave it off your Best of The Year List.

Let's sing it: Dave,....he did it his way ......(with a little too much arthouse)"

E ME: We are the world.