16 October 2000

THE UGLY: I don't really think that the Premiere piece is part of a big DreamWorks backlash… just a guy chasing a story aggressively. Nor do I think is Claudia Eller's piece from Friday's L.A. Times, entitled "Box-Office Fizzle of 'Almost Famous' Stirs Bad Blood." But I fear we are at the beginning of the cycle. What I do think is that Ms. Eller's piece on Almost Famous' failure to light up the box office was a story worth telling. (I've been writing about it for weeks, as have others.) But I also feel that Ms. Eller went way out of her way to turn a piece about the box office into an attack piece. And the only reason I can figure out for the attack, based on the article, is that Crowe didn't return Eller's phone call. Now, there's a good reason to slam a man, a studio and a movie!

Eller sets up, fairly, the trouble with the film. Too high a budget, too arty a movie. Okay. Got it. Eller adds a piece of info that I didn't recall reading before, which is that Sony picked up foreign rights to Almost Famous for $35 million just before its domestic release as part of a three-picture package. Interesting. Relevant.

But then comes the hail of carefully worded attack journalism. First, there are these two short paragraphs:

"Crowe is understandably pained. So much so that the man who granted tons of interviews before his movie's release refuses to come to the phone now to discuss it.

Relations between the writer-director-producer and DreamWorks SKG, which financed and released the movie, sources say, are strained. Crowe is questioning whether the studio, run by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, could have done, and spent, more to sell his movie."

Sources on what side? How close to the situation? How likely is it that these sources are simply extrapolating? She makes it seem as though Crowe won't come to the phone because of the strained relations, doesn't she? Perhaps Crowe, feeling the heat, decided not to call back Ms. Eller, who has become well known in town for dropping reporting for attacking when it comes to those who she doesn't like. Like Peter Schneider at Disney, who she shredded in a piece of a lunch gone wrong, just a few weeks ago.

Eller then uses phrases – not even full quotes – attributed from "sources close to Crowe" to create the image of anger on Crowe's side… the kind of anger that Crowe never seems to have expressed, even as he fought to keep the film from being cut too closely for his tastes. Eller uses those same "sources close to Crowe" to build an image of unhappiness on the DreamWorks side, those sources citing nasty barbs about Almost Famous coming from the DreamWorks team.

Would that have happened if Crowe returned her phone call? Do the rules of journalism change when someone doesn't return a phone call?

And it's funny what Eller doesn't include in her piece. For instance, there is no mention of either Billy Crudup or Brad Pitt, the man who was the second lead of the movie and the man who was almost the second lead of the movie. Why no mention? Let's follow Ms. Eller's lead and theorize. Could it be that Eller didn't want to draw the ire of Pitt's powerful and access-providing publicists? Or perhaps that she didn't want to risk the wrath of Laurie MacDonald, who is said to have been the hard liner on Brad Pitt's salary, keeping the film from including a movie star whose absence Eller's article suggests (reasonably, despite the lack of detail) hurt the box office? And while we are theorizing about that, I should point out that while Eller writes that Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen "run" DreamWorks, everyone in town knows full well that Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald are running the studio, and that it was they who primarily oversaw the post-production of Almost Famous, which is where any bad blood on Crowe's side began. Parkes has been the main name connected to the aggressive whittling down of Almost Famous from two hours, forty minutes to two hours, five minutes. Neither person is mentioned. Not once. Why?

The only attribution of any kind from inside DreamWorks is Terry Press saying, "As far as we know, DreamWorks continues to have a great relationship with Cameron Crowe." And yet, DreamWorks is upset about Crowe going over budget. DreamWorks is upset with Crowe making Vanilla Sky for Paramount. (As though he had a choice… Cruise's deal is at Paramount and he owned the property… it's work for hire.) And, in Eller's final sentence, "(Crowe) obviously spared no expense, and DreamWorks is not happy to be paying the price."

Where is all this anger coming from and why? Everything Eller wrote is old news, yet she paints the picture as though someone… unnamed, unsourced… is really pissed off at Crowe. (P.S. Eller's estimates on music costs, meant to suggest that Crowe was too demanding, are, from what I hear, significantly too low.) And Crowe, who apparently didn't say an attributable word to Eller before or after the film's release, is also angry, thanks to unnamed sources whose focus on marketing seems to make issue with an area in which the studio and the filmmaker were not in serious conflict. Of course, the true thesis of the piece, the "mistake" of greenlighting an intimate movie at $50 million and the struggle to market it, is completely legitimate. Yet, it is spun in a nasty, aggressive way that stinks of personality journalism (like The Hot Button) and not news. And though some of you continue to insist that there is no difference anymore, if you asked the editors of major newspapers they'd still tell you that they are trying to maintain journalistic standards that call for commentary to be labeled commentary (like The Hot Button).

It is hard to believe that anyone at DreamWorks would push for an attack piece on Crowe, especially since Almost Famous is the first commercial misstep of DreamWorks' dream year. On the other hand, speculation that The Legend of Bagger Vance isn't shaping up as a hit and that Castaway (distributed in North America by Fox and overseas by DreamWorks) is looking more and more iffy and that DreamWorks may put its big Oscar eggs in the Gladiator basket and not in the Almost Famous, Contender or Bagger Vance baskets… well, maybe someone is getting antsy in anticipation.

It's easier to believe that Eller started on the basic story that is here, added a few remarks that have surfaced over the last six months from informal chats with DreamWorks folks, and then found a focus when Crowe refused to return her calls. I won't be calling Eller myself because I'm sure she disagrees that she did anything other than report a legitimate story. No point in discussing it. I can only form my opinions based on what was printed. And my read was that it was a good story turned hatchet job. (The Eller piece is here.)