Friday, 2 February 2001

Lots of stuff to catch up on after three-day weekends and personal rants. But before we start, thanks for your responses to yesterday's column. Without exception, the e-mail was thoughtful and encouraging. I really appreciate the effort. As it turns out, I am on my way to the FIU Miami Film Festival, which starts Friday night and ends on March 5. I'll be following that up with my eighth annual trip to ShoWest, the exhibitors' convention that takes over Vegas every year. So, it's two weeks of columns from the road. I'm already exhausted.

LAST WORD ON SHAW: Mickey Kaus, who writes The Kaus Files for Slate, takes on David Shaw's "Hollywood & The Media" series with his not quite patented "Series-Skipper." Funny perspective. Check it out by clicking here.

STILL ON SLATE: I rather enjoyed David Edelstein's "Crashing The Oscars" piece on Slate, in which he summons the spirit of Fred Willard's deserved-a-nomination character from Best in Show, Buck Loughlin and runs down the Oscar nominations… literally and figuratively. Funny piece. (Click here to read it.)

MICROSOFT AGAIN!!!: I guess that Microsoft associated websites are having a good week. The folks at MSNBC.com ran a piece by Howard Kurtz about the state of Internet journalism. (Read it here) He does a pretty damned good job of running down the ugly history of Internet content companies. But he does miss one major point. While most were willing to take a chance at hitting the IPO jackpot by going to work for these iffy start-ups, I think that almost every sensible journalist understood in his or her gut that there was no way to make a profit on web sites with $60 - $120 million annual budgets/burn rates. There just isn't enough money out there to play on that level. And the bigger sites, that seemed to be hitting home runs, are learning the same lesson, as they hit the wall when reinvestment of profits became dangerous because the market bottomed out for banner ads and other alternate forms of income. In other words, content sites can absolutely be profitable. But the budgets have to be relatively reasonable. The web is niche programming with very, very few exceptions. And even the perception of profitability must change, as 20 percent returns remain possible and 2000 percent returns have become a moist dream of a short-term, built-to-flip past.

JUST WONDERING: What do you call it when you get a piece of information under the table and the person who gives it to you doesn't want to run it, the person who wrote it has asked that it not run and the person who the information attacks mercilessly hasn't been reached for comment… and you still run it because it amuses you? I'm pretty sure you don't call it journalism. Sometimes doing what feels right is the wrong thing to do.

OTHER FESTIVALS: I'm headed to Miami and ShoWest now, but on the horizon, Roger Ebert's The Overlooked Film Festival (http://www.ebertfest.com) and The Bermuda International Film Festival (http://www.bermudafilmfest.com). People have asked where they can find these two events, so click on either to go to their websites. P.S. The EbertFest kindly links to old Hot Buttons about the festival. Right now, they don't actually go anywhere because of the roughcut cut-off. I'll have those pages back up and the proper URLs to the EbertFest folk before next Wednesday.

DEATH AND THE LETTER K: Stanley Kramer died at 87 years of age this week. He hadn't made a film in over 20 years, but his shadow has remained over Hollywood all this time. Not many directors can claim a run of films like The Defiant Ones, On The Beach, Inherit The Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg, It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Ship of Fools and Guess Who's Coming To Dinner? At any point in their careers. Seven films. Some say that they were obvious or maudlin or too sentimental. But in their time, they were brave and tough and very, very important. And as a producer? Champion, Home of the Brave, the Jose Ferrer Cyrano De Bergerac, The Wild One, Nigh Noon, The Caine Mutiny… quite a career. He will be missed.

Howard W. Koch spent 60 years in the business, in all kinds of capacities. But he became best known as a producer for films like Airplane and Ghost. Before that, it was films like The Manchurian Candidate and The Odd Couple, credit for which tended to land in different quarters. Koch was the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for 12 years, 1977-1979. In 1989, that organization awarded him the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1989. Not many producers are well liked, but Koch seemed to be just that. He was 84. He will be missed, though his son, Howard Koch, Jr., will carry on the name. They crossed producing credits on Airplane! And Jr. continues, most recently producing last year's sleeper hits Keeping the Faith and Frequency and with the Andy Davis/Arnold Schwarzenegger project, Collateral Damage on the way.

JUST WONDERING 2: Could the headline, "Industry Standard Lays Off 69" be any more accurate in setting the current standard of the industry?

MOVING THE MANDOLIN: Normally, the move of Captain Corelli's Mandolin would be met in these quarters with real suspicion. However, in this case, Universal started telling me how good the film was months ago, offering the possibility of an early look at the film. That never happened. But a delay from May to April to August… which will almost surely become a move to October, where romances bloom more effectively… may not be the mark of evil that these things usually are.

READER OF THE DAY: Everyone was too nice… can't print that stuff. But thanks again. Wait… there was one. I don't know what he meant exactly, but it reads: "Boo-hoo, do your research." Let me correct that… I have no idea what it means. Unless it is a reference to Anita Busch, in which case, I did my research. Oh well.

E ME: What next?