Thursday, 10 May 2001

CANNES CANNES:  Word from the south of France is that Fox’s opening night entry, Moulin Rouge, was received with a five and a half minute standing ovation.  Not rushing to his feet was The Hollywood Reporter’s Kirk Honeycutt, who delivered a mid-Wednesday afternoon review that was mixed to negative.   Variety’s Todd McCarthy was more upbeat, though he also wondered aloud whether the big teen market would latch onto the extravagant film. 

I’ll let you know what I think as soon as I can.

BOTTOM LINE:  The folks at Fox have to be hoping that the Moulin Rouge at Cannes gambit works.  Tuesday, Fox’s earning report for the movie studio fell to $46 million after a $95 million quarter this time last year.  And as you recall, Bill Mechanic’s head rolled for that in June.   Monkeybone was apparently a big part of the drain. 

CANNES 2:  Could IFC picked a less appropriate team to report on the opening of the festival than Veronica Webb and Michael Musto?  I have loafers that have forgotten more about film than the two of them know.  And I’m pretty sure that they know it.  It wasn’t even as if they tried to pretend they knew much of anything.  For a while, the producer tried to feed them info through their earpieces, but after a while, it was all corrections.  They are both moderately interested people as talent.  But anyone who complains about Joan Rivers has to get a load of this duo.  They make her seem like a true cineaste.

RESTRAINT:  Nicole Kidman filed a restraining order against Writer-composer-arranger-songwriter and soon to be director and screenwriter Matt Hooker, forcing him to keep 250 yards away from Nicole and her kids, her home, her place of work and her kids’ school.  Hooker feels that he has been unfairly accused.  But his protestations are about as scary as anything else you might expect he did to inspire Ms. Kidman’s actions against him.  Take a look by clicking here –

JUST WONDERING:  Is DreamWorks thinking that their currently-in-production film, The Castle, can keep that title in release?  The 1997 Aussie comedy, The Castle, distributed by Miramax, would seem to be in the way.  Hmmm…

PLEDGE BREAK:  The sales are going nicely so far… but not overwhelmingly.  Many of you have written in to say that checks were on the way.  Thanks.  Others have had PayPal problems.  I hope you can work them out.  For those of you who are on the fence, please try to imagine a mug with my mug sitting on your desk. 

ESTIMATE THAT!:  I’m not sure what inspired the L.A. Times’ Richard Natale to defend the Sunday estimates in Tuesday’s paper (click here), but it was an interesting choice.  Maybe it’s because the Times questioned the issue publicly in their five-part series about media and the movies just a few months ago… and found near unanimity about the doubts within the industry.   The first defense comes from Dan Fellman at Warner Bros., saying that the estimates are rarely off by more than 5 or 10 percent.  Well, that’s exactly what I’ve been saying for years.  The same is true for the finals.  The fact is, despite Natale’s story, the numbers reported Saturday, as Friday actuals, are changed by studios fairly often before Monday morning so that the numbers look reasonable.  Also, the idea that a 10 percent variation isn’t much is not right.  For an opener – and the manipulation is almost always in the Top Five -10 percent can be well over $1 million.  In the battle for slots, that’s a lot of room to tap dance, when you aren’t in a weekend as singular as last weekend, when The Mummy Returns reigned.  And anyone who is close to the estimations will tell you that in a close race, studios jockey for position as the weekend goes on.  They can’t control the box office… only the reporting.  Anyway, the two execs who went on the record, Dan Fellman and Jeff Blake and the two least likely to ever play games.  Isn’t it ironic?

STRONG INSIDE:   While it’s still there, web denizens are getting the benefit of the cutbacks at Inside.com.   They have two very strong pieces up right now, from David Robb and Denise Levin.  Robb looks at the move by Columbia to schedule Men In Black 2 directly in harms way… IF there is a SAG strike.  Apparently the studio is betting against that eventuality.   (The story is here.)   Then, Levin tells the story of the ongoing battle over the Harrison Ford flick, K19: The Widowmaker, which is now in production.  Indie writer/producer Inna Gotman isn’t waiting for the film to be a hot to jump on the litigation bandwagon.  She’s claiming that Intermedia Films stole her project and she’s suing now.  Can you feel the structure of day-to-day business changing?  (That story is here.)

REALLY ARTIFICIAL INTELLEGENCE:  I got a note from the Blonde Legal Defense Club, including a phone number (888-746-7646) to call, which prompts for a name, phone number and message.  I assume that this is a MGM stunt for Reese Witherspoon’s upcoming, Legally Blonde.  But who knows?  Maybe I’ll get a creepy call late at night that leads me back to the web that is A.I.  Maybe not.

IN THE AIR TONIGHT:  Finally, a chance to see movies the way they were meant to be seen, unedited and on a 6 inch wide screen!  But seriously folks.., Quantas airlines will be wiring their planes so every seat can have an individual screen and each screen will come with a dozen or so choices.   Parents can block R movies or even bad G movies for the kids.  But at least, when one sees a movie on a plane, they can say they at least have the home video experience and not the broadcast version where all the details are blunted.

READER OF THE DAY:  The Cat writes:  "As usual, I'm a day or two late responding to your story on the Native American Film Festival.  The attendees who called Sherman Alexie a white man are wrong -- according to Current Biography, he is part Spokane, part Coeur D'Alene Indian.  Hope you will mention this -- Alexie is one of the few Native American writers to achieve prominence, and it's too bad to see him dissed."

Not Seven Up:  "Could the slump in Hollywood (and the fact that the Japanese chilled on backing films) have anything to do with the cost of making films? I can remember when $14 million was a shockingly high budget; I can remember Spielberg biting his nails over how hard it was going to be for Close Encounters to recover its $17 mil budget. How did movies get to be so expensive? What's the average now, $80 mil for a big-studio picture?

Here's a surefire recipe for an economic crunch: let the cost of what you build get more expensive at a rate that's two or three times the rate of inflation. If that's true, then the question is not Why, but When.”"

DAVID RESPONDS:  Well, the current crunch is a combination of German money drying up, the stock market/corporatization combo and rising marketing dollars… all on top of a rise in the basic costs of making movies.  Add to that the poor economics of movie theaters ownership.  Top that with over reaching in the internet economy.  And shorted up that video window to under 6 months and BOOM!  Here we are. 

How did we go from a $20 million budget being a lot to a $120 million budget being a lot?  Good question.  I would focus, again, on the blockbuster mentality.  The small pictures that could blossom get trampled by the big pictures and their massive marketing budgets.  And the massive pictures are just too big a gamble.  The funny thing is, the industry has gotten better.  In 1997, we had two pictures that were at or above the $200 million mark for production alone, Titanic and Batman & Robin.  That is over.  At $140 million, Pearl Harbor will be the year’s most expensive picture.  But then again, over $100 million for Final Fantasy is pretty scary.

E ME:  Does the Cannes hype help you make decisions about what movies you want to see?  Does any festival?