THE RETURN

I love Bermuda, but after my third festival on the glorious island the Bermuda Triangle came home with me.  After writing a blistering Monday morning commentary on the state of the industry meant to refill the void left by my writing-free week, I checked to see whether the column was up on the site… and the site was gone.  I was warned sometime in the midst of the Miami Film Festival that my URLs needed renewing, but I was a little distracted.  On Monday, both VoicesOfHollywood.com and DavidPoland.com fell off the internet map.  When they finally surfaced, ready to be purchased once again, some Hong Kong pirates had latched on and my good name and my real name.  Surreal. 

So, welcome to thehotbutton.com.  This is the URL I wanted a year ago when roughcut.com became a victim of mergermania.  (I can’t believe I passed on those AOL/Time-Warner stock options!!!  How is their stock doing without the roughcut.com franchise?  Hmmm…)  I guess things always work out in the end. 

I haven’t gone two whole weeks without writing a column or being in the heat of directing a film festival for about five years.  It’s a little surreal.  I haven’t had the chance to do the important things, like praising the growth of the Bermuda International Film Festival and sussing out the areas where they still need some help or directing you all to Champaign-Urbana for the Fourth Annual Roger Ebert Overlooked Film Festival aka The Ebertfest.  (You should check out, however, the Chicago Sun-Times’ Laura Emerick’s excellent coverage of the fest here - please link to: http://www.suntimes.com/output/entertainment/cst-ftr-over29.html.  And look for something on Ain’t It Cool in the near future from Drew/Moriarty.  And while you are waiting, here’s another chance to read about the Floating Film Festival.   I haven’t had the chance to write about significant things, like the disappointing numbers for The Scorpion King and even more so, for Cameron Diaz’ The Sweetest Thing, a not-very-good movie that should have done at least double or triple the business it did.  And I have had no time for the amazingly insignificant things, like the Carl’s Jr. (a hamburger chain, for those out of its markets) and their Spider-Man campaign that uses the soon-to-be-infamous Wet T-Shirt sequence form Spider-Man, but removes Kirsten Dunst’s nipples and areolas from view… yet another use for CG in Spider-Man. 

The worst part of not writing daily after doing it for so long is that I am not used to needing notes.  And I can assure you that there is good stuff that I would have liked to have steered you toward that is now simply gone from my brainpan.  And God knows, there has been plenty of crap that I would have skewered. 

DUMBER THAN HE LOOKS:  I don’t know who is crazier, Vin Diesel’s team for thinking that he’s done anything to deserve a $27.5 million payday for Fast & The Furious 2 or Sony for paying him $10 million for XXX and Universal for paying him $12.5 million for the sequel to Pitch Black… which, apparently, made him think it was reasonable to demand $27.5 million for TF&TF2. 

Here is the part where I examine Vin Diesel’s box office career in depth.  This has been made a little more difficult, as I have dumped my subscription to ShowBizData, a $30 a month service that was once quite good and quite reliable as a source of older box office numbers, but which has become irritatingly inconsistent and often inaccurate in recent months.  When they added non-responsive to their list of poor attributes, they lost one of their oldest customers.  I gather that they have suffered some significant losses and continue to work with less and less staff, perhaps explaining the gaffes that required me to double check many of their numbers.  And I guess that also explains the rather disgusting effort to squeeze even more money out of me each time I wanted something as simple as foreign box office numbers on a movie.  Please! Five dollars or more to get incomplete numbers on one movie’s overseas run is pathetic and nearly insulting.   And there’s nothing better than trying to write a box office piece for the column on a Sunday night and not being able to bring up the site for the second day running.   Here’s a hint, ShowBizData… when a long-time customer calls to complain about your service problems and tells you about the numerous e-mails that went unanswered, offer him a free month of service for his trouble.  It’s called customer service.  Buh-bye.

In any case, the entire budget of The Fast & The Furious was around $40 million and the entire box office on Pitch Black was under $40 million.  TF&TF did get to $145 million domestic, which made it a big success… BECAUSE IT WAS SO CHEAP TO MAKE!!!! 

Maybe Diesel’s people knew that  $27.5 million agreement by Universal for him to do TF&TF2 would be suicidal and that they would pass, deciding to move forward with Paul Walker, who is still willing to work for under $1 million.  In other words, maybe he wanted to get out of the project.  But he sure looks like a jackass the way he did it.  He’s not proven a box office commodity by a long shot yet.  This kind of price acceleration without a film actually coming out has only been done by Julia Roberts, when her price jumped from My Best Friend’s Wedding to Notting Hill to Runaway Bride before MBFW was even released.  But she was Julia Roberts and Vin, you ain’t no Julia Roberts.  At least, not yet.

PAGE TWO:  “Woody, But Could He?”