THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT

Robert Redford and GCC are starting a chain of theaters for independent film only called Sundance Cinemas. But what's going to happen to the real indie experience?

It's 2 A.M. You arrive at the abandoned hot tub factory. You and your date get out of the car, keeping an eye out for muggers and murderers. The smell of urine wafts through the air. A trail of blood and popcorn leads you to a massive sheet metal door. You knock. A skinny guy in a T-shirt opens the door and welcomes you to "Bob's Place" and asks for your credit card. You sign a blank slip. You've just rented a camera crane. There is no candy counter, just a craft service table full of M&Ms and two day old bagels. You go into "Theater One," but find a 13" TV and two folding chairs. "Uh, we don't have a print yet, just half inch video," says your host. You watch it. When your date stops crying, you leave.

What a difference five years makes… and doesn’t.

That 167-word “column” was the first Hot Button.   (You can get an idea of the visual style of that era by clicking here.) I wrote more made-up stuff back then… that, I remember.  And you‘ll notice that the “column” was free of any first-person writing.  Boy, that changed over time. 

But the idea remains the same.  Even if the times have changed quite a bit in five years.

 

THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT 2003:  Five years ago, Bob Redford decided to take the next step with The Sundance Film Festival, spreading his success into an independent theater chain.  Five years later, every indie player with enough cash to make over 20 prints has been bought or co-opted by the studio system - though Artisan and Lion’s Gate are hanging on.  Sundance is reassessing its mission in indie film.  And there is no GCC after being eaten whole by AMC.  But what would happen if Bobby Baby got ambitious again and tried to give you the real indie experience?

 

It’s 8 p.m.  You are at the hot new 4300 screen Ulti-plex, which offers helicopter service from the parking lot to the ticket line, a childcare service manned by retired priests, a gourmet restaurant run on Monday nights by Stanley Tucci and Tony Shaloub and a special 5-seat theater with a digital projector that allows the customer with the remote to change to any of the 7 movies playing in the theater that night.  (The local D.A. has been unsuccessful in shutting down this high-profit “experience” even though there have been six murders, seventeen broken bones and one decapitation as people have fought over the remote during the three-month experiment.)

 

Fortunately, after Weekend 1.5 (it’s now Thursday), Spider-Man 12 has given up one of its 1337 screens (counted as one screen in the official count), making room for that art film you’ve been reading about as it ran on the festival circuit for 18 months, winning awards at 207 festivals.  But it was really the pull-quote from Earl Dittman that got you interested.  Your significant other really wants to go to Spider-Man 12, knowing that it will be out of theaters and on TV by Monday, following its extended two-weekend theatrical run.  But Earl is your man, so you make your way to the box office.

 

As you get closer, you see Robert Redford welcoming you.  But as you get closer still, you see that it’s just a robot, built to look like Redford circa 2002.  And right by his side is a 3-D internet set-up of Jeff Wells, complaining about Redford’s skin.  (Sadly, Wells had already been jailed for years after attempting to perform an illegal liposuction on an unwilling John Travolta and all that was left for us was his column archive.)

 

You pay for your tickets… there’s a discount matinee, so you only pay with 2 pints of blood, an ounce of sperm, two eggs, a kidney and an AOL sign-up disk that you bought on E-Bay for $300, since such discs had been banned after the entire AOL-TW board was killed by a bomb that was triggered by the words “You’ve got mail.”

 

You take the train to Screen 4299, where you follow a trail of blood and popcorn into the theater.  The dead body in the center row with the cell phone stuck down his throat is distracting, but you take your seats.  The screen is a remarkable 90 feet wide.  You wait for the film to start, but it doesn’t.  You realize that there is no projectionist.  You find the big red switch on the wall and push it to start the movie.  The image is 10 feet wide. 

 

Two people commit suicide during the trailer for the new Ethan Hawke film.  Another trailer announces that Quentin Tarantino’s follow-up to Jackie Brown is “Coming Soon.”  You’ve heard the rumors that the film might have to change release dates so that it doesn’t conflict with Gangs of New York, but you enjoy the trailers and laugh when GONY’s trailer is followed by one for Leo DiCaprio in The Sumner Redstone Story as The Older Sumner.  (Redstone, by the way, is still running Viacom/GE/Xerox/Exxon, though all that is left of him is his head, kept alive in a jar… and it recently married last year’s Oscar-winning 23-year-old actress.) 

 

The feature, which stars three stars who are earning over $40 million a picture, is directed Rob Cohen, Jr. and everyone can fly.  But it’s independent… really!  A man in the third row whispers to his date that the male star is really gay and three publicists drag him away and beat him in the hallway.  

The movie ends and you try to leave the theater, but are not allowed to exit until you buy a case of toys and a coupon for a year’s worth of Viagra3000 from the indie’s parent company.  (Viagra 3000 not only gives the man an erection, but also allows him to hit a curveball into center field.) 

You get home just in time to catch the film on HBO/HOME-DVD, complete with special features, including your social security number and checking account balance.  And, of course, a personal thank you from Bob.

TOP TEN HOT BUTTON RULES OF THUMB

Great Media Outlets Allow Themselves To Be Represented By Inferior Talent When The Subject Is Entertainment And That Sucks.

$100 Million Is No Longer A Blockbuster

Successful Movie Advertising Sells One Idea At A Time

The Story Of The Moment Is Almost Never The Real Story

There Are Very Few Journalists In Entertainment Journalism

Talent Is Your Friend Until It’s Time For Talent Not To Be Your Friend

Reviewing Scripts Or Test Screenings Is Selfish And Immoral

Opening Weekend Is Never About The Quality Of The Movie

There Are Things I Know And Things I Don’t Know And Sometimes They Change

Love What You Do And Do What You Love Or Get The Fuck Out.

THANKS:  I have a lot of people to thank, as I have each year.  A complete list will, guaranteed, be an incomplete list.  So, I will stick to some tradition.  I will thank Andy Jones, who brought me to TNT RoughCut.  I want to thank Scot Safon, who saw something in RoughCut that got him to fight for our existence for a long, long time and who became a valued friend (even if I never see him anymore).  I want to thank Cindy Campbell, who kept the money flowing and our egos in check.  And I want to thank much of the RoughCut staff who not only supported my efforts, but filled our site with smart, fun stuff 260 days a year.  I also want to thank the roughcut.com team that we built in Los Angeles in 2001.  The production and writing team was strong enough to overcome any adversary other than AOL’s Time-Warner takeover.

For the last 18 months, I have to thank Jon Strum & Jeanne Caputo for easing my transition to an independent site.  But mostly, I owe thanks for Laura Rooney, my webmistress, who has kept the style and the imagery and the uploads coming day after day after day with little to show for it other than a T-shirt with my picture on it… and that’s not enough.

NEW STUFF:  As The Hot Button moves into its sixth year, its time for a few new kinks.

First up, THB’s first sponsor.  As many of you know, I have been reluctant to sell obnoxious advertising on the site.  But thanks to a longtime reader, I recently connected with a very cool, organically grown DVD retailer called Digital Eyes.  They are based out of Memphis, TN and are still small enough to be owner operated.  But they offer you what the big boys can’t… smarts and personal attention.  You may be able to get the newest DVD for a few bucks less somewhere - though you never pay full retail at Digital Eyes – but their catalog pricing, their interest in finding the most interesting obscure DVDs out there for your amusement, and their commitment to making your experience with them better than any old video/DVD store out there makes them special. 

So we are having a contest to kick things off.  All you need to do is to send in your DVD pick of the week, along with a 25-word or less description of why you love the choice and you are automatically entered to win a copy of the Godfather Trilogy on DVD, care of the kind folks at Digital Eyes.  Send it to dvd@thehotbutton.com.

Starting Monday, we’ll have a daily DVD pick and a variety of other DVD suggestions for your edification.  Some of you buy DVDs and some of you don’t.  For those of you who do, buying through Digital Eyes is the best way to support The Hot Button and to help keep the site going.  And, even better, it will be a great experience for you.  I’ll guarantee it.

So start sending on your suggestions right here at dvd@thehotbutton.com.

ALSO, on Monday, a new website, Movie City News, will premiere here at The Hot Button.  Why isn’t it launching as a stand alone?  Simple.  I don’t want to spend the money yet.  Movie City News is an experimental site.  What I am hoping will happen is that it will become a gathering place for the industry and entertainment journalists who want to write more than your standard new release feature.

Next week, Movie City News will launch the Entertainment Roundtable, a daily chat between three or four industry types, discussing whatever comes up.  Our kick-off week will feature me, another Movie City News co-founder, Jeff Wells and a couple of guest stars who will be introduced on Monday.

On Friday, Chicago’s intrepid Ray Pride will return to the web with Pride, Unprejudiced, his arthouse film column that is guaranteed to shake any of the cobwebs right out of the indie business.

And we’ll see where it goes from there. 

FINALLY:  I want to thank all of you.  Without you, I am just a tree falling with no one to hear me.  You are more than an audience.  Many of you are active participants in this column.  You chide me when I lose my way.  You praise me when I please you.  And, most importantly, you tell me what you think, day after day after day after day. 

I’ve published almost 2 million words about movies in the last five years.  My fingers are tired.  But knowing that you are out there, ready to engage in the conversation about this art form, this business, this orgy of emotion… you keep me going. I am a lucky man to have so many passionate people in my life.  And every day, I meet someone new.  Thank you all.

READER OF THE DAY:  I won’t indulge myself by printing the many kind congratulatory e-mails I’ve gotten this week.  Again, I thank you for your kind words and apologize for not being able to answer each of you individually.

In honor of the day, here is a first-time writer.  He is a young movie writer on the make, currently toiling at USC.  PASSING THE BUCK writes:  “The summer movie season of 2002 may actually be remembered best as the point in which Hollywood's obsession with film as a pre-packaged, pre-sold entity rose to an insane fever pitch. That's not to say summer '02 was thoroughly awful; in fact, it was pretty satisfying in terms of actually offering serious-minded, adult fare, both from the studios ("Minority Report," "Insomnia") and indie distributors (Sayles' "Sunshine State," which for me was the best and most underrated of the summer, "The Good Girl"). However, with both positive and negative consequences, the big studios placed more emphasis on the marketing machine this summer than perhaps any other time in history...which is saying something.

Look at Vin Diesel. Before anyone had even seen a frame of "XXX," the word was out there that Diesel was the next Arnold, the perfect action hero for the post-9/11 world (whatever that means). His surly mug adorned every magazine cover staring up at you from the newsstand, weeks before the movie opened. To ensure that "XXX" would become a franchise, Sony "sold" and "packaged" Diesel before critics or audiences were allowed to make up their minds about his performance.

Look at the best-performing popcorn flick of the summer, "Spider-Man."  Somehow, the buzz before the movie opened was that this was the best, most faithful cinematic adaptation of a comic-book yet, and that it was a surprisingly "character-driven" piece. Now, there are many that liked the actual film better than I did, but it seems that, at this point, the people still calling it "character-driven" and/or "the best comic-book adaptation ever" are deluded to a certain degree. I mean, it was a blockbuster. Fights. Explosions. Sensory overload. Sure, Kirsten Dunst and Willem Dafoe were very good and complex, but that does not by any stretch make the movie "a $135 million version of 'Ghost World.'"

Before seeing "Signs," everyone knew it was M. Night Shyamalan's return to a more crowd-pleasing genre exercise after the arty (and, I might add, pretty damn good) "Unbreakable." After all, he's "the next Spielberg," Newsweek tells us, not the next Kubrick (leave that terrain to indie filmmakers like Mark Romanek, who are more willing to be known as risk-takers...haven't seen "One Hour Photo" yet, but certainly looking forward to it). To compound Spielberg/Kubrick confusion even further, "Minority Report" was pre-sold as "a companion piece to A.I.," without the late auteur being involved in any literal way. It turned out that "Report" both was and wasn't Kubrickian; the chilly touches of the first half hour (i.e. Anderton "conducting" as a maestro in charge of grisly images) are unmistakably influenced by The Great One, but I'd rather call the movie what it is--a sci-fi-noir triumph by That Other Great One.

The pre-packaging of "Full Frontal" (an indie project that proves not just big studios work hard to put definitive "buzz" out there before a movie opens) as Steven Soderbergh's return to indie glory after his successful run as an unparalleled studio-movie auteur ended up working against what is, in my mind, one of the summer's best movies. Turns out there are many people, even some who would like to think of themselves as "sophisticated filmgoers," who would do anything to keep Soderbergh safely in the mainstream. Ugh. If anyone can say with a straight face that the (MILD SPOILER) reconciliation between David Hyde Pierce and Catherine Keener at the end was less delicate, human, and moving, than, say, Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst's final graveyard farewell in "Spider-Man," then he or she would probably be willing to buy lanky, bespectacled ol' me as "the next Arnold" if I was on enough magazine covers that touted me as such.”

E ME:  Enough about me… what do you think of me?  HA!!!

Tomorrow, The Toronto Film Festival Preview, Pt. 1, Box Office Preview and I’ll finally tell you whatever happened to Gary Oldman.