December 19, 2003

I feel a little like I’ve given birth…

Part of me wants to jump on the freeway and just drive down drizzly roads, running into Cheryl Tiegs at a truck stop but not talking to her and ending up receiving fellatio from Chloe Sevigny, but not really , because she’s been dead from a heroin overdose for a few years. The other part just wants a nap.

We’re only eight column days from the end of the year, which means I can focus on my annual array of year-end columns soon. That’s always a relief as Hollywood shuts down and I have nothing to write about for weeks.

Mona Lisa Smile is coming out today and zzzzzzzzzzzzz…. I mean, it’s fine. The movie is like a stick of chewing gum. It has some flavor for a while, then it gets bland, then you find a pocket of flavor, but it’s gone before you know it. There’s not an actor in the film I don’t like. But the bottom line is, it meanders. The material really is fascinating. It should have been great. But the conversation at the restaurant afterwards – provided that one person at the table is a chauvinist, another is a committed feminist and another is a working mother – is probably going to be better than the movie.

One of the elements of yesterday’s Golden Globes nominations that was overlooked by most media was that Lions Gate got five movie nominations for their three movies. The only other “true indie” to get a nominations, outside of foreign language (2 Sony Classics, 1 Miramax, 1 UA, 1 Kino International), was Newmarket’s Monster, which features what should be the Oscar-winning Best Actress performance of this year.

The inevitable question is, did the Globes show favoritism to the indie that sent them DVDs before the ban was broken. The very nature of that question is double edged. The Lions Gate team, from Tom Ortenberg down, has been very passionate and completely hands on throughout the awards season. Unlike Newmarket, they got their materials out early and it’s clearly paying off. But how to balance value between crediting the performance of the marketing team, crediting the movie and crediting fate?

I had some people going as far yesterday as to suggest that all of this is really about the quality of the movies! It’s true and it’s false and it’s somewhere in between. Even Miramax can’t turn shot into Shinola. But you can reposition a movie into be “an awards movie” when it really is not. And if you have enough support, you can win some awards.

And when you do win – it’s an honor just to be nominated – who should get the credit? Nadia Bronson or Tony Angelotti… David Brooks or Michelle Robertson… Harvey Weinstein or Harvey Weinstein? (Joke! That was a joke, Amanda, Cynthia, Paul and the rest of you! But seriously… does it bother Minghella that he made a movie that lingers and slowly draws you in and now has to watch you guys sell it on TV like Die Hard With A Pork Pie?)

The answer really is “all of them.” It takes a village to raise an Oscar. And it takes some villagers to vote for the Golden Globes. (I’m just killin’ myself today!)

I think it’s important that Lions Gate be given a lot of credit for their tenacity in pushing The Cooler, Girl With A Pearl Earring and Shattered Glass. They have been true believers. And for all the calls of “foul” during Oscar season, that relentlessness and faith is really the “secret” of the most successful Oscar nomination campaigns. Of course, in the end, you have to have the movie… there is just no escaping that.

There was a rather disturbing piece in the L.A. Times on Tuesday, as Patrick Goldstein fronted a bit of a whine by Alexander Payne for having to suffer through being an independent filmmaker. He was only able to get $18 million out of Fox Searchlight to make a feature film starring Paul Giamatti and Wings co-star Thomas Haden Church. Thing is, you couldn’t get more and longer lasting (and deserved) acclaim for a Paul Giamatti movie than we’ve had for American Splendor. But the film has still grossed just over $6 million, which means it has netted just under $4 million domestically. Mr. Payne’s Election, his last movie without a major movie star but with a viable movie star in Matthew Broderick, did just under $15 million domestic, or a net of under $10 million. (About Schmidt, with Nicholson, did $65 million.

I love Alexander Payne… as a filmmaker. But you know, $18 million is just about the right budget for an Alexander Payne movie. In fact, removing the cost of Jack Nicholson, there was nothing in About Schmidt that couldn’t have been done for $18 million.

Lions Gate is in an expansion, having just taken over Artisan and its massive home entertainment library. Warner Indie is just getting rolling. Searchlight is producing half dozen or more films in-house each year on a budget of $10 - $18 million apiece. Focus is on its way to producing three or four movies a year at budgets between $20 million and $30 million. Let’s not even try to rationalize Miramax’s production arm as independent.

The point is, the definition of an indie is changing faster and more happily than Paul Bettany’s new son. (I saw Bettany somewhere talking about how much fun he is changing his son’s diapers and making up songs about – if you’ll excuse the reference to Jeff Wells’ site - poop.)

The majors need to start making more movies in the $20 - $40 million range. The risk is low, but the artistic freedom can be high and the financial upside is spectacular. And $18 million is a hardship for Alexander Payne? Geez.

I got a number of e-mails about The Bells of St Mary, the sequel other than The Godfather, Part II to be Oscar nominated. One friend who thinks about such things says that even though Bing Crosby’s portrayal of Father Chuck O'Malley, first seen in Going My Way, is again the lead, the film is not so much a sequel as the continuation of the character in new surroundings. Kind of like Brando in The Freshman as a sequel to The Godfather… with less fat. In any case, The Lord of The Rings trilogy remains a unique event in motion picture history, whichever way you slice (or award) it.

READER OF THE DAY: THE JOLLY ROGERS writes: “I wish that the Globes had dealt the daring death blow to Cold Mountain because I've always longed for a year without a BP nominee from Miramax -just to prove that for once its about films rather than the power of one studio.

But I disagree with you that the Globes aren't telling us something we don't already know. The globe announcement merely shows us again how everything is filtered through our existing paradigms. The thing that's really getting me tuned into this is the BEST ACTRESS category.

It went from being a tight race with a lot of perceived shoo ins like WATTS & CONNELLY to a race that's more interesting and wide open and yet most everyone still has in their rankings WATTS & CONNELLY and even BLANCHETT for "The Missing" as if the Globes don't mean a thing. I think that's strange. People are tough to shake in their beliefs. But there were several surprising and I would argue deserving choices in their mix. Thurman in KILL BILL for one ---a more inspired, and more difficult performance to pull off you'd be hard pressed to find, and yet people treat her candidacy as a joke. It's infuriating. Her work in KB is twice as interesting as anything Kidman attempts in CM, just as rough edged and unpleasant as anything Watts tries on for size and daring in 21 Grams, equally movie-star charismatic as Keaton's work in Something's Gotta Give, and more tonally complex than most of the other candidates and yet, she's a nominee that people think of derisively as OH, THOSE GLOBES! Evan Rachel Wood ? Scarlet Johansson? I don't think people were expecting that much support for the young ones.

Overall, I think it's a safe bet that the Best Actress category at the Globes is a helluva lot more interesting than anything AMPAS is going to come up with.

The number one belief that's sticking despite every evidence that it's a losing bid, is the faith in 21 GRAMS as a multiple nominee contender though. People just can't leave their paradigms behind.

Everyone is saying the Globes didn't tell us anything -they don't tell us anything we didn't already know. But I think, at least in the case of their total shut out of 21 GRAMS they tell us everything we needed to know. What film released in the last twenty years that's been this grim, this structurally loopy, and this lacking in any emotion other than painful ones, has EVER been greeted with joy by the Academy?

And yet people persist in the belief that DelToro and Watts are likely nominees. Just as many persist in believing there is no way Depp could get in for a broad and weird comic performance despite evidence that he's going strong even without a campaign.

Very strange says me.”

E ME: If you have a second, throw out a line…