June 15, 2005

What does Brian Grazer think "happened" to Cinderella Man?

It's an interesting question as the start of a report... since, of course, there is no one less capable of giving you or The New York Times' Sharon Waxman a good answer to the question. Coming in second on that list... Marc Shmuger, who was clearly dragged into this utterly unnecessary (given its lack of actual content) story by Grazer's unwillingness to eat his box office porridge. Poor Shmuger had little he could say outside of blaming the audience.

(In a show of just how inside - and completely unaware of their readers - the NYT has become on this beat, head of marketing Shmuger was only identified as "Universal Pictures Vice Chairman Marc Shmuger," which makes it seem like he is somehow analogous to the woman smart enough not to answer the unhappy ring of Ms. Waxman's call, Stacey Snider. With Jeff Blake unavailable to eat shit for the studio, Sony's Amy Pascal picked up that phone... and did the only thing she could... flailingly blamed the date.)

The bottom line on this story is that Sharon got an earful of the impending "emergency" meeting, which was not an emergency to anyone but Brian Grazer. Brian wants to do a fall awards re-release because he doesn't want to see his film disappear into the pile of perceived failures, so he whispers into the willing ear of the New York Times, which doesn't stop to question the strategy, and now the bug is planted in the media's mind.

Sadly, it seems that this is the new industry-wide strategy for handling the New York Times. If they run a scoop about someone's strategy, eight out of ten times it is someone floating an angle they are trying to sell.

Want to close your deal with Tom Cruise for 5 points less? Give a story to the New York Times about not being sure whether his film is being greenlit! But where was the reporting on how many times the film has already been delayed, how many millions have been thrown away, and how much talent has been paid to walk away already? Somehow, "scoop" supersedes perspective. (And Brad Grey is already the top exec most likely to do all of his business in the media.)

Want to negotiate your exit from Disney? Do it on the pages of the New York Times. If you tell the paper, off the record of course, about how easy it is going to be to get big funding and if you can find an analyst who will agree, people start believing the lie.

Want to blame the studio for the failure of your new film, even though you are the most hands-on producer in the business and hyper-manage the studio that releases all of your films? Call the New York Times.

Want to position your "new" studio vision? If you tell them, they will print.

And then, there is the trend creation role that the paper seems hell bent on filling. The New York Times decides that the DVD has reached the tipping point, forcing a decline in theatrical... so they beat the drum endlessly... never bothering to note that the DVD sell-thru business for movies has actually started to decline or that the overall box office is not like tracking a single business' stock price, but is a weekly series of product launches complete with all the complexity that such an enterprise entails.

But then when Brian Grazer wants to blame the date, that story shows up without irony. Are people waiting to see Cinderella Man at home on DVD?

But that brings up another huge flaw in the reportage... executives are, depending on which side of the paper they are on, either beyond questioning or inevitable liars. Box office tracking is news, not an insiders tool.... even though the numbers are wrong week after week after week. (The definition of insanity... doing the same thing every week and expecting a different outcome?) Where was the story about Madgascar doing almost three times its tracking or The Longest Yard doing almost twice its tracking on Memorial Day weekend? There was none. Why? Because its not news... except when it supports an experiential hypothesis.

Has anyone at The Paper run the numbers? If Cinderella Man opened to its $28 million tracking (Seabiscuit opened to $21 million... Road to Perdition opened to $22 million... Collateral opened to $25 million... yeah, $28 million was a reasonable expectation) and dropped the same 50%, would that have made it all okay? That would put the film in the low 50s now... it would still be well behind Seabiscuit by the end of weekend three, given the drops. Seabiscuit's drops were 15%, 32%, 32%, 24%, +5%, 43% in its first six weekends... that's a 24% average.

As I wrote after Cinderella Man's opening... if it had Seabsicuit drops (no poop pun intended), it would have been fine. Cinderella Man was never seen, in house or out, as a huge open, three weeks and out, typical summer movie. $18.3 million was plenty big enough a sample for this film... but the reality is, it is a period drama about a little known boxer, whose family was not the center of the film or the advertising, with a star who doesn't break his back selling himself or his movies, with a co-star who is not an opener, a third lead who is from the indie world and whose supporters are not anxious to see him supporting big gloss films, and no actor to see or sell after that. Not an easy sell.

And Russell? Gladiator was a genre changer with legs. Master & Commander was a genre changer with okay legs. The Insider was easily the best of these films (in my opinion) and it did under $30 million.

Russell and The Telephone was an almost welcome distraction for this movie. One reason why stars tend to be solid gold at the box office is that they sell the crap out of their movies. Russell doesn't do that. And did you realize that he has only two $100 million domestic grossers... that he has only four $50 million domestic grossers... that Cinderella Man was the third best opening of his career?

And even bringing up Lords of Dogtown in the same piece... oy. The one thing that is instructive about Dogtown - or would be, had it been reported - is that its issues can be examined devoid of all the hype around Cinderella Man. Unlike C.M., Dogtown never got a big sampling and Dogtown didn't have a sellable name of any size. The answer is another question... why couldn't the film find a point of entry with the audience it sought? And the answer can be sought in about 10 factors. And still, analyzing all of them, there may be no answer. Dogtown desperately needed a wave and it failed to create one for itself... mostly because creating your own wave is really, really hard and virtually impossible to do simply out of your own intent. The Weinsteins and the Oscars. They made waves. No one else has been able to do that trick. But they also have failed every bit as often as they've succeeded, if not more. And they did exactly what Brian Grazer has been attempting both before the release of and after the soft numbers for Cinderella Man... they made themselves too good a story to "allow" the media to focus on the failures. Toro!!!

But I digress...

The New York Times is hardly the only major media that is slogging through the mud, grabbing every tabloid moment they can under the guise of reporting on other media and falling prey to the Hollywood hype machine in the guise of challenging it. But for those of you who are enraged by my daring to question The Paper of Record, let me explain... for the media world, the New York Times is The Government. When it runs there, it resonates. What runs in the Times is covered by the rest of the media the same way anything George Bush does is covered... out of a long standing habit. And the Times, at least on my beat, has become as arrogant and self-possessed as any government tends to be... but with that extra twist of fear, as the paper behaves as though it knows its in an election cycle and The Internet is Howard Dean. They're going to (as will The L.A. Times) point out ever "Hoooooo Haaaaaa!" that comes from the web while building their own case.

I don't think that the New York Times is lying to you on purpose. These are lies of omission, not commission. Sharon Waxman is a smart, capable reporter who is trying make sense of an industry that makes no sense while also riding the rollercoaster of her own popularity (or pariah-dom) inside the industry. When Brian Grazer or David O. Russell or Brad Grey or Mark Gill or whomever drops one in her lap, she acts like a news reporter and focuses on that story. But her weakness in this job is her and her editors' failure - not unusual - to understand that these stories have no public context other than the context that they give it. In a "real news" cycle, Brian Grazer's successes and failures as a businessman would be covered in 20 of 52 weeks of each year. He is that central in this business. But this is not real news... this is show business. And no one, with rare exception, wants to publicly call Mr. G. on his failures. Not the studios, not the reporters, not the talent he works with, not agents, and certainly not Mr. Grazer. The reality is that his man has had and will continue to have a remarkable captain-of-industry kind of career. But everyone fucks up now and again. Still, you are unlikely to read anything other than creampuff pieces, even when it is a reporter who prides himself on being a tough guy, like Patrick Goldstein.

I guess that my sense of the role of journalists is to seek the highest possible truth. By seeking only what is put on your plate, whether that meat is overtly shallow or deceptively deep, I feel journalists are doing a disservice not only to their readers but to the industry as well.

No one knows anything. It's never been truer. But who, what, why, where, and when... especially why. Why? Motivation is not truth, but it is real.

If the New York Times continues to move towards being the equivalent of US Magazine in its industry coverage, replacing what some exec told them for a picture of two stars on the beach, entertainment journalism will suffer a true and damaging loss. And it is the pain of considering that loss that fuels my undeniable rage.

E-ME. Do you trust The Government?

And more on the Seattle International Film Festival tomorrow..

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