December 21, 2005

Change is not always for the better…

After the L.A. Times' Patrick Goldstein started trying to slice up the internet a few months ago (seems like a few months), I started thinking about the core of his notion. And as time has passed, the issue of just how the web is affecting the media became more clear to me.

Anne Thompson is a well-respected e-journalist of long standing. She segued pretty quickly from EW to Premiere to The Hollywood Reporter, temping at the New York Times in between. She is of the establishment. Her work, which sometimes stings, has been mostly conventional and a little cautious about bridge burning. Nothing wrong with that. There is a reason she is still able to get a job with dental that actually involves daily reporting.

Anne was one of the people who was a potential partner in MovieCityNews before MCN fully took shape. At the time, she expressed her urge to stretch a little… to tell the tough tale… to let some people have it. But parenthood and responsibility made her, reasonably, think the better of committing to a start-up with no funding.

And then, she got a blog.

Suddenly, as is so often the case, shots usually taken over lunch with friends are public. She is not unkind, but she is not above offering her opinion of the work of other journalists. She picks her spots, her favorites, her irritants.

But it is not just her blog that is rounding out the world's perspective on Anne. Her weekly column is changing also. In the last month or so, she seems a lot more comfortable offering her take on the news she is covering and not hiding behind the magic "they said it" cloak of journalism.

And this brings us what is interesting for a certain class of "bloggers" or Web-Pros, a group in which I count myself. The strategy that Patrick used in his attack was to use "bloggers" as a pejorative, making all internet-based writers somehow equivalent. And what was so wrong headed about that take was that we clearly are not. Love me or hate me, I can't be mistaken for a lot of other writers, on or off the web. And the same is true for many of us. Ironically, Old Media has often tried to keep their internet writers within the constraints of their various print mediums. But with the web becoming more dominant in people's lives, the same old same old does fly anymore.

Bloggers are not, by their very nature, columnists. But some are.

David Carr, at the New York Times' new Carpetbagger awards season blog, is really blogging. He does a little personal reporting and a lot of linking with his take on the link at issue indicated. His writing has been a little dense for a blog, perhaps a little Mickey Kaus influenced. But he is clearly having fun. And, most intriguingly, a newspaper that was extremely light of the attention paid to the internet, has given one of the most savvy media reporters in the game a fresh new beat and the freedom to act wilder than Carr ever did, even in his alt-weekly days. While the hard news coverage of the industry remains a bit iffy and extremely opinionated without ever admitting bias towards certain perceived trends, the soft news is getting better and better at The Gray Lady. The Sunday Arts section is improving almost every week and the spot coverage is quirky and thought provoking. (Say goodbye to "Directions," please.)

Meanwhile, at The Envelope, the experiment in blogging continues to flail for the most part. Clearly they hoped that Tom O'Neil would taste like a soup and eat like a meal. But Tom is really not up to much more than being a condiment, sometimes applied liberally on the side of the plate. Never was. If he does what he is doing for another few years, he might become a professional daily journalist.

But he is a "special issues' kind of guy… and there's nothing wrong with that. Steve Pond is a monthly kind of guy. There is little more there than reported press releases and passing comments on clever plays, like Focus' 94-page insert into a Variety special edition last week.

Liz Snead is doing fine covering clothes. But she is competing mostly with US Magazine, not Oscar coverage or even Defamer.

Goldstein made his second appearance on The Envelope yesterday with his piece on Munich. (More on that and other premature ejaculations in tomorrow's MCN column.) And The Envelope launched their first Pat & Johnny podcast, which is a conversation between best friends that listens like a scripted chat. That said, I loved listening to this because it tells me a lot about these two reporters. And what could be funnier than guys who talk about everything every day asking each other leading questions? ("Hey George, you felt those wiretaps were perfectly legal under the current laws, didn't you?" 'Why yes I did, Don, thanks for asking. And if you listen to my press conference, tonight at 8 pm eastern on CNN, I'll tell you more!" "Wow… can't wait!")

But the attempt to loosen up has created new problems. Reporters are notoriously competitive, even when most of the time in the film world, news happens when someone wants it to happen, not so much broken as souffléd. So with new freedom to "go for it," the intensity of the movie news cycle is getting out of control.

This week will probably be remembered as a historic one in which two minor stories became tsunamis for no real reason. The first was the opening of King Kong and the other was the overreaction to limited screenings of Munich.

Kong was not the massive opening that Universal was hoping for. There is no disputing that. But perspective on the month of December tells us that it was the fourth best opening ever in December. The lowest domestic gross for a film to open over $45 million in December is $279 million. Not good enough. There were lots of better openings in the summer. Attack, attack, attack.

But to be fair, the attack mode followed insanely positive press just ten days earlier. "It's could do Titanic numbers!" was one of the nutty screeds. "An Oscar Best Picture lock… a possible winner!" was another. It still could rack up huge numbers. It still could get a Best Picture nod.

When I say too much hype, people's first reaction is to blame the studio. But with due respect, they do not write copy for Jack Mathews or the trades or whomever. If there is a clear lesson to this, it comes from looking at the success of Narnia that was based mostly on grass roots salesmanship (Christian and otherwise) and the sugar high and crash over the big deal made within the media about Kong. The question about just how much money there is in the marketplace - forget "the slump" - is real. Narnia is doing really great, actually doing better this Monday than last. So does that mean that Kong's excellent-by-any-other-standard numbers need to be pissed on lest anyone get the right idea?

Ask that and you get, "Well Kong was meant to be a blockbuster." Yes, it was. And so was Narnia. And by sane standards, both are likely to be just that. Only 20 movies have ever grossed $700 million worldwide. And I expect both of these films to come pretty close if not improve on that number. Both will be enormously profitable at $600 million worldwide. And innocent little Narnia cost over $140 million itself.

For the record, Kong's 6-day take is $6 million behind Narnia's 6-day take. Six days. And everyone is talking about it like it was Gigli.

On Tuesday, Goldstein headlined "A good film held hostage by bad PR" 15 days after the very first screening of Munich and less than 24 hours after the first Academy screening of Munch ended at the Academy.

And Universal is guilty… guilty of not anticipating just how insane the film media would get in a hurry… guilty of not anticipating how somehow a Munich success was seen as a loss for Brokeback by some people… guilty of not anticipating Variety's Todd McCarthy would write his most bile-ridden review - the one truly negative review of the film I've read to date - since he ripped (falsely, in my opinion) into Lars von Triers' Dogville for being anti-American, more it seemed, on Von Trier's press conference rhetoric than anything in the movie.

While Goldstein is busy pointing the finger at "bloggers" (even though this web journo thought the "We're not junketing" story so meaningless that I never ran it, then Nikki Finke turned it into high drama, followed by John Horn's unnecessary investigation into the non-event), he also embraces the significance of every negative voice against this film that has barely broken into non-obsessive-industry minds yet. McCarthy is "a reliable barometer for critical opinion," regardless of his recent rave for Memoirs of a Geisha. (McCarthy is an excellent critic, but is a human being, not a barometer of anything but his own opinion.) Are David Brooks and Leon Wieseltier really critical voices in the Oscar race? And even the comedy stylings of the HFPA have excuses made for them, as though Spielberg's choice not to attend the after-screening Q&A should have rightfully led to payback in the form of a non-nom. Shouldn't the story be how foolish the HFPA can be are and how stunts like this reduce the legitimacy of the group?

Note that Spielberg did get a best-of-five Best Director nod and Kushner and Roth got a best-of-five Screenplay nod, a feat matched by only Brokeback Mountain, Match Point and Good Night, And Good Luck… all of whose directors did Q&As, photos and all the great stuff/torture that HFPA puts talent through. Also note that none of the 10 Best Picture nominees missed this roundelay, and that besides Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Terrence Malick also failed to play along and then failed to get Picture nominations. (The reclusive Malick never has been nominated by the HFPA, including for Oscar Best Picture nominee The Thin Red Line.)

But my point is, today marks Day 16 in the public life of Munich. And King Kong has been in theaters for seven days. Deep breaths. Sanity will return.

At this pace, the media will be pushed further and further out of studios' marketing plans. We can point the finger all we want. But we have become absolutely rabid, denying ourselves the power of even a little perspective. And in an era of personalities, our first instincts seem to be becoming not the beginning of a conversation, but a flag on the top of our individual intellectual mountains that become something we have to protect, not reconsider as facts come in.

Faster pussycat, kill kill!

And then, we write about how the studios managed the public's expectation, when in fact the issue is how they managed the media's expectations. The only reason any of this is public conversation so quickly is that the media molehills-to-mountains in just hours now and then everyone seems to want to get into the cluster fuck. There are barely any contrarians anymore. The next bus will be along any second now… literally any second.

And you know what? We're still not the story. Even if we blog… even if we column… even if we report… we can never be too much more than our opinions and our specific offers of gathered fact.

I love what David Carr is doing. And I am thrilled for Anne Thompson. I even have hope for the Patrick and John and the L.A. Times. The talent is there… the mindset needs a little changing. But there is a lot of adjusting to do. And we are all learning as we go. What is a column in this atmosphere? What is a blog? What is news delivery? What is an exclusive? (About half the time I write a headline with the word "exclusive" on MCN, I get a note from someone who says they actually got there first.) And most importantly, who are we as individuals and what is our relationship with our readers?

One standard has to change. Being first cannot be being best… or we are all doomed. Because faster is very doable. But might is getting it right.

"Slow down you crazy child
You're so ambitious for a juvenile
But then if you're so smart tell me why
Are you still so afraid?
Where's the fire, what's the hurry about?
You better cool it off before you burn it out
You got so much to do and only
So many hours in a day

But you know that when the truth is told
That you can get what you want
Or you can just get old
You're gonna kick off before you even get halfway through
When will you realize...Vienna waits for you."

E-ME.