How bad can the movies get?

Claudia Eller and Richard Verrier had a good story in today's Business section talking about how a host of big Hollywood productions could be derailed before they go into production if the studios can't negotiate a new contract with SAG by the end of the month. Even uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer sounded pretty concerned, saying that if SAG went out on strike, "We'd have to shut it down and everybody goes home."

I'm rooting against a strike as much as anybody -- or at least I thought I was until I perused the list of films that our piece said could be affected by a work stoppage. Our chart had 17 films that were either in production or slated for production that could be shut down by a strike. As I read the descriptions of the films, which appear to be a fairly representative sampling of mainstream studio filmmaking, circa 2008, I started to cry. OK, I didn't really cry. But I did find myself in the grip of a minor depression.

Want to know why?

The real Darth Vader of American politics

Most of my family is from the South, starting with my grandmother, who spent 93 years living in Georgia, Alabama and Florida. She had a pretty simple rule about politicians, saying, "I'd be happy to vote for a Republican, if I could ever find a good one." Apparently she was one of the few Southerners resistant to the wily political charms of Lee Atwater, who did more than any political strategist of his generation to help the GOP gain a decades-long stranglehold on the South. Atwater is dead, but his malevolent spirit roars back to life in the new documentary "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story," which debuted Sunday night at the L.A. Film Festival. (It plays again Friday at 1:45 p.m. at the Landmark.) Directed by Stefan Forbes, it offers a compelling portrait of one of the great con men of modern American politics. The movie isn't a knee-jerk lefty hit job. In fact, it shows that Atwater was a runaway success not just because he was a devious political operator, but because, in the words of one liberal reporter Forbes interviewed, the sass-talking, guitar-playing Atwater "was the most fun man I ever met."

For anyone who wants to understand why Barack Obama's campaign already has a Fight the Smears website up, debunking scurrilous political rumors, Atwater's political odyssey offers a telling instructional in the black arts of campaign dirty tricks. A protege of Strom Thurmond in South Carolina, one of Atwater's first triumphs came at the expense of Tom Turnipseed, a South Carolina state senator who was expected to be easily reelected until Atwater (working for Turnipseed's rival) started telling reporters that Turnipseed as a young man had "been hooked up to jumper cables."

That was just the beginning. Atwater helped pioneer the use of push polls, hiring operatives to pose as telephone survey questioners. He defeated a South Carolina Democrat named Max Heller by having his henchmen phone voters, ask a few routine questions, then wonder, "Would you vote for a Jew who didn't believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?" A popular mayor until then, Heller was a goner, especially after Atwater nudged a third-party candidate into the race who kept bringing up the issue at campaign events.

But how did Atwater graduate from local Dixie devilment to the national stage, where he ended up running George H.W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign and serving as chairman of the Republican National Party? 

The sky is falling on indie film

Film Department chief Mark Gill, who has spent most of his adult life in the indie film business -- first during the glory days at Miramax, then at the late, unlamented Warner Independent Pictures -- knows better than anyone how bad things are today in that world. Wall Street money is drying up. Indie films have been tanking at the box office. Studio specialty divisions are getting the ax or fleeing the scene (as Gill described one of the cost-cutting moves, "New Line's staff was cut by 90%, and the survivors were sent to hell ... I mean ... Burbank.")

So when Gill gave a keynote speech Saturday at the L.A. Film Festival Financing Conference, it was sort of like hearing Al Gore preach about global warming -- who could possibly have a better vantage point (no pun intended!) from which to deliver the really unhappy tidings? (Go here to read the whole speech.) For the most part, it was a good, unsentimental, bracingly candid speech. One of my favorite parts was where Gill laid out the grim odds facing indie filmmakers:

"Of the 5,000 films submitted to Sundance each year -- generally with budgets under $10 million -- maybe 100 of them got a U.S. theatrical release three years ago. And it used to be that 20 of those would make money. Now maybe five do. That's one-tenth of 1%. Put another way, if you decide to make a movie budgeted under $10 million on your own tomorrow, you have a 99.9% chance of failure."

We've known that the indie business was full of peril for years. But is there a way out of the current doldrums?

This blogging life

Over the past few weeks, whenever I've told someone that I'm starting a new Big Picture blog here at The Times, they invariably have the same reaction: That's nice, but are you going to keep the column?

I know it's meant as a compliment, but it's also a bracing reminder that people prefer familiarity to, well, unfamiliarity. It's why Hollywood keeps churning out sequels. It's why "Law & Order" has been on TV forever.

It's why, back when I was a kid, whenever I'd go see the Allman Brothers, before they'd even had a chance to play some of their new material, some scruffy dude up in the rafters would invariably bellow out, "Whipping Post!"

But in journalism, it's time for a change--big change. As you might have heard, this newspaper, along with virtually every other paper in the country, is under siege. Our whole business model is in free fall--circulation is dropping, profits are down and lots of talented people are losing their jobs. We can moan and groan about it or we can try something new.

That's the idea behind launching the Big Picture blog. As much as I've loved writing a once-a-week column, the world of entertainment and pop culture is moving so fast that it's become impossible to keep up with all the action without weighing in more often than once a week. Over the past few years, I've found myself addicted to reading blogs. The best ones offer a wonderfully brainy, personal and irreverent way of seeing the world. You'll see the paper now has 40-plus blogs, with more being launched all the time.

My guess is that someday soon our blogs will be the backbone of the paper. Journalists have discovered, to our chagrin, that information is everywhere these days. But readers still crave informed analysis and lively writing, which is something we can focus on as newspapers make the transition from mass circulation entities to niche-oriented publications. So while I've got lots to learn about the blogging life--and will surely stumble many times along the way--I'm eager to be a part of that new conversation.

But how will the new Big Picture blog be different from the old Big Picture column?

Brad Pitt is getting younger every day

It's a tantalizing hook for a film, isn't it? What if your hero was born an old man, only to grow younger every day, from wrinkles to wrinkles, so to speak--don't they say that all little babies look like Winston Churchill? That's the premise behind David Fincher's upcoming "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which stars Brad Pitt going from geezer-hood to infancy, and falling in love with Cate Blanchett along the way. The film is due in December and has already been touted for Oscarhood. Now that Paramount has put up its first trailer--download it here--I have no quarrel with any grand predictions.

The trailer promises us a moody, mysterious and bewitchingly bittersweet look at life, lived in an entirely unexpected way. It also offers the tantalizing possibility that Fincher, one of our era's greatest filmmakers, may have found a way (thanks to an Eric Roth script, adapted from a 1922 F. Scott Fitzgerald short story) to marry his often chilly obsession with serial killers and people in peril to a story with more emotional resonance.

If nothing else, the trailer--largely devised by Fincher, the ultimate hands-on filmmaker--reminds us that not every trailer has to play like a greatest-hits reel culled from the (fill in the blank: funniest, scariest or most exciting) scenes in a film, all so hideously pre-tested that no moment with any ambiguity or mystery could possibly survive. In terms of an opening, it's hard to top the trailer's first image:

The academy finally gets it right

The motion picture academy announced a new set of rules today that could help it avoid another disastrous year in its foreign-language film selections. Until now, the academy has racked up embarrassment after embarrassment as it has either ignored or disqualified some of the best-made films before they could compete for the foreign-language film Oscar. In 2005, the academy refused to accept "Cache," a brilliant drama that was one of the year's best-reviewed films, because it was submitted by Austria but its dialogue was in French. In 2004, "Maria Full of Grace," another beautifully directed film, was rejected for similar language issues.

But last year was the academy's lowest ebb of all. First, it refused to accept "The Band's Visit," a wildly popular Israeli film, because more than 50% of its dialogue was in English--something of a prerequisite, something the film focused on: an Egyptian police band's sojourn to Israel, where English was the only common language. (For all the gory details, read this account .) Then, when voting time arrived, the academy's foreign-language committee eyeballed Romania's "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, winner of a zillion critic awards along with the Golden Palm at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival (see clip above)--and promptly left it off nine-film short list that generates the five foreign-language finalists. 

Producer Mark Johnson, the long-suffering chairman of the academy's foreign-language film selection committee, has acknowledged that the dumb moves gave the academy a black eye and promised to make changes. Today he emerged a victor. "This is a huge, gigantic improvement," Johnson said, on the phone from London, where he was at the British premiere of his film, "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian." "It should prevent what happened last year from happening again, when we ended up picking very safe, unimaginative films."

Here's what it looks like:   

Will 10-year-old girls embrace 'Kit Kittredge: An American Girl'?

One of the producers of "Kit Kittredge: An American Girl," which opens Friday in Los Angeles before going wide July 2, checked in with me recently, hoping to get me to see her new film, which stars Abigail Breslin as a plucky 10-year-old girl growing up in 1934-era Cincinnati. I suspect the word was out that I had a 10-year-old kid myself and might be a soft touch if my kid liked the movie.

It was a good idea, except that I have a 10-year-old boy, whose only interest in Cincinnati is that they have a baseball team. He would probably be the first to tell you that the Cincinnati Reds were so bad in 1934 that they had not one but two pitchers who lost more than 20 games. I dutifully showed my son the trailer for the film. But afterward, when I asked if he wanted to see it, he gave me the look he reserves for questions like, "Do you want another helping of broccoli?" However, he suggested we recruit his best friend, Grace, an actual 10-year-old girl, to review the movie. It seemed like a good idea, especially since the film is quite the exercise in girl power, with a woman writer (Ann Peacock, who co-wrote "The Chronicles of Narnia"), a woman director (Patricia Rozema, who did "Mansfield Park") and eight producers and executive producers (including Julia Roberts!), all of them women.

Since Variety weighed in today with its review, it seemed like a good time to have a look at what Grace had to say. As it turns out, critics and kids all seem to be in agreement--it's a perfect film for moms and daughters to see. Variety calls it "a throwback to the kinds of movies they don't make anymore." But here's a pretty perceptive assessment from the real target audience:

'Entourage's' Ari Gold meets Ari Emanuel

"Entourage's" Ari Gold is obviously a caricature of Endeavor's Ari Emanuel, but having been out to lunch with the real Ari several times, I often came away with the feeling that the real Ari--the brash, endlessly competitive and bravado-filled Hollywood agent provocateur extraordinaire--is a caricature too. So let's give credit to Charlie Rose (who can be something of an all-too-talkative talk-show host caricature himself) for offering us a glimpse of the amazing Emanuel family Monday night. (It took a while for a link to the show to appear--if the video above doesn't work, trying going here to watch.)

To see the three Emanuel brothers around the same table--telling tales, laughing, finishing each other's sentences and reliving old arguments--was like seeing a new chapter of Neil Gabler's "Empire of Their Own'' come to life. Rose gave everyone a chance to talk, eldest brother Ezekiel (top-flight oncologist, bio-ethicist and author of a new text, "Healthcare Guaranteed") giving way to middle-son Rahm (former Clinton operative turned Illinois congressman and chair of the Democratic House Caucus) followed by baby brother Ari, whose smarts and hustle have helped make Endeavor into Hollywood's No. 2 talent agency, behind CAA.   

If Ari is ever having trouble pitching a new film, he should try selling the story of his own family, which offers a compelling modern-day twist on the fabled Jewish immigrant success story. The three brothers' (they also have a sister) grandfather was a union organizer who built a synagogue with his own hands. Their father, a talented doctor in his own right, emigrated to Chicago from Israel in 1959 and led an early campaign to get lead paint out of inner-city tenement housing. Their mother was an ardent civil rights activist.

When Rahm and Ari were boys, they had to share a room because their mother had brought in a foster brother, who needed a room to himself. As this exchange from the show attests, they were taught not to just talk the talk, but walk the walk.

How good a bet is Steven Spielberg?

Steven Spielberg has done it all. He's already earned his AFI Life Achievement Award, scored his best director Oscars, hung out in the Clinton White House, been parodied by "South Park" and played the part of a Universal tour guide (see above clip). But with Hollywood abuzz about the news that DreamWorks is putting together a deal with an Indian media conglomerate to finance a new slate of films, I found myself wondering--how many big hit movies does Spielberg, who turns 62 in December, still have left in the tank?

After all, while Reliance Entertainment clearly expects DreamWorks co-chair Stacey Snider to be a major force in picking hit films in the ensuing years, it isn't spending $500-plus-million on her executive talent, as considerable as it might be. It also has to betting that Spielberg can still deliver the kind of megahits he's famous for. His track record is pretty much unparalleled in modern-day Hollywood, with epic successes in every decade of his career: "Jaws" and "Close Encounters" in the 1970s, "E.T." and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in the 1980s, "Jurassic Park" and "Saving Private Ryan" in the 1990s and "War of the Worlds" and the newly released "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" in the current decade.

Spielberg has a slew of classy-looking projects in the works, from a trilogy based on "The Adventures of Tintin" that will have him collaborating, in some fashion, with Peter Jackson, to a biopic of Abe Lincoln (scripted by Tony Kushner) and the "Trial of the Chicago 7" historical drama, penned by Aaron Sorkin. But filmmaking is a young man's game, especially when it comes to making quality films that also attract a mass audience. Outside of Clint Eastwood and John Huston--once in a generation directors--the box-office results for filmmakers who've hit 62 are not pretty.

Borrowing on the work of baseball sabermetricians who project the careers of great sluggers and pitchers after they've passed what passes for middle age in baseball, here's a representative sampling of career work from 10 of our great directors after they've passed the 62-year mark.

DreamWorks goes Bollywood

I'm not going to say TOLDYA!, since that's someone else's shtick. But the Wall Street Journal's scoop this morning that DreamWorks is close to a $500-million-plus equity financing deal with one of India's biggest entertainment conglomerates essentially confirms my column's May 6 prediction that DreamWorks would raise money from outside investors as part of its plan to bail out of its unhappy marriage with Viacom-owned Paramount Pictures. It's a great deal for DreamWorks, which has been looking for a way to regain its autonomy after several years of unhappiness and bruising clashes with Paramount management.

But it looks like an even better deal for the Mumbai-based Reliance ADA Group, which gets instant entry into the film business via DreamWorks, which, while having its ups and downs in terms of pure profitability, has been one of the few studios devoted to making quality commercial films. Reliance gets a company run by Spielberg, America's preeminent filmmaker, and Stacey Snider, one of Hollywood's smartest and savviest studio executives. The moves comes just a month or so after Reliance made waves with its announcement that it had struck development deals with a group of top stars, including Tom Hanks, George Clooney and Brad Pitt.

But what does this impending deal tell us about the future of the movie business?