Warners' films: Movie overboard!

Guy Ritchie's upcoming gangster film, "RocknRolla," is due to be released by Warner Bros. in early October. So why was the film's producer, the inimitable Joel Silver, showing the film to executives at Lionsgate and Sony Pictures?  According to my colleague John Horn, Silver said he was screening it for other studios to get their advice about marketing and release plans for the picture. You can imagine how tickled Warners' marketing staff must've been, hearing the news that the studio's top producer was out soliciting ideas about how to sell his picture from rival studios.

A more likely scenario is that Silver is looking for a new home for the movie; a top executive at one of the studios said it was clear Silver was looking for a buyer for the film. People who've seen the film say it's not bad at all. But as Warners goes through the arduous process of absorbing two dozen or so New Line films into its distribution system, the studio simply has too many movies to release, so it's starting to pick out the weak calves from the herd.

Sources say Warners has also been shopping around "Slumdog Millionaire," a Danny Boyle-directed drama about a kid from the slums of Mumbai who has an amazing run on an Indian version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." The film, whose U.S. rights were acquired for $5 million by Warner Independent Pictures, is good enough to be accepted at this fall's Telluride and Toronto International Film Festivals. But Warners is unsure of its commercial prospects. The film, originally slated for release Nov. 7, has now quietly been bumped to next year. Warners is also open to offers on a third film, "Pride and Glory," an Edward Norton and Colin Farrell-starring drama about NYPD officers made by New Line that was initially slated for release by New Line this spring but bumped from the schedule.

What's going on here? I went to Warners chief Alan Horn for some answers:

Bill Hader: Crazed movie fan?

Every comic who can tell a joke seems to be part of a newly launched Web comedy series. Some are really funny; some are, well, just as bad as anything on B.O.T ( or "boring old TV"). One of my current favorites is "The Line," which stars a host of "Saturday Night Live" writers and cast members, most notably Bill Hader and Simon Rich, who co-created the Web series. It was financed by Lorne Michaels' Broadway Video and debuted late last month on Crackle.com. It's now available everywhere--I've been watching the episodes on YouTube. The premise: Two pals are camping out in line 10 days before the premiere of a "Star Wars"-style summer blockbuster. The comedy is droll, goofy and something of a sociological study in obsessive fan behavior.

Now something of a regular Judd Apatow stock company member, having had parts in everything from "Pineapple Express" to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" to "Superbad" (where he plays Officer Slater), Hader based the concept on some of his own past experiences. Like much of what we've been seeing on the Web lately, the whole series was concocted by funny guys sitting around out of work during the writers strike. As Hader explains: "I told Simon the story of my standing in line for 20 hours, waiting to see 'The Phantom Menace' and all the crazy stuff that happened--including a guy who was breaking up with his girlfriend who kept telling her, 'Come over here, I've got to stay in line'--and Simon said, 'That's the show.' Within five or six minutes, we'd come up with the whole trajectory of the series."

Here are some other notable excerpts from our chat:

How is the Internet changing comedy? "We'd written the whole script, but we kept cutting it left and right because watching seven minutes of comedy on a computer can seem like a long time," says Hader. "After doing the Web series, Simon and I went back to a screenplay we were writing and suddenly we started going, 'Oh no, this scene is way too long. We've got to cut it!' The Internet definitely changes your way of thinking about comedy rhythm."

The Internet makes comedy instantly doable: "In the old days, you'd carry around tapes of your short films in the trunk of your car, waiting to give 'em to some producer. Now you can put it right up on YouTube. You have no excuse not to be making funny stuff on your own every weekend. It's so easy. You do it, cut it at your house and put it up online. And you get instant feedback."

So how did he become part of the Apatow stock company? "I had a small part in 'You, Me and Dupree' and I met Seth Rogen when we were shooting in Hawaii and we started talking about comic books     and after 10 minutes he said, 'Hey, you'd be great playing a cop in this script we wrote.' Ninety-nine percent of the time that's the last you hear about it. But later, when I had a meeting with Judd, he said, 'I think you're playing this cop in a movie I'm producing.' And when someone gave me the script to read, I went, 'Holy [smokes], that's a real part!' "

Here's the first episode from the series:

Photo of Bill Hader (left) and Seth Rogen in "Superbad" from Sony Pictures

Fox's cruel summer: Not a $100-million hit in the bunch

When News Corp. President Peter Chernin was taking a victory lap last week after the company reported a 27% jump in its fiscal fourth-quarter net income, he took pains to credit the 20th Century Fox Film Group for much of the good news. He also predicted healthy earnings in the future, pointing to such upcoming summer 2009 films as "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" and "Night at the Museum II: Escape from the Smithsonian." For Hollywood insiders, it was telling that Chernin--perhaps the savviest showbiz mogul of our era--somehow failed to mention any of his studio's movies from this summer.

And with good reason. This is the first summer since 1997 that Fox hasn't had a $100-million box-office hit. For 10 straight summers, the Fox assembly line has churned out every kind of hit imaginable, from "X-Men" movies to "Dr. Dolittle" and "Big Momma's House" family comedies to last year's "Simpsons Movie." Even more impressively, in three of the last four summers, the studio had three $100-million-plus hits each year (perhaps its best summer being 2005, when it had "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith," "The Fantastic Four" and "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," which all topped $150 million in the U.S. alone).

The remarkable consistency of the Fox movie machine has made this summer's series of disappointments and flops even more of a surprising stumble. It's a shock to the system--like the New York Yankees not making the playoffs. Built around intense fiscal discipline and tight creative control, Fox has been a studio that rarely made a false move. But this summer has been different. Without a true tentpole film, the results have been dispiriting. The studio's biggest hit was "What Happens in Vegas," a forgettable comedy that grossed $80 million in the U.S. and roughly $215 million around the world. "The Happening," a poorly reviewed thriller from M. Night Shyamalan, topped out at $64 million (though it's performed better overseas). The other films have been embarrassments, especially by Fox standards.

"Meet Dave," a costly Eddie Murphy comedy, was a big bomb; "The X Files: I Want to Believe" had a weak opening and dropped off precipitously afterward, and "Space Chimps" barely made a ripple (though it wasn't financed by Fox). This coming weekend's entry, "Mirrors," is another film Fox is simply distributing (it was financed by New Regency), but it's still eating up time and money on the release schedule. According to tracking numbers, it's on course to be another loser.

Fox executives say that after 10 straight summers of success it was inevitable that they'd have an off year. Fair enough. But I say the cruel summer numbers are also the result of a rigidly constructed system that has driven away nearly all of the creative filmmakers and producers who once worked on the lot, putting the studio's movies in the hands of hacks, newcomers and nonentities who largely execute the wishes of the Fox production team led by studio Co-Chairmen Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopulos.

Rothman and Gianopulos (who would not speak to me for this story) have been running the studio since 2000 and they've run it as well as anyone else in the business. But by Hollywood standards, nine years is the equivalent of a couple of centuries. Is it time for some new blood--or at least a new approach?

Monday media update

For me, the writers strike cast a spotlight on an overriding issue that loomed far larger than the equation for new media revenues or any DVD profit-sharing formula. It was the idea that the time has come for artists to become entrepreneurs. While I'm a big believer in unions, in today's corporatized entertainment world, where media companies have deeper pockets and wider diversification than ever before, writers and filmmakers (and, yes, actors too) will ultimately benefit more from their entrepreneurial energy than from any old-fashioned guild negotiations.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the music industry, which has quietly undergone a massive transformation as the power has shifted almost entirely from record companies to artists (and their managers). The careers of most pop musicians are now fueled by income from touring, merchandising and advertising opportunities, not record sales.

No one has been more in the vanguard of this entrepreneurial spirit than Peter Gabriel, who was the subject of a fascinating story in the Sunday New York Times. The piece was in the business section, not the arts section, because Gabriel has made his mark in recent years figuring out new ways to construct new economic models for artists and musicians. They are also models that work just as well for writers and filmmakers. Why? 

Bernie Brillstein: The happiest man in showbiz

Bernie Brillstein, who died yesterday, did a thousand things in show business, but he was one a kind: agent, manager, producer, executive, raconteur, confidante, great source for lowly reporters in search of a good quote or a great tip. I first met him years ago on the set of a movie that was going down the drain, but you'd hardly know it from Bernie's demeanor. He always had an easy smile, a funny remark and the attitude that whatever was going wrong couldn't possibly spoil his day. When I started writing a column, he'd take me to lunch or call me with suggestions, quips and encouragement, as in: "Hey, you haven't written anything bad about Mike Ovitz for weeks. What are you waiting for?"

For years, Bernie had a regular monthly lunch at Hillcrest Country Club with two old pals, Jerry Seinfeld's managers George Shapiro and Howard West, who got their start, with Bernie, in the William Morris mailroom in the mid-1950s. I was occasionally invited as a guest. Everything was off-the-record, although, ironically, they had a tape recorder on the table, saving everything for posterity. As Bernie joked: "We're getting so old that soon this will be the only way we'll be able to remember all the stories." I hope the tapes are being well preserved--they'll be a treasure trove for some future showbiz historian.

At lunch, Bernie always had plenty to say about the current state of affairs, firm in his opinion about which studio chief was a total moron, which agency was in total disarray and what network chief wouldn't know a hit show if it bit him on the tuchis. But I especially loved hearing tales from the Morris mailroom, which for decades was the launching pad for all of Hollywood's kingpins, from David Geffen to Barry Diller to Ovitz to current CAA barons Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane. (With loads of help from Bernie, David Rensin wrote a fabulous book in 2003, "The Mailroom: Hollywood History From the Bottom Up," that is an oral history of the chicanery and escapades that occurred on the premises.)

Every day in the mailroom was an adventure, whether you were delivering a package to Zsa Zsa Gabor's apartment (she would often come to the door in a negligee) or rushing across the street--as Bernie once did--to buy the young Elvis Presley a sweater when he was stuck in a chilly dressing room waiting to appear on a variety show. Back in the 1950s, WMA mailroom flunkies made $40 a week, but somehow Bernie lived like a prince even on a pittance. When I heard this morning that Bernie died, I called up Irwin Winkler, producer of "Raging Bull," "GoodFellas" and dozens of other great films, and also a mailroom graduate from Bernie's era. "Bernie was a guy who knew how to live." Winkler recalls. "Even when we only had $40 a week, let me assure you, Bernie spent all $40 and more. We were poor, we'd both just gotten married, but when our checks would come every other Friday, we'd go right out and splurge."

Winkler remembers that Brillstein somehow had access to tickets for every hot Broadway show in town. "He's say, 'Let's go see a show,' and take me to 'My Fair Lady' or 'Gypsy,' whatever the great show of the moment was. He always had tickets. And he never let you put your hand in your pocket. He'd pay for everything. Bernie taught me a lot of things, starting with knowing how to laugh at everything, even adversity. He just knew how to live."

Everyone has a favorite Brillstein story. Here's one he loved to tell that perfectly captures Bernie's wry take on the showbiz life:

Bill Maher argues with Jesus: Exclusive new clip from 'Religulous'

Bill Maher has never made any secret of his aversion to religion. I'm no therapist, but you have to wonder if it had something to do with Maher being raised in his father's Irish-Catholic faith, not discovering until he was practically a teenager that his mother was Jewish. On the other hand, like so many comics, maybe he was just under the spell of George Carlin, who was no fan of religion either.

I've gotten a deluge of reaction to my last post about my recent interview with Maher, whose "Religulous" documentary--due in October--is something of a sustained attack on all sorts of religious extremism (the above clip -- an exclusive scene from the movie that you can only watch here -- shows Maher in a lively if somewhat lopsided debate with Jesus; well, an actor playing Jesus at a Florida theme park). In the movie, Maher debates a host of zealots, including a minister who claims the ability to help gay men go straight.

I found it a little suspicious that Maher confronted all sorts of people in the film, but never lost an argument.  Wasn't the deck stacked? "I'm not going to lie--the deck was stacked," Maher said. "Let's face it, when it comes to religion, there is no convincing argument. If you believe in the Bible in a way where you think you can live to be 900 years old and turn your wife into a pillar of salt, you're going to lose any logical debate. Your story just falls apart."

Maher spends a lot of time in the film overseas, particularly in Holland, an especially tolerant country that, because of an influx of Muslim extremists, has been caught up in a struggle over how to react to religious intolerance. What did Maher learn there?

"That if it can happen in Holland, it could happen in America too. The lesson is--don't be afraid to exert the superiority of Western civilization, at least when it comes to free speech, equality of the sexes and freedom of the press. Those are things we have that they don't have in Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Iran. And in my view, if we have it, and they don't, then we're a better place. That's not prejudice. That's just reality." 

Watch out, Hollywood: The Republicans are invading!

You may think of David Zucker as one of those uproarious Zucker brothers who made the "Airplane!" and "Naked Gun" movies. But Hollywood conservatives look upon Zucker as their Paul Revere, their Gen. George Patton, their Oliver North ... any uncompromising, right-thinking warrior type will do. In recent years, Zucker has become one of the most outspoken voices in showbiz conservative circles who believes that Hollywood is in "a new McCarthy era" because of its hostility to conservative views. He's also convinced that Democrats are weak, foreign-policy appeaseniks. As for Barack Obama, Zucker says: "Obama is not qualified to be president, and it'll be a disaster."

Having already made a series of agitprop videos mocking Madeleine Albright, pro-tax congressional Democrats and the Iraq Study Group, he's now graduated to a feature film spoofing liberals of all stripes and sizes. Called "An American Carol," it will hit theaters in October, released by Vivendi Entertainment's new feature film division. I tried to talk to Zucker myself via his PR people, but didn't get anywhere. However, the new issue of the right-leaning Weekly Standard has a fascinating profile of Zucker, examining his odyssey from ardent Barbara Boxer liberal to flame-throwing Dick Cheney conservative.

The story also offers a treasure trove of excerpts from the film, which lampoons a host of prominent liberals and showbiz types, from Michael Moore to Rosie O'Donnell, with even a couple of jabs directed at Obama. It also features a host of notable Hollywood conservative actors, including Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer, James Woods and Dennis Hopper. They are clearly not happy to be swimming in a big pond full of lefties. Grammer, who is friends with Ann Coulter, says he once quoted her pearls of wisdom to some young staffers at his company. As the Standard recounts, the reaction was not pretty:

" 'Ann Coulter,' " Grammer says, recalling their horror and assuming their voice. " 'She's the anti-Christ.' And I said, 'What the f--- do you know about the anti-Christ? You don't even believe in Christ.' "

So how much do Hollywood liberals take it on the chin in the movie? Let's say--plenty:

Can anyone pronounce the title of Charlie Kaufman's new movie?

Sony Pictures Classics had its first L.A. screening last night of "Synecdoche, New York," Charlie Kaufman's mysterious magnum opus about a man obsessed with his own mortality. The film is Kaufman's debut as a director after emerging as indie film's best known oddball screenwriter, having penned such surpassingly strange delights as "Being John Malkovich," "Adaptation" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." I'll weigh in later today with a first take on the movie itself. But before the screening, a gang of us grungy media types lollygagged around, like a cut-rate version of NPR's "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me," trying to guess how to pronounce the movie's title, a play on Schenectady, N.Y. (The only person who seemed to truly have a clue was Christian Science Monitor critic Peter Rainer, but I think I spied a dictionary in his back pocket.)

Of course, this wasn't just an idle exercise. In a business that depends on word of mouth, how do you possibly market a movie with a title that no one can pronounce? Always a good sport, Sony Classics co-chief Tom Bernard laughed when I asked if he'd given Kaufman a list of other possible New York towns that might roll off the tongue a bit more mellifluously, like Rochester or Syracuse or even Ithaca.

"We're completely happy with the title," he says. "The whole idea is to brand it as a Charlie Kaufman film. So if it's an issue with anyone, people can just say it's the Charlie Kaufman movie. Maybe it will be a good thing. If people can't pronounce the title, that simply means they'll have to spend more time talking about it."

We'll see. But the title is a still a tonsil-twirling tongue-twister. When the film debuted at Cannes this spring, a clever videographer did man-in-the-street interviews, asking people how they would pronounce the film. The results are pretty funny--just see for yourself:

Photo of Charlie Kaufman by Sean Gallup / Getty Images

Bill Maher hates your (fill in the blank) religion

In Bill Maher's new documentary, "Religulous," the film's protagonist--Maher himself--feels the same way about the film's subject matter at the beginning as at the end: In other words, he thinks religion is a big crock of spit. You know irreverence is the order of the day when Maher, reacting to a smooth-talking black preacher's boast that he got a great deal on his $2,000 suits, drolly observes, "I find it interesting that you're a Christian, you used to be a Muslim but you buy all your clothes like a Jew."

"Religulous" doesn't open until Oct. 3, but after seeing the movie I couldn't wait to grill Maher about how he managed to get so many deeply religious figures to actually talk to him, since it's obvious to anyone whose ever watched Maher's act (on "Politically Incorrect" or HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher" or in a comedy club) that he wasn't much of a believer. In many ways, the film is a comic bookend to Sam Harris' "The End of Faith," a humorless best seller that views religion as a bastion of superstition and moral hypocrisy. Although Maher embraces Harris' belief that religion is a destructive force that has brought great pain and suffering into the world--at one point he calls it a neurological disorder--Maher is always searching for the humor in every situation. A longtime acolyte of George Carlin, when Maher confronts a religious zealot or hustler, he prefers mocking over scolding.

Rolling his eyes, often full of derision, Maher gets in his licks with everyone, from a guy playing Jesus at a Holy Land theme park in Orlando to Muslims at a gay bar in Amsterdam to a rabbi who advocates the dissolution of Israel (he wears a card with the slogan "A Jew Not a Zionist"). As everything from "The Gong Show" to "Borat" has proved, real people and situations are often undeniably funnier than anything scripted by the best comic minds. In Holland, Maher is in the midst of questioning a somber Muslim cleric when he's interrupted by the cleric's cellphone, whose ring tone is Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir."

So how did Maher manage to get all these people to actually talk to him? Since "Religulous" was directed by Larry Charles, who also did "Borat," I suspected that subterfuge and trickery were involved. I was not far wrong. Here's how Maher pulled it off:

'Indy 5'? Say it ain't so, George

With "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" hitting the theaters next week, George Lucas has been out on the interview circuit, beating the drums for the latest installment in the franchise, this one an animated film featuring the derring-do of Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Every time I read a new interview with Lucas, my heart sinks. Once a bold, experimental filmmaker overflowing with great ideas, he's been transformed into your wheezy great uncle, boring you with the same dreary old yarns about his youthful exploits.

The "Star Wars" series ran out of gas years ago. This summer's "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" (though it made tons of dough) should have stayed in the garage. Sandwiched between sleek, imaginative, jet-propelled summer fare like "Iron Man" and "The Dark Knight," it felt like a jalopy rumbling along behind a pair of sleek Porsches. In a long interview with the London Times, Lucas suggested--perhaps threatened would be a better word--that he isn't through with "Indiana Jones" at all. As Lucas put it:

"If I can come up with another idea that [Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford] like, we’ll do another. Really, with the last one, Steven wasn’t that enthusiastic. I was trying to persuade him. But now Steve is more amenable to doing another one. Yet we still have the issues about the direction we’d like to take. I’m in the future; Steven’s in the past. He’s trying to drag it back to the way they were, I’m trying to push it to a whole different place. So, still we have a sort of tension. This recent one came out of that. It’s kind of a hybrid of our own two ideas, so we’ll see where we are able to take the next one."

All I can say is--Yikes! For years, Lucas has been giving interviews, saying how he's eager to return to smaller, more personal filmmaking. He does the same in the Times interview, saying he wants to direct some "esoteric films that have a personal significance." But it's time to put up or shut up. As the slogan goes: Just do it. George's old pal Francis Coppola finally dragged himself away from his vineyards and made a personal film, "Youth Without Youth." It wasn't so hot, but at least Coppola shook off the cobwebs and put his unique cinematic skills to work. He's already headed down to South America to shoot another film.

These days Lucas sounds like a museum curator, fussing with dusty memorabilia. It's time he challenged himself. In the interview, he called personal filmmaking an "expensive hobby." I disagree. It's a craft and a rare, wonderful skill. Lucas has always been as much of an inventor as a filmmaker. If he has any inspiration left, he shouldn't waste it on exploiting something old when he could put it to use dreaming up something new. 

Photo of George Lucas from Lucasfilm Ltd.