This is, of course, the Oscar season, the one time of year when moviegoers are suddenly deluged with adult-oriented Academy Awards contenders. I guess that's what makes it even more depressing to peruse the holiday weekend box-office results--and hardly see an Oscar contender in the bunch. If there were ever a time when it was more clear than ever that Oscar films and commercial pictures are operating in separate universes--sort of like men from Mars and women from Venus--this would be it.
If you study the weekend's numbers, you'll discover that of the top 10 box-office winners, only two--"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which ranked No. 3 with a three-day total of $27.2 million, and "Doubt," which brought up the rear, landing at No. 10 with a three-day figure of $5.7 million--were legitimate best picture contenders.
The remainder of the box-office Top 10 consists of mainstream, crowd-pleasing pictures, some of them quite skillfully made, but none that has any chance at a best picture nod. In fact, one picture, "Valkyrie," though it earned respectable reviews, was deliberately kept out of award-season contention, with MGM/UA refusing to screen the picture for critics groups or run an Oscar campaign, fearing (quite legitimately) that if the film was snubbed by critics and awards groups, it would tarnish its commercial potential.
Isn't this a strange, not to mention altogether unhealthy, state of affairs, where at year's end, Hollywood essentially divides up its fourth-quarter releases into two totally different quadrants--the world of popcorn movies the public wants to see and the world of dark, brooding Oscar movies handled so gingerly that they can't actually be shown in wide release until moviegoers has been properly hypnotized by thousands of 'For your consideration' ads and softened up by a flurry of early January Oscar nominations and Golden Globe awards?
I'm not blaming the motion picture academy, which simply wants to reward quality. And I'm certainly not blaming moviegoers, who, in their own way, are eager for good pictures to see. But by insisting on releasing all the potential Oscar candidates in the last 10 weeks of the year--and then largely only in limited release--studios have walled off all the potential best picture candidates in an awards-season VIP lounge, a self-defeating exercise, since once the academy announces its five best picture finalists in January, all the other films are, by definition, damaged goods, roundly ignored by the media for the rest of the season. If a movie has genuine audience appeal, why not allow it a chance to shine in a less competitive time of year?
To be blunt about it, the Oscars ignore too many good movies. It's painfully obvious that somewhere in the evolution of the Oscars (and this is a topic we'll return to in another post) academy members started rewarding movies not for their skill and craftsmanship but for their aesthetic and social importance. This has transformed the Oscars from a mainstream movie institution to an elite art society, leading to its increased marginalization, both as a barometer of public taste and as a big-time media event. If we want studios to make movies that embrace both popular taste and deft artistry, we need to find a way to give out awards that reflect both kinds of aspirations. If we put the Oscar movies in an Oscar ghetto of limited release in small pockets of urban America, we'll end up insuring that they never reach a broader audience, an audience just as hungry as Oscar voters for good pictures to see.
Photo of an Oscar statuette by Bob Fila / Chicago Tribune
When you have a new movie hitting the multiplex at holiday time, it's always a bad sign when critics write their reviews in rhyme. No one did it better than Manohla Dargis, who back in 2003, when she was a film critic at the L.A. Times, celebrated Thanksgiving by dismantling Mike Myers' frenetic rendition of "The Cat in the Hat," concluding her Seuss-style review by writing:
Critics are paid to suffer bad art,
No matter how icky it is from the start,
So all we could do was to Sit! Sit! Sit! Sit!
And we did not like it, Not one little bit.
Now it's New York Post critic Kyle Smith's turn, whose review of "Marley & Me," which opens Christmas Day, is penned in doggerel verse, which he says (clearly with his tongue in cheek) should be sung to the tune of "Some Old Lang Syne," Dan Fogelberg's 1980 hit about two old lovers meeting by chance on Christmas Eve. Calling the film a "labra-bore," Smith gets to take shots at the actors, the script and--being a N.Y. Post critic--manages to rhyme "snooze" with his tabloid's arch-rival, writing "the movie's fit for me to pee upon, like the Sunday Daily News."
He says that he and his date gave the film "two paws down," ending with a joke about dogs being in heat that you'll have to read for yourself. All I can say is this: Seeing movies they disdain seems to give critics' imagination free rein. Or as Smith puts it:
The dog steals Frisbees and at storms he barks,
That's not exactly life on Mars,
Between the leads I couldn't see sparks,
They're less fun than chasing cars.
Photo of Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson in "Marley & Me" by Barry Wetcher / 20th Century Fox
I'm going to be posting infrequently this week -- everyone's entitled to a little holiday break -- but I couldn't resist indulging in every moviegoers' favorite ritual: toting up the worst movies of the year. I see so many movies each year that I treat the bad ones like way a baseball player handles the game where he struck out four times, the last time with the bases loaded: You forget about it and move on.
But Christian Toto, the Washington Times film critic, just posted a timely reminder of his least favorite films of the year, with his No. 1 pick going to "88 Minutes," the horrifically bad Al Pacino thriller, which will surely be remembered more for the color of Pacino's hair -- burnt orange -- than for its hapless filmmaking and inept acting. As Toto puts it: "If you're not thinking 'What were they thinking?' during every scene of this misbegotten crime thriller, then your brain may not be connected to the rest of your body."
Toto offers up a few other choice clunkers, including "Jumper," The Happening" and "10,000 B.C." But everyone has their own taste when it comes to really awful films, so I'm eager to hear your worst film of the year choices. Just to get the ball rolling, here's a few more candidates:
"Meet the Spartans," an inane spoof (allegedly of "300," though who would know for sure) that got so many bad reviews it actually earned a two on Rotten Tomatoes, inspiring heaps of critical abuse ("It's so bad that even Carmen Electra should be embarrassed," wrote the Detroit News' Adam Graham).
"Meet Dave," a clunky one-note Eddie Murphy sci-fi comedy vehicle that inspired Empire magazine's Simon Crook to write: "Avoid it like the plague."
Spike Lee's "Miracle at St. Anna," a soggy, interminable (2 hours and 40 minutes) drama about black World War II soldiers that might be Lee's worst film ever, filled with every WW2 cliche known -- or as the Christian Science Monitor's Peter Rainer put it: "Whatever miracle occurred at St. Anna never made it to the screen."
And the dreadfully unfunny "Hamlet 2," which Focus Films inexplicably bought for $10 million after seeing it at Sundance, enhancing the festival's reputation (remember "Happy Texas"?) as the burial ground for film comedy. The movie had so few comic moments that it inspired the New York Post's Kyle Smith to write: "I laughed zero times at 'Hamlet 2,' which is aimed at campy men and the women who find them hysterical."
I know there are lots of more possible deserving entries, from "Funny Games" to " Saw V" to Will Smith's "Seven Pounds," which is currently inspiring a wealth of critical venom. Surely I've forgotten a few groaners. Help me out here!
We all know that the media world is sinking at a sickening rapid pace, but as Christmas approaches there’s still one small cause for celebration—the return of the Oxford American’s 10th annual Southern Music issue. The magazine, which has struggled mightily in recent years, has managed to stay afloat long enough to produce yet another spectacular issue, full of absorbing and entertaining essays about great Southern music.
But the real reason to buy the magazine isn’t just the writing. As OA habitués know, the best part of the music issue is that it comes with a CD allowing you to listen to all the great tunes its writers are paying tribute to, with an introduction by Morgan Freeman, a longtime Oxford American supporter. (Hint, hint: Imagine how much fun it would be if our weekly awards magazine, The Envelope, came with a DVD with scenes from all the Oscar contenders we were writing about.)
This year’s music issue offers a bonus—a second CD that compiles the best material from the past decade of Southern Music issues. If you go to the magazine’s website, you can find highlights from the current issue, as well as other Web extras, information about subscriptions, back issues and local newsstand locations, so you can go out and buy yourself a musical Christmas gift.
As always, the issue is full of great writing, starting with a colorful essay on Jerry Lee Lewis by the incomparable Peter Guralnick, whose latest book, a biography of Sam Cooke, is a must-read. It also features Alan Light on Little Walter (the Chicago blues harmonica great who’s featured in “Cadillac Records”), Greil Marcus on Neko Case, Walton Muyumba on Ella Fitzgerald (who’s represented on the CD with a jazzy big-band version of “Sunshine of Your Love”), Chet Flippo on Clarence (Gatemouth) Brown, William Gay on Delta bluesman Furry Lewis and Brian James Barr on Bobby Charles, one of the South’s greatest unknown songwriters, whose admirers include Neil Young, Dr. John, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and Fats Domino. (Signed to Chess Records when he was 15 after Leonard Chess heard his first bluesy demos, Charles took the train to Chicago and walked into Leonard’s office, who took one look at him and, after spewing a few choice expletives, bellowed, “You mean to tell me you’re not black?”)
The CD with songs from past issues is a keeper. It captures the amazing breadth of Southern music, which spans every culture and social stratum imaginable. Highlights include: “Going Away,” a great Delta-style gospel track by the Staples Singers; Blind Willie McTell’s hypnotic “Travelin’ Blues”; Mose Allison’s silky-smooth “Foolkiller”; “Righteously,” a great moody ballad from Lucinda Williams; Eartha Kitt’s sultry (could she be anything but) take on Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”; and Jerry Lee Lewis himself, with the Stax Records rhythm section, making Sam and Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Coming” all his own.
With Hanukkah and Christmas both on the way, you should treat yourself to some wonderfully distinctive writing and music, all rolled up in one magazine, the way it should. In an era where great writing (not to mention music) is under economic siege, it’s a blessing to still have the Oxford American around to enjoy. Or as Jerry Lee Lewis put it, when once asked by a reporter if there ever would be anyone like him again, “I certainly hope so.” “Why?” asked the reporter. “Well,” the singer replied, “just think what a dull world this would be without a Jerry Lee Lewis in it.”
Here's Jerry Lee in his prime, on "American Bandstand," with blond curls and no socks, singing "Great Balls of Fire":
If you’re a documentarian, you know that while it’s a great honor to make the academy’s short-list for best documentary short, it’s almost impossible to get anyone in the media to write about your movie, since they’re almost totally obsessed with handicapping the ups and downs of the various actor and best picture races. But thanks to the Canadian government, in particular Alberta’s minister of culture, Leslie Iwerks’ documentary short “Downstream” has a shot at a little notoriety, which is just what a doc-short needs to steal a little attention from the endless speculation about Kate Winslet’s Oscar chances.
Iwerks is no rookie filmmaker. The granddaughter of Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney’s first great animator, Leslie recently directed a documentary about Pixar, “The Pixar Story,” and was nominated for a 2006 Oscar for “Recycled Life,” her doc-short about the Guatemala City dump, the largest toxic landfill in Central America. In her pursuit of other environmental subjects, Iwerks discovered the controversial saga of the oil sands in Alberta, a parcel the size of Florida that is a big part of Canada’s oil excavation industry, even though the extraction of oil is apparently causing a huge increase not only in greenhouse gases but in human illness.
The main character in Iwerks’ short—which will eventually be part of a feature-length documentary—is Dr. John O’Connor, a family practitioner who discovered extraordinarily elevated cancer rates in the local aboriginal Indian population that lives near the oil sands. “The doctor suspects that the suspiciously high rates of cancer are the result of the dumping of toxic material in the local rivers,” Iwerks told me when we spoke this week. “But when he talked to a local reporter about his findings, he was charged with causing undue alarm in the community. If that charge is proven, he could lose his license.”
Eager to present a balanced point of view, Iwerks sought out a variety of oil and energy executives as well as Alberta’s minister of environmental affairs. “But no one would talk to us. The only person who went on camera was a media rep for the Canadian petroleum producers’ lobbying organization.” Of course, doing a documentary about a potential environmental disaster in the distant reaches of Canada wasn’t what finally got Iwerks some attention. It turns out that when she raised funds for the film, which is largely bankrolled by Babelgum, a Web-oriented film network, she managed to score a $67,000 subsidy from the Alberta provincial government. But news of her short being short-listed for the Oscars prompted Alberta’s minister of culture to criticize the film, saying he didn’t know what the film was about when he approved the subsidy.
Now there’s talk about the provincial government imposing more creative control over the content of documentaries it funds—meaning, of course, that it might be impossible to fund a film in the future that is critical of local government policies and programs.
Iwerks defends the film’s objectivity. “I don’t think I’ve made a negative film at all,” she says. “All we’re doing is shedding light on a human rights issue. I’m not a scientist, but I think the proof is in the pudding. The authoritative reports that I’ve seen all show high levels of toxic chemicals in the water in that area. It’s not some tiny output of poison. The tailing ponds of toxic sludge are so big that you can see them from outer space. And that’s the water that often gets dumped into the local rivers. It’s something everyone should be concerned about.”
I’m getting a copy of the short to see for myself, but it sounds like exactly the kind of story that needs to be told. It certainly wouldn’t hurt if it got a boost from some awards-season attention. It’s another unsettling chapter in the story of America’s addiction to oil, since as Iwerks points out, we get the majority of our oil, not from Saudi Arabia, but from Canada. There’s a price to be paid for all our gas guzzling, a price that rarely is seen by those of us who simply pump gas into our cars. Iwerks has gone to the source, showing what our addiction has done to the health of the people who live near Canada’s oil sands. That’s where the picture isn’t very pretty.
If you want to learn more about the film---and the buzz it's started--go to its website http://downstreamdoc.com and see for yourself.
Talk about bad timing! On a day when Paramount Vantage ran a whopping seven full-page ads in the New York Times for its awards season contender, “Revolutionary Road,” the movie failed to score a Screen Actors Guild ensemble cast nomination, a leading indicator for which films will earn a pivotal best picture Oscar nomination. Coming off a weak showing with the top critics groups—it was shut out by both the New York and LA film critics—this may spell doom for Sam Mendes’ wonderfully crafted adaptation of the cult Richard Yates novel, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as an unhappily married couple in late-1950s suburbia.
The budget for the film, which Paramount produced along with DreamWorks, ended up in the $45-million range. As any kid running a lemonade stand in Beverly Hills could tell you, that’s way too much for a movie that is the 2008 equivalent of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” a bleak drama about a marriage that starts out on shaky ground and gets worse as it goes along.
So how did the movie get made? In a word—pedigree. Adaptations of Yates’ book kicked around Hollywood for years (it was published in 1961) before Winslet fell in love with a script by Justin Haythe. When she asked Scott Rudin, the film’s producer, who should make the movie, he suggested Mendes, who, conveniently enough, was indeed the right man to direct the picture—and also her husband. Everyone at DreamWorks was a big fan of Mendes, who made two movies at the studio, including studio chief Stacey Snider, who made Mendes' last film, “Jarhead,” at Universal. Once DiCaprio signed on, it was obvious that everyone hoped that the star power—DiCaprio and Winslet, who appeared together in “Titanic,” the biggest-grossing film in Hollywood history—would triumph over the bleak subject matter.
Now Paramount has its work cut out, as it tries to find a way to market a terrific film with zero crowd-pleasing appeal. In an era where downer movies are out of fashion, “Revolutionary Road” needs every great review it can get just to have a shot at breaking even. I worry that the die is already cast, with the movie screening so late in the awards cycle that most critics, not to mention SAG members, already had other favorites in mind when the time came to vote. After the dust settles, it may be harder than ever to get a movie like this made, which would be a loss for us all. But maybe it will be a bracing reminder that if you want to make an ambitious film, even if you cast it up with movie stars, you still need a new lean 'n' mean business model to make the numbers work.
Photo of Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in "Revolutionary Road" from DreamWorks Pictures
If you had any doubt about the depth of trouble the Screen Actors Guild is in right now, you only had to pick up Wednesday’s LA Times op-ed page, where Melissa Gilbert, a former SAG president, basically read the riot act to the current SAG administration, calling their upcoming strike authorization vote a "foolhardy move that endangers not only the union, but our entire entertainment industry." While acknowledging that the deal on the table has its flaws, she asked a pertinent question, in light of the fact that unemployment in California is expected to reach 9% next year: "How can any SAG member vote to knowingly put so many people in our industry into further jeopardy during the largest financial crisis since the Depression?"
It’s no secret that SAG is now a guild divided against itself, with a hugely influential group of stars having joined a growing legion of rank-and-file realists who are now firmly aligned against any kind of strike. Living in its own dream world, the SAG leadership is still steaming full speed ahead, Titanic-style, oblivious to all the icebergs in its path, with its plan to send out strike authorization ballots January 2nd. The guild needs a 75% approval by those voting to forge ahead with a strike. However, in her piece, Gilbert revealed just how serious the union’s divisions are by introducing an explosive new phrase into the contentious debate, a phrase that must have sent chills down the spine of SAG president Alan Rosenberg.
Boldly predicting that many working guild members are not only determined to vote against a strike but “will not honor if one is called,” she used the phrase you only hear when a union is starting to splinter—“financial core.” Known in guild parlance as fi-core, it is the way dissenting members give up their guild membership but retain their union protection while opting to work during a strike. The fact that Gilbert even voiced the phrase tells you that Rosenberg and SAG chief negotiator Doug Allen have managed to thoroughly alienate a host of guild stalwarts with their capricious leadership.
After being rocked by a lengthy strike by the WGA earlier this year, no one in Hollywood, from the highest-salaried studio boss to the lowliest office temp, wants to suffer through another work stoppage, especially with studios already having firing hundreds of employees in recent days. Knowing it has been painted into a corner, SAG is going with its one last option—call for a strike vote, hope to win an overwhelming mandate and then, using a strike threat as leverage, try to wrangle a few face-saving concessions from studio negotiators. “Studios Avert SAG Strike: Deal Sweetened With 11th Hour Compromise ” would be the way Variety would headline the pact.
There’s only one problem with SAG’s strategy. It’s increasingly unlikely that it will get a 75% vote, much less an impressive majority. And even if it does, the studios won’t play ball. Infuriated by the guild leadership’s refusal to accept a deal every other union took earlier this year, buffeted by all sorts of bad economic news and worried that DVD sales will continue to crater in the coming months, the studios aren’t planning to do any more negotiating. Rightly or wrongly, the deal they put on the table isn’t getting any better. It’s take it or leave it time. The doves in the studio firmament are hoping the guild will toss out its current leadership, paving the way for a more pragmatic team to take control. The hawks simply want to crush the guild like a bug. As Variety recently reported, 20th Century Fox has already acknowledged that it wouldn’t rule out switching its current TV series from SAG to AFTRA contracts, a move Warners said it could make as well. AFTRA has said it wouldn’t participate in such a move, but it was another crystal clear message that the studios plan to play hardball. Using the current economic troubles as a handy excuse, they’d like nothing better than to rollback some of the gains the guilds have made in recent years.
Apparently oblivious to what a bad hand they have in this poker game, SAG is playing into the hard-liner’s hands, threatening to undue many of the impressive gains the Writers Guild achieved during its strike. The WGA didn’t just win some valuable concessions from the studios, it persuaded many industry observers that a show business guild could be a responsible player in the game, flexing its muscles, handily trouncing the studios in the PR battle and sticking up for its members without tossing them all off a cliff. It’s hard to fathom what the SAG leadership’s game plan is right now. To use a metaphor that Doug Allen, a former negotiator for the NFL players association might understand, SAG is like a football team deep in their own territory at the end of the fourth quarter, down a couple of touchdowns, without their best players on the field.
Taking a strike vote in the middle of a deep recession is like tossing a Hail Mary pass on fourth and long. There’s really only one way the game can end and it’s not pretty.
If you're running an Oscar campaign for a low-budget movie that needs all the help it can get from rave reviews, as Fox Searchlight is doing right now with "The Wrestler," the very last thing you want in life is to open up the L.A. Times and see a scathingly negative review from our lead critic, Kenny Turan, who put the critical equivalent of a Vulcan death grip on the movie. The headline for the review, which took up most of the front page of today's Calendar section, said it all: "As Fake As Wrestling: Despite Mickey Rourke's performance, the tale doesn't ring true." As any Oscar consultant could tell you, that's not the kind of headline you want the thousands of academy members who read The Times to see with their morning bagel and coffee.
I admit to being of two minds about Kenny's review, which calls the movie "off-putting and disappointing," not to mention "hopelessly contrived and predictable." On the one hand, I'm a bit baffled that Kenny--who's a friend--didn't like the movie more. After all, it offers what critics always say they admire most: uncompromising filmmaking tied to a spirited, emotionally raw acting performance. When I first saw "The Wrestler" at the Toronto Film Festival in early September, I was ecstatic, since it brought two great talents back from the abyss: Mickey Rourke--who had very publicly destroyed his acting career--and the filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, who finally fulfilled the promise of his stunning debut, 1998's "Pi," after losing his way with a pair of troubled projects, 2000's "Requiem for a Dream" and "The Fountain," which had bombed in Toronto in 2006.
On the other hand, even if I disagree with him, I'm happy to see Kenny take such a bold stand, clearly knowing that he'd be largely out of step with the critical establishment, which has lavished praise on "The Wrestler," a movie destined to turn up on dozens of end-of-the-year critic Top 10 lists. The movie is such a cinematic darling that it currently has a 100 rating at Rotten Tomatoes, the leading online review rating site. (I guess they haven't posted Kenny's review, which would obviously bring down the score.) The movie's been getting raves across the board, from the New Yorker to Variety to Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman, who said it was "like 'Rocky' made by the Scorsese of 'Mean Streets.' " (The film's only other high-profile detractor has been Time's Richard Corliss, who after seeing the film in Toronto called it "bogus" and "visually inert.")
Call me old-fashioned. But I admire critics who trust their taste--and are enough of a contrarian--to take a stand, even if they know it's going to be unpopular with their peers. When I read Kenny's recent lukewarm review of "Milk," I suspected that he'd pulled his punches, not wanting to knock a feel-good movie with such a popular following. Kenny's "Wrestler" review speaks its mind, much as his now-notorious pan of "Titanic" did a decade ago, which inspired weeks of angry letters from its fans (not to mention James Cameron). I thought Kenny was just as wrong about "Titanic" as I think he is about "The Wrestler." If you care about film, "The Wrestler" is a must-see movie about a beautiful loser trying to hang on to the one thing in his life that keeps his soul intact. I hope Rourke and Aronofsky reap even more rewards from putting so much passion into the project.
Does that mean Kenny was wrong to put a sleeper hold on the film? Should a critic always be in step with the rest of us? Not at all. I've had my disagreements with Manohla Dargis (our former critic who's now at the N.Y. Times), but I value both her ardor and cool analysis, even when I think she's dead wrong. I guess what I'm saying is that if you admire a critic, its just as important to read them when you're mad at them as when you're contentedly nodding your head in agreement. In today's world, we're surrounded by round-the-clock advertising, designed to satisfy our every whim. It's nice to have a few critics around who don't just soothe us into submission, but can ruffle our feathers too.
It ended not with a bang, but with a whimper. After years of breathless coverage in every newspaper and magazine known to man, Anthony Pellicano was sentenced to 15 years in prison for running an illegal wiretapping operation that dug up dirt--or at least tried to unearth dirty laundry--on a host of prominent Hollywood celebrities and industry insiders. A longtime private investigator who engaged in everything from wiretapping to computer fraud, Pellicano was supposed to bring down half of Hollywood with him. But after years of titillating speculation, the story was a bust. The news of Pellicano's conviction didn't make the front page of my paper, which put the story on the front of the California section, next to a winter storm story, while the New York Times buried its brief news account on Page 3 of its business section.
If you think I'm exaggerating about the over-amped coverage, let's revisit the 10-page Vanity Fair story that ran in its June 2006 issue. After some scene-setting, it said:
"No scandal in Hollywood history can compare to the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping scandal. Not the Fatty Arbuckle murder trials, of the 1920s, not the killing of Lana Turner's lover Johnny Stompanato, in 1958, not director Roman Polanski's statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl, in 1977, not even the late-1970s 'Indecent Exposure' embezzlement scandal involving producer David Begelman. 'People out here, they're talking about this endlessly,' says media magnate Barry Diller. 'If you're talking to people in L.A. right now, it's the only topic.' "
If they gave Oscars for stoking media hysteria, Vanity Fair would have a row of statuettes on its shelf, though we'd have to give out some lesser awards to the New Yorker, the New York Times, my paper and many other publications who often appeared convinced that a host of industry luminaries, led by legal eagle Bert Fields, ex-CAA czar Mike Ovitz and Paramount chief Brad Grey, were all going to end up in the slammer as well. Wherever I went, I was bombarded with gossip and innuendo about Fields, Ovitz and Grey, who were, as Vanity Fair put it, the "whales" in the investigation whose futures were being "debated every night at the Ivy, Mastro's Steakhouse and Koi," VF's idea (circa 2006) of three must-be-seen-at Hollywood eateries.
So what happened? Why did the story turn out to be such a bust? Keep reading:
Ever since Jeffrey Katzenberg boasted this September that sometime soon "all movies are going to be made in 3-D," I've had a nagging feeling that there must be a catch to all this 3-D ballyhoo, since, let's face it, do you really want--or need--to see "Doubt" or "Milk" or most of the other Oscar contenders in 3-D anytime soon? (Though I am looking forward to the first ad that trumpets: " 'The Reader': See It Now As You've Never Seen Before--In 3-D!")
As I've said before, I am not a knee-jerk 3-D detractor. I've sampled most of the 3-D reels in recent months and can imagine a host of movies being great candidates for 3-D, including the next "Ice Age," Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland,"and "Iron Man 2." It's just that in an era of preplanned obsolescence, where I'm supposed to toss out all of the electronic equipment in my home (computers, TVs, cellphones, etc.) every 15 minutes, I've become a little suspicious when someone insists that even my happy movie theater-going is suddenly in dire need of being entirely reinvented, based on the vague promise that 3-D will provide a far more dazzling experience, which has been Katzenberg's sales pitch so far.
Thanks to Variety, which did a good job of covering a recent meeting between Katzenberg and a scrum of Wall Street analysts, I'm beginning to see why the DreamWorks Animation chief is really so eager to push us all into 3-D paradise. Surprise: He wants to improve his profit margins. It turns out that Katzenberg envisions us paying a $5 premium every time we see a 3-D movie, greatly enhancing both DreamWorks' and theater owners' profits. As Jeffrey's chief financial officer Lew Coleman put it: "Because the costs of 3-D are fixed, there is substantial leverage and most of the extra revenue falls to the bottom line."
That's a nice financial officer way of saying--we get to rake in more dough. According to Coleman, had "Shrek the Third" been released in 3-D, with moviegoers shelling out an extra $5 and DreamWorks only paying $15 million in extra production costs, the film "would have booked $80 million of additional profit." Katzenberg is hoping that his upcoming 3-D extravaganza, "Monsters vs. Aliens," will be on enough 3-D equipped screens next March to attract 40% of its ticket sales from the 3-D version of the film.
This is surely a good thing for DreamWorks, along with everyone else investing in 3-D technology. But is it good for moviegoers? 3-D technology is certainly a boost for theater owners, who are always looking for new ways to drag families away from their cozy home entertainment centers. But the movie genres that benefit the most from 3-D, digital-effect-filled summer action films and computer animation, are already the most successful commercial genres in the marketplace. The only thing Katzenberg is really saying is that if you want to see the most popular films in 3-D, you'll pay an extra $5 for the privilege. But the genre of films that's least likely to benefit from 3-D--adult-oriented dramas, now largely only released during awards season--will be viewed by theater owners as even more of a second-class citizen, since they don't lend themselves to any 3-D enhancement and--most important--to a higher, more lucrative ticket price.
So the movies serious filmmakers are most eager to make will have another strike against them in the marketplace, finding themselves increasingly ghettoized on the smaller screens in various multiplexes, while the new 3-D extravaganzas become bigger cash cows than ever. This is good news for Jeffrey, because he makes mass-appeal family animation. 3-D simply improves his profit margin. But is it good news for the rest of us, who are perennially starved for more challenging films? I don't think so.
Patrick Goldstein
has been a film writer for The Times’ Calendar section since 1998 and a contributing writer to the paper since 1979.
His column, “The Big Picture,” offers news and insight on the currents and underpinnings of the film industry.
He also has been a contributing writer to major publications such as Rolling Stone, Esquire, Playboy, Vogue, the Chicago Sun-Times, New York Times Sunday Magazine, and British GQ.
He received a master’s degree in English literature in 1976 and a bachelor’s degree in film studies in 1975, both from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
The remainder of the box-office Top 10 consists of mainstream, crowd-pleasing pictures, some of them quite skillfully made, but none that has any chance at a best picture nod. In fact, one picture, "Valkyrie," though it earned respectable reviews, was deliberately kept out of award-season contention, with MGM/UA refusing to screen the picture for critics groups or run an Oscar campaign, fearing (quite legitimately) that if the film was snubbed by critics and awards groups, it would tarnish its commercial potential.
