Day: July 5, 2005

Nine years after I saw Swingers and right after wrote a Mr. Showbiz piece insisting that this then-svelte, 77-inch-tall actor was the hot new guy, Vince Vaughn has been toasted with his very own Newsweek profile by Devin Gordon, who calls him an attitude comedian who’s finally come into his own. The story is basically a tribute to Vaughn’s allegedly very cool performance in The Wedding Crashers (which nearly every journo and media person in Manhattan will finally get to see this Thursday evening), but why do I have this feeling that the Newsweek editors decided to okay the piece only after they picked up on the Us rumble about Vaughn possibly being Jennifer Aniston’s first-guy-since-Brad-Pitt on the set of The Break Up? Why do I suspect that, even if it’s bullshit (which is what Aniston and Vaughn are saying)?

Does everyone understand what happened last weekend to poor George Romero? On its second weekend Romero’s Land of the Dead nose-dived 73.4% and ended up with a $16,209,660 cume. This doesn’t just mean that younger audiences didn’t care for Romero’s film, but also that his zombie visions are out-of-synch with the times. The old-fogey, slow-shuffling zombies who made their legendary debut in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead 37 years ago are done for — the fast-sprinting zombies in Danny Doyle’s 28 Days Later and the ones in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake obviously have struck more of a chord. Romero himself has been retired by Land‘s financial failure. All the middle-aged hip journalists love and respect the guy but this was his big comeback shot and it didn’t happen, and now he’s more or less fucked as far as the financial tough guys are concerned.

I’ve gotta jump into this reporters-going-to-jail thing for a second. It’s too bad that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald is being a total prick and urging that Time reporter Matthew Cooper and the New York Times reporter Judith Miller be sent to the slammer for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigating the outing of Valerie Plame as a covert C.I.A. operative. It’s a little bit wimpy for Cooper and Miller to ask to be sent to a couple of summer-camp prisons, but it’s still incredibly shitty of Fitzgerald to say no, fuck you, do your time with hard-core cons in a jail somewhere around D.C. Today’s New York Times story reports that a Judge Hogan held the reporters in civil contempt last October and sentenced them to up to 18 months in jail. These sentences were suspended while the reporters appealed, however, and it now looks like the maximum time the reporters will face is 120 days, as the term of the grand jury will expire in October. That’s it? Jimmy Cagney or George Raft could do four months standing on their heads in Sing Sing or San Quentin. On the other hand, Fitzgerald has suggested in a recent filing that criminal prosecution is also a possibility. “The court should advise Miller that if she persists in defying the court’s order that she will be committing a crime,” he wrote in a 21-page briefing about Miller’s position. “Miller and The New York Times appear to have confused Miller’s ability to commit contempt with a legal right to do so.”

A survey of moviegoer response to War of the Worlds done last week (or weekend) is coming up “fair,” which is roughly equivalent to a CinemaScore rating of about 70. This means it’s going to see a fairly steep drop in business next weekend — not catastrophic but precipitous.

In Sharon Waxman’s latest box-office-slump story in the N.Y. Times, she reports that Paramount executives are seeing no evidence of any War of the Worlds revenue slippage due to Tom Cruise’s eccentric behavior on the promo circuit. “[Cruise’s] audience came out in greater numbers than ever before” for this film, Paramount vice-chairman Rob Friedman tells Waxman. “I think the world separates the star and celebrity from a movie actor and the performance on screen, and this shows that completely.” I’m hearing this is precisely what Par execs are not discerning in the tea leaves. I’m told there’s been some muttering in the hallways that War could have made closer to $140 or $150 million over the first six days if Cruise hadn’t acted like a wackjobber on the talk shows. The fact that Waxman quotes notoriously obsequious industry cheerleader Paul Dergarabedian as supporting the Cruise-linkage theory speaks volumes. “Those who had in mind that they wanted to see the movie, [the Cruise shenanigans] didn’t have any effect,” he said. “But if you’re a person who has a strong feeling about what Tom Cruise said, you might say, ‘I don’t want to support that movie.'”

“Like the rivets popping off the wing of an airliner”….good one! The Tom Wolfe-ian wordsmith is D.J. LaChapelle, webmaster for TomCruiseIsNuts.com. The quote was given to Daily News “Lowdown” columnist Lloyd Grove: “What really inspired us was Tom’s appearance on the Today show. His body language, the way he got in Matt Lauer’s face — it was all pretty amazing. Watching one of America’s best actors coming unglued — like the rivets popping off the wing of an airliner — there’s a kind of fascination.”