Day: July 12, 2005

This is just an industry thing, but the other shoe finally dropped at Paramount today when it was announced that Rob Friedman is leaving his job as Paramount’s COO and vice chairman “to pursue other interests,” which basically means he’s been shown the door. The reason, I’m told, is because Tom Freston, the Viacom president and COO who hired Brad Grey as Parammount’s chairman and CEO and who basically calls the shots, has a “history” with Freidman from the era when he ran the Viacom-owned MTV Networks. “When Freston was running MTV and he was trying to get stuff done under Sherry Lansing,” a studio source says, “the two obstreperous forces were Friedman and Jonathan Dolgen. When Freston took over [Paramount] it was just a matter of when Friedman would go…there was no way he could have stayed on.” Friedman is a notorious hardballer who created the extremely defensive (as far as the media was always concerned) garrison- state mentality at Paramount. He fostered that attitude at Warner Bros. when he was running things there also. But he’s always been straight and upfront with me. For what it’s worth and as far as it goes, I think he’s a relatively okay guy. He should go to Tuscany and chill out before taking the next job.

Warner Home Video deserves a hearty thanks for making Arthur Penn’s Night Moves available and looking spiffy on DVD starting today. WHV made another excellent move last Tuesday (7.5) when they released a first-rate DVD of John Boorman’s highly-respected noir Point Blank. It’s truly an excellent thing that these long-absent classics are finally out and gettable…even if I was told “sorry, we don’t have it” seven times last weekend during a painstaking search to find and buy the Point Blank DVD. (More about this in a piece running Wednesday, 7.13.)

Let me get this straight: the perfectly dreadful Fantastic Four, a film so awful it makes you briefly toy with the idea of never going to a movie again, made $56.1 million last weekend and because people just blindly paid to see to this piece of shit despite overwhelming indications they were in for a bad time…this means the slump is over? The forces driving The Big Fade are not going to turn on the fortunes of a single crappy movie, trust me. I’ll say it again — it’s not the money, it’s the attendance. ’05 theater admissions are down about 10.4% from ’04 and just shy of 8% from ’03. Summer admissions are off almost 14% from 2004 and roughly 9.5% from 2003.