If there’s one central message conveyed in Boffo, a slick, agreeable and insightful doc about success, failure and mainstream filmmaking now playing on HBO, it’s contained in the answer to this question:

What’s the one thing that seems to lead to the making of a hit — more than a good script, a perfect cast, the right director, etc.? Or rather, what’s the one voice that a producer or a studio chief needs to listen to above all the others? The answer is, “The one from the gut.”
As producer Richard Zanuck says halfway through Boffo, “Your head can talk you out of a lot of things, but your gut always tells the truth.”
Here’s the first three or four minutes of Boffo. The speakers are (in precisely this order) Danny DeVito, Peter Guber, Peter Bogdanovich, Jodie Foster, producer Brian Grazer, 20th Century Fox chief Tom Rothman, Sydney Pollack, Morgan Freeman, Zanuck and fellow Jaws producer David Brown, and finally George Clooney .
Boffo was directed by Bill Couterie and produced by Variety editor Peter Bart, and is being billed as a celebration of Variety‘s 100th anniversary, but aside from several Variety headlines being shown, the promotional element doesn’t feel all that persistent.
Boffo is very smooth, engaging, and well-produced. However, I have two or three beefs:
(1) Boffo seems more interested in being chummy with its celebrity talking heads and paying tribute to their past successes and being supportive of the industry’s potential for making new successes, and less interested in exploring the whys and wherefores of failure. (There’s a fascinating moment when Morgan Freeman is asked what went wrong with The Bonfire of the Vanities, and Freeman barely answers. His body language and facial expressions, however, speak volumes.)
(2) While it only deals with the monumental failures ( Howard the Duck, et, al.), Boffo doesn’t even mention Last Action Hero…surely one of the most grotesque wipeouts of the last 15 or 20 years. It’s not even a blip on the screen.
(3) Boffo doesn’t deal at all with questions about why and how certain films have failed. It doesn’t get into the word-of-mouth mystique and how various producers and studios have responded to it, or into research screenings and whether or not that’s good or bad or a mixed bag, and it doesn’t mention how bad-buzz spreading through the media has contributed, fairly or unfairly, to the failure of this and that film, and, in line with this avoidance, doesn’t mention how bad buzz on this and that film moves much faster these days via the internet and text-messaging among the under-20-somethings.

A third big gun — L.A. Times critic Carina Chocano — is bitch-slapping Pirates 2 for being tedious, unfocused and overlong: The film “is unsure of what it wants, so it takes the omnivorous approach, and all of the story lines suffer for it. Intermittently fun and high-spirited, Dead Man’s Chest sags under the weight of its own running time, which clocks in at about 2 1/2 hours. That’s a lot of time to commit to watching people chase one another around, turn, and chase one another the other way. At half the running time, it would have made for an amusing time-killer; as it is — no matter how clever, energetic and beautifully designed — it borders on waste.” (Apologies for the Turan boner earlier this morning….haste makes waste.)

There’s a fascinating, well-put thought from screenwriter William Goldman on one of the commentary tracks on the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid double-disc DVD that came out three or four weeks ago. I didn’t transcribe it but I remember it pretty well: “We were lucky with Butch. We had a great director [George Roy Hill], and we had Connie Hall‘s phenomenal photography and a great crew and a solid script and a neat story and the casting was perfect. But if just one of these elements didn’t happen…it tells you that a good script and a good director and the right cast aren’t enough . The photography has to be right on, ditto the score and the editing…and if just one of these elements isn’t exactly right, you are dead. Nobody realizes how important the editing is, or how important the composer is…and there’s no reason for people outside the movie business to realize this, that movies are so fragile and anything can screw them up.”

Enron ogre Kenneth Lay died this morning in Aspen. The cause printed in the N.Y. Times was a heart attack, which it may have clinically been. Of course, the dramatist in all of us can’t help but imagine-presume that what really brought his curtain down — a combination of stress, the shame-horror of doing prison time and, of course, not wanting to die in jail.
Lay was found guilty several weeks ago on six counts of fraud and conspiracy and four counts of bank fraud, and was looking at a very long sentence, and having lived a cushiony lifestyle for so long, he must have been filled with dread at what lay ahead.
I don’t mean to sound heartless about this, but Lay was one of the most heartless corporate pricks of all time, a major conniver whose venal spinnings and maneuver- ings resulted in the ruining of many lives. Take a look sometime at Alex Gibney‘s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and tell me I’m wrong. If anyone deserved the label of “bad guy,” it was certainly Kenneth Lay.
So let’s be honest and admit that Lay’s death this morning is dramatically satis- fying. If anything he got off easy. Aspen is a very beautiful and soothing place and a good place to breathe in mountain air, lie down, close your eyes and bid farewell. A better point of departure, certainly, than some prison cell in some federal facility.
For some reason I’m thinking of that moment in Casablanca when Ingrid Bergman laments that if Humphrey Bogart’s Rick doesn’t help Victor Laszlo by selling him the fabled “letters of transit” that he’ll die in Casablanca, and Bogart snaps, “So what? I’m gonna die in Casablanca. It’s a good spot for it.”

I thought I’d do the radical thing today and not post anything further because everyone and everything has shut down for the holiday. Tuesday the 4th is a flatliner. I hate days off but you can’t fight City Hall.

Superman Returns took in around $13.9 million yesterday (Monday, 7.3). Apparently the Sunday morning estimates were low because no one considered the bad-weather-around-the-country factor, meaning that Superman‘s Sunday haul was probably closer to $19 rather than $16 million, which translates into a five-day figure more like $87.5 million rather than, say, Box-Office Mojo‘s estimate of $84.7 million.
Add yesterday’s $13.9 million to the $87 million-plus and Superman Returns has now crested $100 million with another $7 or $8 million expected today.
But as I’ve said two or three times over the past week, earnings will be down next weekend (low to mid 20s) when the Pirates hit town, and it’ll basically be a Superman toilet-water-swirl from then on.
Nikki Finke‘s souces are telling her it probably won’t make it to $200 million domestically, but I think it just might. But there’s no fighting the general consensus, which is that Superman “didn’t do well enough…it didn’t do what it needed to,” as a plugged-in journo put it Sunday night.
Bryan Singer, Brandon Routh, Jon Peters, Kevin Spacey and especially lightweight Kate Bosworth didn’t quite do the thing…they stirred and delighted a good portion of the U.S. but there were too many naysayers and thus a good-but-not-great showing.
The best move now for everyone involved (and I’m including Alan Horn) is to grab their dark glasses and fishing hats and get in their cars and drive out to the desert and stay there for a couple of weeks until the Great Superman Letdown has faded from memory and everyone has moved on and begun to obsess about the next tragedy.

Another big gun — Variety‘s Todd McCarthy — has slammed Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest for being empty and bloated and too long. He says “there’s not a genuine moment” in either of the two Pirates films, “no point of human contact…they’re baldly concocted, confected, engineered.” (Just as I said in my review that “there’s nothing, nothing, nothing going on inside [Pirates 2]…nothing kicks in within…not ever, not once.”) And he claims the new one “puts the viewer into a bland stupor.” And “why wear out the film’s welcome with a wearisome two-and-a-half-hour running time,” McCarthy wonders, “when a tight-ship 100 minutes would have insured more constant excitement, not to mention giving exhibitors more showtimes per day?”

Fast Footwork

A few days ago good buzz was chasing Ian McCrudden’s Islander, an affecting drama about a Maine lobster fisherman (Thomas Hildreth) trying to get his life back on track after doing time for manslaughter, but then along came a pair of great trade reviews.
Variety‘s Justin Chang called it “powerfully atmospheric…a film that glides gently on a sea of understated emotions and character insights.” And the Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt called Islander “an intelligent and compelling drama that deserves wider theatrical exposure.”

Phillip Baker Hall (l.) and Thomas Hildreth in scene from Islander

With reactions like these published on the same day (Thursday, 6.29) following two L.A. Film Festival showings, you’d think McCrudden, the film’s director and co-writer, would have been delighted.
But he wasn’t. A phrase in Chang’s review — “a lengthy, slightly awkward set-up” — compounded a feeling that McCrudden had since Islander‘s 6.26 showing at the festival that the beginning could be tighter. And so on the morning of Friday, 6.30, he decided to re-edit the opening — fast — so he could screen a slightly different version for Islander‘s last festival showing on Saturday, 7.1, at 7:15 pm.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
The fact that McCrudden managed to recut Islander with time to spare shows how easy it is these days to re-shape a film on the quick.
McCrudden had the plan worked out when he called Islander‘s rep, Jeff Dowd, on Friday morning. “After watching the movie with an audience twice I said I think I can make some things work better,” he says, “and Jeff said, ‘Go ahead and do it….this is how the big boys make movies.’
“I have a low-resolution version of the film on my laptop, and I knew in my head what I wanted to do with it, so I simply sat down and did the re-edit on Final Cut Pro HD, which took me seven to eight hours with the work finished by Friday evening around dinner hour.

(l. to r.) Islander producer-star Thomas Hildreth, publicist Mickey Cotttrell, director Ian McCrudden

“The next morning at 8 am I took it down to Tyler Hawes at Hollywood-DI on Formosa, and we brought out the digital master and conformed it to the cuts I’d made on the computer.
“As it happened we had to eyeball it, or manually repeat the cuts, because the two programs wouldn’t speak to each other numerically, but it could have happened this way,” says McCrudden. “But the work took only two or three hours and was done by 12:15, which is when we left Hollywood-DI with a new version of the film on digital HD tape and headed over to Laemmle’s Sunset 5 and did a run-through.
After the 7:15 screening McCrudden mentioned the re-edit during the q & a. “I said it was kind of nice to have this new version and there were some people who told me they’d seen the previous version and noticed something had changed and knew it was faster, but couldn’t quite figure what,” he says.
This story doesn’t have a distribution punchline because, as Dowd said, there are “lots and lots” of distributors who haven’t seen Islander, so maybe there will be something to report down the road. For whatever reason, says Dowd, the L.A. Film Festival didn’t attract that many distributors across the board.

Honeycutt will be showing Islander to his UCLA Sneak preview class on 7.12 at the Writers Guild theatre. You’d think with those trade reviews and the fine-tuning that distributors will make the effort to show up this time.
If they don’t, says Dowd, “we’ll feed them to the lobsters.”

If you’ve seen Jackie Brown, you know Quentin Tarantino is a big fan of Barry Shear‘s Across 110th Street (1972) — a tough, violent, above-average blaxpoitation flick that costarred Yaphet Kotto, Anthony Quinn and Anthony Francioca — because he used the “Across 110th Street” title song, written by Bobby Womack and J.J. Johnson and performed by Womack, over Brown‘s opening credits.

And now it turns out Elvis Presley was right on the same page. In an excerpt from Jerry Schilling‘s “Me and a Guy Named Elvis” that appeared on “Page Six “, it says that Presley “celebrated his 41st birthday by telling friends about Across 110th Street, which apparently was his “favorite blaxploitation flick.” The King “began to act out the whole movie, setting up each scene and then presenting just about every line of dialogue in the script. He brought each character to life with walks, vocal mannerisms and the subtlest of gestures. [He] didn’t stop until he got to the final scene of the film.”

An important distinction about the Platinum Dunes remake of The Birds, as pointed out by Cinematical — they’re aren’t sampling Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1962 classic as much as adapting Daphne de Maurier‘s classic novella. Right. The gore wallowers whose output makes the resume of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus look like that of John Houseman‘s…the thick-fingered vulgarians who made ’05’s The Amityville Horror and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are going to try and service the vision of the British-born author who wrote “Rebecca” and “My Cousin Rachel.”

N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr has penned words of tribute to Richard Lester‘s Petulia, some 13 days after the Warner Home Video DVD arrived in stores. “A moving romantic tragedy with comic detailing that was released to largely uncomprehending audiences,” Petulia is a “great” film that “belongs on any list of the classics of American filmmaking,” says Kehr, “and this beautifully produced DVD belongs in any serious cinephile’s collection .”

This is an actual T-shirt being offered to rightwing nutbags on a site called Thoseshirts.com. Kinda gives you a taste of what the ’08 campaign may be like if the Democrats are self-destructve enough to nominate Hilary Clinton for President. (Have you read James Carville‘s argument that she can win?) Check out this Ann Coulter T-shirt…amazing.