Month: April 2018

The same thing is happening in Hollywood. To me, I mean. As a columnist friend put it a couple of months ago, “The voracious corps — Penske Media, Hollywood Reporter, TheWrap, Vulture, N.Y. Times and a few others — is trying to vacuum up every advertising penny in the sector and drive all competitors out.”

From “Introducing HE:(plus),” posted on 2.27.18: “Award-season ad revenue is finite, and over the last two or three years the big gobble guys have muscled their way into the banquet room like the Al Capone mob. They’ve been throwing their weight around and sucking up the oxygen and indirectly eating me (and others I could mention) alive, no lie.

“Plus the new whiz-kid agency buyers are, like their forebears of a decade ago, interested only in numbers and page-views, and not in HE’s sui generis cosmology as well as its longtime award-season selling point — not just numbers but the quality of industry eyeballs — the coolest directors, producers, screenwriters, Academy members, agency guys, ubers, early adopters, grumpy know-it-alls, etc.

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With $665,355,740 in domestic earnings thus far, Black Panther is obviously a huge, historic, worldwide phenomenon. But it’s not a Titanic beater, and it probably never will be. And currently it’s not the all-time third highest grosser either. Not by inflationary standards, it’s not.

By the close of ’98 Titanic ended up with $600,788,188. If you add the nearly $58 million haul for Titanic 3D, which was released in 2012, the lifetime domestic gross is $659,353,944. But let’s stick to the ’97 and ’98 earnings.

The 2018 dollar is 52.8% higher than the 1998 dollar. $100 in 1998 is equivalent to $152.76 in 2018, and so Titanic‘s initial haul of $600,788,188 translates into $917,735,286 by current monetary standards.

After saluting Black Panther this morning as “the number 3 movie of all time in the U.S.,” Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman speculated that it might hit $700 million before it’s done. If that milestone is achieved, Black Panther will be $217,735,286 behind Titanic‘s domestic ’98 tally. By inflationary criteria.

Titanic‘s worldwide earnings (including the 2012 3D re-release) are at $2,187,463,944 — i.e., roughly $2.2 billion, and at least 90% of that was earned in ’98. Right now Black Panther‘s worldwide tally is at $1.3 billion, or $1,2999,855,740.

I’m sorry but I like the poster more than the trailer for Terry Gilliam‘s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. The poster kills; the trailer is a “hmmm, yeah.” I’m doubly sorry that Gilliam won’t be able to screen his long-gestating film in Cannes next month, due to a lawsuit with Portugese producer Paulo Branco. Costarring Jonathan Pryce, Adam Driver, Stellan Skarsgård, Olga Kurylenko, Joana Ribeiro. Who remembers Lost in La Mancha? It doesn’t feel like it popped 16 years ago, but it did.

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Eric Kohn‘s 4.7 Indiewire piece about the Netflix-vs-Cannes brouhaha mentions a significant point, which is that a law overseen by France’s culture minister requires 36 months between a film’s French theatrical release and its streaming debut. So if Netflix were to theoretically commit to theatrical openings this year for its five films slated for the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, the company wouldn’t be able to stream them in France until 2021. That is beyond absurd. A six-month window would be more like it.

Kohn and Anne Thompson‘s latest Screen Talk:

…into submission by this thing, sitting there in my seat and getting pounded, elbowed, waffle-ironed and slam-banged for 156 minutes. And it’s all about perks, pomp and paychecks…an army of filmmakers hauling it in, and not so much as a taste for Hollywood Elsewhere. This movie will do nothing but sap and impurify my precious bodily fluids.

I’ve been wondering all my life why Orville Nix was so far from the Presidential motorcade when he captured his crappy footage on 11.22.63. The motorcade route was widely known, having been published in the local papers. Why was Nix so far away from Elm Street, a half-block to the north? Nix just before the big moment: “I can hear the motorcade coming. It’ll be coming down Elm any second now, but I don’t want to get too close. It’ll make for a better shot if I can capture the whole panorama. True, I won’t get a closeup or even a medium shot of the President and Mrs. Kennedy, but the grass and the asphalt road and the trees and the blue sky are just as important, if not more so.”

And what about that gifted cinematographer Abraham Zapruder? He wasn’t aiming his 8mm camera properly, and so most of what he captured was above the JFK limousine. In fact Zapruder almost managed to miss the grisly Kennedy head shot. 85% to 90% of the image is about Dealey Plaza grass — 10% or 15% of the Zapruder image, at most, shows the limousine and its occupants. Zapruder just barely captured what happened. He nearly missed it entirely.

Zapruder and Nix were typical suburbanites with typical photographing skills. Both clearly believed in the importance of touristy wide shots, and had no apparent use for MCUs or close-ups. If only someone with a knack for decent framings had been on the scene. If young Steven Spielberg, 16 or 17 years old at the time and visiting Dallas with his mother for some reason, had been at the base of the grassy knoll and shooting with an 8mm Kodak wind-up, history would have been in his debt.

It’s time for another scolding about another mispronunication. Case in point: The last name of special prosecutor Robert Mueller. It’s a German name, of course, and the easiest explanation is to break it into two syllables. The first syllable is pronounced like “mule” and the second is pronounced “lehr.” And yet every cable news and radio announcer pronounces it “muller” — first syllable “mull” (as in mulling something over) followed by “lur.” Film mavens are familiar with the still-living German actor Armin Mueller-Stahl, and that his last name has always been pronounced mule-ler and not muller. And don’t forget Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

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Hollywood Elsewhere disapproves of the Quiet Place creature design. A large brown praying mantis with a human-skull head with moving parts that pop in and out. I didn’t believe it. All I saw was yet another competitive CG creation, built by designers who are looking to create a cooler-looking monster than the one they all saw in the last big monster film.

You know what would be cool for a change? Non-CG Tom Savini-styled monsters. All makeup, nothing digital, played by actors in makeup and no deep-register gurgling. The monsters in Cowboys & Aliens made that same damn gurgly sound.

Imagine if the Quiet Place monsters were seven-foot-tall bipeds who were bald and howled like cats and sucked the blood out of humans for nutrition — if, in short, they looked, sounded and acted like James Arness in The Thing. Absurdly primitive, of course, but at least it would be different and even wowser in the midst of today’s creature-design dictatorship.

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Sent this morning to management of La Pizza in Cannes: Bonjour, La Pizza! — Je vous écris pour demander deux grandes tables (15 ou 20 personnes par table) le lundi 7 mai, pour le groupe de journalistes américains habituel (environ 40) qui se réunit chaque année à La Pizza, la veille du départ de Cannes. Festival du film.

Nous rencontrons toujours le mardi soir mais cette année le festival se lance un jour plus tôt — le mardi 8 mai. Donc, cette année, nous rencontrerons le lundi 7 mai en soirée, vers 19 h et 19 h 30, à donner ou à recevoir.

S’il vous plaît essayer et nous accueillir. Merci, et à très bientôt. — Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere

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Thierry Fremaux and the Cannes Film Festival team are seeing movies all this weekend in Paris as well as on Monday (4.9), Tuesday (4.10) and Wednesday (4.11) next week. Their viewing eyeballs will be bleeding right up until next Thursday’s press conference announcing the official slate. You wouldn’t think that things would be all that fluid right now, but they are.