Day: April 30, 2020

HE to Quibi Subscribers: So…?

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I’m honestly not all that intrigued about becoming a Quibi subscriber. Not now, at least. But tomorrow’s another day.

Quibi honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg to Gold Derby‘s Bill McCuddy: “”A commitment to watch a Quibi show or an episode is six to eight minutes. And a series is two hours. To watch a Netflix series — I’m in the middle of Ozark right now — that’s ten hours. And theirs is about watching on a TV set and ours is about watching on a phone.”

McCuddy: “So you have no regret about launching in the middle of a pandemic with people unable to watch your content on TV?”

Katzenberg: “I have 100% regret about it. The good news about being a startup and being entrepreneurial is that when your customer talks to you, if not shouts at you, you must listen. And so literally we will launch, in less than two weeks, an update for the app that will let people watch Quibi on their TV set. That’s something we didn’t anticipate. And obviously we didn’t realize the world would be sheltered in place, literally. If that’s what the customer wants it’s our job to give it to them.”

Career Criminal Fesses Up

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“A novel angle on achieving notoriety in the art world is revealed in The Painter and the Thief, an engrossing Norwegian documentary born of the unlikely but resilient bond between a young female artist (Barbora Kysilkova) and a career criminal (Karl-Bertil Nordland) who stole two of her large canvases. Benjamin Ree’s second feature doc, after Carlsen, a widely seen 2015 portrait of Norwegian chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen, thrives on its odd couple pairing of two societal misfits in turmoil brought together by real circumstances — a situation that most fiction writers would reject as too contrived. Substantially in English, the film has an unusual and positive nature that will help find it homes in docu-friendly markets.” — from Todd McCarthy’s 1.123.20 THR review.

Beatty + Kael Saved “Bonnie and Clyde”

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Yesterday the combined forces of Steven Gaydos and “Norton Ghomestead‘ tried to discredit a popular notion that Pauline Kael’s epic-sized New Yorker rave of Bonnie and Clyde was a key factor in that 1967 film’s revival, following a dispiriting late-summer release.

Ghomestead maintained that “Warner Bros. promotion guys, realizing that savvy showmen in the south were doing well with [Bonnie and Clyde] as a Thunder Road-like tale of high spirited lawbreaking, smartly capitalized on that [and thereby gradually] made it a hit”.

Gaydos reposted his 2003 Variety piece (“Truth takes bullet with Clyde tale”) which basically said that the legend about Kael’s review is not supported by research and that the film gradually became a hit through old-fashioned blood, sweat and tears — i.e., the promotional kind.

HE reply: I see. Thanks, guys, for straightening me out. So to sum up (and please correct me if I’ve got this wrong), Pauline Kael’s landmark reassessment in The New Yorker had little if anything to do with saving Bonnie and Clyde. Instead it was the Warner promo guys re-selling it as a “Thunder Road-like tale of high-spirited lawbreaking” to redneck audiences.

A film inspired by the French New Wave, a film that was clearly ahead of its time, a film that Francois Truffaut was initially interested in but passed on, a film with an art-filmy impressionistic sequence when Bonnie and Clyde visit her frail old mom, and another when they’re found wounded and bloodied by Okies,,..this alternately edgy and poignant film was reborn when WB sales guys pitched it to Nehi Cream Soda-drinking yokels. So Pauline Kael was incidental at best. Got it. Check.

I’ll accept the Gaydos assessment — “Bonnie and Clyde [was] carefully nurtured from Montreal to Manhattan with both studio and private promotion, solid reviews and solid business and given time to build into a breakout hit just as dozens of other films of the era had” — blended with the impact of the Kael piece, but that’s as far as I’ll go.

Without tossing out the redneck promotion side-story, the likeliest scenario is that Beatty saved the film (and his own financial ass) by refusing to back off in his dispute with the antagonistic Jack L. Warner, to the point of threatening legal action.

Wiki excerpt: ” At first, Warner Bros. did not promote Bonnie and Clyde for general release, but mounted only limited regional releases that seemed to confirm its misgivings about the film’s lack of commercial appeal.

“Beatty, Bonnie and Clyde‘s producer and star, complained to Warner Bros. that if the company was willing to go to so much trouble for Reflections in a Golden Eye (they had changed the coloration scheme at considerable expense), their neglect of his film, which was getting excellent press, suggested a conflict of interest; he threatened to sue the company.

“Warner Bros. gave Beatty’s film a general release. Much to the surprise of Warner Bros.’ management, the film eventually became a major box office success.”

Apology to Jonze

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HE hereby apologizes to Spike Jonze for having posted the badly-scored version of his landmark 2005 Gap commercial, “Pardon Our Dust,” instead of the correct one. The correct version [directly below but shitty looking] uses Edvard Grieg‘s “In The Hall of The Mountain King,” which lends an arch, mock-bombastic air to the raucous destruction of the Gap store. The incorrectly scored version, posted yesterday, uses a sickening Up With People recording of “Don’t Stand Still.” Between the two videos is a 2005 paragraph (written, I think, by an Ad Age reviewer) about the differences.

Props for Stiller

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During a chat with Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn about Spike Jonze‘s Beastie Boys Story doc (AppleTV+), Beastie Boy Mike “Mike D” Diamond notes that during the watching of Ben Stiller‘s Tropic Thunder, “Every three minutes something happens where you’re like, ‘That could never be in a movie in 2020.'”

Kohn: “It often seems like Stiller doesn’t get enough credit as a filmmaker.”

MD: “He really doesn’t. Cable Guy is incredible.”

Spike Jonze: “Escape From Dannemora is incredible.”

Jonah Hill: “I’ve heard ‘Stiller doesn’t get enough props as a filmmaker’ enough to think that there’s something behind it. He’s made so many bangers. I think there’s something interesting in that statement in itself. He’s made like five of my favorite movies. Then I heard this from film people, that he doesn’t get enough props as a filmmaker, but maybe it’s a backhanded compliment, because who says he doesn’t get enough props as a filmmaker? Do you think it’s because, if he just had that roster of five films we all love — if his IMDb was just, Reality Bites, Tropic Thunder, Zoolander, Cable Guy and Escape From Dannemora, you’d be like, ‘This guy is one of the best guys around.’ You think it’s because he’s also so famous as an actor that it strips back some of his props as a filmmaker?”

Kohn: “Jonah, this all feels very meta since, like Stiller, you’re a comedy guy now making your way into directing movies.”

JH: “I couldn’t know yet because I haven’t made enough films. But of course, I’m interested in that question. It’s so fascinating. There’s a selfish interest in that, but I’m also thinking about it as a fan of him as a director.”

MD: “Here’s an interesting footnote: Adam and I first met Ben Stiller after Paul’s Boutique came out, and after Cable Guy came out. We had this shared misery of putting all this time into a project that we respectively completely believed in. We didn’t even question it. To make stuff for this company and they’re like, ‘This thing is great’. And then it completely tanks commercially. But then some people say they love it. It’s a weird conflict.”

Leftovers

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Taken in 1959 from somewhere near B’way and 48th. Otto Preminger‘s Porgy and Bess opened on 6.24.59. Notice that John Ford’s The Horse Soldiers, playing at the Astor, is billboarded in the distance. Ford’s film opened on 6.12.59.

This Is Cinerama opened on 9.30.52. It played for at least a year at the Warner. After one year in four cities (New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago), pic had grossed $4,305,000, with $2,208,000 in New York alone.

William Wyler’s Detective Story, promoted on two-side Mayfair billboard, opened on 11.6.51. The fact that Audrey Hepburn (whose biggest 1951 credit was a small part in The Lavender Hill Mob) isn’t wearing a cold-weather coat suggests pic was shot right after Wyler’s film opened.

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Dogged Berners Won’t Stop

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The Berners would rather see Trump win than allow Biden to run unblemished. To hear it from them (along with the #BelieveAllWomen crowd), Tara Reade‘s inconsistent, highly questionable sexual assault accusation is straight from the King James Bible. Despite the fact that it’s full of holes and almost certainly bullshit. Please consider this 4.29 USA Today piece by former federal prosecutor Thomas J. Stern. Read it, give it some thought, take two steps back.

Posted on Facebook by Sasha Stone:

1. As you all already know I’ve been sounding the alarm against the hysteria of the #MeToo movement for a while now. I think it was a necessary over-correction to a long history of women being disregarded and not listened to. But I also think it was more of an irrational reaction to Trump’s election. We couldn’t do anything about Trump so we went after people we could destroy. Currently on the scrap heap are a lot of people, some who deserved it (Harvey Weinstein) AND some who didn’t (Chris Matthews, et. al.). It went way too far, and now has become weaponized. At this point, I think it’s gone so far that we’re about to see a pendulum shift way back in the other direction, where every accusation is shot down.

2. We have to admit on the left that we didn’t want Kavanaugh on the court. Period. We would have done anything to stop him. I myself believed and still believe that Christine Blasey Ford was telling the truth that she was not-quite-raped. I can’t say, and no one can say, that Kavanaugh was the guy. Also, I was never comfortable with a 30-year-old charge being enough to completely wreck someone’s reputation. But I’ll come clean and say I was caught up in it because I didn’t want him on the court. So I went along with it.

3. The Tara Reade case has made me reflect a lot on that case and now I feel like we did not follow the rule of law, innocent until proven guilty. And I went along with character assassination. Now I feel like there has to be a healthy balance of women who feel like they CAN report sex crimes and be listened to and believed rather than making Dustin Hoffman a sex offender 40 years later for patting women on the rear end on the set.

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