James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, Joseph L, Mankiewicz, Sidney Poitier, Charlton Heston and Harry Belafonte discussing the civil rights struggle in Washington, D.C., hours after the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which culiminated in Martin Luther King‘s “I Have A Dream” speech, on Wednesday, 8.28.63. All the noteworthy lefties of the day (including Bob Dylan) were there.

Yesterday The Hollywood Reporter‘s Alex Ben Block quoted Universal Studios president and COO Ron Meyer as saying that some of his recent remarks about “shitty” movies were taken out of context in a Jen Yamato Movieline piece from the Savannah Film Festival. Yamato’s article ran on 11.3.11.

Benicio del Toro in The Wolfman

“I was quoted as saying Hollywood make[s] shitty movies,” Meyer told ABB. “What I said is we make some good movies and some shitty movies. [But] nobody ever sets out to make a shitty movie.”

I’m sorry, but that’s just not true. Studio guys decide to make shitty movies all the time if they believe that this or that shitty movie will make money. Even if a studio chief wants to only make quality films no matter what, he/she knows that there’s only so much talent out there, and that Sturgeon’s Law is more or less true — i.e., “90% of everything is crap.”

Actually that isn’t entirely correct, movie-wise. About 5% to 10% of films each year are excellent-to-very-good. The next 15% tend to be seen as okay, fairly good, half-decent, passable. The next 20% are not-so-hot, disappointing and/or tolerable but irritating. The bottom 50% or 55% are outright garbage.

All studio chiefs know that their job requires them to make money for the studio, and that means punching out a lot of Jimmy Dean link sausage and insipid CG Comiccon slop and whatever else might make a buck. Millions of people have no taste in movies. Look at all the dough being made by The Hunger Games, a mediocrity if there ever was one.

“We make a lot of shitty movies,” Meyer said in Savannah. “Every one of them breaks my heart. We set out to make good ones. One of the worst movies we ever made was The Wolfman. Wolfman and Babe 2 are two of the shittiest movies we put out, but by the same token we made movies we believe in. We did United 93, which is one of the movies I’m most proud of. It wasn’t a big moneymaker, but it’s a film I believe every American should see and it showed you what people can do in the worst of times and how great the human spirit is and all that, so there are moments that can make up for all the junk that you make.”

Yamato asked Meyer “what happened with well-publicized financial disappointments Scott Pilgrim, Land of the Lost, and Cowboys & Aliens?”

“Cowboys & Aliens wasn’t good enough,” Meyer answered. “Forget all the smart people involved in it, it wasn’t good enough. All those little creatures bouncing around were crappy. I think it was a mediocre movie, and we all did a mediocre job with it.”

“Land of the Lost was just crap. I mean, there was no excuse for it. The best intentions all went wrong.”

“Scott Pilgrim, I think, was actually kind of a good movie. [Addressing a small section of the audience, cheering.] But none of you guys went! And you didn’t tell your friends to go! But, you know, it happens.”

“Cowboys & Aliens didn’t deserve better. Land of the Lost didn’t deserve better. Scott Pilgrim did deserve better, but it just didn’t capture enough of the imaginations of people, and it was one of those things where it didn’t cost a lot so it wasn’t a big loss. Cowboys & Aliens was a big loss, and Land of the Lost was a huge loss. We misfired. We were wrong. We did it badly, and I think we’re all guilty of it. I have to take first responsibility because I’m part of it, but we all did a mediocre job and we paid the price for it. It happens. They’re talented people. Certainly you couldn’t have more talented people involved in Cowboys & Aliens, but it took, you know, ten smart and talented people to come up with a mediocre movie. It just happens.”

For whatever reason I’d never watched this alternate finale scene from Titanic until this morning. Obviously it’s a little too on-the-nose (i.e, Rose repeating Jack Dawson’s “make each day count”), and it too conspicuously alludes to the uproarious laughter finale at the end of Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The only good bit is when the fat bearded guy tells Gloria Suart what he thinks of nonsensical romantic gestures.

If great wealth is lost through bad luck or some dark roll of the dice, wise men can find it in their hearts to laugh. And if a wealthy person decides to give away a large sum to a poor person or a noble cause, fine. But only fools throw valuable things into the sea.

The aesthetic fate of Catching Fire, the Hunger Games sequel, is back in jeopardy this morning. Nikki Finke and Mike Fleming are reporting that “multiple sources” have told them that director Gary Ross “has not formally withdrawn from the Hunger Games sequel”…zounds! Ross “is off on a family vacation and couldn’t be reached” — bullshit — “but these internet reports that described his withdrawal as definitive are simply not accurate,” per Finke and Fleming.

I wrote yesterday that if — if — Ross has left the franchise it’ll be a good thing all around because his direction of The Hunger Games was/is highly problematic. I also stated a suspicion that Lionsgate execs realize they can do better than Ross for the next two films, and if they’re smart they’ll nudge him toward other pastures and opportunities.

Earlier this week Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy suggested some alternative choices for the Catching Fire gig, given the mismatch with Ross. It’s unlikely Lionsgate will go for an auteur because they’ll want someone they can push around. But they’d be foolish to ignore what Alfonso Cuaron proved when he took the reins on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (’04), which is that talented directors can up the artistic ante while still delivering what the franchise requires.

McCarthy suggested Cuaron and four others:

Kathryn Bigelow: “If The Hurt Locker and Bin Laden filmmaker wants a mainstream gig, she could elevate the pedigree of the Katniss saga.”

Mel Gibson: Don’t laugh. If Catching Fire is one-third as exciting as Apocalypto, it would be dynamite. But can Mel do PG-13?

Walter Hill: “The old-guard director (The Warriors) could provide style and an authentic feel for action that was missing in the first film.

Nicolas Winding Refn: “If modern edginess and unexpected moves are desired for the sequel, then the Drive director could be the man to deliver them.”

HE’s own suggestion: Juan Antonio Bayona, director of The Orphanage and the forthcoming The Impossible.

I don’t believe those reports about Hunger Games director Gary Ross quitting the lucrative franchise because Lionsgate wouldn’t give him a sufficient raise. If true, I suspect that Lionsgate gave Ross the oblique heave-ho because almost everyone thought his direction of The Hunger Games was bad and Lionsgate knew they could do better. In fact, I’m personally claiming partial credit for Ross’s departure as I was one of those who bemoaned his visual handlings.

Hunger Games director Gary Ross.

Consider these complaints:

“Certainly the character [of Katniss Everdeen] is strong enough to survive Gary Ross’s direction…she’s such a sensational character that she fires up your imagination, even when Mr. Ross seems intent on dampening it.” — Manohla Dargis, N.Y. Times.

“Working with the cinematographer Tom Stern, Ross shoots in a style that I have come to despise. A handheld camera whips nervously from one angle to another; the fragments are then jammed together without any regard for space. You feel like you’ve been tossed into a washing machine (don’t sit in the front rows without Dramamine). Even when two people are just talking calmly, Ross jerks the camera around. Why? As the sense of danger increases, he has nothing to build toward. Visually, he’s already gone over the top.” — David Denby, New Yorker.

“The Hunger Games is at best a mediocre effort — an obviously second-tier thing, tedious, lacking in poetry or grace or kapow. It feels sketchy, under-developed, emotionally simplistic and hambone. And it looks cheap and cheesy. My strongest reaction was to Tom Stern’s awful cinematography, which I found visually infuriating. Stern’s shooting, especially in the last two thirds, is almost all jaggedy, boppity-bop, bob-and-weave close-ups. Way too close.” — me, Hollywood Elsewhere

“The most egregious failing of The Hunger Games [is] the direction by Gary Ross. Guys, there is not a single shot in this movie that is longer than four seconds. Not one. I fucking timed them. It is a 2 1/2 hour parade of lightning-fast cuts that jumble the storytelling, allow no time for the audience to get a sense of place or relationship, and muddle every action sequence to the point where it’s almost impossible to tell what’s going on.” — Andrew Nienaber, fataldownflaw.com.

These coasters are included in the Casablanca 70th anniversary Bluray box set. They also show how corporate mentalities screw stuff up. It would be okay to have coasters that say The Blue Parrot or La Belle Aurore sitting on your coffee table, but slapping the Casablanca logo on the bottom of each kills the mood. It says “these are marketing tools!” The fantasy should be that the coasters came from actual restaurants. Corporate people are incapable of grasping this distinction. All they know is, “Push the brand.”

In his January 2010 review of High School, Film School Rejects’ Neil Miller called it “a stoner comedy worthy of being mentioned in the same paragraph as both Dazed and Confused and the great John Hughes…for a movie that could be easily labeled a ‘stoner comedy,’ it’s about as good as it gets.” So the reason it’s being released two and half years later is because distributors…what, felt it needed to age like fine wine?

EW’s Owen Gleiberman gets Titanic over, under, down, around and sideways — he gets the all of it, the heart of it, the delight, the wowness, the metaphors, the sadness and the transportation…the oompah trumping cornball each and every time, and to hell with the cheap snarkos and naysayers. Here’s the closing graph in his Titanic 3D review:

“A starry-eyed youth romance that collides with history and disaster: That’s the ‘concept’ of Titanic. [And] yet there’s so much more going on in this movie, with its deftly structured mythological framework, its heart-of-the-ocean timelessness, and — yes, I’ll say it — its hauntingly gorgeous Gaelic-pop theme music.

“The Titanic, that splendid vessel, is like the 20th century itself, launching forth in all its looming luxe and promise, with Jack as the symbolic new man on the rise — the aristocrat of the spirit who uses his charm and talent to enter realms from which he would previously have been barred. Rose, with her hint of a Jane Austen dilemma (if she follows her bliss and goes off with Jack, it will leave her family in ruins), is the young feminist who now has the peril, as well as pleasure, of choice.

“And once the ship scrapes up against that iceberg, Jim Cameron‘s filmmaking turns humanly brilliant, as the prospect of sudden death unmasks — in the most touching and shocking ways — who each and everyone on board really is. Jack’s death scene in the water has the shuddery majesty of the greatest silent films, because it’s a moment that touches how vulnerable and precious life really is. To watch Titanic again is to do nothing less than enter a movie and come out the other side, with one’s spirit feeling just a little bit larger.”

I’m not saying the word “magic” in a movie title means “stinker”, but it’s usually cause for concern. And you can double it when you add “directed by Rob Reiner.” I’ve always thought of “magic” as a tedious word used by lazy-minded people. Anyone who says “it’s movie magic” is someone you probably don’t want to know too well. These folks also say “genius” a lot. Anyone who says something like “my friend Linda is a genius at marketing” is instantly crossed off for life, and I don’t want to know Linda either.

I remember sensing right away that Magic, the 1978 Anthony Hopkins film written by William Goldman, would be bad. Ditto The Magic Christian, Practical Magic, Thomas as the Magic Railroad, etc. The instant I saw the poster for The Magic of Lassie I knew it would be a crap family film. And I’ve always hated that song that goes “oh, oh, oh, it’s magic!”

N.Y. Times “Media Decoder” columnist David Carr has written a blunt but fair-minded and quasi-definitive appraisal of Keith Olbermann by describing him as a tempestuous drama queen who off-camera will never be a day at the beach. Carr calls him (a) a “big baby…any reporter who has covered him could tell you all about that,” (b) a guy known for “unmanageability and unpleasantness” and (c) “the equivalent of a supremely talented left-handed pitcher with a strong arm — and some obvious control issues — that can give whatever team hires him a lot of quality innings.”

Here, by the way, is that Spy magazine portrait of another big baby.

I intend to purchase the Bluray of George Roy Hill‘s The Sting when it comes out in June. I can’t find a link but Pauline Kael allegedly wrote, “What is this movie about anyway?” Answer: Emotional comfort in the form of assured professional craft. It’s about conning people into caring about a shallow story with no themes or subcurrents whatsoever. It’s about keeping them intrigued even though the good-guy con artists have the upper hand all the way.

18 months ago I wrote that the Chicago Limited poker-game scene “is the most satisfyingly shot and performed scene of its type in Hollywood history because it’s not about poker, but about two cheats trying to out-fuck each other. Paul Newman‘s smug and rascally confidence is key, but the whole thing really depends upon Robert Shaw‘s seething rage — the scene wouldn’t play without it. It’s all about boiling blood.

“I can watch this scene all day long and never get bored because it’s perfectly shot, acted, lighted and timed. It’s the kind of thing that big-studio movies used to do really well. The emphasis was just so.”

In 2008 director Rob Cohen (The Fast and The Furious) told the following story to reporter Germain Lussier of the Times Herald, a Hudson Valley newspaper:

“I was a reader for 100 bucks a week for a big agent named Mike Medavoy, who went on to be a studio head and producer,” Cohen began. “Mike put me in this cubbyhole and they hadn’t had a reader in about a month and the backup was enormous in this agency because I was reading scripts for all the agents. So I was in this little cubbyhole piled floor to ceiling with unread scripts and I began to develop a little code unto myself. Like ‘I will never read two scripts in a row with yellow covers.’ Or ‘On Wednesday, I only read scripts with blue covers.’

“So there are all these piles, and Wednesday came and I pulled this script out of the bottom of heap. I had to read five scripts a day and write the coverage on them, basically reading 600 pages of material and writing 10 pages of material a day, which is a lot. So I started to read this script like you begin to read all scripts, like, dubious, because after you’ve been disappointed so many times reading, ‘When am I going to read a really good script?’

“And so I kept turning the pages on this one and it got better, then it got better and it got better and I realized that finally at the end I had been conned and the audience had been conned just like any other long con or short con in the movie. I flipped out and I wrote this glowing two-page synopsis and opinion, that I still have framed in my office, in which I fully went on record as this is the great American screenplay and this will make an award-winning, major-cast, major-director film.

“And the agent, Medavoy, came into my cubbyhole after he read the coverage and said, ‘How good is this script?’ and I said, ‘It’s as good as I just told you.’ And he said, ‘I’m going to try to sell it this afternoon and if I don’t you are fired, so tell me how good the script is.’ I said, ‘You can fire me if you don’t sell it.’

“And he went out, called a few people at Universal and the script was bought that day. And by the end of the week, it had Newman and Robert Redford and George Roy Hill reprising their relationships from Butch Cassidy.'”

Martin Scorsese‘s brief discussion last night of New York, New York (“I tried, I tried”) reminds me of a January 2010 post called “Honest Failure,” to wit: “Very few people feel much affection for New York, New York. It has one terrific scene — i.e., when Robert De Niro is thrown out of a club that Liza Minelli is performing in, and he kicks out several light bulbs adorning the entrance way as he’s manhandled out by the manager and a bouncer — but otherwise I’ve never wanted to re-watch it on DVD.

“But I’ve always liked Pauline Kael‘s line about New York, New York being ‘an honest failure,’ and I’m wondering what other films could be so described?”

Films that didn’t sell many tickets, I mean, and perhaps were critically dumped on besides, but which had a certain unmistakable integrity and stuck to their guns and did what they did without any crapping around. Movies that gave it to you straight and clean.

Here’s my idea of an honest failure: Freddy Got Fingered. The script, at least, was really up to something. The movie captured about 75% or 80% of what was on the page, but the idea and the current were exceptional. I laughed out loud at portions of it, and I almost never do that.

We all run into films every so often that seem exceptional in a deep-down way. Not just in a particular-personal vein but smacking of some kind of profound life-lesson and/or greatness of theme that seems to reach out and strike a universal chord. Or they deliver an emotional connection that seems to reflect our commonality in some rich and resonant fashion. And yet — here’s the rub and the shock — much or most of the world doesn’t agree. Almost everyone you know and nearly every other critic seems bored, unmoved, mocking, snide.