wired

This isn’t news to readers of IMDB postings, but one of the all-time saddest orphans of Movies-in-Limbo Land — The Devil and Daniel Webster, which Alec Baldwin directed and costarred Anthony Hopkins, himself and Jennifer Love Hewitt — will be released in ’07 by The Yari Group, or roughly six years after this modern-day (hah!) rehash of Stephen Vincent Benet‘s story and Archibald Macleish‘s play finished lensing.

Look at the stills of Baldwin as he appeared while directing the film and compare them to how he looks today — he was a kid! Hopkins hadn’t made Hannibal, Red Dragon or The Human Stain when TDADW was shot, and Hewitt’s feature film career hadn’t yet gone into the crapper. It’s a pre-9/11 nostalgia movie. Here’s a YouTube trailer.
Yari apparently intends to release the film with Alan Smithee as the credited director, since Baldwin renounced it eons ago because his edit of the film was taken away and recut, apparently because the original jerkwater producers felt it wasn’t funny or commercial enough. Baldwin reportedly wanted a dramatic ensemble piece while the editors changed the tone and pacing and tried to hawk it as a comedy.
The original producers also apparently got into dutch for reporting fraudulent financial information to the IRS and therefater went bankrupt. The film had it’s premier in Florida in April 2004 at the World Cinema Naples Film Festival. A Beverly Hills company called My Own Worst Enemy Productions has apparently bought the rights (the movie is on their website — company rep Michael Golland didn’t call me back), and in turn has apparently pacted with Yari to get it into theatres.

The plot’s about an unsuccessful writer (Baldwin) selling his soul to the devil (Hewitt) in exchange for fame and fortune. When his success isn’t everything he thought it would be he attempts to wiggle out of the deal, which leads to Daniel Webster (Hopkins) to defend him in a kind of cosmic court setting.
How bad is The Devil and Daniel Webster? It may actually be watchable. An IMDB poster has written there were three versions of this film. He saw the original and says it “left a lot to be desired.” But there were two more versions, one after Baldwin abandoned ship and the last one just before it was sold to Yari. The guy says “that the final cut, a half-hour shorter that the previous ones, is by far the best!” So it may be passable, but never trust anyone who uses exclamation points to convey enthusiasm about anything.
Webster was screened at the 2003 Cannes Film Market, and, acccording to the IMDB, opened commercially in Russia on 8.7.03.

But if you go by the general rule that the more producers a film has the worse it is, then Webster is a super-stinker. There are 17 producers of varying importance and credibility listed on the IMDB: Alec Baldwin, Tony Cataldo, Terry Chase Chenowith, Jonathan Cornick, Katie Daily, Craig Darian, Randall Emmett, George Furla, Carol Gillson, David Glasser, Michael Z. Gordon, Michael S. Grayson, Brian R. Keathley, Dessie Markovsky, Adam M. Stone, Scott G. Stone (are they brothers?), Jeff G. Waxman (i.e., line producer) and Jason Zelin.

The weekend projections are in and aside from Saw 3 being the #1 dog-of-all-dogs (a projected $32,984,000 by Sunday night, which indicates a heavy Friday-to-Saturday falloff given the opening-day tally of $14 million- something), the omens are bad for Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers and Phillip Noyce‘s Catch a Fire, and very good for Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu‘s Babel .
Despite Flags having added 300 screens this weekend for a total of about 2100, it’s expected to take in only about $6,023,000, which is a drop of just over 40% from last weekend’s haul of $10,749,000. Catch a Fire has opened very weakly — one could almost say disastrously — with a projected $2,029,000, or roughly $1565 per print. And yet Babel, which opened on only 7 screens this weekend, will tally a remarkable $378,000, which works out to $54,000 a print — a very strong showing.
The Prestige will take the #2 slot with $9,408,000, off 39% from last weekend…which isn’t half bad. The Departed, off a modest 32%, will take in $9,104,000 for a $90 million cume by Sunday night. Flags will finish fourth. Open Season will end up fifth with $5,616,000. Man of the Year is sixth with $4,517,000. The Grudge 2 will take in $3,590,000. Marie-Antoinette will finish up with $2,829,000 on Sunday night — a not-good drop of 51% from last weekend’s opener. Runnning With Scissors expanded its run by roughly 600 theatres with a projected total of $2,429,000, or roughly $4100 a print, also not good.
Newmarket’s Death of a President will end up with $214,000 from bookings in 91 situations and a per-screen average of $2381 — pretty weak.

“Before I read any more reviews and start questioning my judgment, I’m going to predict that Babel will be nominated for best picture this year. What’s more, I think it just might win,” says Newsweek‘s Sean Smith in a 10.27 posting. “Why? Because the Oscar is almost always awarded from the heart rather than from the head. Pulitzers Prizes and Nobel Prizes and National Book Awards are doled out, in general, for intellectual achievement — they reward how a piece of work makes us think about the world. But the deepest value of movies is how intensely they make us feel.
“Babel could only have been made in a post-9/11 world, and it is a powerful comment on our cross-cultural anxieties and our assumptions and fears about each other. It also features mesmerizing performances, including the most natural, raw and memorable scene of Brad Pitt’s entire career. Yes, maybe the film is melodramatic. Maybe too many bad things happen to too many good people. But there is also a sense at the end of the film that most of these characters will survive their tragedies and will manage to find some measure of happiness — that there is hope for them and, by extension, us.
“Babel may be painful, but it is not bleak. Ultimately, though, the reason I think Babel could win best picture has nothing to do with what I think about it at all. It’s because watching Babel in a packed theater last month, I felt the same rush I had watching American Beauty, Shakespeare in Love and Million Dollar Baby. I can’t rationalize it. I can’t quantify it. I can barely explain it. All I can tell you is that, as sappy as it sounds, those films — and this film — made me feel as if my heart had expanded.
“Judging from all the people crying around me, and in the elevator afterward, and in the parking garage after that, I suspect that I am not alone. All of that may mean nothing. It’s just a feeling. But this year, at least, I’m not going to ignore it.”

Time and again Hollywood types — directors, producers, studios — get into business with oily foreign guys (European or Israeli) who tend to live high and swagger around and smoke cigars. The Hollywooders are always interested because there are always fresh oilies looking to buy their way into the business, and they’ll hook up with almost anyone with a connected rep in order to do so. Elie Samaha, Giancarlo Peretti, Jean-Marie Messier, Bob Yari, Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus, Avi Lerner, etc.
Yari has been doing pretty well for himself lately (The Illusionist is a hit), but sooner or later the matters of oily men always seem to turn sour or go south. Hollywooders who make movies with them always seem to regret it, sooner or later. The latest example of this syndrome has been written about by N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman, and it concerns Harsh Times director-writer David Ayer and his bumpy ride with Phillipe Martinez and his distribution company, Bauer Martinez, which bought rights to Ayer’s film during the ’05 Toronto Film Festival.
Harsh Times will be released on 11.10 by a “reconfigured MGM with scant public awareness, a nest of tense financiers and a handful of abandoned release dates in its wake,” she writes. “Martinez says he still loves the film and has supported it by approving a $15 million marketing campaign and relatively wide, 800-theater release. ‘If I didn’t care about the film, I’d never have put $15 million into the marketing,” Martinez — “an expansive, cigar-smoking Frenchman” — tells Waxman that Ayer “should kiss me every morning for what I do for his movie.”
“Yet Martinez is not actually putting up the $15 million,” Waxman reports. “The money comes from MGM, which had originally expected Bauer Martinez to pay for marketing and delayed its publicity and advertising campaign when the deal stalled over this and other business issues,” and blah, blah. Ayer tells Waxman he got into bed with Martinez with the idea that “we can be neophytes together and reinvent the system.” But the system, Ayer has learned, “is not so easily reinvented. Ayer now says he wants “the warm, loving embrace of the studios. Studios are the way they are for a very good reason.”
The irony is that Harsh Times is no film to avoid. Set in East L.A., it’s a riveting, hard-case melodrama. Christian Bale plays a violent Gulf War veteran looking to find work as a professional right-wing mercenary. Freddy Rodriguez is his irresponsible best friend; Eva Longoria plays Rodriguez’s opposite-number wife. I saw it last March or April…a good while ago. I’ll get into it more next week.

To me, the end-of-the-year Oscar beat mosh-pit action is tough and bruising but bracing and a lot of…well, fun. In a perverse sort of way. But to David Poland, it’s becoming more and more of a wallow — craven, degrading, downmarket and heavily caked with brown glop. His latest rant, which I love, sounds like a ringside boxing reporter complaining about the hitting. It’s really good, though. I actually laughed out loud and that’s rare But I need help on one thing. Of all the “controversies [that] will be at a premium,” I’m clueless about ‘Rinko’s vagina.” (He’s referring to Babel costar Rinko Kikuchi.) Anyone?

At Wednesday’s Tom Freston roast in Manhattan, Paramount Pictures honcho Brad Grey was quoted by Variety‘s Jill Goldsmith and Scott Kirsner about his studio’s shucking-of-Tom-Cruise move that happened two months ago.
Paramount “had considered two options when Cruise’s producing pact came up for renewal,” the story reads. “The first was to ‘reduce the capital we were putting in so dramatically that it wouldn’t have made sense for Tom to keep it,’ Grey said. Such a readjustment ‘would’ve changed the ceiling for all top talent deals.’ The second option was not to reach an agreement. When it became clear, in late August, that the two parties would choose door No. 2, [Viacom chief Sumner] Redstone spilled the beans.”

To get up to speed for her piece about formidable Best Actor contender Leonardo DiCaprio, Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson persuaded Warner Bros. to let her see Blood Diamond, the hard-hitting Ed Zwick drama set in South Africa that costars DiCaprio, Djimon Honsou and Jennifer Connelly. Thompson treads gingerly in describing the film, but the piece nonetheless contains three “tells.”
One, she calls it “a big expensive drama with a heartfelt political message, just the kind of movie that needs the extra boost of an Oscar campaign.” Two, she says that Warner Bros. “will mount Oscar campaigns for both The Departed” — in which DiCaprio definitively kills as a Boston-mob mole — “[which is] already a commercial success and doesn’t need an Oscar push to attract audiences, and Diamond, which needs all the help it can get.” And three, she says that “if Departed really takes off as a Best Picture contender — and if Diamond doesn’t — then DiCaprio too could be promoted from supporting actor consideration for the Scorsese movie into a best actor aspirant for that movie as well.”
Dicaprio, Thompson proclaims, “is front and center in an anti-hero role” in the Zwick film. “He’s a ruthless South African diamond smuggler who enlists Connellly’s perky journalist to help him find the missing son of Honsou’s South African farmer — as well as his buried giant diamond. Along the way, Connelly and Hounsou’s characters both help DiCaprio’s damaged treasure hunter find his conscience. It’s DiCaprio’s movie all the way, thick Afrikaner accent and all, and Warners is pushing him for a best actor nomination.
“There’s just one problem: The studio’s Departed has become such a hit with critics and audiences that the one movie Scorsese and DiCaprio had no intention of campaigning for has become a serious Oscar contender as well. This leaves the studio scrambling to take care of the needs of all its players.”
DiCaprio, she concludes, “is facing the happy dilemma of handling two possibly Oscar-worthy performances. Warners says it will campaign for DiCaprio in the best actor category for Diamond, a movie whose political agenda he cares about deeply.
“At this point, according to his p.r. rep Ken Sunshine, DiCaprio will join his Departed brothers in the supporting actor category, which will pit him against Nicholson and Damon in a hugely competitive race along with likely contenders Hounsou, Adam Beach (Flags of Our Fathers), Eddie Murphy (Dreamgirls), Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children), James McAvoy (The Last King of Scotland), Michael Sheen (The Queen) and Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine).” (HE says forget Haley and McAvoy.)”

All that Jack Nicholson-for-Best-Actor-in- The–Departed jazz? Forget it. Warner Bros., I’m hearing, is off the boat on that one. Delicious as he is, Jack is all flavor and feisty backup in that film, which I’ve felt from the beginning. Oscar prognosticators, take note.

The trailer for Richard Eyre‘s Notes on a Scandal (Fox Searchlight, 12.25) is very nicely done, but my goodness…it’s one of those trailers that gives away 90% of the movie. I feel I’ve really and truly seen it now, on top of being instructed how obviously top-tier the performances from Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench and Bill Nighy are going to be. Now, it seems, the only thing to do is sit down and see the feature-length version. I didn’t realize how Fatal Attraction-y this was going to be, to judge from the descriptions and whatnot. It certainly seems to have been cut from the same cloth.

Now I really want to watch the Dixie Chicks’ Shut Up & Sing documentary, which the Weinstein Co. is opening in New York and L.A. tomorrow and nationwide on 11.10, now that the the cowardly NBC and CW networks are refusing to air ads for the film, apparently because they’re afraid of whatever political blowback may result from vengeful apparatchiks in the Bush adminstration.

Harvey Weinstein, co-owner of the Weinstein Co., is fuming about this turndown and complaining big-time to Matt Drudge, who apparently broke the ad-turndown story this evening. “It’s a sad commentary about the level of fear in our society,” Harvey’s saying, “ that a movie about a group of courageous entertainers who were blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech is now itself being blacklisted by corporate America. The idea that anyone should be penalized for criticizing the president is sad and profoundly un-American.”
Drudge is reporting that NBC has said the network “cannot accept these spots as they are disparaging to President Bush” and that the CW is explaining its refusal is because it “doesn’t have appropriate proramming in which to schedule this spot”
Barbara Kopple‘s Dixie Chicks doc, which I didn’t manage to see at the Toronto Film Festival, is, I’ve read and been told, an above-average behind-the-scenes look at the political fallout that that happened in ’03 after the group’s lead singer Natalie Maines said she was “ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”
Drudge is reporting that the Weinstein Company “is exploring taking legal action.” The rejected commercials for “Shut Up & Sing” can be viewed here.
The Dixie Chicks ad turndown follows last week’s story about Fox, NPR and CNN refusing to run ads for Newmarket’s Death of a President, which is partly about the fictional shooting of Bush at a Chicago political rally and how the government is subsequently a little too eager to pin the blame on a man of Middle Eastern descent.

According to Advertising Age reporter T.L. Stanley, a research report titled “Hollywood Online: Ad Innovators Play Spending Catch-Up” is saying that “studios have made a misstep by not increasing their online spending sooner in order to reach the coveted young consumer who spends significant amounts of time on the web.”
“Studios spend about 3% of their marketing budgets on online ads, which is below the 5.7% that the average U.S. industry spends, according to the eMarketer study. Hollywood is expected to make up some ground, though, spending 8% of ad budgets online by the year 2010. That translates to $526 million and 17% of studios total ad spending. Other marketers will spend about 8.9% of their budgets on the web by that time, the study found.”
The study said that “a number of movie marketers surveyed put that figure considerably higher, or more in the vicinity of 6%.