“The humiliating box office returns for All the King’s Men may have trickled in over the weekend (a pathetic $3.8 million), but the death knell sounded almost a year ago and unintentionally came out of its producers’ mouths. When Sony Pictures announced, just two months before the film’s planned Christmastime release, that its opening would be pushed into the next year, the official reason was that more time was needed to complete the editing and score.
“But the unmistakable message sent to savvy audiences (that means everyone now) was: This movie is in trouble,” begins a 9.26 Caryn James piece in the New York Times.
“The studio ignored one of the harshest realities of movie marketing today: It’s almost impossible to recover from bad buzz. Studios wield their marketing campaigns as they always have, priming audiences to expect the best. But with the media following every twist of a movie’s progress, viewers head to theaters loaded with behind-the-scenes information. A current television spot for the Ashton Kutcher-Kevin Costner action film, The Guardian (opening Friday), actually flaunts its preview audience test scores, calling it ‘one of the best-playing and highest-scoring movies in the history of Touchstone Pictures.'”
“Even insidery advertising campaigns, though, can’t change the fact that blogs, television infotainment and mainstream entertainment reporting can amount to an anti-marketing campaign, priming audiences for the worst.”
And I love this graph….
“Desperately trying to spin viewers with higher expectations, All the King’s Men set itself up for failure because it is impossible to forget a year’s worth of factoids. When Sean Penn first appears on screen in the film, as the self-described hick and soon-to-be-political-savant Willie Stark, his short-sided period haircut may jog your memory: that’s the funny haircut he had at the Oscars two years ago.”

When Columbia decided several weeks ago against putting Mike Binder‘s Reign O’er Me into the derby by opening it in early December, one of the factors, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, was that “Columbia had a heavy fall/Xmas slate (four films) and they didn’t want to add another film to that list in the first place,”
Those films were All The King’s Men, Running With Scissors, Stranger Than Fiction and The Pursuit of Happyness.
It’s funny how things change so quickly. Here is it only late September (four or five weeks after writing that short article) and two of those films — King’s Men and Fiction — are dead in the water as far as Oscar aspirations are concerned, and a third — Running With Scissors — is looking…well, I don’t know how it’s looking, but not sending it to Toronto was some kind of hint.
That leaves only Gabrielle Muccino‘s The Pursuit of Happyness, a kind of Kramer vs. Kramer father-son heart-tugger in which Will Smith costars with his son, at a stand-out contender of any kind. And you never know with a Will Smith movie. No matter the vehicle, he has to be the “movie star” and that means endless opportu- nities for “charm”, cloying-ness and Smith-schtick.
Another reason weighing against Reign opening in December, I wrote, was the fact that Columbia “already has two funny guys giving dramatic performances — Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction and Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness — so do the math.” Even with Ferrell out of the picture, the Smith vs. Sandler equation still stands and this, I believe, is finallly why Reign was bumped into March-April of ’07.
Columbia wanted the playground free and clear for Smith’s presumed (i.e., hoped for) Best Actor nomination. They didn’t want another Sandler’s Reign performnace getting in the way, even as a vague competitive possibility.

Sharon Waxman‘s latest N.Y. Times piece (dated 9.25) is about Jim Carrey ‘s recent decision to leave UTA agent Nick Stevens and how the move “rumbled through Hollywood like a storm [and] signaled changing times for a tight network of stars who have dominated Hollywood comedies for several years — Carrey, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, Vince Vaughn, Steve Carell and writer-directors Judd Apatow, Adam McKay — and how the key to this web of interwoven talent has been Stevens and his deputies at the United Talent Agency, and the talent managers Jimmy Miller and Eric Gold, who represented most of the artists — and how that may be coming to an end, amid accusations of back-stabbing and character assassination.”
Waxman’s story isn’t as dishy as Nikki Finke‘s 9.20 L.A. Weekly story, but it frames the new situation — is the UTA/Gold-Miller Kings of Comedy house-of-cards about to crumble? — in tight dramatic terms.

There are implications of laissez-faire rich-girl posturings in Sofia Coppola‘s decision to stroll around Paris with a New York Times photographer (who, I’m told, is a personal friend of Coppola’s) and pose for shots here and there. Coppola is female and fairly young and a lover of the alluring eyefuls one normally finds in the shops and parks and museums of Paris, and that’s fine…but the montage provides an echo, for me, of the rank emptiness (i.e., the constant regarding of 18th Century surfaces) in Coppola’s Marie-Antoinette. The shots by the Times are appealing and some are exceptional, but I shoot stuff like this all the time when I’m in Paris, and I think my choices — group #1, group #2 and group #3 — are more atmopsherically intriguing.

I wasn’t having all that terrific a time with the entirety of Todd Phillips‘ School for Scoundrels last night (I went to one of the commercial sneak showings), but I did enjoy the sour-shit attitude in some of Billy Bob Thornton‘s put-down lines. Particularly the retort to costar Jon Heder when he talks about a developing relationship with Jacinda Barrett (who doesn’t do it for me, by the way…especially not after The Last Kiss) and Thornton goes, “Yeah…I’m sure you’re days away from adopting a Chinese kid together.” If that reminds you of something you read about in People a few years ago, you’re not alone. This Film Stew item explains it.

In an upcoming (10.2.06) Al Pacino interview on James Lipton‘s “Inside The Actor’s Studio” series on Bravo, the 66 year-old actor tells a simulated rear-entry Oscar statuette story.
It happened right after he’d won his Best Actor Oscar for Scent of a Woman. I get in the elevator and I’m going down with a lot of people,” Pacino tells Lipton. “And I had my Oscar [and] a very well known actress is in front of me and she starts to squirm. And I realized the head of my Oscar was touching her behind. I leaned over and said, ‘Oh pardon me, that wasn’t me — it was my Oscar.'”
This reminds me of a comment that Pulp Fiction writer Roger Avary said in front of a packed crowd at the Independent Spirit Awards ceremony in Santa Monica in February ’95. Holding up a Spirit Award trophy, which is basically a Valkyrie with a pair of jagged angel wings sticking out of her back, Avary said that having anal sex with an Oscar Award (or at least with the bald guy’s head) was doable, but it was obviously out of the question with a Spirit Award.

“Murders have continued almost unabated [in his films], and at 66, Brian De Palma has been at it a long time, since the mid-’60s. While the other major directors of his generation — Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola — have ranged high and low, De Palma keeps hitting the same groove. Like Hitchcock, to whom he has often been compared, and not always favorably, his name represents a brand. [But] even in a film as roundly slammed and wildly unsatisfactory as The Black Dahlia, there are moments when De Palma’s ecstatic love of filmmaking comes through. But his ardor can be a mixed blessing. De Palma’s technique alone can hold you, but sometimes we must ask: technique in the service of what?” — one of the few portions in Peter Rainer‘s longish, well-written piece about De Palma in today’s L.A. Times that I agree with wholeheartedly.

“I found the whole time [in the writing of The Queen] that I had to dampen down the inflammatory nature of what I was being told,” screenwriter Peter Morgan tells N.Y. Times profiler Sarah Lyall . “You have no idea how much hosing down and cooling of information we had to do. We were shedding and throwing out sensational information the whole time.” A little too much!

In this well-researched, skillfully written New Yorker piece about the life and legacy of the life of Marie-Antoinette, Judith Thurman says the following about Sofia Coppola, director of the empty and for the most part despicable Marie-Antoinette (Columbia, 10.20):

She “is a fashion celebrity and muse who helps to publicize the work of designer friends by wearing it with the teasing glamour of a jaded virgin playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes. She has always been drawn to beautiful, trapped girls, who belong to a generation too cynical to unite in rebellion and too cool to unite in conformity. You can see why Coppola thought that the ‘teen Queen’ — a hostage to appearances — would make a good subject. But, rather than play to [Marie-Antoinette’s] forte for impiety, she and an ensemble of virtuoso technicians have produced — despite the odd, postmodern wink — a sanitized, old-fashioned costume picture.”
Thurman’s piece again reminds me what a fascinating film Marie-Antoinette might have been if someone other than Coppola had directed it.
Marie-Antoinette unfolds as if there was such thing as a film school with an unlimited stratospheric budgets for its students, and Coppola was a student in this school and her instructor had said to her one day, “Sofia, I’m giving you a special assignment. I want you to do more than just make a film about Marie-Atoinette — I want you to portray her in the shallowest and most vapid way imaginable. Really, Sofa…I want you to take out everything that would give her depth, resonance, empathy. I want you to gut your film of everything but the emptiest elements. You can do this, Sofia. I have faith in you. Just look within yourself, look at what your own life has been, use your father’s connections…and follow your heart.”

Four days ago TMZ’s Claude Brodesser-Akner (where did the “Akner” come from?) wrote a short piece about the whacking of Bradford Simpson, the top guy at Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Appian Way. A big reason Leo fired the poor guy, Brodesser-Akner reports, is that “lots of interesting stuff was in development [at Appian Way], but little has come to fruition.” Brodesser-Akner mentions Appian Way’s interest in developing a film about LSD guru Timothy Leary , (with the idea of Leo eventually playing him), hiring playwright Craig Lucas (The Dying Gaul) and Leary archivist Michael Horowitz to develop the screenplay. Hold on, hold on…I know more about Appian Way and the Leary project than Brodesser-Akner. Leo’s interest in the Leary thing has been festering for over two years. I wrote a short piece about the whole magilla last March. Here’s the key observational quote: “There’s not a lot of focus at Appian Way…Leo is all over the map…[Appian Way] doesn’t exactly have a center-of-gravity thing going on.”

“‘What’s human sacrifice if not sending guys off to Iraq for no reason?'” — alleged Mel Gibson remark following last night’s Apocalypto screening at Austin’s Fantasticfest. The film, which Harry Knowles saw twice yesterday, is about big bad Mayans (aggressive, militaristic) conquering and mauling a smaller and simpler grass-hut society.
So there’s the critique of the U.S. and the Bushies — an idea to hold onto — but the thing that seemed to have really impressed everyone last night are the B-movie action-driven aspects.
“After the second screening, I have to say it plays even better,” Knowles has written. “The themes about how the industrial needs of a civilization, even a primitive one, lay the groundwork for moral, societal and physical decay really begin to come out. Then there’s just the pure B-movie pulp of an action film. I heard at least five people afterwards say that it was a Mayan Western.
“Louis Black, editor of the Austin Chronicle, was heard to say, many times, that “it’s like a Terrence Malick film with a B-movie plot!” — and if you know Louis, you know how heartfelt and excited that was. One of the reasons Louis Black and I are friends and have known each other for the last 30 years is that we love High Art and Low Art. And most of all we love it when the two converge. This is a B-movie with the soul of a great artist and the production values of the best of Hollywood.”

Mel Gibson, wearing a mask and a wig so he wouldn’t be noticed, visited two Oklahoma towns on Thursday and Friday to attend test screenings of Apocalypto, which Disney will release on 12.8. The Friday screening played before “a mostly American-Indian audience” — the film is about an ancient Mayan culture — at the Riverwind Casino in Goldsby, Oklahoma. The Thursday screening happened at Cameron University in Lawton. If anyone who saw Apocalypto at either screening wants to share, please get in touch. It’s strange that Gibson would wear a “mask”, no?