There’s a fascinating, well-put thought from screenwriter William Goldman on one of the commentary tracks on the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid double-disc DVD that came out three or four weeks ago. I didn’t transcribe it but I remember it pretty well: “We were lucky with Butch. We had a great director [George Roy Hill], and we had Connie Hall‘s phenomenal photography and a great crew and a solid script and a neat story and the casting was perfect. But if just one of these elements didn’t happen…it tells you that a good script and a good director and the right cast aren’t enough . The photography has to be right on, ditto the score and the editing…and if just one of these elements isn’t exactly right, you are dead. Nobody realizes how important the editing is, or how important the composer is…and there’s no reason for people outside the movie business to realize this, that movies are so fragile and anything can screw them up.”

Enron ogre Kenneth Lay died this morning in Aspen. The cause printed in the N.Y. Times was a heart attack, which it may have clinically been. Of course, the dramatist in all of us can’t help but imagine-presume that what really brought his curtain down — a combination of stress, the shame-horror of doing prison time and, of course, not wanting to die in jail.
Lay was found guilty several weeks ago on six counts of fraud and conspiracy and four counts of bank fraud, and was looking at a very long sentence, and having lived a cushiony lifestyle for so long, he must have been filled with dread at what lay ahead.
I don’t mean to sound heartless about this, but Lay was one of the most heartless corporate pricks of all time, a major conniver whose venal spinnings and maneuver- ings resulted in the ruining of many lives. Take a look sometime at Alex Gibney‘s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and tell me I’m wrong. If anyone deserved the label of “bad guy,” it was certainly Kenneth Lay.
So let’s be honest and admit that Lay’s death this morning is dramatically satis- fying. If anything he got off easy. Aspen is a very beautiful and soothing place and a good place to breathe in mountain air, lie down, close your eyes and bid farewell. A better point of departure, certainly, than some prison cell in some federal facility.
For some reason I’m thinking of that moment in Casablanca when Ingrid Bergman laments that if Humphrey Bogart’s Rick doesn’t help Victor Laszlo by selling him the fabled “letters of transit” that he’ll die in Casablanca, and Bogart snaps, “So what? I’m gonna die in Casablanca. It’s a good spot for it.”

I thought I’d do the radical thing today and not post anything further because everyone and everything has shut down for the holiday. Tuesday the 4th is a flatliner. I hate days off but you can’t fight City Hall.

Superman Returns took in around $13.9 million yesterday (Monday, 7.3). Apparently the Sunday morning estimates were low because no one considered the bad-weather-around-the-country factor, meaning that Superman‘s Sunday haul was probably closer to $19 rather than $16 million, which translates into a five-day figure more like $87.5 million rather than, say, Box-Office Mojo‘s estimate of $84.7 million.
Add yesterday’s $13.9 million to the $87 million-plus and Superman Returns has now crested $100 million with another $7 or $8 million expected today.
But as I’ve said two or three times over the past week, earnings will be down next weekend (low to mid 20s) when the Pirates hit town, and it’ll basically be a Superman toilet-water-swirl from then on.
Nikki Finke‘s souces are telling her it probably won’t make it to $200 million domestically, but I think it just might. But there’s no fighting the general consensus, which is that Superman “didn’t do well enough…it didn’t do what it needed to,” as a plugged-in journo put it Sunday night.
Bryan Singer, Brandon Routh, Jon Peters, Kevin Spacey and especially lightweight Kate Bosworth didn’t quite do the thing…they stirred and delighted a good portion of the U.S. but there were too many naysayers and thus a good-but-not-great showing.
The best move now for everyone involved (and I’m including Alan Horn) is to grab their dark glasses and fishing hats and get in their cars and drive out to the desert and stay there for a couple of weeks until the Great Superman Letdown has faded from memory and everyone has moved on and begun to obsess about the next tragedy.

Another big gun — Variety‘s Todd McCarthy — has slammed Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest for being empty and bloated and too long. He says “there’s not a genuine moment” in either of the two Pirates films, “no point of human contact…they’re baldly concocted, confected, engineered.” (Just as I said in my review that “there’s nothing, nothing, nothing going on inside [Pirates 2]…nothing kicks in within…not ever, not once.”) And he claims the new one “puts the viewer into a bland stupor.” And “why wear out the film’s welcome with a wearisome two-and-a-half-hour running time,” McCarthy wonders, “when a tight-ship 100 minutes would have insured more constant excitement, not to mention giving exhibitors more showtimes per day?”

If you’ve seen Jackie Brown, you know Quentin Tarantino is a big fan of Barry Shear‘s Across 110th Street (1972) — a tough, violent, above-average blaxpoitation flick that costarred Yaphet Kotto, Anthony Quinn and Anthony Francioca — because he used the “Across 110th Street” title song, written by Bobby Womack and J.J. Johnson and performed by Womack, over Brown‘s opening credits.

And now it turns out Elvis Presley was right on the same page. In an excerpt from Jerry Schilling‘s “Me and a Guy Named Elvis” that appeared on “Page Six “, it says that Presley “celebrated his 41st birthday by telling friends about Across 110th Street, which apparently was his “favorite blaxploitation flick.” The King “began to act out the whole movie, setting up each scene and then presenting just about every line of dialogue in the script. He brought each character to life with walks, vocal mannerisms and the subtlest of gestures. [He] didn’t stop until he got to the final scene of the film.”

An important distinction about the Platinum Dunes remake of The Birds, as pointed out by Cinematical — they’re aren’t sampling Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1962 classic as much as adapting Daphne de Maurier‘s classic novella. Right. The gore wallowers whose output makes the resume of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus look like that of John Houseman‘s…the thick-fingered vulgarians who made ’05’s The Amityville Horror and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are going to try and service the vision of the British-born author who wrote “Rebecca” and “My Cousin Rachel.”

N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr has penned words of tribute to Richard Lester‘s Petulia, some 13 days after the Warner Home Video DVD arrived in stores. “A moving romantic tragedy with comic detailing that was released to largely uncomprehending audiences,” Petulia is a “great” film that “belongs on any list of the classics of American filmmaking,” says Kehr, “and this beautifully produced DVD belongs in any serious cinephile’s collection .”

This is an actual T-shirt being offered to rightwing nutbags on a site called Thoseshirts.com. Kinda gives you a taste of what the ’08 campaign may be like if the Democrats are self-destructve enough to nominate Hilary Clinton for President. (Have you read James Carville‘s argument that she can win?) Check out this Ann Coulter T-shirt…amazing.

The sword of Damocles hovering above the Disney work force that N.Y. Times reporter Laura Holson wrote about a while back will strike within two or three weeks, and the percentage of people laid off could be moderate or quite high, depending on who you talk to and how worried they are. A Disney guy told me last night the Mouse House cuts could affect anywhere from 10% to 20% of Disney employees. The slump in DVD sales (i.e., a downturn in growth), the rising cost of making movies (FX houses and big-star salaries) and a rethinking of the types of movies that Disney wants to get involved in are said to be the main reasons for the cuts.

“The barrier to entry in internet media is low — [but] the barrier to success is high,” says Gawker Media’s Nick Denton to N.Y. Times columnist David Carr.
“[Denton] thinks all of the bluster around blogs, fueled in part by AOL’s purchase of weblogs, has brought stupid money off the sidelines,” Carr writes. “He has felt the touch of clammy hands from venture capitalists more times than he would care to count. ‘There is no doubt that there is a bubble right now,’ he says.
“So why not cash out? ‘Because it would be too hard to start over,’ he answers. ‘Sites need to be well-managed and well-designed and even then it is harder and harder to launch one. The world does not need more blogs,” adding that if you count all the pages on MySpace, “there is approximately one reader for every blog out there.”
Note to readers: MCN’s David Poland linked to Carr’s article either last night or earlier this morning, so that means he kind of owns it, and if anyone else links to this article or riffs on it, they’re a kind of poacher, or so Poland believes. They’re taking a dump on land that he’s found and staked out and filed a claim on. HE recognizes that MCN linked to the Carr piece first, and profusely apologizes for offending Poland’s acute sense of territoriality.

Just before the start of Sunday evening’s Little Miss Sunshine showing at the Wadsworth, marking the end of the L.A. Film Festival — 7.2.06, 6:40 pm.

(a) The actual Little Miss Sunshine VW van used during filming, parked in front of the Wadsworth — Sunday, 7.2.06, 6:45 pm; (b) Something between a greeting and a warning; (c) Photographers snapping arrivals prior to Sunday’s Sunshine screening — 7.2.06, 6:42 pm; (d) Islander producer-star Tom Hildreth, publicist Mickey Cottrell, director Ian McCrudden at L.A. Film festival outdoor after-party next to Wadsworth theatre — Sunday, 7.2, 10:35 pm; (f) bad photo of after-party bartenders near the end of their rope — Sunday, 7.2, 11:15 pm; Little Miss Sunshine costar Paul Dano (left), who comes from my high-school home town of Wilton, Connecticut , with his girlfriend (whose name I forgot to write down) and a close pally (ditto) who also hail from Wilton, snapped at Sunday night’s Wadsworth after-party .