wired

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way wants to produce a movie of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle…cool. I have had the image of an Ice-Nine catastrophe — all of the world’s oceans, rivers and great lakes suddenly freezing solid in a massive chain-reaction — sitting in my head since reading Vonnegut’s novel 30-something years ago. Claude Brodesser’s Variety story describes the plot as being about “a race to recover the world’s most dangerous substance, Ice-Nine, a new form of ice that freezes at room temperature.” Vonnegut’s book explains that Ice-Nine, created by a character named Felix Hoenikker, is capable of creating a chain reaction that would solidify all water and thus destroy all life on earth. Vonnegut studied chemistry at Cornell University and knew about various permutations of ice through his brother, Dr. Bernard Vonnegut (1914-1997), a former professor of atmospheric sciences at the State University of New York at Albany. Garden variety ice (ice cubes, snowflakes) is called ice-one and has a familiar hexagon arrangement. Under different conditions, different chemical arrangements can occur. Ice-nine has not yet been created in a lab, but other permutations (ice-eleven and ice-twelve) have reportedly been cooked up….emphasis on the word “reportedly.”

Speaking of DiCaprio, what’s happening with his intention to produce a film about (and perhaps play) LSD guru Dr. Timothy Leary? Work on a script was begun late last year by L.M. Kit Carson. I know because Kit told me, and because I urged Carson to research it by wading into a book by Jay Stevens called Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, which is by far the most comprehensive and fascinating account of the ’60s psychedelic movement I’ve ever read. I mentioned it to DiCaprio when I saw him at a party last February in Santa Barbara, and was left with a vague impression he hadn’t read it. Here’s an excerpt from the book.

Don’t believe that David Poland clique saying there’s no box-office slump. There is a slump, there is a slump…the average gross per movie has been on a decline since ’03 and average attendance per film has been dropping steadily since ’01. It’s the attendance, stupid — the actual number of people showing up at theatres is dropping year after year.

Plexes should extend that satisfaction-or-your-money-back offer for all films, all the time…except for big crowd-pleasers like Fantastic Four, Bewitched, etc. Nobody will lose any money (it’s been reported that only a relative handful have asked AMC and Cinemark theatre staffers for their money back after seeing Cinderella Man) and it might goose things up a bit.

Another way of boosting theatre biz would be to adopt my idea of selling time-passes to plexes, in which the patron buys a ticket to a particular film but also, for an extra two or three bucks, buys a pass permitting him/her to wander around from theatre to theatre free and clear in order to sample the various attractions or simply see another film. I do this all the time under the ushers’ noses. If I don’t like something, I slip out and try some other film…or I see pieces of two or three films, just to get an idea of how they play. This way I never feel burned when I leave. Exhibitors need to remove that feeling of having been taken (“I blew $30 bucks to see this piece of shit?”) that so many moviegoers have these days on their way to the parking lot.

Forget the talk that Cruise’s cultish orgasms of late have sabotaged War of the Worlds. The real reason it’s underperforming is the putrid word of mouth. I’ve had no less than SIX friends call me immediately after seeing it, pissed at the typical Spielberg tacked-on ending. And when I say pissed, I mean incensed. His hackneyed amending of A.I. was legendarily bad, and the buzz is that this is on par with that. Kubrick is nodding vigorously in his grave.

Nine years after I saw Swingers and right after wrote a Mr. Showbiz piece insisting that this then-svelte, 77-inch-tall actor was the hot new guy, Vince Vaughn has been toasted with his very own Newsweek profile by Devin Gordon, who calls him an attitude comedian who’s finally come into his own. The story is basically a tribute to Vaughn’s allegedly very cool performance in The Wedding Crashers (which nearly every journo and media person in Manhattan will finally get to see this Thursday evening), but why do I have this feeling that the Newsweek editors decided to okay the piece only after they picked up on the Us rumble about Vaughn possibly being Jennifer Aniston’s first-guy-since-Brad-Pitt on the set of The Break Up? Why do I suspect that, even if it’s bullshit (which is what Aniston and Vaughn are saying)?

Does everyone understand what happened last weekend to poor George Romero? On its second weekend Romero’s Land of the Dead nose-dived 73.4% and ended up with a $16,209,660 cume. This doesn’t just mean that younger audiences didn’t care for Romero’s film, but also that his zombie visions are out-of-synch with the times. The old-fogey, slow-shuffling zombies who made their legendary debut in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead 37 years ago are done for — the fast-sprinting zombies in Danny Doyle’s 28 Days Later and the ones in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake obviously have struck more of a chord. Romero himself has been retired by Land‘s financial failure. All the middle-aged hip journalists love and respect the guy but this was his big comeback shot and it didn’t happen, and now he’s more or less fucked as far as the financial tough guys are concerned.

I’ve gotta jump into this reporters-going-to-jail thing for a second. It’s too bad that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald is being a total prick and urging that Time reporter Matthew Cooper and the New York Times reporter Judith Miller be sent to the slammer for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigating the outing of Valerie Plame as a covert C.I.A. operative. It’s a little bit wimpy for Cooper and Miller to ask to be sent to a couple of summer-camp prisons, but it’s still incredibly shitty of Fitzgerald to say no, fuck you, do your time with hard-core cons in a jail somewhere around D.C. Today’s New York Times story reports that a Judge Hogan held the reporters in civil contempt last October and sentenced them to up to 18 months in jail. These sentences were suspended while the reporters appealed, however, and it now looks like the maximum time the reporters will face is 120 days, as the term of the grand jury will expire in October. That’s it? Jimmy Cagney or George Raft could do four months standing on their heads in Sing Sing or San Quentin. On the other hand, Fitzgerald has suggested in a recent filing that criminal prosecution is also a possibility. “The court should advise Miller that if she persists in defying the court’s order that she will be committing a crime,” he wrote in a 21-page briefing about Miller’s position. “Miller and The New York Times appear to have confused Miller’s ability to commit contempt with a legal right to do so.”

A survey of moviegoer response to War of the Worlds done last week (or weekend) is coming up “fair,” which is roughly equivalent to a CinemaScore rating of about 70. This means it’s going to see a fairly steep drop in business next weekend — not catastrophic but precipitous.

In Sharon Waxman’s latest box-office-slump story in the N.Y. Times, she reports that Paramount executives are seeing no evidence of any War of the Worlds revenue slippage due to Tom Cruise’s eccentric behavior on the promo circuit. “[Cruise’s] audience came out in greater numbers than ever before” for this film, Paramount vice-chairman Rob Friedman tells Waxman. “I think the world separates the star and celebrity from a movie actor and the performance on screen, and this shows that completely.” I’m hearing this is precisely what Par execs are not discerning in the tea leaves. I’m told there’s been some muttering in the hallways that War could have made closer to $140 or $150 million over the first six days if Cruise hadn’t acted like a wackjobber on the talk shows. The fact that Waxman quotes notoriously obsequious industry cheerleader Paul Dergarabedian as supporting the Cruise-linkage theory speaks volumes. “Those who had in mind that they wanted to see the movie, [the Cruise shenanigans] didn’t have any effect,” he said. “But if you’re a person who has a strong feeling about what Tom Cruise said, you might say, ‘I don’t want to support that movie.'”

“Like the rivets popping off the wing of an airliner”….good one! The Tom Wolfe-ian wordsmith is D.J. LaChapelle, webmaster for TomCruiseIsNuts.com. The quote was given to Daily News “Lowdown” columnist Lloyd Grove: “What really inspired us was Tom’s appearance on the Today show. His body language, the way he got in Matt Lauer’s face — it was all pretty amazing. Watching one of America’s best actors coming unglued — like the rivets popping off the wing of an airliner — there’s a kind of fascination.”