Movie theatre attendance “is running behind last summer’s and has even fallen below that of summer 2005, a year of box-office duds that had some analysts predicting audiences were abandoning movie houses in favor of home theaters and other entertainment options,” the AP’s David Germain reported in a 7.3 piece.
“With studios offering a stronger late-season lineup than normal this year, attendance likely will pick up and lift Hollywood to a respectable summer. Still, early forecasts that Hollywood would have its first $4 billion summer now look like wishful thinking.”
The reason seems obvious to me. Attendance is down because none of the big May-June-July blockbusters — Sony’s Spider-Man 3, DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek the Third, Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Uni’s Evan Almighty and Dreamamount’s Transformers — have really connected. They’ve all stunk of corporate-think and therefore haven’t really turned audiences on. (There’s a difference between rote and genuine enthusiasm.) The only groundswell word-of-mouthers have been Knocked Up and Once and…what else?

The Lives of Others director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has written a piece in yesterday’s edition of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung saying it’s a good thing for Germany that Tom Cruise is playing would-be Hitler assassin Col. Claus von Stauffenberg in Bryan Singer‘s Valkyrie.
Donnersmarck’s article obviously implies that German authorities who’ve refused to give permits to Singer’s movie to shoot at a legendary building in Berlin should re-think their position.
Cruise, wrote Donnersmarck, is “the most successful of all the [Hollywood] superstars, [and] his superstar light will illuminate this rare shining moment in the darkest chapter of our history. In doing so, he will do more to improve Germany’s international image than 10 soccer World Cups could.”

I’ve been waiting for the right thought or angle with which to jump into the Scooter Libby thing. A pretty good one hit me yesterday — i.e., that Bush’s commutation of Libby’s prison sentence provides a perfect third-act climax to Warner Bros.’s Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson project, which Akiva Goldsman and Jerry and Janet Zucker are producing — but then Sasha Stone beat me to it. (I haven’t found any links, however, to support her notion that Sydney Pollack is involved.)

Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame

In any event, here’s another one: Jez and John Butterworth, the guys writing the Plame-Wilson screenplay, need to finish their work quickly so the movie can shoot as soon as possible. The increasing velocity and high-volume turnover rate means that the voltage on this story will be dropping off sooner rather than later. The producers are dreaming if think they can take their time with this thing. If it’s not out by, say, the end of ’08, forget it.
Plame was outed by Robert Novak as a CIA agent in July 2003 — how many years does Hollywood need to throw a film together on an evolving news-topic movie? The Watergate break-in happened in June 1972, and Robert Redford got All The President’s Men onto screens by the summer of ’76 — four years from start to finish. If the Plame-Wilson movie hits screens by late ’08, it will have taken five and a half years after the inciting incident. Somebody or something is dragging ass.
Oh, and I still say Tom Hanks as Wilson and Robin Wright Penn as Plame.

Fantasymoguls.com columnist Steve Mason is reporting that Transformers “scored an estimated $28 million to $31 million on its opening day, surpassing the previous Tuesday record of $15.7 million set by Pirates 2 last summer. [and] likely the 4th-best opening day of 2007 behind only Spider-Man 3, Pirates 3 and Shrek the Third.
“Ratatouille is holding especially well, adding another $7.85 million Tuesday and pushing past the $60 million mark. Live Free or Die Hard is also proving resilient with $4.44 million Tuesday and a new cume of $57 million. License to Wed, a critically-reviled comedy from Warner Bros, is a full-scale disaster earning only an estimated $2 million.”

In a 7.4.07 piece, N.Y. Times reporter David Halbfinger has looked into “the explosion of the old gentlemen’s agreement by which the Hollywood studios screened movies early for critics, and the critics held their reviews until opening day,” which has brought about the only card that studio publicists have to play these days — i.e., “hide the ball.”
The destruction of the old g.a. “has been several years coming,” Halbfinger says. “The rise of film blogs like MovieCityNews.com and Hollywood-Elsewhere.com — for whom there is currency in being first to have seen an important new movie — has prompted the trade dailies to view them as competition.
“The trades’ quest for a wider consumer audience, in turn, has brought first Variety‘s and then The Hollywood Reporter‘s critics out over the news wires. The Associated Press has often responded by speeding up the publication of its own reviews, publicists for the studios say.
“For film critics from major newspapers, standing by while the available positions on a given movie are staked out by multiple competitors, whether online or in print, can be too much to ask.” Halbfinger quotes N.Y. Daily News critic Jack Matthews as saying, “I think editors are right in asking, `Why is it okay for bloggers to review movies early and not us?’
“Studios used to exercise much control over when reviews and other articles would publish,” Halbfinger writes. “But the contours of today’s online reviewing landscape dictate hard decisions about when to screen movies in advance, and whom to invite. ‘It’s about all we have control over any more,’ Adam Fogelson, president of marketing at Universal Pictures said.
“So, for films that are bad or merely expected to be assailed by critics, the play to run is hide-the-ball, especially when the movie doesn’t need critical support to be a success. In a watershed move last year, for example, Sony did not screen The Da Vinci Code for critics until the night before its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was widely panned, but the movie still was a worldwide blockbuster — in part because interest in the movie had fueled countless articles in the entertainment press exploring the subject from every conceivable angle that didn’t require seeing the movie in advance.
“‘Every single movie is its own little war,’ says David Poland of Movie City News. ‘The whole thing is about avoiding the negative. Unless you’re a smaller picture, reviews are no longer the issue. The marketing is so huge that what they need to avoid are the critics hating something. It’s a defensive game: only a community saying one thing in a single voice can hurt a picture.”
Avoiding the negative, eh? Why is it that articles of this sort never state the obvious bottom-line truth, which is that oppressively expensive dumb-ass tent-polers are the essence of negativity themselves? A movie that numbs, bores, bludgeons, tromps on the gas and recycles is a movie that is saying “no, no, no, no….we will not try anything truly new, we will not work out the kinks, we will not divert or depart…we will do only what the Lorenzo di Bonaventura types want us to do. Bayo, Bayo, Bayo!”
What’s a mild-mannered columnist supposed to do in the face of all this? Channel Susan Granger?

Best commercial ever….

I haven’t heard from my numbers guys, but Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke reported late this morning that Michael Bay‘s Transformers “made between $8 million and $9 million Monday night, a hefty amount considering the DreamWorks/Paramount pic didn’t even start its screenings until 8 p.m.” The more money Transformers makes, the gloomier I’ll feel.

A site called mingle2 is handing out MPAA ratings to various sites and blogs. I am completely comfortable with Hollywood Elsewhere‘s R rating. (Life itself is generally an R-rated thing.) Deadline Hollywood Daily also got an R. Movie City News has been handed a PG-13, Hollywood Wiretap, Fish Bowl LA, In Contention, Defamer and Drudge Report have gotten a PG, and Thompson on Hollywood, The Envelope, Perez Hilton and Awards Daily get a G. Disney World!

25 movies with real impact have been listed in order of importance by USA Today‘s Suzie Woz (a.k.a., Susan Wloszczyna). I like, love, admire or at least respect all but one of these films. Why, then, did reading this list make me feel so bad, so trapped…so “let me out of here”? Partly, I guess, because the list feels so AFI-ish.

Spike Lee‘s untitled World War II drama, based on James McBride‘s “Miracle at St. Anna“, is apparently going to play like an American riff on Rachid Bouchareb‘s Days of Glory (i.e., Indigenes), the 2006 war film about French-speaking North Africans fighting for the French during World War II and dealing with prejudice in the ranks.

This is definitely the kind of topography you want to shoot a World War II film upon (i.e., taken by myself in an area south of Volterra in 2003)

Lee said during a recent Rome press conference to announce his film that “if you look at the history of Hollywood, the black soldiers who fought World War II are totally invisible,” adding that the film would be about the “paradox” of “black people who were fighting for democracy but at the same time were second class citizens at home.”
Lee will begin shooting the film early next year at Rome’s Cinecitta Studios, in Italy’s Tuscany region — nice! — and in New York City.
An Amazon synopsis for McBride’s book suggests it’s also going to be a bit like Sydney Pollack‘s Castle Keep: “Miracle at St. Anna vividly follows four of the U.S. Army’s 92nd Division of all-black buffalo soldiers as they become trapped between forces beyond their control and between worlds. Three of the soldiers have bolted behind enemy lines to rescue their comrade, the colossal, but simple Private Sam Train.” (Who could Lee have in mind for this role, I wonder?)
“They find themselves stranded between worlds in a remote central Italian village, with the German Army hidden on one side and their racist and largely mismanaged American commanding officers on the other. The strange world of the village floats between myth and reality, where belief in magic coexists with the most horrific acts of war. In the melee that opens the book, Train suddenly comes to believe he can turn invisible, the local miser believes he is cursed with a wealth of rabbits, and each of the other soldiers also exists in a mythical world of his own. But they are all about to be shattered by the Miracle.”
“Magical”, “myth and reality”, a psychologically confused soldier who thinks he’s “invisible”, a miracle”? If Lee’s movie turns out to be half as fantasy-driven and airy-fairy as this synopsis suggests, it’s going to suck eggs. Mix in the fanciful stuff with Lee making a point about the military treating the Buffalo Soldiers like shit…forget it. Too much in the pot.

Instead of speak to Sicko director Michael Moore (who’s been quoted everywhere lately), L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein has spoken to directors Paul Greengrass (United 93, The Bourne Supremacy) and Brett Morgen (Chicago 10) for a 7.3.07 piece about Moore’s style and tactics.
Moore’s work, says Greengrass, is “‘highly interventionist‘ in the sense that he’s willing to use the power of film, be it clever cutting or funny archival footage or cheap melodrama, to carry the day. ‘His work is often intensely tabloid, but I remember from my days as an on-camera interviewer that the question that makes you sweat by the very idea of asking it is the one you should always ask. And Moore’s brilliance is that he always asks that question, over and over.”
I felt guilt pangs the instant I read that passage about “the question that makes you sweat is the one you should ask.” I’ve wimped out on that score more times than I’d care to remember. Too often when I have a tough question in my head I go into my chickenshit tap dance — equivocation, verbal padding, side-stepping — before saying it.

Shortcut to Happiness, the Alec Baldwin– directed film that was previously known as The Devil and Daniel Webster, is finally opening in U.S. theatres on 7.13 after a delay of approximately six years. I wrote about it last October, but Shortcut may have endured the longest post-production, delayed-release period in the history of motion picture distribution, which easily qualifies it as one of biggest train wrecks of all time.

New York or L.A. critics looking to see and review it for history’s sake are facing a problem though. A publicist working for the Yari Film Group, the film’s distributor, told me this morning that neither screenings nor theatrical bookings are scheduled for LA, NY or New Jersey. She said it will open on 7.13 in only six cities — Las Vegas, Rochester, Ft. Meyers, Columbus (Ohio), Alberquerque and Santa Fe. The publicist graciously offered to send me a DVD screener.
Baldwin directed, produced and costarred along with Anthony Hopkins and Jennifer Love Hewitt. The plot — an ambitious young Manhattan guy sells his soul to the devil in exchange for worldly success, and then hires an esteemed old-school lawyer to get him out of the contract — is a late ’90s rehash of Stephen Vincent Benet‘s story and Archibald Macleish‘s play.
Baldwin had his directing and producing credits taken off eons ago because his edit of the film (allegedly a dramatic ensemble piece with “dramedy” undertones) was taken away by the producers and recut into a comedy.
Yari Flm Group has decided against giving director credit to “Alan Smithee”, the fake industry pseudonymn that turns up on IMDB listings 28 times. Instead, the “directed by” credit has been given to the non-existent Harry Kirkpatrick, according to the YFG publicist.
Last October I called Shortcut to Happiness (then known as TDADW) is “a pre-9.11 nostalgia movie….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.”