This first-person account by N.Y. Times Baghdad correspondent Marc Santora, appearing in Sunday’s edition, about Saddam Hussein‘s final hour of life is historic, essential reading — tight, terse, riveting. (The eyewitness observations apparently came from Ali Adeeb and Khalid al-Ansary.)
“At 6:10 a.m., the trapdoor swung open. [Hussein] seemed to fall a good distance, but he died swiftly. After just a minute, his body was still. His eyes still were open but he was dead. Despite the scarf, the rope cut a gash into his neck.”
Wait…”he died swiftly” but his body wasn’t still until “a minute” had passed? Doesn’t sound that swift to me. My idea of swift is the way Slim Pickens‘ Major Kong dies at the end of Dr, Strangelove.

The lead graph introducing USA Today‘s “Oscar Oracle” chart begins as follows: “If the Academy Awards were given out based on what the nation’s film critics think, at least two of the races would be over right now: best actor and actress.” And then it goes blah, blah, Forest Whitaker, blah, blah, Helen Mirren (The Queen)….we’re bored, we need something to fill space with, we’re just running another Oscar chart based on critics like Movie City News, blah, blah…it’s the end of the year and we’re plotzing.
The critics have gone good things by celebrating United 93 and Emmanuel Lubezki and Half Nelson, etc., but they’ve also bored everyone to tears with the uniformity of their choices, the result being that nobody wants to hear about them any more. They’re done. The Hollywood guilds — Screen Actors Guild (1.4.07), DGA (noms on 1.9.07), Producers Guild (1.20.07), etc. — are next on the agenda. They’re being announced within the next two or three weeks or so, culminating with the announcement of the Academy Awards nominations on Tuesday, 1.23.07. (The DGA hands its awards out on 2.3.07; the WGA bestows its awards on 2.11.07.)

Having finally watched the Extended Unrated Bugsy DVD last week, I can report with great satisfaction that N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr was totally right when he said that this longer version of the 1991 film “plays much more smoothly and inexorably than it did in the edited [theatrical] version,” which ran about 15 minutes shorter.

(l. to r.) Toback, Levinson and Beatty taping discussion about the making of Bugsy, which is included on the DVD.

We all know that extended versions of films are not necessarily better or fuller things to sit through. This one is, however. In so doing the all-new Bugsy ranks alongside Cameron Crowe’s longer “Untitled” version of Almost Famous and James Cameron‘s longer cut of Aliens.
I was going to run a tape of an interview I did with Bugsy screenwriter James Toback just before Christmas at the Harvard Club, but I screwed up by acciden- tally deleting it off the recorder as well as my hard drive — brilliant. I was only able to salvage this pathetically short snippet in which Jim discusses the Hollywood syndrome of “parasites feeding off parasites.”
To make up for the loss, I recorded the opening ten or twelve minutes of a chat between Toback, Bugsy director Barry Levinson and star-producer Warren Beatty that’s included in the DVD doc called “The Road to Damascus: The Reinvention of Bugsy Siegel.”

Night at the Museum, the four-day weekend’s #1 film, will end up with about $44,898,000 on Monday night (1.1.07), for an overall cume of $124 million…pretty good for a piece of CG shit. The Pursuit of Happyness, the #2 film, will have $24,200,000 as of Monday night, and a cume of $103,200,000. Dreamgirls, playing in 862 theatres, will end up with $17 million for the holiday weekend (i.e., not a bad haul), which makes it the #3 film.
The Good Shepherd (#4) will end up with 14,226,000 by Monday night. Charlotte’s Web (#5) will hit $14.091,000. Rocky Balboa (#6), $13,899,000. Eragon (#7), $10,448,000. We Are Marshall (#8), $10,228,000. Happy Feet (#9), $8,846,000. The Holiday (#10), $8,346,000.
None of the limited opening films are knockin’ em down: Children of Men, Pan’s Labyrinth, Notes on a Sandal and Letters From Iwo Jima are all puttering along…nothing earth-shaking or dish-rattling. Iwo Jima is dying, in fact — it did about $28,000 in 6 theatres last night, and will end up Monday night with about $110,000. Perfume, playing in only three theatres, did about $13,000 yesterday and should do about $52,000 for the four-day weekend. Miss Potter did $3000 in two theatres, and will end up with about $12,000 on Monday night. The Dead Girl died in two theatres — $2000 earnings last night, a projected $9000 for the holiday weekend.

Dreamgirls will have roughly a $40 million cume by Monday night (1.1.07), but can it reach $100 million over the next four weeks? Big financial earnings in all sectors are seen as an indicator of Oscar potency, after all. And let’s face it — between now and the end of January (or early February) is the peak earning time for this DreamWorks musical. If it cleans up in the Oscar nominations (which are being announced on Tuesday, 1.23), its hand will obviously be strengthened. But by how much?
It reportedly made $4.7 million yesterday (Friday) compared to $8.7 million on opening day last Monday (12.25). To hit $100 mill by it needs to take in another $60 million over the next four weeks, but I’m guessing (tell me if I’m wrong) that it’s not looking at much more than a $12 to $14 million haul next weekend, tops…perhaps less.
Bottom line: if it doesn’t score with multi-Oscar nominations across the board three weeks and three days from now, Dreamgirls will stall somewhere south of $100 million. Can it still win the Best Picture Oscar with only a respectable (as opposed to astronomical) box-office tally? Sure — if people want it to win, it’ll win. But won’t this make it a tad harder?
Chicago ended up with $170,687,518 domestic, yes, but maybe it’s not fair to expect a musical with a somewhat restricted demographic (if I explain what it is I’ll be called a racist homophobe, right?) to make $100 million-plus. I don’t know. You tell me. Some feel it’s bad form to bring up racial matters in discussing box-office potency, but it’s a fact of American life. It’s nice to think we’re all clever, classless and free, but the lyrics from Randy Newman‘s “Rednecks” still apply in some areas, sorry to say.

Cheers to N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman for writing one of the nerviest (let alone unusual) pieces I’ve ever read in this very staunchly establishment newspaper, renowned for its rigorous prose style and well-deserved reputation for being libidinally restrained (to say the least), if not disinterested altogether. Waxman has certainly sidestepped that attitude in the 12.31 edition by taking a look at “The Graying of Naughty” — i.e., how a new type of porn film starring older, grayer and saggier performers is broadening the market.

“The mature-woman genre,” Waxman writes, “represents one of the fastest growing areas of video pornography, say leading distributors and retailers, and next month it will be inaugurated as a category at the AVN Awards, the Oscars of the skin trade.” Porn film director Urbano Martin tells Waxman that the market for beautiful, airbrushed young women “is oversaturated…this is [about] more normal people, more meat on the bone, like what you have at home.”
The focus of Waxman’s piece is a fairly attractive 50 year-old sex actress named De’Bella, and the somewhat mindblowing element — for a Times reporter, I mean — is that Waxman apparently stood nearby and took notes as De’Bella and her 54 year-old “performing partner” Rod Fontana did the mambo nasty.
“‘What’s the premise on this one?’ Fontana asks De’Bella before starting. ‘Pizza boy?’
“Whatever,” Waxman writes. “Within a few unscripted minutes they’re mostly unclothed, panting and moaning for the camera, engaged in sexual contortions and obviously unbothered by visiting onlookers.”

For their role in deliberately obstructing the showing of An Inconvenient Truth to school kids, which would obviously help to raise awareness about the global warming threat, the administrators of National Science Teachers Association have befouled their reputation by refusing to accept 50,000 free copies of Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore‘s documentary to distribute to their members.
The stated reason was that the NSTA has a policy of not endorsing a particular project — despite the reported fact that the NSTA “has accepted contributions from ExxonMobil, Shell and the National Petroleum Institute” and “[has] even distributed a Petroleum Institute video called You Can’t Be Cool Without Fuel, which Inconvenient Truth producer Laurie David has called “a shameless pitch for oil dependence.”

L.A. Times guys John Horn and Patrick Goldstein in a series of podcast chats about Oscar snubs, the apparent chasm between Academy members and critics regarding Best Picture choosings, the Academy’s problem with violent movies, and the surgings of Volver and Penelope Cruz.

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil asks if too many year-end releases are causing distribs to crunch Oscar voters and thereby hurt their films’ chances. “With a glut of quality late-December releases this year, would-be contenders find themselves struggling to attract attention…and Academy and guild voters find themselves facing an onslaught of screenings and screeners,” etc. Tom talks to Hollywood Wiretap‘s Pete Hammond, the Hollywood Reporter coumnist Anne Thompson and…well, myself.

Coming Soon’s Edward Douglas thought some of us might be interested to know that Universal is expanding Children of Men into 1200-plus theatres next Friday. We’ll all be curious to see how this expands, of course. Douglas predicts it will end up in the $5 million range for the weekend (i.e., about the same as Babel)

“I’ve heard from multiple sources in Los Angeles, including an editor at the L.A. Times, that David Geffen told a Timesman that were he to succeed in buying the paper, his first order of business would be firing a reporter in the business section who had crossed him. If Geffen has that on his to-do list — much less at the top — he’s the wrong man at the wrong Times.

(r.) David Geffen with (l. to r.) Dreamgirls director Bill Condon, costars Jennifer Hudson, Anika Noni Rose and Beyonce Knowles

“Yes, he has a canny eye for quality, from Joni Mitchell to Jackson Pollock. But he could make Wendy McCaw, the multimillionaire owner who has decimated the Santa Barbara News-Press, look Pulitzer-obsessed.
“Those who have dealt with Geffen while covering [the Hollywood filmmaking] business should find that obvious. Geffen is famously vindictive. One reporter now at the Times once called me in tears after an encounter with him on the phone (one truly has to be on the receiving end of his verbal savagery to appreciate it). And does anyone think he’ll tolerate articles that annoy him or his friends? And he has lots of friends — from Hollywood to Washington, from Steven Spielberg to Hillary Clinton.” — Slate‘s Kim Masters dishing on Geffen and his possible purchase of the Times.