When all is said and done Talladega Nights (Columbia) is expected to be the #1 film on Sunday night with $22,871,000. It was down 52% from last weekend(indicated by that B CinemaScore), but the cume will be roughly at $90,800,000so it’s going good . Step Up was #1 Friday but will come in second with $21,241,000, or so the experts are saying. World Trade Center will end up with about $25,700,000. Barnyard will be #4 with $9,509,000, Pulse (#5) with $8,818,000…nobody cares about the lesser numbers. Miami Vice, whipped, will come in ninth with $4,427,000…a real shame. Little Miss Sunshine added 90 theatres and looking at a $2.5 million weekend haul, for an average of $16,7000.

The surprise-heat movie of the weekend is Disney’s Step Up, a teen dance-romancer that got a failing grade on Metacritic (50%) and a much worse number on Rotten Tomatoes (19%). But it was the #1 movie yesterday, doing $8,499,000 and beating out the #2 Talladega Nights and #3 World Trade Center . The final weekend tally for Will Ferrell’s NASCAR flick is expected to nudge it into first place, although Step Up is expected to finish with a higher-than-projected $21,240,000.

Step Up‘s Channing Tatum

The Step Up surprise was mainly about ace-in-the-hole Channing Tatum, the 26 year-old hunky male lead from Alabama who’s very hot now with teenage girls. (His previous punch-throughs happened in Coach Carter and She’s The Man — he had an uncredited bit part in War of the Worlds.) My son Jett, 18, said “the girls in the audience were gasping” whenever Tatum was on-screen during a She’s The Man show he went to last March in Boston.
I can smell piece-of-shit teen flicks like this a mile off, which is why I didn’t catch the press screening. But magnetism that works is always worth checking out, which is why I’ll probably pay $11 bucks plus parking , popcorn and a coke to sit through this thing (well, part of it) sometime later today or tonight. $20 bucks to watch Channing Tatum! Maybe I’ll learn something.
My favorite review blurb is from Chicago Reader‘s J.R. Jones, who wrote that “this teen chick flick is so perfectly calculated I wouldn’t be surprised if every i in the screenplay were dotted with a little heart. Any guy who sits through this date movie deserves to get to third base at least.”
If you go by MCN’s predictions chart, everybody was way, way off on this one. Coming Soon foresaw Step Up earning $11.1 million this weekend, Box-Office Guru said $8 million, Hollywood Reporter $13, Poland predicted $9, EW $11 and Box Office Mojo said $10.5. Thursday’s tracking indicated a late surge and a figure between $12 and $15 million, but that was still a short call. Nobody saw this one coming. Those tracking-survey guys had better figure some way to get to younger types on their cell phones and not just depend on land-line surveys.

“My girlfriend went crazy during this movie and was actually the one who wanted me to send in a review because she wants everybody to see it. I would rate this 10 out of 10 and is probably the best movie I’ve seen in a couple of years. We couldn’t believe how much we got into this movie and the music. Everybody was tapping their feet and laughing and cheering.

“At the end of the movie the whole crowd was applauding for a long time and they had this part when the credits were on where they had clips from all the different actors, and everybody clapped like crazy for each actor and then screamed nonstop when Jennifer Hudson came on.” — A guy named “Nightmare” who caught Bill Condon‘s Dreamgirls at a theatre in San Diego’s Gaslamp district a couple of days ago and wrote a review for AICN. I’m into the idea of this film as much as the next guy, but “Nightmare” sounds like an easy lay.

Disney’s Touchstone division will definitely distribute Mel Gibson‘s Apocalypto on 12.8, according to Disney spokesperson Heidi Trotta. Her statement came in response to Roger Freidman‘s Fox 411 report that Disney was trying to shop it around because of concerns that the controversy over Gibson’s anti-Semitic remarks would diminish the box-office. I don’t believe Disney didn’t at least explore the possibility of dumping it, or delaying the release date. Any responsible company would have.

So it was Frank Whaley‘s paramedic character in World Trade Center — a real-life guy named Chuck Sereika — who was the first to crawl “into a burning black hole in the unstable pile of debris that was once the World Trade Center, and was the first man to reach trapped Port Authority officer Will Jimeno” — the guy played by Michael Pena. But in Oliver Stone’s film, the guy who goes in first is NYPD officer Scott Strauss (played by Stephen Dorff).

Frank Whaley as Chuck Sereika, the real rescue guy in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center

So reports Rebecca Liss in a Salon piece that went up two days ago. (Old news! The nostalgia file!) “Perhaps it seemed more dramatic or believable to the filmmakers for the NYPD to make this daring rescue basically on their own,” she writes. “Whatever the filmmakers’ reasons, they missed one of the more remarkable aspects of this rescue story.
“Sereika, a man with no training in collapsed-building rescue and extrication, risked his life that day for men he had never met. Sereika said he was sure he would die when he crawled in. Unlike the police and firefighters who without hesitation sacrificed everything — and I in no way discount their selfless acts — Sereika was not called to duty by his unit. He arrived on his own accord.
“Serieka was a paramedic, but his license had expired and he had left that life behind as he sought treatment for addiction problems. But he grabbed his medic sweatshirt and his cell phone and headed down to Ground Zero to see if he could apply a few splints or perform minor triage. He never imagined that he would be involved in one of the few and most memorable rescues of Sept. 11.”

Hey, how come Toronto Star critic Peter Howell didn’t include The History Boys among his top 12 fall films? Does he know something? Or has Fox Searchlight’s low-profile campaign been too successful?

Art of the Dodge

What’s up with Fox Searchlight’s cards-to-the-chest History Boys campaign?
London publicists are preparing for a 10.13 opening, and so Nicholas Hytner‘s film is starting to screen for the press next week. With the pic opening stateside on 11.24, nothing’s doing here now. And yet — this is the unusual part — there are no plans to show the film version of Alan Bennett‘s Tony Award-winning play at the Telluride, Toronto, or Venice Film Festivals.

Portion of invitation to next week’s London screenings of The History Boys (Fox Searchlight, 11.24)

One interpretation is that Fox Searchlight marketers are so confident about Boys having the goods that they’re figuring they don’t need Toronto, Telluride or Venice.
Fox Searchlight COO Stephen Gilula wouldn’t respond to this, but said, “We want to do the right thing for the film itself, rather than satisfy expectations of the press and of conventional industry wisdom. We’re not playing a ‘game’ with this movie. Our first priority is to position it for the public, and not for the award community.”
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Another speculation is that homoerotic content in The History Boys is making Fox Searchlight nervous, and they’re figuring it’s better to keep the talk down for now.
Gilula says that “content is not a concern for us…we have absolutely not had that conversation. We’re the company, remember, that distributed The Dreamers with an NC-17 rating, and also released Quills.”
One reason for not showing The History Boys in Toronto, Gilula says, is that “it’s a British play and a national icon there and they wanted the world premere to happen there. Plus the show is still playing on stage and we want to respect that.”
If you respect the pedigree of the Tony Awards and especially if you’re an avid reader of Movie City News, you’re probably assuming that The History Boys is in the running for possible Oscar awards — Best Picture, Best Director (Hytner), Best Adapted Screenplay (Bennett, who wrote the play), Best Actor (Richard Griffiths), etc.

Because the currently-running Broadway play won six Tony Awards last June (including Best Play), and you have to figure at least some of the lustre will rub off on the film version. And because David Poland has link-blurbed The History Boys as a possible Oscar contender once or twice, and because MCN “Voices” contrib- utor Stephen Holt all but proclaimed The History Boys a multi-Oscar nominee in a piece that ran on MCN last June.
The Tony Awards sweep “paves the way for the film version of The History Boys to score heavily in the Oscar race, breaking out fast as an early favorite,” Holt enthused. “And Fox Searchlight execs on both coasts are understandably ecstatic about [the Tony Award win] and are going to focus all their Oscar-savvy energy on a major campaign for the film, which opens in the U.K. in October.”
But not showing a film of this type at one of the big prestigious September festivals is a definite eyebrow-raiser.
The rulebook says if you have a high-pedigree film opening in the mid-to-late fall that looks like a possible Oscar contender (like last year’s Brokeback Mountain or Capote), you take it to Toronto or Venice or Telluride. Period. You couple your openings at Telluride and Toronto, or at Toronto and Venice, or you go for a trifecta.
If you don’t do this, you either (a) don’t quite have the quality everyone’s expecting, or (b) you do have this and you’re figuring you don’t need early-fall festival buzz to start things off, or (c) you have the goods but something’s holding you back. A concern, say, about a subplot involving an iconoclastic middle-aged teacher who has an occasional thing about fondling the genitals of his male students.

A Fox Searchlight rep told me this morning that one reason for The History Boys not going to Toronto is that the mostly all-male cast can’t get out of their daily performances in the Broadway show. Except nobody in the press knows the cast members very well, and the general public doesn’t know them at all. In any event the press would much rather talk to Hytner or Bennett.
And if the cast is really the reason, why not show The History Boys movie at the New York FIlm Festival, which would eliminate the can’t-travel issue?
I’m told that Telluride honcho Tom Luddy made an overture about seeing The History Boys for possible consideration, but that he was told no-go.
“If you really have something, you don’t have to take it to Toronto,” an Oscar campaign consultant said earlier today. “If you feel you need to prove yourself, and if you really want people to talk about your film, you take it to Toronto or Venice or Telluride…but if you’re absolutely sure that you’ve got the goods, you don’t need a festival.”
And if this isn’t what’s going on…well, here it is again.
After the Tony sweep it seemed as if The History Boys had instant credibility as a year-end Oscar contender. I wrote, however, that “I don’t think that’s necessarily true.”

I saw The History Boys last May, and it’s a brilliant and impassioned tribute to the glories of inspired teaching, and of passing along those things that truly matter in life.
In the film, Griffiths (best known as Harry Potter’s mean-spirited Uncle Vernon) will repeat his Tony-winning stage performance as an eccentric history instructor in an English boys’ school who’s expected to prepare them as best he can for university entrance exams, but is forced to leave his post when the school’s headmaster learns about his erotic fondling of some of the students.
There’s a longstanding homoerotic tradition in dramas about English schoolboys and boarding schools (reflections of this were in Lindsay Anderson’s If) and it’s certainly no big deal to X-factor types.
The idea seems to be if you’re broadening a student’s mind with profound teachings (as Griffith’s History character certainly does), copping a discreet feel is a forgivable impulse/indulgence, but it’s a different story if you’re a priest passing along repressive Catholic dogma.
“Toronto is over two months before the History Boys [U.S.] opening,” the consult- ant says. “And when you have a film with complicated issues or feelings that you don’t want percolating for too long, you don’t want to show it too early.

“Everything is a moving target these days. The media changes, people’s tastes change…and maybe the world is ready for a fondling teacher. But the American public’s interest in sexual content is nil. They can’t handle sexual content, and maybe [Fox Searchlight] doesn’t want it out there too early because of this. They don’t know what the reaction is going to be.”
A gay guy who attended the same History Boys performance that I saw last May confided that he was mildly offended by the genital-fondling aspect. I figured if this guy was slightly put off…
“If it’s somewhat challenging material, no one’s going to fire you for saying no and not exposing it early,” the consultant concluded. “It may be better to be safe than sorry. Challenging material is just that…challenging. And there ‘s no projecting what’s going to happen. Maybe everybody took a step back and said, ‘Let’s not.’ Why give it two months to percolate before it opens?”
I read this to Gilula and he repeated, ” There’ s been absolutely no conversation about content at all regarding plans plans for the film. We’re not concerned about that. Content is not an issue.”

This well-cut trailer for Douglas McGrath‘s Infamous (Warner Independent, 10.13) is fascinating and strange. An undeniable “here we go again” feeling — Truman Capote, Perry Smith, “Nell” Harper Lee, etc. — with a somewhat brighter, less austere tone than Bennett Miller’s Capote.

Toby Jones, Hope Davis in Douglas McGrath’s Infamous

A friend says it’s quite good — I won’t see it for another two weeks or so. Toby Jones is obviously much more of a close physical emodiment of Capote than Phillip Seymour Hoffman was. The costars are Sandra Bullock, Daniel Craig, Peter Bogdanovich, Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, Gwyneth Paltrow, Isabella Rossellini, Juliet Stevenson and Sigourney Weaver.
I still say Warner Independent should have released this last year along with Capote. It may or may not have competed in terms of Oscars, but anybody who saw one would have had to have seen the other. It would have been fascinating with everyone comparing the two. It would have been wild…trippy. But corporate egos got in the way.

In Friday’s Entertainment Weekly, Danel Craig — the new Casino Royale 007 guy with the blond hair and the boxer’s face — has been quoted as saying that “if I went onto the internet and started looking at what some people were saying about me — which, sadly, I have done — it would drive me insane.”
This is a very queer sentence — a suppositional “if” that turns into a blunt admission that leads back to a conditional “would”.
Craig then says that the old-school, pot-bellied, going-online-in-their- parent’s-basement 007 fans “hate me….they don’t think I’m right for the role. It’s as simple as that. They’re passionate about it, which I understand, but I do wish they’d reserve judgment.”
Ahhh, but Craig is right for the role because he’s got that cold-streak thing, and because he’s not the sort to toss off those lame little Roger Moore-like 007 quips, which bozo Bond producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli couldn’t divest themselves of.
It doesn’t matter, of course, because the Bond movies are dead. There are milllions who will pay to see Casino Royale when it comes out later this year, but we’re living in a Matt Damon, Paul Greengrass and Jason Bourne world. They own the rough-and-tumble secret-agent realm of 2006 and into the foreseeable future, and that’s that.
That said, Craig sound as if he hasn’t been around online verymuch. Online posters are extremely passionate about everyone and everything — it doesn’t matter who or what the topic may be. If you’re being discussed by onliners, you’ll be dissed and then some. You’ll be poked, punched, mocked, bitch-slapped, humiliated and disembowled.
The internet community is actually one of the healthiest places to hang these days because at least everyone’s rage is being openly expressed. A few years ago I asked a psychologist from Pacific Palisades what was the most common malady he noticed among all his patients over the years. “Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “Suppressed rage. That’s the #1 thing that everyone is not dealing with, and which is causing more problems than anything else.”

When a big-name client star (like, say, Mel Gibson) screws up big-time, a smart publicist should (a) urge him to “go fast, go humble” in terms of admitting guilt and showing remorse, (b) suggest a one-on-one mea culpa interview with a single reporter (i.e., Larry “cottonball” King) who will allow the client to make as good a case as possible” and “then go radio silent and not keep flogging that wild beast “, (c) urge him to say he’ll “never do it again, but [he] also has to say it to himself and mean it”, or (d) all of the above.
This is some of the sage advice passed along by various crisis publicists in a New York Times piece by Dennis McDougal about the lessons of the Gibson mess.
Veteran publicist Richard Lewis says Gibson’s problem isn’t insurmountable, adding that both the Rev. Jesse Jackson and former California congressman Robert K. Dornan “were eventually able to rise above” notions that they held anti-Semitic beliefs. “The next step in[Gibson’s] rehabilitation is to get him in front of Jews,” Mr. Lewis tells McDouglal.
But Hollywood p.r. legend Michael Levine says Gibson is looking at a very long and arduous process. “Some things are so egregious that you can’t get out of it in a day or two,” he tells McDougal. “This will take 20 years to fix, not 20 minutes. [Gibson] has a long walk up a steep hill.”

It does seem earlyish for Dawn Hudson‘s Film Independent (formerly known as IFP West) to be announcing a final submission date of 10.6.06 for fimls to be considered for the 2007 Independent Spirit Awards. That’s more than three weeks before Halloween…whoa. It’s also eight days earlier than last year’s 10.14.05 deadline, but then the ’07 Spirits are happening earlier also. I’m sure thought was given to this. If you’ve got an indie-type feature coming out in mid-November or early December, you’ll probably have some kind of watchable rough cut on a DVD by early October…no? It doesn’t feel as if the ’06 Spirits happened that long ago, does it? It’s like the world is spinning faster on its axis and we’re all part of a big Superman movie.

It’s fair to say that Emilio Estevez‘s directing abilities were amply exhibited in Rated X (’00), which I felt was pretty awful after seeing it at Sundance six and half years ago. This is one reason I’m not all that enthused about seeing Bobby (Weinstein Co., 11.17) at the Toronto Film Festival. Estevez’s film (he directed and co-wrote) is about how Robert Kennedy‘s shooting on 6.4.68 affected various people (i.e., not just campaign workers) who were inside L.A.’s Amassador Hotel when it happened.

Sharon Stone in Emilio Estevez’s Bobby

Between the Estevez directing resume (which also includes Men at Work and Wisdom) and that hugely entertaining, frequently funny story written by Bobby screenplay polisher John Ridley in Esquire last year, I’m not seeing indications of great artistic assurance. I don’t think anyone is.
Take the Bobby one-sheet,, for example. It uses three lines that Sen. Ted Kennedy spoke in his eulogy speech for his slain brother during the funeral service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral: “He saw wrong and tried to right it. He saw suffering and tried to heal it. He saw war and tried to stop it.” Fine…but this obviously makes the film sound like a drama or a doc about Kennedy himself, as opposed to a story about how others were affected by his death or influenced by his example. It’s a dishonest ploy that leads you on.
The fact that Bobby is going to be screened as a gala (i.e., Roy Thomson Hall) showing at the Toronto Film Festival as a “work in progress” (per a press release issued today) obviously infers that somebody at the Weinstein Co. feels it’s not in a state of maximum readiness.
That said, I’m hearing that Sharon Stone gives the pop-through performance among the large ensemble cast.
Estevez has given himself a role in the film along with Anthony Hopkins, Helen Hunt, Stone, Harry Belafonte, Nick Cannon, Laurence Fishburne, Heather Graham, Joshua Jackson, Ashton Kutcher, Lindsay Lohan, William H. Macy, Demi Moore, Freddy Rodriguez, Martin Sheen, Christian Slater and Elijah Wood.
Let’s at least give the Weinstein Co. credit for changing the Bobby release date from Wednesday, 11.22.06 — the 43rd anniversary of JFK’s assassination — to Friday, 11.17.06. The former date has absolutely nothing to do with Bobby, and trying to use JFK’s murder as a springboard was a rancid thought, to put it mildly.