World Trade Center didn’t exactly rock the U.S. yesterday with $4,499,000 haul in some 2803 theatres, or about $1605 per print. (A friend went to a 5 pm showing in a big L.A. plex yesterday in a 400-seat theatre, and there were only about 25 people there.) And I can’t imagine that today’s liquid-bomb news from London is going to help. WTC will do less today — figure $3.6 or $3.7 million, maybe a bit more — and the prognosis is that it’s looking like a push to bring in $20 million over the coming three-day weekend.
The five-day tally may be closer to the mid 20s rather than the vicinity of $30 million, which is apparently what some analysts projected. (A piece by critic Glenn Whipp mentioned a possible $31 million haul a few days ago.)
The reviews were (68% on Metacritic), the conservative patriot crowd didn’t manifest as strongly as hoped, and the same cowards who stayed away from United 93 held to form yesterday. World Trade Center is a heartfelt, very well made film and I’m sorry, but the numbers are in, there’s not a whole lot of heat under the pot and it’s probably fair to say there’s not a lot of joy floating around the Paramount lot this morning.
MCN’s Leonard Klady is reporting a slightly higher Wednesday figure — $4.7 to $4.9 million.

Let’s presume that by the time everyone travels to the Toronto Film Festival a little less than four weeks from now, the airlines won’t be prohibiting carry-on luggage out of London or anywhere else. Today’s news from London about a coordinated plot to blow up airliners traveling between Britain and the United States (the 21 British Muslim suspects intended to build bombs in mid-flight with liquid explosives and detonators) means that normal air-travel misery levels have worsened dramatically. If there’s a carry-on luggage ban when it’s time to fly to Toronto, that’s it — no computers means no Toronto and no coverage. I’m not uninterested in or unaware of the greater potential horror, but that’s an obvious area of concern for me and hundreds of other journalists and distributors.

Roddy McDowell‘s “Antony lives no more!” speech from Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s Cleopatra (’63) — one of the few really good moments from an otherwise tiresome and pretty much discredited film.

The drop-dead perfect final lines from Billy Wilder‘s Double Indemnity (45), a remastered version of which Universal Home Video is releasing on 8.22. It looks improved — richer, crisper tones and fewer speckles than on the old cruddy version that Uni issued in ’98 — but so many scenes are shot in shadowy darkness it can’t possibly gleam like shiny silver. Great audio commentaries and retrospective doc, though.

Fred MacMurray, Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity

The news was unofficial 9 or 10 days ago about Werner Herzog‘s Rescue Dawn playing at the Toronto Film Festival — now it’s official. Earlier today a big-time distributor told me he’s seen it and “between this and Grizzly Man, Herzog is enjoying a real rennaissance these days. It’s Herzog going back upriver and into the jungle…it’s really good. Perhaps not the most brazenly commercial film but what do you expect from Herzog? Christian Bale really goes for it, really out on a limb…and Steve Zahn is also good because he’s fairly restrained.”

Indiewire says the 50th London Film Festival (which runs in late October) will open with Kevin Macdonald ‘s The Last King of Scotland …big deal. It’ll also show at the Telluride Film Festival in early September, and then at the Toronto Film Festival a week or so later. Scotland is that Idi Amin movie with Forrest Whitaker and James McAvoy.

Okay, hold up there on that Disney-dumping- Apocalypto thing. At least until you consider the view of another connected distribution guy who called back this afternoon and said he hasn’t heard anything about Mel Gibson‘s film being quietly offered to other distributors, and “you’d think I’d be hearing something.” But then you never know with Disney, he added, because “they’re so crazy.” He emphasized, in any case, that it would be awfully expensive for Disney if they tried to get rid of Apocalypto because Icon, Gibson’s production company, is “very tough” and would insist upon Disney paying very heavy financial penalities if they pulled out. Take this with another grain.

Hollywood Wiretap had the link first, but columnist Jim Hill (of Jim Hill Media) is reporting that “studio insiders who have actually worked on the Pirates sequels are saying that — thanks to all of the elaborate FX sequences in Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End — the combined production costs of these two films is now well north of $600 million.
“And let’s keep in mind that we’re just talking about production costs [and] not the additional $100 million that a studio typically has to spend in order to properly launch a summer blockbuster. That $600 million was supposedly spent on just producing those two motion pictures, not on their promotion and marketing.
“And let’s not forget that [director] Gore Verbinksi hasn’t actually finished shooting the third Pirates sequel yet. Sets are being built on the Burbank lot right now for [certain] At World’s End scenes [and] according to studio staffers that I’ve spoken with, it’s going to take Gore at least six more weeks of shooting before he gets everything that he needs to complete At World’s End. Which means — in essence — that the meter’s still running on this incrediblyexpensive project. And that the final combined production costs of these back-to-back “Pirates” sequels could eventually reach as high as $650-$700 million.

Okay, it’s true — Robin Williams has gone into rehab. Anyone who faces up to a problem and tries to do something about it deserves respect and support. Presumably he’ll be out and jazzed when he starts doing publicity for Man of the Year (Universal, 10.15), which is said to be his best film is a while. Barry Levinson‘s too.

Sussing Shepherd

Take this with a grain, but early murmurings about Robert De Niro‘s The Good Shepherd (Universal, 12.22) indicate it’s less of a story of how a real-life CIA counter-espionage ace (Matt Damon) gradually succumbs to obsessiveness and paranoia, and more of a…well, the readings are a bit vague. Positive but varying — how’s that?
Damon plays Edward Wilson, a character modelled on legendary super-spook James Jesus Angleton. And Shepherd, a verite spy thriller, is more or less his story. It’s said to be dense and labrynthian and exacting — all positive things — and also that it’s a wee bit long (or was when the film was screened a while back) and that it needs a few trims.

Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie in Robert De Niro’s The Good Sherpherd (Universal, 12.22)

There’s a bit of a “hmmm” factor though. I haven’t heard that much, but I’ve heard enough to wonder if the film has soft-pedalled or even bypassed who and what Angleton became as he got older and more caught up in the rigors of counter- espionage.
The studio-supplied synopsis on Coming Soon says Shepherd is about “the tumultuous early history of the Central Intelligence Agency” so maybe it doesn’t even touch the ’70s. How old could Damon play? A guy in his late 30s or early 40s? That would take Wlson/Angleton story into the early ’60s.
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One guy called Shepherd a kind of Godfather-like epic about the CIA from the mid ’40s to whenever (i.e., it doesn’t stay with Wilson/Angleton until the end of his career or life). Another said the Godfather analogy is off-base, and called it a rich, fascinating inside-the-CIA drama with a side serving of Wilson/Angleton gradually “paying a price” for being ultra-obsessive about counter-sleuthing.
And yet if you know anything about Angleton, you know he’s mainly known for having become a bit of a wackjob, especially in the ’70s. Go to Angleton’s Wikipedia biography and you’ll read that Angleton’s “excesses as a counter- intelligence czar, arising from extreme paranoia that may have been clinical, had adverse effects on the agency, especially during the 1970s.”

(l.) Damon as Wilson; (r.) the real James Angleton

You’ll also read that the term “Angletonian” is an adjective meaning something conspiratorial, bizarre, eerie or arcane.
And yet one of the Good Shepherd viewers I spoke to said flat-out that Wilson doesn’t turn into a nutter. Maybe he was just downplaying it — maybe Damon just turns hyper and rigid as opposed to foaming at the mouth — or maybe the Shepherd plot doesn’t advance that far.
But if De Niro (working from a script by Eric Roth) has de-accentuated Wilson’s wackazoid aspects, that would be a bit like making a movie about boxer Jake La Motta and downplaying the fact that he eventually turned into an overweight, wild-mannered Miami club owner who wound up on the skids.
The Good Shepherd costars include Angelina Jolie, De Niro, William Hurt, John Turturro, Alec Baldwin, Billy Crudup, Keirr Dullea, Michael Gambon, Gabriel Macht and Joe Pesci.

Jolie, Robert De Niro on set of The Good Shepherd

Wikipedia’s opening graph reads as follows: “A poetry aficionado with known ties with the likes of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and an avid fly-fisherman and orchid- grower, Angleton was an unofficial adviser to successive directors of the CIA, most notably Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. His creative genius for scenario- building and thoroughly penetrating understanding of espionage, deception and false flag operations remain uneclipsed to this very day.
“Considered by many within the intelligence profession as the single most polari- zing, most controversial and admittedly most revered spymaster bar none, Angle- ton had lived spy tradecraft with mad passion. Even the KGB used much of his tradecraft as training tools for their case officers and assets.”

“Watching World Trade Center, I thought of several prominent critics who argued that United 93 was little more than a conventional Hollywood heroism saga in verite-documentary clothing. It’s true the filmmakers didn’t frame 9/11 in the context of a larger geopolitical struggle. But United 93 did lay out, in haunting detail and with stunning immediacy, the lack of military preparedness, the garbled lines of government communication, and the absence, for all practical purposes, of a commander in chief. If it was indeed a saga of heroism, its heroes weren’t conventionally introduced, and all, unconventionally, perished [and was therefore] a fitting monument to people who turned out to be Washington, D.C.’s last and only line of defense.” — David Edelstein, New York magazine.

I don’t mean to be a killjoy but those Metacritic review samples for Oliver Stone‘s World Trade Center (opening today) average out to a 68% positive. Any grade below 70 is a flunk unless the teacher likes you and cuts you a break, and there are some stiff rebukes out there, particularly from L.A. Times critic Kenny Turan, New York critic David Edelstein, and Toronto Globe & Mail critic Rick Groen.
Not that moviegoers give a damn what these guys think, but still…
The question facing WTC is whether paying audiences will be sufficiently enamored with the film’s plainly emotional, family-centric, non-political current to bypass the second-act confinement problem. Patriots, righties, flag-saluters, supporters of the Iraq War, etc. — Paramount needs you guys to turn out in force and push World Trade Center past a low-to-mid 20s showing for the weekend and a low-30s showing for the full five days.