Only a week or so on the job and Disney production chief Oren Aviv has already defined himself as a disciplined dispenser of carefully composed (read: disengenuous) press statements.
First he told N.Y. Times reporter Laura Holson that he was “surprised when Disney chairman Dick Cook asked him…to succeed [Nina] Jacobson” and that he “never asked for [the] job.” Now he’s telling Slate‘s Kim Masters that he’s ready to look past Mel Gibson’s attitudes about Jews. “I’ve worked with Mel on several films over the years and we have a great relationship, ” he said. “We all make mistakes and I’ve accepted his apology to what was a regrettable situation. I wish him the very best on his path to healing.”
That’s a nice Christian comradely thing to say, and also a necessary thing considering that Disney is stuck with the task of distributing Gibson’s Apocalypto, but there’s an art to bullshitting the press that Aviv hasn’t gotten the hang of yet. You have to try and sound like someone who hasn’t rehearsed his quotes ten times over before picking up the phone. Every now and then you have to just blurt something out that sounds tossed-off and what-the-hellish and and 90% true. If you say too many half-true, half-horseshit statements, reporters will get wind of your character sooner or later and then they’ll stop listening.

The anti-Jewish thing has been tattooed into Mel Gibson’s forehead and there’s no laser procedure that will remove it. There’s only one way to deal with it, and that’s what Henry II did after Thomas Becket was murdered. Gibson needs to do penance. He needs to visit a prominent temple, take his shirt off, kneel on the stone floor and submit to lashings by a team of rabbis. Repeatedly, I mean. For weeks and probably months to come. He needs to make a show of groveling at the feet of Hollywood’s Jewish bigwigs. That’s the only thing that will even half-assedly begin to get him off the hook . Me bad, me anti-Semite, me looking for guidance. Question is, does he have the character or the will to do that?

An Access Hollywood piece set to air this evening reportedly quotes Lindsay Lohan‘s manager-mom Dina as saying that the wording in the letter sent to her daughter last week (i.e., the one warning Lindsay to cool it on the partying and missing work or else) by Morgan Creek honcho James Robinson was “way out of line” and “ridiculous.” She reportedly added, “Maybe [Robinson] has personal issues with whomever and it came out with my child. I don’t know him. I can’t judge him. I don’t think it was a smart thing to do to a young girl.”

Speaking as a parent, this tells me three things are probably in place. One, Dina is dug into the role of being her daughter’s friend and supporter as opposed to being her parent, and this mindset doesn’t allow for dealing with her daughter’s issues. Two, she’s probably some kind of seminal laissez-faire provocateur as far as her daughter’s past nocturnal proclivities are concerned. And three, she’s a present-tense enabler of same. When (I’m not even saying “if”) Lindsay winds up with the inevitable substance-abuse issues and goes into rehab and all that, there will probably be people other than her mom who will provide the right kind of counsel and support. I mean, look at Dina’s photo above (she’s the blonde on the right). Consider that smile on her face. She’s obviously a hottie who’s obviously open to glamour and lusciousness and sparkling encounters.

Here’s the Save-the-River-Oaks-theatre petition site, and here’s another Houston Chronicle article (it ran last Friday, 7.28) about the public clamor to try and save this beautiful old theatre with the beautiful red-and-yellow neon marquee. Over the last ten days or so the online petition (sponsored by the Houstonist.com site, although you’d never know it by looking at the petition page) has close to 14,000 signers.

The Chronicle story also reports that City Councilwoman Ada Edwards and “other council members” hope to persuade Houston-based Weingarten Realty Investors to change its plans. Nobody is going to “persuade” the Weingarten gang to change anything — pressure that threatens their pocketbook is the only thing that big-wheel developers understand.
Make no mistake — the Weingarten executives who are running the local Houston show are the bad guys in this story. They want to impose unwanted, culturally- damaging change upon the only section of Houston has has any real sense of architectural soul, and concerned citizens are uniting in opposition to this. The possibility of the River Oaks theatre being destroyed is not a benign act of nature — it’s a matter of deliberate will on the part of some obviously greedy people. And if you ask me the following pro-River Oaks statement, issued by Landmark Theatres CEO Bill Banowsky, strikes me as rather wishy-washy in the face of this:
“Landmark Theatres is 100% committed to the historic River Oaks Theatre. We hope to continue to serve Houston residents with the best in quality art and independent film for a very long time. Landmark Theatres upholds a strong tradition of saving and restoring old movie palaces. We’ve accomplished this with the River Oaks Theatre and many other beautiful theaters across the country. We believe this to be a worthy undertaking for the appreciative audiences in the communities we serve. It is their support that has enabled Landmark Theatres to bring these wonderful buildings back to life.”
If Landmark was “100% committed to the historic River Oaks theatre”, wouldn’t you think they’d issue a statement with a bit more fighting spirit…that wasn’t so generically bland?

Hard-nosed assessments of Mel Gibson‘s compromised reputation by (a) Endeavor agent Ari Emanuel, (b) L.A. Times guys Robert Welkos and John Horn, (c) Variety‘s Gabriel Snyder, and (d) the Hollywood Reporter‘s Anne Thompson. Plus two stories about this — the list is getting longer by the minute — by USA Today‘s Anthony Breznican.
The judgment is basically that Gibson’s Apocalypto (Disney, 12.8) is over as an Oscar contender — when Gibson campaigns he’ll be asked over and over about the anti-Semitic remarks and not the film, etc. — and that he has major career-repair work in front of him, to say the least. There’s even some rumbling about Disney possibly wanting to bail on its Apocalypto distribution deal. Seems doubtful. Who wouldn’t want to see it now? Out of major curiosity if nothing else?
I get all this and the people who are saying Apocalypto is toast as an awards contender probably aren’t wrong, but one question: what if turns out to be an exceptionally good and profound film? There are indications it may not be. (MCN’s David Poland, who has long criticized journos and columnists for making negative assumptions about movies that haven’t been seen and/or have had their release dates delayed, told Breznican “It could be bad enough that the movie has to be pushed [to a different date].”) But what if the indications are wrong and it turns out to be something out-of-the-park special? No matter, apparently. Gibson’s name is mud and that’s pretty much it. For now.

It’s been 22 years since the first Miami Vice season on the tube in ’84-’85, and I never rented the February ’05 Vice DVD that had that entire season on it. But reader Dewey Yeatts of Whitehall, PA, is saying that Michael Mann‘s just released Miami Vice features is based on a February ’85 Vice episode called “Smuggler’s Blues,” in much the same way that Mann’s Heat (’95) was a big-star feature version of the 1989 TV movie he wrote and directed called “L.A. Takedown.”

Is there anyone who’s seen the big-screen Vice who also remembers “Smuggler’s Blues” in detail? And if so, does Yeatts have it right?
Here are Dewey’s similarites: (1) The movie and the episode “both open with the death of a drug runner/informant and his family”; (2) “What follows is a federal officer pulling Crockett and Tubbs into a secret meeting also attended by Lt. Castillo. In both versions, the Fed knows about a leak in the system, and pleads with Crockett and Tubbs to go undercover and make contact with a drug lord”; (3) “In both versions, they hit the underworld to obtain transportation (in the TV show, they wind up in a plane piloted by Glenn Frey — in the movie, they go to work on the competition’s ‘go fast boats’ and then fly their own plane to Latin America)”; (4) “They then make contact with a drug lord, and the meetings in both versions are weird (though for different reasons”; (5) “After the meeting they go back to their seedy hotel room and check the doors and windows. (To my eye, the room in the movie seemed to be the exact same one from the episode — the movements of the detectives seem very similar during the sequence.)”
“The movie at this point sets up more twists and plot points, which is normal, since the film has nearly three times the running time of the episode,” Yeatts writes. “But Crockett’s seduction of Gong Li’s Isabella is right out of the TV show’s playbook. How many episodes involved around romantic entanglements that dovetailed with the “case”? And how many episodes revolved around one of the girl detectives being put in danger? (See next item…)
“In the TV episode, on the partners’ return to America, Trudy is taken hostage by the bad guys and wired for explosives. In the movie, upon the partners’ return to America, Trudy is taken hostage by the bad guys and wired for explosives. (It should be noted the radical difference in the way these scenes are handled in each version.)

“To my mind, the film may have lacked the show’s pastel fashions, had hipper music (in 20 years will the movie soundtrack seem dated? Of course it will) and almost zero humor (though I felt there were a few dry lines that crackled.) But overall, the movie to me played like a larger-scale episode. The story beats from “Smuggler’s Blues.” The romantic issues. The lady-detective-in-peril. Scenes of cars and boats going very very fast. (Mann did resist the urge to go Phil Collins on us however.) The end, where they are to meet at a point along the river, reminded me of a similar sequence in the pilot episode.
“In the end, Mann did not make an homage — he just made a better version of what was already pretty cool and cutting edge. The fact that all the major cop characters had exactly the same names (Switek, Zito, etc.) says that Mann was not turning his back on his creation — just enhancing it.”
“One last thing: although the Cro-Magnon audience I saw the film with was restless at times (you don’t want to know about Friday night screenings in my neck of the woods`– mouth breathers, the lot of them), the crackerjack third act (the siege in the trailer, the firework-laden finale) sent them out of the theater crackling. So the word of mouth may be better than you think. Let’s hope so. This is the movie that should get a sequel.”

Nikki Finke is quoting Lt. Steve Smith, the guy “in charge of the detective bureau for the Malibu/Lost Hills station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, as saying that ‘the contents seem to be similar’ between the official reports and the four pages posted by TMZ.com indicating that Mel Gibson ‘blurted out a barrage of anti-Semitic remarks’ — ‘fucking Jews’ and ‘The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world’ and asking the arresting deputy ‘Are you a Jew?’ — during his DUI arrest early Friday morning. So there was no attempt at an early departmental cover-up, Smith is saying.

Adjusted weekend grosses are in, and Miami Vice‘s tally will be closer to $25,195,000. Business didn’t bump up very much on Saturday but it’s still the all-time biggest opening weekend for a Michael Mann film. And Little Miss Sunshine will end up with $357,000 after opening in seven theatres, and a per-screen average of $51,000. I saw LMS last night in Century City, by the way, and with a not-very-hip crowd. They got and responded to maybe 40% of the stuff that crowds seeing it at Sundance and at the L.A. Film Festival responded to with hilarity and occasional applause. [SPOILER! SPOILER!] When the hard-luck Hoovers are told near the end that they won’t be allowed to compete in any more California beauty pageants and Steve Carell‘s character says quietly, “I think we can live with that”, it got a good laugh in Park City…but last night’s crowd just sat there like a piece of day-old Wisconsin cheese on the kitchen counter. I hate watching good movies with dead audiences. I expected better from a West L.A. crowd, and I paid money for this experience on top of everything else.

This is a really dramatic photo of a huge movie-lot fire, but it had nothing to do with the well-being of Casino Royale , the latest James Bond flick starring Daniel Craig. A set simulating an area of Venice, Italy, that had been used by the Royale team was what caught fire. It happened earlier today outside of London, caving in the roof of a Pinewood Studios sound stage. But the movie wrapped a while ago so no biggie. No one was hurt and insurance will cover the damages.

‘I have a middle-aged soul. When I turned 38, I said to my wife, ‘Am I not 40 yet?’ I feel like I’ve been 40 for about seven years.'” — Paul Giamatti speaking to the Guardian‘s Gaby Wood. A lot of people and writers I know have described Giamatti’s Miles and Thomas Hayden Church’s character in Sideways as “screwed-up guys in their early 40s.” Giamatti was probably 36 when he shot the film in ’03.

An L.A. Times goes after the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department in the Mel Gibson DUI anti-Semitic tirade story. Get ’em, sweat ’em….feet to the fire. What journalists do. But step back and think about this for a second. The Lost Hills cops may have tried to do a nice human thing, which was save a guy from great embarassment and career damage. Dishonest and procedurally incorrect, okay, but a fairly decent thing to try and do for a guy with an obvious problem or two. Put yourself in Gibson’s shoes minus the ugly epithets, and imagine that you’ve just stepped into it big-time. A couple of West Hollywood cops cut me a break about twelve years ago after I did something unwise, and I’ve never forgotten that.

I wrote Werner Herzog yesterday and asked whether Rescue Dawn will be included at the Toronto Film Festival roster. “At the moment we should treat the Toronto Film Festival as some sort of a rumor, as there is no clear confirmation yet,” he answered.
“I just arrived in London for music recordings with the cello genius Ernst Reijseger — we did the music together for my two movies The White Diamond and The Wild Blue Yonder, using five Sardinian shepherd singers and an additional singer from Senegal. With Reijseger I shall work on the transition of the film into the unreal. The score is being written by Klaus Badelt (who recently scored Poseidon), but Reijseger will contribute music for a very strange moment in the film.
“Last week I have done color corrections, ADR, and sound post-production. Some of the digital effects (yes, I do have a few of them) are almost finished, and mixing has to be done. My guess is that we shall have a 35mm print before August 20th.”
In a New Yorker profile of Herzog that appeared earlier this year, writer Daniel Zalewski wrote the following: “Herzog believes that modern life has disconnected humans from their most elemental pleasures. His films, accordingly, attempt to connect modern cinemagoers to their prelapsarian selves: the emotions are always primal, and landscape is integral to the drama. Herzog says, ‘You will never see people talking on the phone, driving in a car, or exchanging ironic jokes in my films…it is always bigger, deeper.'”