The Los Angeles premiere — finally! — of John Scheinfeld‘s Who is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everybody Talking About Him)? will be a one-shot thing at the American Cinematheque’s Aero theatre on Wednesday, 8.23 at 7:30 pm. A truly touching saga of a relentlessly self-destructive genius, Nilsson is still apparently looking for a distribution arrangement of some kind. (A call to Scheinfeld wasn’t returned.)
Nilsson was one of rock music’s most gifted songwriters and melody-makers…ever. The glory of his life was a period of eight years — roughly from ’66 to ’74 — when he wrote or sang “Cuddly Toy,” “Without You,” “Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me” (the famous Midnight Cowboy tune), “Maybe,” “One,” “Daybreak”, “Coconut,” “Jump Into the Fire” and “You’re breaking my heart, you’re tearing it apart, so fuck you.” His first 25 years were formative (he was born in 1941) and the last 20 were about self destruction — booze, drugs and who knows how many tens of thousands of cigarettes. His parents both died in their 50s so maybe he believed it was in the cards, but Nilsson’s heart finally gave out in January 1994, just before the big L.A. earthquake.
Obviously those eight years were blessed, shining, God-imbued. The parts of his character that would eventually lead to his death were present and pulsing, but the creative instincts ruled and he was truly king of a kingdom then. The Beatles, Randy Newman and Brian Wilson worshipped Nilsson, and so did everyone else in the music industry along with the millions of fans. But as Eric Idle says of Nilsson, “He liked to party, and he got that….and in the end, it got him.” In the life story of almost any genius, the third act usually sucks.

There’s a bit of a “what’s this about?” feeling behind Lorenza Munoz‘s L.A. Times examination of the daunting tasks facing Universal’s co-chairman Marc Shmuger, and particularly the industry view (which she seems to personally endorse) that marketing guys like Shmuger and Disney’s Oren Aviv running the show at two major studios is a bad trend. I mean, you can feel the agenda when she takes a swipe at Shmuger for “using cold business terms such as the ‘product line.'”
I’m not saying that marketing guys-running-the-big-studios is necessarily a wonderful trend either, but here’s what I think may have happened. Munoz and her editors mainly wanted to go after Aviv, in part because she and her editors were angered and alarmed when Dick Cook picked Aviv to suddenly replace Nina Jacobson last week (everyone was upset about this), and also because Aviv was disingenuous with N.Y. Times reporter Laura Holson the other day about the circumstances leading up to his being offered the job, and because he said “I want to make movies like The Pacifier,” but there’s nothing to really nail him for so she went after Shmuger instead. It’s just a theory, but at least it explains the “why?” behind her piece.
The topical opportunity. obviously, is Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, which opens on 7.28. There’s a graph in which Munoz all but forecasts Vice‘s failure, and you get the idea she’s not exactly dispassionate about the idea of Shmuger struggling and possibly failing to get this richly aromatic crime film off the ground. Calling it Uni’s “biggest gamble,” she notes that Vice “cost $140 million to make…but given the somewhat tepid tracking with audiences so far, the film could have difficulty turning a quick profit despite a $50 million marketing and publicity campaign.”

An Indie McTheatre

The first indie film superplex in the country is being built right now in West Los Angeles…ooh-rah.
One doesn’t normally think of independent, alternative and foreign movies playing in big, swanky, state-of- the-art theatres…but that’s the deal with the Landmark Film Center, which will open in June 2007. Twelve screens, three stories tall, stadium seating, a lounge, a wine bar, a couple of restaurants and a book store. Like the Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood, only newer and a few miles closer to the sea.

West L.A.’s Landmark Film Center, due to open in June 2007

And with totally free parking (which beats the Arclight’s policy of always hitting you up on the way out, even with validation) as well as smiling valet guys in white shirts and black vests hanging out in front.
Being a Landmark Theatres project, people will probably refer to this destination as the Landmark or the LFC . I like LFC better, even if it sounds vaguely akin to Ken- tucky Fried Chicken. If I were Landmark’s marketing guy I would suggest calling it the LBD, or the Landmark Big Dick. Just kidding.
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An indie superplex is a very up-to-the-minute deal.
Seeing a foreign or indie-type film in L.A. has always meant going to a small or mid-sized plex — either the Landmark’s stand-alone Nuart or that twin-screened operation on Wilshire and 14th, or the shoebox miniplexes (Landmark’s defunct Westside Pavillion plex or Laemmle’s Sunset 5, which has the worst theatre seats in the world) or Laemmle’s two-screen art theatres on the Wilshire strip in Beverly Hills.
But 11 months from now, the LFC will change all that. L.A. movie mavens will be able to see the latest Gus Van Sant or Jim Jarmusch or Wim Wenders film in a much more plush and archecturally hip environment. I’ve never seen alternative fare myself in a posh stadium theatre except at the Toronto’s Cineplex at Bloor and Yonge during the Toronto Film Festival, and I definitely won’t mind having this option in my back yard.

Landmark Film Center bar, where I hope they won’t be charging $10 for mezzo-mezzo California Chardonnay.

Moviegoers have developed a taste for first-class moviegoing over the last six or seven years, which means that today’s exhibitors are looking at a fairly simple equation: provide stadium seating in a plush, uptown atmosphere, or sooner or later you’ll be dead. Landmark, which has 57 theatres in 23 markets nationwide, is simply recognizing this fact and getting in step.
The yen for stadium seating “started around ’98,” says Landmark’s head film buyer Ted Mundorff. “People started voting with their pocketbooks, saying they wanted stadium seating and they weren’t going to support old-style theatres” — seats built on a slightly graded or sloping floor — “if presented with any kind of choice.
“When the AMC Grand 24 opened in Dallas with modern stadium seating, it absolutely changed the town,” he says. “Same with the Mission Valley 20 in San Diego. It was very clear what people wanted.”
The success of Pacific’s Arclight — a first-rate superplex in Hollywood with cavernous theatres and state-of-the-art projection and sound — bears this out, and AMC having just built their new plex in Century City is also part of this trend.
The Landmark Film Center “will be very complimentary to the Arclight experience,” says Mundorff.

Landmark vp Ted Mundorff

The sightline advantage is the main stadium-theatre selling point, but people are also into bigness these days. The big hotels, particularly the ones in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and Cancun, are measured in hundreds or thousands of square yards. McMansions are the going thing all across the country with buyers who can afford them. Exhibitors are merely following suit by building McTheatres.
The size of the LFC stadiums “will vary,” says Mundorff, “with nine falling under the small or intimate category to three fairly large ones.” The plex will have “full digital capability, and full 35mm capability,” he adds.
How will the LFC affect the business and the programming at West L.A.’s Nuart? “It will give us the flexibility of playing even more product at the Nuart,” Mundorff answers. I’m not sure what that means, but if the IFC catches on fewer patrons will be buying tickets at the Nuart, no? The two will be only a mile or so apart.
I’ve also been told that the L.A. Film Festival, which enjoyed a resurge a few weeks ago by moving to Westwood, is planning on staging a significant portion of its events at the LFC next summer. Good idea.
I drove by the LFC construction site the other day and all you can see is a big green tent. Maybe Los Angelenos don’t like to look at brawny construction workers kicking up dust, or maybe commercial developers feel it’s not attractive enough or something.
They don’t do the tent thing as much in Manhattan. You can always look through the hole in the wooden fence bordering any construction site and see what’s happening. It’s part of the grit that goes with that town. Coverups are more the thing in L.A. — facelifts, green tents, scenery-blocking billboards.

And let’s not have anyone selling micro-bags of popcorn for $5.75 either.

But these artist illustrations (sent to me by Landmark uber-publicist Melissa Raddatz) provide an idea of the LFC experience. Look at the photo directly above this graph — the smiling guy approaching the popcorn stand (i.e., the one with the girlfriend) looks a lot like Hank Azaria. And the wine bar looks cool. A place to meet hot women with good taste in movies.
The main accomplishment of the LFC will be, just for redundancy’s sake, an upgrading of the indie-film experience — a larger-environment, richer-impact thing that not only ties in with current exhibition trends but may restore a sense of specialness to the indie-film watching.
McTheatres, after all, are the closest thing we have these days to the old movie palaces that were fairly standard in this country from the 1920s to 1960s. They’re also a blessed reversal of the shoebox megaplex trend of the late ’70s early ’80s, which everyone hated.
Big swanky movie theatres are, in a sense, holy places because of the big-temple atmosphere. As film essayist F.X. Feeney told me this morning, “Movies in big theatres are like ball games in that they deliver euphoria to masses of people on cue. Churches and ballgames and big theatres are all kind of tied together in this sense, all part of the American spiritual experience.”

Miami Vice is “about guns and sex and fast boats, and, baffling as it is at times, it’s still the kind of brutal fantasy that many of us relish a great deal more than yet another aerated digital dream. We can enjoy the pretense that police work is like this — sleepless, incredibly dangerous, constantly vehicular, and unsullied by paperwork. The honesty of this kind of movie can be measured by how juicy its sense of licentious pleasure is. Despite its generally saturnine mood, this one passes the test. ”
Colin Farrell‘s Crockett “eyes the Chinese-Cuban mistress and business manager of the Colombian big guy — Isabella, played by the beautiful Gong Li. She stares back, they exchange a few words, and immediately take off for Cuba to drink and make out. As the two lovers race across the Caribbean in a twin-engine Super Cat, the movie achieves a quality of screw-you willfulness, a sense of reckless freedom. That’s the essence of crime, and, for us landlubbers, it makes up for a lot of narrative confusion and chewed-off gibberish that seems designed to shut us out.” — New Yorker critic David Denby in the 7.31.06 issue.

A late-arriving obit for Argentinian director Fabian Bielinsky (The Aura), who died on 6.28. Nicely written by the Guardian‘s Michael Chanan.

A split decision from the trades on Michael Mann‘s Miami Vice. Variety‘s Brian Lowry doesn’t do cartwheels but he generally approves of the fact that “Mann’s handsome adaptation eschews the campy spoofs and thinly veiled disdain for the source material (think Starsky & Hutch and Charlie’s Angels) that have plagued TV-based movies; instead, Vice revels in the creative latitude that an R-rated feature provides without departing from the show’s rudimentary structure.” But the Hollywood Reporter‘s Michael Rechshaffen is calling it “a long and talky excursion that fails to engage the viewer from the outset” with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx appearing “to be engaged in a contest to determine who can appear more morose while expending the least amount of energy, especially in terms of their own flat exchanges.”

Variety‘s Gabriel Snyder has written a savvy story about how tracking from the three big companies (NRG, Marketcast, OTX) sometimes varies wildly, and how “midway through the summer, the studios have become keenly aware of cracks in their crystal ball.”
Tracking, or the survey data that’s supposed to give a strong clue what films people are interested in seeing, “has become the key source of studio expectations over B.O. prospects,” Snyder writes. “But the information, once closely guarded, has gone public at the exact moment that serious questions are being raised over its reliability.”
The biggest complainer in the piece, understandably, is Universal’s co-chairman Marc Schmuger, who was irate over an item I wrote from Cannes about The Break-Up that noted that 30% of people polled had a “definite interest” in seeing the film, and only 5% said it was their “first choice” to see that weekend, which seemed to mean that “the game is pretty much over,” I wrote. (Snyder says the author was “a blogger from Hollywood-Elsewhere.com.” I guess there’s no way to stop people from calling HE a blog, but I prefer the handle of “columnist.”)
I was just repeating what I’d been told and the figures weren’t inaccurate, but the verdict wasn’t a fully considered call on my source’s part or my own, and I’ve openly admitted this and tried to learn from this episode. (Schmuger says that NRG, MarketCast and OTX “were in complete disagreement on how The Break-Up was going to perform along every step of the way…when your information is in such disagreement, you’re in complete confusion…it was a classic case where tracking was significantly off from where the performance was…it was the most frustrated I’ve ever been in my many, many years at a studio.”)
I consider myself a bit wiser about tracking as a result. I learn something new every time I sift through it. Snyder’s article points out four flaws in the surveying techniques of the three companies, and these same flaws have been pointed out to me by a Universal publicist pal, and I wrote about them myself. So let’s hope that tracking improves down the road.

M. Night Shyamalan‘s Lady in the Water did 4% less business on Saturday than it did on Friday. That’s due to word-of-mouth, of course. It might have dropped even more if it hadn’t been for the rain that hit the northeast (and especially the New York City area) on Saturday. Lady is going to end up with about $18,165,000…the weakest Shyamalan showing since he became “big.” Kevin Smith‘s Clerks 2 suffered a big Friday-to-Saturday drop also. It went from a 7.21 take of $3,967,000 to a haul of about $3,214,000 on 7.22. Sorry to be the bearer but that’s a 20% dropoff…bad. It may not even make $10 million by this evening. Ivan Reitman‘s My Super Ex-Girlfriend will finish seventh with $8.5 million…another tank.

Spider-Man 3 (Columbia, 5.4.07) will be the last one? I somehow don’t see that as a huge problem. Does anyone?

Elsa Pataky, a Spanish-born European actress who’s been doing fairly well in Spanish features and TV for the last eight or nine years, has a small role in Snakes on a Plane. Her character is called Maria, and she’s on the cover of Maxim this month. The New Line guys showed a couple of her Maxim photos at Comic-Con on Friday, and I’m trying to end this item without giving off the vibe I’m giving off. Forget it…lost cause.

Isolate all the “fuck”‘s in The Big Lebowski and cut ’em all together. Not brilliant, but pretty funny.

The Fun’s Over

[Before reading this article, click on this mp3 file — the song you’ll hear fits the mood of what’s being said.]
For yours truly, the helium began to leak out of the Snakes on a Plane balloon when it was announced last Tuesday that New Line had decided not to advance- screen it for critics. That was a big uh-oh for those who knew the code. Then came last Friday afternoon’s Snakes presentation at Comic-Con, and that was it. End of story, case closed, unplug the phones.

Dumb animatronic snake drawing response from actress hired to play terrified passenger in New Line’s Snakes on a Plane (8.18)

Judging by the eight or nine-minute reel I saw in Hall H, Snakes on a Plane is going to be a wackazoid cheeseball thriller for the pseudo-hippers. But not that much fun for people like me.
The reel seemed to promise a film that will be energetic and kick-assy and will almost certainly do the old New Line exploitation bootie-shake from start to finish. But it also had some fake-snake CG that seemed to be generated by FX software created in 1997. And of course the snakes are lethal killing machines that actually go “hssss!” like a pissed-off audience sitting in a movie theatre. And some of the big snakes, like Spielberg’s Jaws shark, rumble and growl like lions on the plains of Kenya. And some of the animatronic snake models don’t look right.
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The reel promised a lot of screaming and sweating and some great snake-kill moments, but the cutting didn’t seem all that great. (It seemed to me that a bit with Samuel L. Jackson slipping into the pilot’s seat and trying to bring the plane out of a steep dive — a standard plane-thriller gambit — was handled pretty sloppily.)
And it had at least one instance of shamelessly bad dialogue when Jackson says to a senior stewardess when things get rough, “I need you to be strong for me.” A guy I talked to later on tried to dismiss this as part of the joke that I’m incapable of getting because of my own problems, not the movie’s. If I had a sense of humor I would relish the fact that Snakes on a Plane is a genre parody, he meant. So SoP is Airplane now? I think not. Some dialogue isn’t awful enough to be funny — it just goes thud.

The great Samuel L. Jackson (r.) at FBI agent Neville Flynn.

But the hoo-hah demeanor projected by Snakes director David R. Ellis is what really did it. 45 seconds after he walked out on-stage and started talking about the film, alarm bells were racketing in my head. A former stunt man, actor and 2nd A.D., Ellis reminds me of a hundred below-the-line guys I’ve met in this town over the last 20-odd years…an amiable go-alonger with a good sense of humor and a lot of friends….a guy who walks around in shorts and sandals and who likes to chill in the backyard on weekends with burgers on the barbie and a can of beer in his hand.
Don’t get me wrong. Snakes will be “fun” if you go with the right downmarket attitude. It’s a safe bet it’ll clean up when it opens on 8.18 (the guessers are talking a first-weekend tally in the mid to high 20s), and I’ve been told it has at least three or four “nooo!” scenes that fans are going to howl at as they text-message their friends and spread the word. If this happens it’ll probably translate into decent repeat business.
But the X-factor, smart-guy audience that had been primed and ready to enjoy this comic horror-thriller since the Snakes internet movement began last March has been jettisoned. Jettisoned back when the film was made, I mean. The hepcats loved the title and had fun with it, but they never realized (or wanted to realize) what kind of film Snakes on a Plane actually was all along. And I include myself in that equation.
The impression I got from the short reel on Friday is that Snakes on a Plane is maybe one-tenth as hip as the Snakes riffs we’ve all enjoyed the last three or four months on www.snakesonablog.com….if that.

Snakes on a Plane director David R. Ellis

I said it a long time ago, but the best part of Snakes on a Plane happened online in March and April. The movie couldn’t possibly live up to all the hype, and now we’re all starting to get the idea that it indeed hasn’t. Reality has set in, o my brothers. Welcome to the world of 116 No. Robertson Blvd.
Jackson,who was fantastic last Friday on the Hall H stage, said at one point that he loved what had happened with the internet Snakes frenzy, and that he’s looking forward to a day when interactive fans will create plot points for a new film — that the fans will one day become the new auteurs. In fact the fans were the auteurs with the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon. They ran the show. The Snakes team and the New Line “creatives” have been playing catch-up and “hey, can we get in on this thing?” all along.
Who knows what the three Snakes screenwriters — John Heffernan, Sebastian Gutierrez, David Dalessandro — had in mind in the early stages, but I know the Snakes footage I saw on Friday and the what-the-hell, pocket-the-paycheck attitude I picked up from David R. Ellis are one and the same.
The New Line powers-that-be have basically said, retroactively, “Uhh, thanks for the internet word-of-mouth guys. We all had some fun with those clever videos and songs and posters you came up with…really loved it. But that was you, not us. Thanks for thinking it might be and for helping us make millions, and…well, try not to blame us for not being on your wavelength.”

I guess I basically drove all the way down to San Diego last Thursday to have my concerns about Snakes on a Plane confirmed, and now they have been.
I’m sure New Line publicity would like me to be strong for them. Do the dance, hold the line and wait until the movie opens on Friday, 8.18. But they showed the footage at Comic-Con and brought Ellis up on the stage, and I think it’s fair to air my impressions of that.
It just hit me I may be helping the cause with this piece. Critics and media people who haven’t thought much about SoP may read it and go “stupid piece of shit” and write it off, and then they’ll pay to see it in theatres at those 10 pm shows on Thursday , 8.17 and — who knows? — maybe it’ll be a lot more entertaining than what the Comic-Con footage reel indicated and they’ll write good reviews and spread the word.
It’s always better to see a film with low expectations (or no expectations) than high ones. Any distribution exec will tell you this, including the ones at New Line.