Time and again Hollywood types — directors, producers, studios — get into business with oily foreign guys (European or Israeli) who tend to live high and swagger around and smoke cigars. The Hollywooders are always interested because there are always fresh oilies looking to buy their way into the business, and they’ll hook up with almost anyone with a connected rep in order to do so. Elie Samaha, Giancarlo Peretti, Jean-Marie Messier, Bob Yari, Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus, Avi Lerner, etc.
Yari has been doing pretty well for himself lately (The Illusionist is a hit), but sooner or later the matters of oily men always seem to turn sour or go south. Hollywooders who make movies with them always seem to regret it, sooner or later. The latest example of this syndrome has been written about by N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman, and it concerns Harsh Times director-writer David Ayer and his bumpy ride with Phillipe Martinez and his distribution company, Bauer Martinez, which bought rights to Ayer’s film during the ’05 Toronto Film Festival.
Harsh Times will be released on 11.10 by a “reconfigured MGM with scant public awareness, a nest of tense financiers and a handful of abandoned release dates in its wake,” she writes. “Martinez says he still loves the film and has supported it by approving a $15 million marketing campaign and relatively wide, 800-theater release. ‘If I didn’t care about the film, I’d never have put $15 million into the marketing,” Martinez — “an expansive, cigar-smoking Frenchman” — tells Waxman that Ayer “should kiss me every morning for what I do for his movie.”
“Yet Martinez is not actually putting up the $15 million,” Waxman reports. “The money comes from MGM, which had originally expected Bauer Martinez to pay for marketing and delayed its publicity and advertising campaign when the deal stalled over this and other business issues,” and blah, blah. Ayer tells Waxman he got into bed with Martinez with the idea that “we can be neophytes together and reinvent the system.” But the system, Ayer has learned, “is not so easily reinvented. Ayer now says he wants “the warm, loving embrace of the studios. Studios are the way they are for a very good reason.”
The irony is that Harsh Times is no film to avoid. Set in East L.A., it’s a riveting, hard-case melodrama. Christian Bale plays a violent Gulf War veteran looking to find work as a professional right-wing mercenary. Freddy Rodriguez is his irresponsible best friend; Eva Longoria plays Rodriguez’s opposite-number wife. I saw it last March or April…a good while ago. I’ll get into it more next week.

To me, the end-of-the-year Oscar beat mosh-pit action is tough and bruising but bracing and a lot of…well, fun. In a perverse sort of way. But to David Poland, it’s becoming more and more of a wallow — craven, degrading, downmarket and heavily caked with brown glop. His latest rant, which I love, sounds like a ringside boxing reporter complaining about the hitting. It’s really good, though. I actually laughed out loud and that’s rare But I need help on one thing. Of all the “controversies [that] will be at a premium,” I’m clueless about ‘Rinko’s vagina.” (He’s referring to Babel costar Rinko Kikuchi.) Anyone?

At Wednesday’s Tom Freston roast in Manhattan, Paramount Pictures honcho Brad Grey was quoted by Variety‘s Jill Goldsmith and Scott Kirsner about his studio’s shucking-of-Tom-Cruise move that happened two months ago.
Paramount “had considered two options when Cruise’s producing pact came up for renewal,” the story reads. “The first was to ‘reduce the capital we were putting in so dramatically that it wouldn’t have made sense for Tom to keep it,’ Grey said. Such a readjustment ‘would’ve changed the ceiling for all top talent deals.’ The second option was not to reach an agreement. When it became clear, in late August, that the two parties would choose door No. 2, [Viacom chief Sumner] Redstone spilled the beans.”

To get up to speed for her piece about formidable Best Actor contender Leonardo DiCaprio, Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson persuaded Warner Bros. to let her see Blood Diamond, the hard-hitting Ed Zwick drama set in South Africa that costars DiCaprio, Djimon Honsou and Jennifer Connelly. Thompson treads gingerly in describing the film, but the piece nonetheless contains three “tells.”
One, she calls it “a big expensive drama with a heartfelt political message, just the kind of movie that needs the extra boost of an Oscar campaign.” Two, she says that Warner Bros. “will mount Oscar campaigns for both The Departed” — in which DiCaprio definitively kills as a Boston-mob mole — “[which is] already a commercial success and doesn’t need an Oscar push to attract audiences, and Diamond, which needs all the help it can get.” And three, she says that “if Departed really takes off as a Best Picture contender — and if Diamond doesn’t — then DiCaprio too could be promoted from supporting actor consideration for the Scorsese movie into a best actor aspirant for that movie as well.”
Dicaprio, Thompson proclaims, “is front and center in an anti-hero role” in the Zwick film. “He’s a ruthless South African diamond smuggler who enlists Connellly’s perky journalist to help him find the missing son of Honsou’s South African farmer — as well as his buried giant diamond. Along the way, Connelly and Hounsou’s characters both help DiCaprio’s damaged treasure hunter find his conscience. It’s DiCaprio’s movie all the way, thick Afrikaner accent and all, and Warners is pushing him for a best actor nomination.
“There’s just one problem: The studio’s Departed has become such a hit with critics and audiences that the one movie Scorsese and DiCaprio had no intention of campaigning for has become a serious Oscar contender as well. This leaves the studio scrambling to take care of the needs of all its players.”
DiCaprio, she concludes, “is facing the happy dilemma of handling two possibly Oscar-worthy performances. Warners says it will campaign for DiCaprio in the best actor category for Diamond, a movie whose political agenda he cares about deeply.
“At this point, according to his p.r. rep Ken Sunshine, DiCaprio will join his Departed brothers in the supporting actor category, which will pit him against Nicholson and Damon in a hugely competitive race along with likely contenders Hounsou, Adam Beach (Flags of Our Fathers), Eddie Murphy (Dreamgirls), Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children), James McAvoy (The Last King of Scotland), Michael Sheen (The Queen) and Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine).” (HE says forget Haley and McAvoy.)”

All that Jack Nicholson-for-Best-Actor-in- The–Departed jazz? Forget it. Warner Bros., I’m hearing, is off the boat on that one. Delicious as he is, Jack is all flavor and feisty backup in that film, which I’ve felt from the beginning. Oscar prognosticators, take note.

The trailer for Richard Eyre‘s Notes on a Scandal (Fox Searchlight, 12.25) is very nicely done, but my goodness…it’s one of those trailers that gives away 90% of the movie. I feel I’ve really and truly seen it now, on top of being instructed how obviously top-tier the performances from Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench and Bill Nighy are going to be. Now, it seems, the only thing to do is sit down and see the feature-length version. I didn’t realize how Fatal Attraction-y this was going to be, to judge from the descriptions and whatnot. It certainly seems to have been cut from the same cloth.

Now I really want to watch the Dixie Chicks’ Shut Up & Sing documentary, which the Weinstein Co. is opening in New York and L.A. tomorrow and nationwide on 11.10, now that the the cowardly NBC and CW networks are refusing to air ads for the film, apparently because they’re afraid of whatever political blowback may result from vengeful apparatchiks in the Bush adminstration.

Harvey Weinstein, co-owner of the Weinstein Co., is fuming about this turndown and complaining big-time to Matt Drudge, who apparently broke the ad-turndown story this evening. “It’s a sad commentary about the level of fear in our society,” Harvey’s saying, “ that a movie about a group of courageous entertainers who were blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech is now itself being blacklisted by corporate America. The idea that anyone should be penalized for criticizing the president is sad and profoundly un-American.”
Drudge is reporting that NBC has said the network “cannot accept these spots as they are disparaging to President Bush” and that the CW is explaining its refusal is because it “doesn’t have appropriate proramming in which to schedule this spot”
Barbara Kopple‘s Dixie Chicks doc, which I didn’t manage to see at the Toronto Film Festival, is, I’ve read and been told, an above-average behind-the-scenes look at the political fallout that that happened in ’03 after the group’s lead singer Natalie Maines said she was “ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”
Drudge is reporting that the Weinstein Company “is exploring taking legal action.” The rejected commercials for “Shut Up & Sing” can be viewed here.
The Dixie Chicks ad turndown follows last week’s story about Fox, NPR and CNN refusing to run ads for Newmarket’s Death of a President, which is partly about the fictional shooting of Bush at a Chicago political rally and how the government is subsequently a little too eager to pin the blame on a man of Middle Eastern descent.

According to Advertising Age reporter T.L. Stanley, a research report titled “Hollywood Online: Ad Innovators Play Spending Catch-Up” is saying that “studios have made a misstep by not increasing their online spending sooner in order to reach the coveted young consumer who spends significant amounts of time on the web.”
“Studios spend about 3% of their marketing budgets on online ads, which is below the 5.7% that the average U.S. industry spends, according to the eMarketer study. Hollywood is expected to make up some ground, though, spending 8% of ad budgets online by the year 2010. That translates to $526 million and 17% of studios total ad spending. Other marketers will spend about 8.9% of their budgets on the web by that time, the study found.”
The study said that “a number of movie marketers surveyed put that figure considerably higher, or more in the vicinity of 6%.

A nicely put David Poland/MCN copy link — “a Bosley Crowther moment?” — went up a while ago regarding this John Patterson Guardian piece about Martin Scorsese and The Departed . Patterson trashes the film and harumphs that “after an enormously fulfilling relationship of nearly 30 years, it may be all over for me and Scorsese [since] I cannot decently call The Departed ‘a return to form’, which seems to be the prevailing opinion.” It’s perfectly fine to roll with your own opinion in whatever direction, but that’s what Crowther was doing when he (a) praised Cleopatra, (b) questioned the appropriateness of mocking the defense estab- lishment in Dr. Strangelove and then (c) trashed Bonnie and Clyde.