Three or four hours after being released from Century City Doctors Hospital early Saturday afternoon, the swollen bear-claw hand and the red interstate highway streaks on my left arm had returned. My resources drained by my 16 hours at CCDC, I had no choice but to check into the UCLA Olive View County hospital in Sylmar. I stayed there Saturday night and all-day Sunday and am leaving today. And I think things really are cured now. My hand was actually operated on yesterday and the infection has been removed and I’ve been told I’m over the hump.
Intravenous antibiotics administered for 16 hours at CCDH on Friday and Saturday morning had merely suppressed the infection for appearance’s sake. The chumps at CCDH didn’t want to actually attend to the swollen, senstive-to-touch, pus-filled wound on my left palm (they were afraid of something going badly — private medicine procedure today is all about fear of possible malpractice lawsuits ), and by 5 pm Saturday I realized I had to go back into another hospital for Round 2.
I’d been told by a doctor at a Beverly Hills walk-in clinic a couple of days earlier that Olive View was “nicer than USC County”, so I drove up the 405 and onto 5 and into Sylmar — right up against the mountains in the northernmost area of the San Fernando Valley. I eventually found the hospital and was admitted to the Olive View emergency room by 8:30 pm.
Right away I knew I was dealing with very smart, ultra-focused doctors and nurses — professionals of a much higher order than the ones I encountered at CCDH. The Olive View doctors and nurses are straight off ER and St. Elsewhere and other TV shows of that type, by which I mean they seemed to say and do the right professional thing at all times.
A friendly, youngish, no-b.s. ER doctor named Bloomfield anesthetized, lanced and excavated the wound, and I was given more doses fo antibiotics Saturday night and all day Sunday. Another doctor and a small team performed a 15-minute operation late Saturday afternoon (I was put to sleep with a general anesthetic), and staffers gave me all kinds of pain medication and more antibiotic drips after I got out.
So I’m out of here this morning, and thank goodness for the stirring George Clooney goodness of the doctors at Olive View. Bloomfield is going to be featured on an upcoming epsode of some Discovery channel show about unusual medical experiences, or something like that. (I’ll pass along the details later.)
Do not ever go to Century City Doctors Hospital for anything, including directions. All they do is sedate and placate and get as much money as they can from you. I wouldn’t exactly call them a disgrace to their profession, but they’re contenders for that distinction. What they did for me on Friday was equivalent to a guy going to a hospital with a broken leg and the doctors saying, “Well, we’re not too sure we want to get into the leg part, but here’s some pain medication and we’ll send a therapist to your room so you can discuss your feelings.”
I’m typing this from the Olive View hospital library. The only thing good about CCDC is that they have broadband computer hookups in each private room. But that aside, forget it. They even refused to give me a copy of my medical chart so I could give it to the Olive View people. Or rather, they said I could have a copy but I’d have to come back to the hospital and fill out a form and give them $23 dollars, and then they’d fax it to me within 2 to 10 business days. I was told this by a bitchy senior nurse named Linda, who works on the 4th floor.

Will someone good at subterfuge and pretend guises please slip into the development room — stealthily, like a panther — and while George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford aren’t looking (or are out putting quarters in the street meters), pick up a pillow, lean over the crib and smother the Indy IV project until it’s dead, dead…deader than dead? With compassion, I mean. Like the Will Sampson‘s Big Chief did to Jack Nicholson‘s Randall Patrick McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Rupert Everett, a resident of London’s Bloomsbury district, is bonding with about 1000 neighbors to try and keep a new Starbucks from opening. He calls the Starbucks chain a cultural “cancer”, an arguable, far-from-startling observation. The worldwide corporate cancer that is Starbucks, The Gap, McDonalds, TGIFs, Kentucky Fried Chicken and all the other internationally known food, drink, clothing and hotel brands have penetrated almost every city I’ve been to. The tourist areas, I mean. Good for Everett and the fighters of the world trying to keep neighborhoods organic and unblemished. By the way: Chuck Palahniuk didn’t write about blowing up Starbucks outlets in his “Fight Club” book but they were definitely targets in David Fincher ‘s film version.

I’ve been writing this morning’s stuff from a hospital room. I had hoped that the minor infection from a dirty exacto-knife stabbing in my left palm (I mentioned this a couple of days ago, although the item seems to have strangely disappeared) would be suppressed by oral antibiotic medication. But it morphed into a systemic poisoning situation sometime on Thursday.

Dreary, mildly depressing hospital room — Saturday, 8.19, 9:45 am; far worse than a coach-level breakfast you might be served, say, on a New York to-London red-eye, and no warmer than room temperature.

It had turned my hand into a puffy bear claw by the time Thursday’s Snakes on a Plane screening was letting out. By yesterday afternoon (i.e., Friday) the infection had spread into my forearm — red streaks appeared like interstate highways on a road map — and all the way up to my left shoulder by dinner hour.
So I checked into a hospital and they hooked me up to regular (every five or six hours) antibiotic intravenous drips. The worst of it had passed by this morning, thank fortune, but if I’d been stuck out in the desert somewhere and beyond of the reach of good medicine…

The trailer for Phillip Noyce‘s Catch a Fire (Focus Features, 10.27), which I had the pleasure of catching in rough-cut form a while back, and is another expression of a relatively recent, somewhat grittier aesthetic for a director once known for his expert helming of early to mid ’90s big-studio thrillers like Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger.
Like The Quiet American and Rabbit-Proof Fence, Fire feels half exacting and half instinctual, which is a very tricky thing to pull off. It’s a South African political drama based on the true story of Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke), an Average Joe laborer who became radicalized under the boot of apartheid in the early 1980s. And it feels like a South African film in the best possible sense of that term, like something discovered and written and made there by a native (or by someone very good at assimilating)…by someone who knows what the land smells like in the summer as you’re standing in some outlying area in the early evening.
Catch a Fire will play the Toronto Film Festival and I don’t know where else.

Amid fears of an economic downturn or some kind of card-shuffling realignment that will ultimately result in less dough being thrown around and fewer vacation homes being purchased, a lot of producers and studio execs are complaining that movie-making is becoming more and more brand-driven, marketing-driven, non-creative, etc. In this Laura Holson N.Y. Times piece, I mean. And they’re right — things are vaguely shitty, but they’ve been moving in this direction for years.
Producer Leonard Goldberg, for one, believes that Hollywood “will adapt as it did when silent movies became talkies, and three decades ago, when the VCR was perceived as a threat,” Holson reports, adding that Goldberg “has no sympathy for those who do nothing but complain. ‘Let them get a real job,’ he said. ‘They get paid a lot. They go to great parties. They fly around in jets, not only for business reasons, but for personal things, too. I think there are worse jobs to have.'”

The Snakes under-performance aside, the projected weekend tallies for the other biggies are as follows: Talladega Nights wll do about $12,700,000 as of Sunday night, down about 43% from last weekend. The third-place World Trade Center will do about $10,763,000, off about a 43% drop — a half-decent hold. (It’s up to about $45 million domestic so far.) Accepted will do about $10,520,000. Step Up, off 51% from last weekend, will end up with $10,008,700. Little Miss Sunshine has spread out to about 700 situations and will do about $4,823,000 by Sunday night — about $7000 a print.

Five demerits each to Box Office Guru, Coming Soon and EW for predicting Snakes on a Plane‘s weekend grosses in the $30 million range ($28 million, $30.8 million and $31 million respectively) when one Saturday morning prognosis is eyeballing a Sunday-night figure of $15,322,000. New Line’s airborne reptile thriller took in $6,257,000 on Friday, but that figure includes the Thursday night showings also. A dip is expected today (the hard-cores went to see Snakes on Thursday and Friday nights — R-rated, young-male fare always drops off on Saturday) so there’s a chance it may total out a bit south of $15 million. The Hot Button predicted $22 million, H’wood Reporter said “lows 20s to low 30s” and Box Office Mojo predicted $24 million — and they all have to stay after class and clean the blackboards. Yesterday I wrote that with Snakes playing in roughly 2555 theatres, “Variety‘s forecast of a weekend total in the mid to high teens seems more likely than a Sunday-night tally in the 20s, much less the 30s. I still say mid teens.”

A first-rate column by the Hollywood Reporter‘s Anne Thompson examines the back-stories and ramifications behind Bryan Singer‘s decision to bail on 20th Centry Fox’s X-Men 3 and do Superman Returns instead.

I did an interview with producer Keith Barish in 1982 about his latest flm, Sophie’s Choice, and I remember one thing about our sit-down more than anything else. This was Barish saying with absolute resolution that one of his biggest passions was to make a film of D.M. Thomas‘ The White Hotel.
I read the book not long after writing my Barish piece, and it’s certainly a dark and haunting piece — emphasis on the former. And now, 24 years later, Santa Barbara-based producer Susan Stewart Potter and writer-director Simon Monjack have raised $20 million to make their own feature film version. Good for that, but I say woe unto those who would produce a movie after many, many others have been trying to do the same thing for a long time.
There’s usually a reason that movies never quite happen, and that reason usually has something to do with the humanity, or the lack of humanity, in the core material. Terrence Malick, Pedro Almodovar, David Cronenberg, Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch, Hector Babenco and Emir Kusturica have all tried to make this film, or have at least seriously flirted with it. It has a curse on it, this project. The Thomas novel doesn’t want to be made into a film…not really.

L.A. Times Claudia Eller on the exceptionally bad ’06 that Warner Bros. has suffered through so far. The bombing of Poseidon, Lady in the Water, The Ant Bully and ATL “could lose more than $120 million combined for Warner and its financial partners,” Eller reports. And let’s not forget about the under-performing of Superman Returns. “The price of failure is high,” WB chief Alan Horn tells her. “It’s not just the financial cost. It’s reading about it in the newspaper.”

The new dayglo mustard-yellow backdrop of Movie City News is too much. I debated whether or not to say anything, but it’s an eyesore. It’s butterscotch pudding on peyote. There was a lady who lived two or three blocks from our home in New Jersey when I was a kid who once painted her house teal blue, and you needed sunglasses just to look at it. She was within her rights but taste cannot be taught — it’s a result of a thousand distastes accumulated over time, and either you get it or you don’t.