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A day-early (5.4) summation by Hollywood Wiretap‘s Stephen Saito of Christina Spines‘ Entertainment Weekly piece about super-sized star salaries being re-considered and re-calculated. Will Ferrell is worth $20 million? When he did his out-of-the-shadows walk-on in The Wedding Crashers last summer, I could feel the audience deflate…seriously. I could almost hear them groan.

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Hollywood Wiretap‘s Tom Tapp on the real reason(s) why Warner Independent Pictures honcho Mark Gill was let go. In a nutshell: a mandate within Warner bros. to cut costs and use other people’s money. This didn’t square with Gill’s wanting to nurture and produce his own projects with Warner production chief Jeff Robinov wanting to put the emphasis on acquiring films.

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“I went to see M:I:3 [Thursday] night at the local AMC 20 plex, expecting at least a sizeable crowd. I pulled up to the theatre and there wasn’t a single person at the box-office window . I thought that they had cancelled the screening, or that maybe I had misread the time in the paper. Nope. I walked up, bought a ticket and walked inside. There wasn’t a single person in line at the concession stand either.

And this was the only theatre in town showing the midnight showing of M:I:3. I walked into the theatre and maybe 20 people were in there, and that’s being generous. Walking out after the movie ended, I noticed a few women shaking their heads and the guys kind of jawing about how they liked it. I overheard one female say, ‘I don’t care what you think, I still don’t like him” And she wasn’t talking about Phillip Seymour Hoffman.” — David DuBos, “Movie Talk” host, New Orleans, LA.

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I’ve read the copy about guys in the L.A. gay community expecting Bryan Singer‘s Superman Returns (Warner Bros., 6.30) to play, in a certain sense, “for them”, and that it may be even more gay-accentuated than Joel Schumacher‘s Batman and Robin. But I don’t see the faintest stirrings of gay attitude in the trailer. Brandon Routh, who plays Superman/Clark Kent, is extremely good looking — okay, cute — but he could be Chris Reeve‘s son or nephew, and his manner and line readings seem to be almost modelled on Reeve’s in the original 1978 Richard Donner Superman film. I’ve watched the trailer three times and it really does seem more like a tribute to the Donner film than anything that could be called freshly imagined. I mean, you half-expect to see Glenn Ford (who just celebrated his 90th birthday, by the way) turn up.

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I’ve read and heard about several possible dramatic features about Jimi Henrix over the years, and they’ve all been shot down over rights issues, which is a euphemism for the fact that Experience Hendrix, the company run by Hendrix’s sister Janie Hendrix, are very conservative-minded and very nickle-and-dimey in their thinking. The latest no-go is a biopic of some sort that Dragonslayer Films’ John Hillman wanted to make. He thought he’d secured likeness rights to Hendrix, along with music and live footage, but nope. Nobody is going to make a Jimi Hendrix feature as long as those Seattle small-timers have anything to do with the rights….never.

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Here’s a good, concise, and yet very thorough piece by Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson about the selling of Al Gore, Laurie David, Lawrence Bender and David Guggenheim‘s An Inconvenient Truth.


Davis Guggenhiem (left, horn-rimmed glasses) and Al Gore plugging An Inconvenient Truth at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. (mpRm publicist Michael Lawson stands at far right)
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You’d never know it by looking at the boring-blah photos for X-Men: The Last Stand on Rotten Tomatoes, but something kinda bad…well, “bad” is a relative term, so let’s say “bad” in an engineering sense…happens to the Golden Gate bridge in this film.

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Here‘s a promotional video about David Fincher and his Zodiac editor Angus Wall using Apple’s Final Cut Pro…a good piece. The Paramount release (11.10) was shot with HD Viper cameras (i.e., the same used for Michael Mann‘s Collateral and Miami Vice). Nothing mu8ch about the film, although it shows stills of costar Brian Cox wearing his long, silvery Melvin Belli wig. It also shows that Fincher’s team have created complex digital cityscapes to portray San Francisco at it was in the late ’60s, when the Zodiac killings were (mostly) happening.

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“I went to see Mission: Impossible III at one of the sneaks last night (i.e., Thursday, 5.4). I enjoyed it very much, and think it’s the best of the three films. And yet last night there were maybe 20 other people in the theatre besides my party of five. The theatre I went to see it in is a 10-plex that is opening the film today on five of their screens. They were apparently prepared to show the film on all five screens at 10 pm to accomodate crowds, but the need didn’t materialize. I think it√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s gonna do well this weekend (I mean, with a 4,000 screen opening, no one will have much of a choice), but I wonder how strong it will be in the long run.” — David Adams, Boston, MA.

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Mission: Impossible III “is almost a video nerd’s spoof of a whole genre of loud, cold, exhaustingly extreme thrill-ride films , Cruisified into extravagant pulp,” writes the San Diego Union-Tribune‘s David Elliott. That’s a pretty vivid sentence, but this one is even better: “[It’s] about as much fun as somebody dipping into your brain with a motorized ice cream scooper.”

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“I have to echo what you and others had said about Cruise being damaged goods, especially when my girlfriend declared ‘no interest whatsoever in seeing another Tom Cruise movie,’ including ones where things explode and the early word is strong. Do you think it’s a gender thing? Are guys more forgiving of a star’s very public ‘private’ life as long as they deliver the goods on screen, while women can’t shake the fact that the guy they’re supposed to be cheering for on screen is something of a nutter in real life?” — Brad Abraham