Poor Shelley Winters, who died

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Poor Shelley Winters, who died yesterday at the age of 86 years and 4 months, was always feisty and frank. I sat right next to her at a 1983 Cannon Films press luncheon for Over the Brooklyn Bridge (held prior to shooting), and as producer Menahem Golan got up and began making a speech, Winters squinted her eyes and said to pretty much everyone at our table, “Don’t like him… nope, don’t like him.” I met her again in 1997 at the Silver Spoon, a breakfast place in West Hollywood, and she told me I reminded her of an old boyfriend from New York. The IMDB bio has this passage about a visit she paid to Johnny Carson’s Tonight show in July 1972: “[Winters] grew
tired of [fellow guest] Oliver Reed’s attitude towards women…and after Shelley told Reed what she thought of his opinions, she left the set. The show continued with Reed still going on about women to Carson. Shortly after Winters appeared from stage left, carrying a champagne bucket of ice and water. She surprised Reed by dumping it over his head. Reed was furious over this and tried to attack her but [production assistants] intervened. The show broke for a commercial break, and when it resumed both actors were gone.”

“I just read your Wired

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“I just read your Wired comment about James Franco with Tristan and Isolde not catching a break, and I couldn’t agree more about his being a fine actor. His work on Freaks and Geeks (the most perceptive show about high school to ever air) was wonderful. It’s unfortunate that so many people only know him as Peter Parker’s bitch from the Spider-Man films.” — Jesse Perry, Nashville, Tenn.

Brokeback Mountain, playing in just

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Brokeback Mountain, playing in just over 700 theatres as of yesterday, will reach $32 million or thereabouts by the end of the four-day weekend. I’m presuming that Focus Features will expand big-time after Monday’s night’s expected Best Picture win at the Golden Globes awards. One marketing expert is forecasting a $60 million haul by the end of the theatrical run, but I don’t know…if it wins the Best Picture Oscar on March 5th it’ll get a new surge and probably stay in theatres until April, and it could go a lot higher. Ain’t no reins on this one.

The box-office positions could switch

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The box-office positions could switch between now and Monday night, but it appears that Hoodwinked, the animated Weinstein Co. release, is going to nudge its way into being the #1 film over the Martin Luther King holiday. Analysts are projecting a 4-day take of $16,900,000 over the second-place The Chronicles of Narnia with a projected $16,340,000. Hoodwinked “is not burn- ing up the pea patch,” a marketing veteran commented, “but it’s the first kids picture to hit the market since Narnia.” Some anal- ysts were speculating that Glory Road, the Jerry Bruckheimer forumula sports flick about a black Southern college basketball team in the ’60s, might be the winner because of the MLK holiday, but the current expectation is that it’ll come in just under Narnia with $16,280,000. Hostel is looking at $12,350,000 for the holiday weekend, Fun with Dick and Jane should do about $10,400,000, King Kong about $8,809,000, and Tristan and Isolde about $8,760,000. Poor James Franco…a really fine actor, can’t catch a break.

Here’s a very fine beat-by-beat

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Here’s a very fine beat-by-beat description of “Diana,” that short-film sequence in Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives that I got all jazzed about in one of my October columns…the one that happens in the supermarket between Robin Wright Penn and Jason Isaacs. The description (accompanied in Sunday’s edition by similar riffs by A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis) is by the New York Times‘ Stephen Holden. I’m guessing that 97% of the people reading this never saw Nine Lives. Well, it’ll be out on DVD on 2.14.06…just four weeks from now.

I had a nice and

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I had a nice and relaxed “Elsewhere Live” chat with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga on Wednesday, 1.11. Arriaga is the gifted screenwriter of Tommy Lee Jones‘ The Three Burials of Melqui- ades Estrada (Sony Classics, opening wide in early February) as well as three films by Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu — Amores Peros, 21 Grams and the forthcoming Babel. I’ll eventually put this into the “Elsewhere Live” archive, but here it is in the meantime. Arriaga spoke to me from his home in Mexico City.

Another slam against Munich, this

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Another slam against Munich, this one from the Washington Post op-ed columnist Charles Krauthammer. Doesn’t matter on this coast because Munich is a dead horse. In late December when the notion of “poor Munich” was the going thing I thought it might get lucky with a Best Picture nomination, but I doubt even this will happen now.

I was talking today with

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I was talking today with a journalist friend about David Poland’s Oscar blogger-rat pack analogy (Anne Thompson is Shirley MacLaine, Tom O’Neil is Joey Bishop, etc.) and the journo said, “Well, Poland’s part of this group so who’s he? Akim Tamiroff?” (This is a reference to Tamiroff having co-starred with Sinatra, Martin, Lawford, Davis, et. al. in the 1960 Ocean’s 11.)

I don’t cover Hollywood business-affairs

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I don’t cover Hollywood business-affairs stories because they’re boring (guys buying other guys’ companies and getting their friends to run them, etc.) but I’m told there’s activity going down right now regarding a purchase of Lions Gate. The suitors could be either MGM chairman-chief exec Harry Sloan, who’s an old pal of Lions Gate CEO Jon Feltheimer, except that Sloan would first have to void Sony’s purchase of MGM (he’s supposedly not happy there) by giving the money back and then he’d be free to do the Lions Gate deal. The other possible scenarios are about Paramount or Disney buying Lions Gate, as both are said to be interested. For all I know I’m being used to start a rumor and there’s no truth to it, but a guy I trust says it’s “definitely happening.” I called Lions Gate about this and their response was as follows: “We’re for sale every day on the New York Stock exchange because we’re a publicly traded company.”

David Carr, the N.Y. Times

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David Carr, the N.Y. Times Carpetbagger guy, tried to dimiss Walk the Line as a Best Picture contender this morning. Or has this Johnny Cash biopic in fact lost serious steam? That would be news to me, but maybe I’m not talking to the right people. Carr back- handed Jim Mangold’s film with stealth and without seeming too aggressive. He merely said it “has faded from memory, perhaps because it was not that memorable of a film.” Maybe…but it’s the only the Best Picture contender on the short list that’s certain to top $100 million, and isn’t there some kind of interest in having at least one Best Picture contender be a popular hit?

I liked David Poland’s comparing

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I liked David Poland’s comparing the various Oscar bloggers to early ’60s Rat Pack members (Pete Hammond is Sammy Davis, Jr., David Carr is Dean Martin, I’m Bing Crosby, et. al.), but boy, is he wrong when he says the Oscar race “is a horse race” and “there is no Secretariat this year” and that “anything can happen.” I know it’s more fun to pretend the ball is still in the air, but that sad little flick about them cowboys jes poke-poke-pokin’ along has the Best Picture Oscar all but roped and tied, and for two reasons above and beyond the reviews and the critics awards and the guilds: (1) when sizable numbers of Average Joe’s in red-state areas went to see it last weekend, thus proving it’s not just a blue-state, big-city film, and (2) when the gentlemanly Larry Miller took it off the marquee in his megaplex in Sandy, Utah, it suddenly became The Movie That Got Shut Down by Red-State Bigotry, which of course gives a whole ‘nother dimen- sion. Now if you vote for ole Brokeback you’re socking it to Miller and his fat-cat cronies from Utah…yee-haw!