Saturday Silliness Cinema: A Parcel of Python

I just got back from the annual library overstock sale, and like every year, I went completely ape-shit and bought about 100 pounds of books for about $25. Hardcovers, paperbacks, fiction, non-fiction, anthologies, omnibuses, and just about every genre. So here's some Monty Python, and I promise to post something business and rant related later today. So y'all come back now ya' hear.

Sorry folks...

Sorry that I didn't blog today. A mix of slow news, hot weather, and too much else to do. Though I did get a lot of work done on my book about Hollywood business today, so it wasn't a complete wank.

My search for a literary agent is going strong. I sent out just about a dozen queries for this round, got 3 rejections so far, and all the rejections had one thing in common. All three came literally within the amount of time it took to hit the reply button, and paste in a form rejection letter, which tells me that those agents didn't even read the materials their submission guidelines asked for. The fastest was literally within an hour of the e-mail query being sent.

Well, if they don't bother to read the letter and the other materials their guidelines claimed to ask for, I won't be wasting my time with them.

Anyway, posting for tomorrow is a tad uncertain. I have to attend a funeral tomorrow, and will be gone most of the day, and Saturday is the annual summer library overstock sale. Which has a huge selection of used books at rock bottom prices. So I will probably be going ape-shit crazy at the sale, like I do every year.

Be good, and I'll be back posting as soon as possible, until then feel free to read my last two posts, and place your 2 cents in the comments.

Hollywood Babble On & On #327: Let's Help MGM

I'm buoyed by the response I got over my suggestions with what could have been done with the $60 million pissed away on the movie Che, so I'm going to posit another possibility.

MGM-UA has been declared a going concern, and has been meeting all of its debt requirements, which bodes well for the company, but it's $5.5 billion dollar library isn't enough to keep the company going. It needs new product to increase it's value and revenue potential.

Now normally I don't support remakes, I think MGM's plan to remake Red Dawn is about 20+ years too late, but it looks like MGM might have no choice but to do some remakes until the company is on a surer financial footing.

Which is where you come in. I want you to look up the MGM library, and see what films could be used in a remake that won't offend the sense and sensibility of movie fans.

Here are my suggestions:

TELEFON: The original was a Charles Bronson vehicle where he played a KGB agent hunting Donald Pleasance who is using the phone to set off brainwashed people and turn them into killers.

THE REMAKE CONCEPT: A KGB agent, whose came to America as a sleeper in the 1970s or 80s and stayed after the USSR's collapse, finds out that an old associate has sold the list of brainwashed people, and the instructions to use them, to a terrorist organization, and has to stop the plan before this cold war relic wreaks havoc. It'll be a great part for an older actor, and if anyone says that won't sell, tell them three little words: "Gran Torino, Taken." Hat tip to Thierry Attard whose horrified reaction to the concept made me think of this post.

THE SATAN BUG: A thriller about a mad scientist threatening to "play god" with vials of stolen bio-weapons and the secret agent tasked to stop him.

THE REMAKE CONCEPT: Despite being directed by action movie legend John Sturges, and a script by top action/adventure writers Alistair McLean, James Clavell, and screenwriter Edward Anhalt, was surprisingly light on real thrills. They were trying to be more cerebral than the Bond films but when was found wanting by critics and audiences. My advice, take the thrills and suspense that's inherent in the story, and run with it.

THE BRIDE WORE BLACK: A French film by Francois Truffaut, about a woman out for revenge when her husband's killed at their wedding.

THE REMAKE CONCEPT: Beautiful woman, action, suspense, and beautiful European locales, the film makes itself.

FROM NOON TIL THREE: A rare Charles Bronson romantic comedy about an Old West outlaw who becomes a legend thanks to the overwrought imagination of a lonely widow in a big isolated house, but when he can't live up to the legend things start to get weird.

THE REMAKE CONCEPT: If handled as a satire of media culture, with liberal doses of racy comedy, it could work.

SECRET ADMIRER: An old fashioned romantic farce in the guise of an 80s teen sex comedy about a misdirected anonymous love letter that wreaks havoc wherever it goes.

THE REMAKE CONCEPT: Michael Cera, Amada Seyfried, as the leads, a sharp script, and Jason Reitman directing, you could have a winner.

YOUR PAST IS SHOWING: A mostly forgotten Peter Sellers black comedy about a TV star with a taste for elaborate disguises plotting to kill a blackmailing tabloid editor.

THE REMAKE CONCEPT: Jim Carrey dons a variety of disguises as he plots to snuff out an obnoxious gossip blogger who is blackmailing half of Hollywood. Trust me, the hissy fits it'll cause among real gossip bloggers will be worth millions in advertising.

So get poking around the MGM-UA library, come up with some concepts, and I'll poach them and pitch them to MGM myself for millions! Bwah-hah-hah!

Just kidding, MGM doesn't have millions to spare.

I'll do it for thousands! Bwah-hah-hah!

Hollywood Babble On & On #326: Regrets & Raking It In

1. THE FALL OF COMMUNISM

Director Steven Soderbergh was rather candid in an interview with UK's The Guardian newspaper, admitting that he regrets making his 2 part, 4 1/2 hour biopic of Marxist rebel Che Guevera.

Well, I can understand the regrets. I mean Soderbergh literally pissed away around $60 million dollars making an incredibly long movie about someone that the majority of people either know as a celebrity fashion accessory, or as a hopped up mini-Hitler wannabe who shot anyone and everyone that displeased him in the slightest with wild abandon. Even Fidel Castro, his one time comrade in arms, didn't like Che, sending him militarily naked to Bolivia to get killed, and only started canonizing him after his death.

What I don't understand is exactly how he got $60 million to get it made. That might become a case for Furious D, Private Dick, someday.

But anyway, it's interesting to see a filmmaker admit that he made a big $60 million mistake that despite what the Guardian says, made less than $2 million at the international box office according the most accurate sources. He might learn from it, but since he's part of Hollywood, that's probably unlikely.

And this is where you, my readers come in, I want you to come up with as many ideas as you can as to how you would spend the $60 million spent on Che, and leave them in the comments.

2. THE RISE OF CAPITALISM

American Idol host Ryan Seacrest has inked a 3 year $45 million deal to continue hosting the show.

News of this deal sparked a lot of bitching a moaning about how talentless he is, and how he doesn't deserve this sort of deal, yadda, yadda, yadda...

Well, I guess I have to repeat what I wrote in an earlier post, that while I don't care for the shows that he hosts, he does have a talent, and that is not having talent. He's not the star, and he doesn't even try to be the star of the show, he comes out, has a few words with the singer, lets the judges speak, takes a shot at Simon, reminds people of what numbers to call to vote, and then gets the hell off the stage. He doesn't go make a film about Marxist revolutionaries, do talk show appearances mocking other people's religious or political beliefs, or make pseudo-profound pronouncements on how others should live their lives. He does his job, and then he shuts the hell up.

Knowing when to shut the hell up is a supremely rare gift in Hollywood, and despite the occasional on camera screw up, he seems to be using it well, so I won't knock his fat paycheck.

Hollywood Babble On & On #325: Miscellaneous Monday Money Movie Musings

1. BRUNO GOES DOWN, BUT NOT IN THE WAY HE LIKES...

Sasha Baron Cohen's mockumentary Bruno, made about $30 million in its opening weekend, that's the good news for them. The bad news is that the ticket sales between Friday and Saturday dropped around 39%.

That doesn't bode well.

Universal paid $45.2 million to Media Rights Capital for the right to distribute the film, and then shelled out tens of millions more to promote the bejayzuz out of the flick, so if it fails to crack the $100 million mark, Universal could lose a lot of money on what looked like a sure thing.

Then again, if you looked at the history, they might have seen this coming, but I think I know why they didn't.

Borat cost $18 million dollars to make, didn't spend as much in promotion, and pulled in $128 million domestically. That's great, especially if you owned a piece of the film, but when you look at the big picture, when compared to the $500 million to $1 billion made by the big blockbusters, it's not that groundbreaking.

Then you make another movie, which is pretty much the same thing, except this time the foreigner in question is flaming gay, you run the risk of the audience going in on opening night, expecting the fresh originality of Borat, but seeing nothing new except for more genitalia on display.

This kills the repeat business, plus the word of mouth that gives a film legs past its opening weekend.

The film may pull it's onions out of the fire thanks to international box-office, but I'm not sure if the film is being distributed by UIP (Universal's international distributor that it co-owns with Paramount) or if MRC licensed those rights to other companies. I'll have to look that up.

I fear that Universal got a little caught up in the media hype over Borat, which outweighed its box-office enormously, and thought that if they spent tens of millions to sell the film they could make Bruno, even bigger. The problem is that a one-trick pony tends to have diminishing returns, and you have to protect your investment.

2. THE GERSH AGENCY GERSHES ITSELF UP

The Gersh Agency has dropped the "Agency" from its name, and now it's just called Gersh.

I'm not so sure as to why they thought that was necessary, but whatever floats their boat as they say.

The Gersh Agency also announced that Steve Gersh, the 3rd generation of Gershes, has joined the family business as an agent.

Well, I wish him good luck. Family businesses can get complicated, because of familial and business stresses working together to screw you, and a lot of them don't survive the third generation. I hope his family has taught him the business well, and that he's got the hustle in his bones to make it, because I like seeing people succeed by working hard, and not pissing it away.

My message to Steve Gersh: Don't screw it up, that's your name on the letterhead too, and that comes with a truckload of responsibility.

Hollywood Babble On & On #324: Sunday's Sundry Stumblings...

1. GREEN LANTERN CAST?

It's all over the interwebs that Warners Bros. has actually made a decision about the Green Lantern movie. To play the part of All American test pilot turned space cop Hal Jordan, they've cast a Canadian.

Vancouver spawned Ryan Reynolds, best known for playing crazy mutated anti-hero Deadpool in Wolverine: Butchered Continuity, the assistant turned hubby, turned love interest in The Proposal with Sandra Bullock, and as Macro in the coma fantasy kid show The Odyssey, will don the green jewelery and matching tights to save the various species of space sector 2814.

This brings up two issues:

WHAT ABOUT DEADPOOL? Marvel does seem intent on going through with a Deadpool movie, but Reynold's reported casting as a DC hero, in what could be the flagship of a new franchise could put an onion in their ointment.

While Deadpool has his fans, he also has a lot of detractors, who don't just not-like the character, but actively loathe the character and his 4th wall breaking motor mouth and other post-modernist tendencies. Those that like Deadpool also may not care for a non-disfigured version of their fave psychotic anti-hero in his own movie, especially one following the mangled continuity of the Wolverine movie. Despite many people saying that Reynolds' performance as Deadpool was a highlight of an otherwise forgettable movie, going forward with a Deadpool movie is still a really big risk.

Also Marvel may not like having people look at their character, and thinking about another company's character, and could nix the Deadpool movie and cut their losses before they spend too much on it.

Also...

WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER POTENTIAL LANTERNS? Just before the announcement that Reynolds was going to be the Green Lantern, the studio leaked that the top three candidates were Ryan Reynolds (natch), Bradley Cooper (hot off The Hangover) and Justin Timberlake (the boy band popster).

Now while Reynolds and Cooper both had the potential to be good at the part, I just can't wrap my considerable brainpower around the concept as Justin Timberlake even making the Top 20 possibles for the part of Hal Jordan.

Hal Jordan is essentially an old fashioned heroic lawman character. He's got his flaws, but he's essentially a straight arrow, fearless, and possessing a powerful will. He's first and foremost an adult.

Timberlake, despite his age, and his attempts at growing a pubescent beard, is still a kid. Where the Green Lantern may present righteous anger, Timberlake would look like a teenager having a hissy. The only reason he could have possibly been considered was because of his success as a pop star, and some studio executive thought that it could translate into line ups of teenage girls buying tickets to see him again and again, the way they did with Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic.

Yet the real performance of his attempts to play in movies shows that while those girls may buy his albums, and swoon over his curls in a Tiger Beat style photo-shoot, they aren't going to pay to see him on the big screen.

Which illustrates a problem in Hollywood. It's obsession with youth has rendered very few modern "leading men" to have the maturity necessary to play real leading man roles. There are just too many vain pretty-boys, and too many slovenly immature boy-men, and not enough men who look like they can handle themselves in a fight without a lot of special effects and trick editing.

2. THE ONE TRICK PONY

Bruno has opened big, and is looking that it might top Borat's $120 million+ box office take, which is pretty impressive for a hard "R" rated movie.

But it also creates a problem for Sasha Baron Cohen, the creator and star of Bruno and Borat. Outside of occassional acting roles, the British comedian has essentially based his career on ambushing people while playing aggressively obnoxious characters.

The problem is that he, and his characters are now a tad too well known for that sort of comedy to work. Even during the filming of Bruno the internet was abuzz of fashion shows, and premieres that he was crashing, and pondering where he would strike next.

That's not good when you've based your career on being a cypher outside the characters you portray.

Also Cohen is facing some harsh criticism for Bruno, mostly because he takes a slightly different tack than he did with Borat. In his first film he used Borat to harrass and annoy reactions out of ordinary Americans, with Bruno he's reportedly gone after the Hollywood fame machine itself, and they don't care when people piss in their own lawn. He could stop being the critic's darling, and that could hurt his next project.

And Cohen's act isn't exactly new. Canadian comedian Rick Mercer did a gentler, but still funny version of the same schtick in the late 1990s and early 2000s with Talking To Americans.



Interestingly, I read an interview with Mercer that gave his theory on why this worked. Mercer said that the working and middle class folks gave him the impression that they were onto him, but played along because they thought it was funny, and didn't want to be rude to the strange out of towner, but it was the politicians, university professors, and other "brain trust" professionals, that seemed to fall for it the worst. (And also the funniest parts of the skit.)

Mercer, like Cohen, knew that by using Americans, they were less likely than folks in other countries to beat the living piss out of him, and it helped make audiences in other countries feel smarter than the folks in the most powerful nation on Earth.

My advice to Cohen, first: I hope you banked your money, second, find another act, this one's done and dusted, and it's time to move onto something else.

Saturday Silliness Cinema: Mr. Show

Sorry for not blogging yesterday, a combination of hot weather, no real news, and an attack of the dumbs. But I'm back with my usual Saturday offering of comedy videos, and I'll be back to ranting about business as soon as I stop being so damn lazy.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy a sampling from the 90s HBO comedy series Mr. Show.

Hollywood Babble On & On #323: Independent Daze...

1. TROUBLE IN PARADISE OR A TROJAN HORSE?

Lionsgate's management has made a deal with 19.8% shareholder Mark Rachesky to go on the company's board and apparently side with them against corporate activist/raider Carl Icahn.

The twist in the tail is that Rachesky is an old friend and former apprentice to Icahn. So you can look at this in two ways. Is there a breech in the relationship between Rachesky and his mentor? Or is he going to be a Trojan Horse, and help open the gates to Icahn and finalize his planned takeover of the company?

These two men have a lot of history, so it's a matter of time if we see if they're really rivals, or allies in the takeover of Lionsgate.

I hope that whoever takes over Lionsgate, that it's the company that survives. It has the potential to provide a new business model for Hollywood if the management has the right philosophy.

So let's keep our eyes peeled on this one.

2. WEINSTEIN CAN DO BASTERDS, BUT PROBABLY NOT MUCH ELSE...

Nikki Finke reports some good news and bad news for the battered and beleagured Weinstein Company.

First...

THE GOOD NEWS: It looks like Harvey and Bob were able to shake enough change out of the couch cushions, and clip enough enough coupons to put the $30 million minimum needed to handle the domestic release of Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds.

Of course this is a mixed blessing for the company. To raise this money they had to hoard all their available cash, and not release a lot of their upcoming production slate, including some rather expensive productions. Which is really not much of a change in their usual business model of burying productions made by anyone whose name doesn't rhyme with Benton Farentino.

However, this is still a terrible risk for the Weinstein Company, because their whole future is pretty much riding on this one film. As I've said before, the roots of the film are in the dark, nihilistic, and anarchistic European war-action-exploitation films of the 1960s and 70s. American audiences may not care for a dark, nihilistic and anarchistic view of the war that made grampa a hero, and could be turned off by the whole thing.

The film may do connect better with European audiences, who remember WW2 differently than Americans, but those distribution rights, and the revenues they come with, are with Universal. That means if Americans don't make Basterds a domestic hit, the Weinstein Co. is going to be screwed royally.

And now...

THE BAD NEWS: A rumour that the Encore/Starz media company was going to invest in TWC was referred to by a company insider as "complete and utter bullshit."

BURN!

But seriously, why would anyone invest in TWC in any way that didn't involve the ouster of the men whose name graces the stationary.

I mean these are the people who:

A. Bought loads of independent films, only to sit on them, sometimes for eons, and refuse to release them for obscure accountancy reasons, ensuring that any momentum, and potential for profits, from the festival attention these films got is lost completely.

B. Started a feud with NBC-Universal over Project Runway, resulting in millions lost to litigation over bad faith contract negotiations, and a major mega-conglomerate contemplating the aesthetics of their heads on pikes.

C. Put all their eggs in the basket of getting another Oscar under their belt, destroying relationships, alienating Academy voters, and putting no thought into releasing something that might, you know, make a lot of money.

D. Produced and released a lot of really shitty films that lost boatloads of money.

E. Pissed off just about everyone that ever did business with them.

I can understand the position of Encore/Starz completely.

Hollywood Babble On & On #322: A Couple of Miscellaneous Money-Movie Musings...

1. MGM GETS A THUMBS UP

At least they get a thumbs up from the auditors, who declared the long moribund company a "going concern" in a recent report. (h/t Nikki Finke)

Well, bully for MGM I say, especially with some interested and potentially very serious buyers sniffing around.

Let's hope that these buyers are able to get around the company's crippling debt, and get the company on a solid and productive footing again. And since I don't like to repeat myself, though I often do, here are a few tips they might want to consider.

Plus, I hope that they don't try to leap right into trying to make the company a mega-major again, it hasn't been that since the late 1960s, and has to start modest, and grow from there.

2. NBC PINS A SPIN MEISTER

Jeff Zucker, the head of NBC Universal, appointed a long-time friend to take over public relations for the battered network/studio conglomerate. I had made some suggestions of who they could hire, but Zucker had his own ideas.

This news has sparked one of my trademark PSYCHIC FLASHES!

I predict that they'll be crowing a lot about Sasha Baron Cohen's Bruno making a lot of money on its opening, while completely ignoring the financial and creative washout of Land of the Lost, or that NBC could be the only network on the air, and still end up in fourth place.

Hollywood Babble On & On #321: Michael Jackson Is Dead, Alas

I managed to avoid the almost non-stop live coverage of Michael Jackson's memorial service, but unless I am willing to move to a cave in Uzbekistan, I just can't escape hearing at least some of the tidbits. The coverage of the memorial scored about 31 million viewers in the USA, a few million less than the last funeral given such coverage, the memorial for Ronald Reagan in 2004.

But I'm not here to talk about ratings, instead I'm going to tell you what I think the memorial told me about Michael Jackson the man and the world he lived in. And I've made a couple of lists...

WHAT I SAW:

1. His coffin was GOLD PLATED. Yep, a solid bronze coffin, plated in 14k gold. I'm sorry, but even an 18th century French market would look at that crate and think it was ostentatious and went beyond the line of tacky, to the realm of just plain nutty.

2. People are criticizing the family for putting his young children out on stage to somehow defend their father to wider world.

3. Many of the speakers went beyond telling the world about his success as an entertainer, but instead declared him the greatest entertainer who ever lived, and giving him credit for things like the election of Barack Obama, which occurred about 20 years after his last major hit album.

4. Many of the same "friends and associates" are now trying to squeeze something for themselves out of his death, from his former personal videographer/manager (and former gay porn producer) selling insider tidbits to the highest bidder, and even Barbara Walters, ignoring the wishes of the grieving family to score some illicit footage with a spy camera.

5. The family is supposedly arguing over where to bury him. Some want him in Neverland, hoping to make it some sort of Graceland type theme park, while others want him buried someplace else where he could rest in peace, and not be part of a package tour, two-bits a gander.

WHAT THOSE THINGS TOLD ME:

1. I associate waste with Michael Jackson. Wasted potential, wasted talent, a thousand wasted opportunities, and millions in wasted dollars. What purpose does this coffin serve other than to promote some sort of image of Jacko as a mad wasteful royal wannabe, and giving the mutant grave-robbers of our post-apocalyptic future something worth stealing after society totally collapses in 2059? Like just about everything in Jackson's life, there were a million better things that could have been done with those resources, but those things weren't done for reasons that really don't make any rational sense.

2. Personally, I think those kids have enough baggage to deal with, and making them part of the on-stage circus just strikes me as exploitative. Of course exploiting and emotionally scarring children is a Jackson family tradition, and that's according to Michael himself.

3. This shows the tendency to glorify the man way beyond his accomplishments. He had a lot of hits, and one ultra-mega-hit album with Thriller, but his career really didn't have the longevity or artistic adaptability necessary for supreme greatness in entertainment. Everything he did after-Thriller was pretty much indistinguishable from Thriller, with the addition of extreme plastic surgery and crotch grabbing to his repertoire. Also the rush to sanctify Jackson was pretty much a slap in the face of people like Martin Luther King, and the other African Americans who did way more than him, with apparently a lot less appreciation.

He was a great entertainer, his past success showed that, but he wasn't the greatest, and while he did a lot, he didn't change the world in the ways these people claim. And let's not forget how many of these same people wouldn't touch him with a ten foot pole when his sales were in the tank and he was being accused of child molestation. Like Jackson's life, and Hollywood itself, there's no restraint, and a bloated sense of importance.

4. Too many of the people who claimed friendship with Jackson are now trying to profit from him, and his death. It tells us a lot about the nature of fame and personal relationships. He used his personal relationships to get attention, and henceforth profit, and they in turn try to use their relationship with him for profit.

5. Everything associated with Jackson always seems to end in an argument, and usually in litigation. It's only a matter of time before the lawyers get involved, and then things will get really ugly, and no one involved will be safe.

Of course the big lesson of all this is that Jackson wasn't just an entertainer, he, and his memorial, was the embodiment of Hollywood itself. The wasting of potential & talent, the exploitation of innocent people, the overweening self-importance and ego at the expense of reality, the sleazy and corrupt nature of personal relationships, and even in death, everything ends in arguments and inevitable litigation.

He could have been a movie studio.