Hollywood Truths »

The New Yorker has been on a roll lately. Only a couple of weeks after Anthony Lane's fascinating, where-did-this-come-from essay, in which he laid out an argument for the reassessment of Walt Disney's importance to film history, the other critic at the House of Kael, David Denby, has delivered a multi-faceted 8,300 word piece that sums up the state of the film industry at the start of 2007. The essay is a Candide-like stroll through a landscape both in decline and on the cusp of possible renewal, beginning with a caustic slap at the video iPod, with its pretensions of delivering cinema in the palm of your hand, and then delving into a treatise on the big subject of distribution, and how studios will manage (or mismanage) it going forward. Denby slaps away the "content when you want it, where you want it, how you want it" blather that studio chiefs are now trumpeting with the salient point that young people who watch Citizen Kane on a tiny screen are getting a bad experience "even if they never know it."

He points out that nothing can bridge the disconnect between sound and picture when you're watching a film on a hand-held device and listening to it on head-phones. "In Brokeback Mountain, as a storm breaks, the lightning flashed on-screen, but the thunder roared in my head." For a counterpoint, Denby also evaluates the ultimate in home theater entertainment -- a $200,000 set-up with strategically positioned speakers and the very best HD DVD available -- and acknowledges the awesomeness of the experience. He generously concedes that there are wonders that only digital can do, but also explores what it lacks and what it can't recreate, like the rich, painterly bleed of color and shadow that exists in a film like Taxi Driver. His complaint that human flesh looks synthetic in digital film is answered by a digital technician: "You want pores, we'll give you pores." Denby concludes that, like it or not, digital will create a "radical break with the many ways of watching movies that have given us pleasure in the past."

Nope, she's not going away quietly. Lisa Marie, the former model and long-time girlfriend of director Tim Burton who was thrown over when Burton met Helena Bonham Carter on the set of Planet of the Apes, has filed suit against Burton in Los Angeles Superior Court, claiming fraud and breach of fiduciary duty. What fraud did Burton commit? According to the suit, it's that he once told Marie he would "support her for the rest of her life." Turns out he's forgotten about that, what with the career and the getting on with his life and the making Borat into a singing barber and what-not. Marie, who was most memorable as the voluptuous Vampira in Ed Wood and as the Martian scout in Mars Attacks!, is also claiming that poor legal advice led to her signing certain papers with Burton that "deprived her of her rights" -- presumably her rights to the very monies she is so adamantly seeking now.

The lawsuit asks for a scuttling of all contracts between the former lovebirds, as well as an unspecified amount of dough. This is not the first post-break-up outburst from Marie, whose anti-Hollywood screeds in the press have earned her a toxic reputation in Tinseltown and prevented her from racking up a single film credit in the five years since the split. Early last year she prompted a minor media stir by holding a 'psychic cleansing' public garage sale, in which she divested herself of all Burton-related belongings, including movie props such as a chaise lounge used in Ed Wood.

The debate over Erich von Stroheim's reputation as a filmmaker exists in a state of suspended animation: it's more or less settled, but could conceivably fly open one day if the 9-hour version of his masterpiece, Greed, is ever discovered. The film was a page-for-page rendering of Frank Norris' classic American novel McTeague, about a man of limited intellect who fails at his ambition to be a dentist and winds up chained to a dead man in Death Valley. With a shooting script only ten pages shorter than the novel, it took a grueling year to shoot and ended up provoking an actual fistfight between von Stroheim and Louis B. Mayer. Upon completion, it was screened for a select few at its full length, then Mayer ordered that it be hacked down to two hours and allegedly ordered the remaining seven hours of footage to be destroyed. Unless that information is wrong, and several dusty film cans pop up in a basement somewhere in the year 2036, we're stuck with what we have.

First of all, everything you imagine about a film festival like Cannes is wrong, wrong, wrong. You don't rub elbows with stars; you don't go to fabulous parties. You wake up, you see three or four movies, you write -- a lot -- and try to come to grips with the fact that for every movie you're seeing there are four, five, six more that you're missing. You try to not think about it, because you'd go mad -- but you do think about it, and you do go a little mad.

The thing you also need to know about Cannes is that it's essentially a big, shiny façade -- the reality of it is nothing like you see in the media. Cannes is a festival, but it's also a market -- a place where films are bought, sold and crafted. I remember my first year here, two years ago, seeing posters for 16 Blocks and thinking "Bruce Willis? Mos Def? Why haven't I heard about this film?" Then, sitting down with a coffee and reading the trades, I realized that the reason I hadn't heard of 16 Blocks before that morning was because before that morning it didn't exist -- the deal had been signed that night, foreign financing and markets brought on board and ensuring the film would happen.

Here are three easy ways to piss off a movie critic: 1) Search his bag or pat him down, because there is no warmer feeling to start a two-hour relationship with than, "I accuse you!"; 2) Don't let him bring his own food in to a screening, and ignore his sensible cries of, "If I ate nothing but the food you serve here all day, I'd die."; and, 3) Tell him that he can't see your movie in time to make his deadline.

According to a story in the New York Post, less than two months in, 2006 already tops 2005 for major studio films that have not screened for the press. The Post's Lou Lumenick quoted Tom Ortenberg, president of Lions Gate (whose Friday release Madea's Family Reunion did not screen for the press), as saying, "We are not going to spend $50,000 for the privilege of negative reviews for a film that isn't going to be affected by them."

I'd venture to say that when a studio announces ahead of time that its movie is not going to screen for the press - like Sony did with last week's #2 movie (heh heh) Date Movie - that it hurts more than it helps, as it creates a backlash and in many cases, a shortfall at the box office. Like it or not, people listen to critics for guidance as to how to spend their hard-earned dollars. People form relationships with particular critics, using them as metersticks for their own tastes and sensibilities, even when there is disagreement. Is there really any such thing as "critic proof", and aren't audiences the biggest critic of all?

I have an idea as to how the studios can make this entire discussion moot in the future - STOP MAKING SHITTY MOVIES!

When a movie is advertised as "from the writers of" or "from the producer of," that means that they're unsure of how to either market the movie and/or the movie looks kinda lame so they have to do all they can to associate it with a better, more well-known film.

I once saw a movie (can't remember which one) advertised as "from an executive producer of..." Huh? Who cares? Movies have often been advertised as "from the director of...," but who the hell cares about executive producers?

I can't wait for the day when we hear "from a friend of the man who was the assistant costumer on Superman Returns comes..."

Whenever you see a celebrity on television and they are at a sporting event, they will be rooting for either the Los Angeles Lakers or The New York Yankees. This is because they don't really follow sports and they just throw on the cap from one of these teams and root for them so they seem like a regular Joe or Jane.

Whenever a celebrity says one of the following...

• "I don't read reviews."
• "I don't listen to gossip."
• "I have all the same friends I had when I was a kid."
• "I posed nude because it's empowering to women."
• "I've never smoked pot."
• "Oh, I still get along with my ex-husband/wife."
• "I never wanted that sex tape to get out - someone stole it from me."

...it's probably not true.

No one in the world enjoys those trivia questions we see on movie screens before the coming attractions start. I mean, "Unscramble this movie star's name: BOB EPOH?." They're not even trying anymore.

Whenever Jay Leno says to a guest after interviewing them, "I know you have to go...", that means the guest doesn't have any place to go but is much too big and important to bother sitting around on the couch for the rest of the show while the lesser stars are on.