[Eug Wanker]

Rob Schneider rips a new one in the LA Times

[sideus]

Haha!

[Randman]

Hmm, hard up for material today, eh?

[ManOfSteal]

Nice!



I had no idea they garnished enough profit from the 1st movie to create a sequel though...I'm sure it will make hundreds of dollars nation-wide!

[paully dub]

Basicially everyone who loved the "Making copies" sketch on SNL...

Funny, though in a "I still wouldn't pay 10 bucks to see his stupid movie" kinda way.

[MacGorilla]

ha ha. Great letter!

[hayesk]

Funny, but why do I get the feeling this letter is fake, like those fake Andy Rooney essays and George Carlin bits that get spammed across the Internet every once in a while.

[ManOfSteal]

Originally posted by hayesk:
Funny, but why do I get the feeling this letter is fake, like those fake Andy Rooney essays and George Carlin bits that get spammed across the Internet every once in a while.

True, and where was this exactly in the LA Times?

[Apple Pro Underwear]

the academy is biased.

the criteria used on nominating movies is partial to dramas and the like when comedies and cartoons offer equal artistic expression.

[sideus]

http://www.baltimoresun.com/features...&cset=true

In Hollywood, Oscar's an outsider

Big studios share spectacular lack of creative spark, risk-taking execs

By Patrick Goldstein
Los Angeles Times

January 30, 2005

HOLLYWOOD - It's a funny thing, but today's movie studios are no longer in the Oscar business. If there's one common thread among this year's five best-picture nominees, it's that they were largely financed by outside investors.

The most money any studio put into one of the nominees was the $21 million Miramax anted up for Finding Neverland. The other nominated films were orphans - ignored, unloved and turned down flat by most of the same studios that eagerly remake dozens of old TV series (aren't you looking forward to a bigger, dumber version of The Dukes of Hazzard?) or bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to the incomparable Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.

Most of the nominees aren't even classic outside-the-system indie movies. They're artistic gambles financed by entrepreneurs. The Aviator, although released by Miramax, was financed largely by Graham King, who was responsible for roughly $80 million of the film's $116 million budget. Ray, which earned six Oscar nominations, was financed by real-estate tycoon turned media baron Phil Anschutz, who put up the entire $40 million budget after every studio in town passed on the project.

Even Clint Eastwood, who's been making movies for Warner Bros. since before many of his rival best-actor nominees were born, couldn't persuade the studio that spent $85 million on Scooby-Doo to put up $30 million for Million Dollar Baby. So, Hollywood's most revered actor-director went begging. When no other studio would make the film, Eastwood persuaded another entrepreneur, Lakeshore Entertainment's Tom Rosenberg, to put up half the budget, with Warner Bros. kicking in the rest.

Keep looking for 'yes'

So how do good movies get made these days? Luckily, in Hollywood, some people just won't take no for an answer.

Take as an example Sideways, which earned five Oscar nominations Tuesday. The film's writer-director, Alexander Payne, took the project to a slew of studios with his cast already in place. He got a chorus of no's, not because the studios didn't like the script, but because they wanted Brad Pitt or George Clooney instead of Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church in the leading roles.

By the time Payne and producer Michael London took the movie to Fox Searchlight, which agreed to make it for a meager $16 million, they'd gotten a yes from only one other studio, Paramount Pictures. One studio told London it was full up with special-effects thrillers - "we've already done our one movie about people."

From the studio point of view, the goal these days is to make movies that have the kind of easy accessibility that allows them to perform well in international markets, on DVD, and in all the other ancillary revenue streams the studios love to boast about to investors. Without the marketing momentum of Oscar nominations, it was hard to make a safe bet - the emphasis, of course, being on "safe" - that any of these films would turn a profit.

Such bottom-line obsession hasn't always been the case in Hollywood. In 1997, with Leonardo DiCaprio on board as star, two studios ended up spending $200 million to make James Cameron's Oscar-winning Titanic. Today, even though DiCaprio remains a huge international star, it was King, not a studio, who took the risk on Aviator, a $116 million film.

It's no wonder that King alone has produced three best-picture nominees in the past five years: Aviator, Gangs of New York and Traffic. Unlike the studios, King, who bankrolls his films by selling off the rights in foreign territories, is in the risk-taking business. He says Aviator met with rejection everywhere because everyone was scared that Scorsese would be uncontrollable. "And yet they were happy to turn around and green-light some very ordinary action-adventure movie you could see any day of the week."

Staying safe

If there's any lesson to be drawn from Tuesday's Oscar hoopla, it's not just about movie financing but the lack of studio creativity. Of the five best-picture nominees, only Finding Neverland went through a studio development process, where the studio pays a writer, approves a cast and puts up the money for the production. All the other pictures were made like independent movies. The studios do market and distribute these films and get some of the glory, but it's not the same as taking the risk to make them.

When you're doing a remake of a TV show, it hardly matters whether the studio marketing chief is in the room, lobbying for a younger cast or more teen-friendly toilet humor. But when it comes to art, the equation is pretty simple: the less meddling, the better the movie.

According to Eastwood, he learned not to fool with what he thinks is a good thing from his mentor, Don Siegel, who directed five Eastwood films, including Dirty Harry. "I've learned when you have a good draft of a script, you just shouldn't mess with it anymore," he said.

Maybe not taking no for an answer isn't such a bad career move.

Ray director Taylor Hackford had the rights to the film for nearly 15 years before he got it made. Alexander Payne cut the budget for Sideways over and over before he got it down to a number where someone would agree to back the film. Eastwood has now made two Oscar best-picture nominees in a row (last year's was Mystic River) where he had to waive his salary to get them off the ground. He considers it a small price to pay for the opportunity to make a good movie.

"The studios would like to not take any risk, but there's no such thing," he says. "If you want to make a good movie, you always take a risk."

The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Publishing newspaper.

[Mafia]

i enjoyed the first one, but i enjoyed watching it on cable for free. i'd never pay to see this.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by ManOfSteal:
True, and where was this exactly in the LA Times?

You could always hold up a mirror to the PDF to get some clues...

[andreas_g4]

Who's Rob Schneider. I only know the name from a South Park Episode.

[E's Lil Theorem]

This paragraph had me rolling:

Patrick, I can honestly say that if I sat with your colleagues at a luncheon, afterwards, they'd say, "You know, that Rob Schneider is a pretty intelligent guy, I hope we can do that again." Whereas, if you sat with my colleagues, after lunch, you would just be beaten to beyond recognition.

Originally posted by andreas_g4:
Who's Rob Schneider. I only know the name from a South Park Episode.

Check out what else he's done.

[andreas_g4]

Ahh, didn't know he was at imdb. Well, I could have googled… Thx anyway!

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
You could always hold up a mirror to the PDF to get some clues...

I'm not sure what it has to do with a werewolf, but flipping the letter does reveal that the text bleeding through is from a story that ran Feb. 2…in Variety.

[Eriamjh]

Rob Schneider IS "The Stapler"!