Hollywood Babble On & On #333: MGM, Relativity, & 2 Combating Columnists!

The Wrap's Sharon Waxman poo-pooed Nikki Finke for poo-pooing The Wrap's story about a plot by Relativity Media to take over MGM by buying up their debt, forcing the semi-moribund studio into bankruptcy, then taking it over, sweeping out the old management, putting in some new folks, and remaking the studio in their image.

Sharon Waxman says yes, and has what is alleged to be samples from a Relativity presentation called "Project Smith." The presentation illustrates a plan to take over an unnamed studio code-named "Smith" and by the way, Studio Smith, just happens to have the James Bond franchise.

Nikki Finke says that her sources say that Relativity is planning some other deal with the debt, possibly selling it at a profit at a future date when the general economy, and the studio are on a surer footing.

I'm not sure who to believe.

So let's look at the evidence:

Relativity recently dipped its toe in MGM's pond by co-producing the remake of The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3.

However, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 lost a lot of money for Relativity, Columbia, and MGM, ouch.

Relativity has a very close relationship with Universal Pictures.

However, that relationship can't all that hot right now, especially after the bath both companies took with the movie Land of the Lost, and Relativity's rather odd decision to buy Universal's former "B-Movie" division Rogue Pictures and turn it into some sort of "lifestyle brand."

So this could go either way. The Project Smith papers could merely be a trial balloon by some executives at Relativity that got leaked, or it could be a real plan of action. The real trick is if Relativity and its backers have the hard cash to take over MGM, and make it an active company without amassing the sort of crippling debt that's kept the company from being more than just a bare bones distributor and a film library.

In the case of Waxman vs Finke, I only have one solution to prove who is right:

THUNDERDOME!!

Hollywood Babble On & On #331: 2 Bits About Bosses

1. NBC-U: IT'S EVERYONE ELSE'S FAULT

Kim Masters at The Daily Beast is a little amazed that the majority of the rumors about who is to blame for the slow sinking of the good ship NBC-Universal don't put the blame on its Captain and First Mate, CEO Jeff Zucker and network boss Ben Silverman.

The prevalent theory is that Zucker, Silverman, and/or their staff are planting the rumors in hope that it will somehow help them keep their jobs.

I can believe that theory, because they're definitely not running a studio/network, and henceforth have the time to go around planting rumors. The studio's had a string of turkeys this summer, and even managed to turn a #1 opening weekend for Bruno into a disaster.

On the network side NBC can't buy a hit, literally. The entire network's become a black hole, just being their has become a mark against the shows, regardless of quality.

The company needs a fresh start, with fresh blood, and you can't get much fresher than...
You can't blame me for trying.

Anyway, in other news...

2. BOB NEEDS HELP?

Defamer's buzzing about an anonymous help wanted ad calling for an assistant for a New York movie executive. They suspect the ad was posted by Bob Weinstein, who is debuting on this blog, and that he is in need of some help with operating The Weinstein Co. which currently makes NBC-U look well run.

Let's have a look at the ad, and I'll tell you what they're really looking for:

Responsibilities include:

· Managing heavy phones, rolling calls, and maintaining call sheet

Somebody to run interference from filmmakers demanding to know why their film hasn't been released, and won't be released, ever.

· Scheduling meetings and managing calendar for all work and personal related matters

Arrange meeting times that I'll ignore, and be able to take getting blamed for me being late.

· Supply constant mobile communication and attend to personal errands

Be able to answer my phone and wipe my ass at the same time.

· Preparation and submission of expense reports

Lots of imagination needed.

· Liaison between executive and studio presidents, financial institutions, talent agencies, principal investors, fortune 500 CEOs, writers, directors, producers, and A-list talent

You have to do it, because none of them are talking to me.

· Able to juggle multiple tasks, deadlines, and responsibilities

Basically do everything I tell you, all at the same time.

· Booking all travel and travel arrangements

Be able to book my travel on your credit card instead of the company card. The company will reimburse you, I swear.

· Traveling with executive, usually at the last minute and for unknown periods of time

I need someone to carry my luggage, and on occasion, me.

· Superb gate-keeping skills

Must be able to hold back angry torch wielding mobs. Which are legal in New York as long as they don't smoke indoors.

· Ability to travel on a moments notice and stay away from home for uncertain amounts of time

If I need you to meet me in the woods and to bring a shovel, you will do it.

· Ability to stay on top of an ever-changing day and night

Follow my mood swings.

· Attending events and company-related functions with executive

Do my running and fetching, and making sure that everyone knows that I'm still important.

· Take dictation and be responsible for speaking on behalf of executive

Write down what I say, and then leak it to the press, verbatim, to make the company look like it's still viable.

· Coordinate screenings, meetings, private lodging, parties, etc. for executive and senior staff

Must know what places don't ask for cash up front.

Experience and qualifications must include:

· BA/BS degree

We've got lots of BS here, that's for certain.

· Expansive knowledge of film and the film industry

Know the difference between who hates me, who loathes me, and who is plotting to kill me.

· Must know how to do script coverage

Look at films that we either won't make, or bury if they do get made.

· Minimum 2-3 years experience assisting another top-level executive or high-level professional

I need someone to tell me what it is that a top level executive actually does.

· Organized and detail-oriented

Be what I am not.

· Excellent writing and communication skills

Mus rite gud an talc widdout usin da word "fuck" in every sentence.

· Personable and professional demeanor

Keeping your crying jags, and depression fueled booze and drug binges on your own time.

· Minimum of three references

Not that I'll be able to check them, no one's talking to me anyway.

· Must know how to use blackberry and Microsoft Outlook

Because I don't.

· Mac & PC literate

Able to fix the computer that I threw at you.

Wow, that ad says a lot.

(Knock-Knock)

Who could that be?

Bob Weinstein?

Aaargh!

Hollywood Babble On & On #330: Pound Foolish

1. JACKSON RISES FROM THE GRAVE (SORT OF)

Word on the street is that Sony is the front runner to make some sort of feature film from the 80 hours of rehearsal footage, and pre-shot interstitial material the late pop star filmed just before his death.

Now the price is rumored to be north of $50 million. Which I find rather interesting, because the first reports said that the bidding would start at $50 million. Since they're not bragging about how frenzied the bidding was, or how much higher than $50 million the final price will be, I have the feeling that bidding wasn't particularly frenzied, or that AEG will be getting much more than starting price. At least that's my suspicion.

Anyway, this brings me to the price itself. $50,000,000 seems a tad high to me for something that may never be more than a ghoulish curiosity. Because the reports I've seen about those rehearsals say that Jackson just couldn't deliver the energy that made his early performances so popular due to age, poor health, and a reported loss of passion for performing. It strikes me that Sony will have their work cut out for them if they're going to make anything out of the 80 hours of footage that won't come across as a redux of the whole Britney Spears/MTV Awards fiasco.

Now MTV used that to get their logo on every infotainment show in the world, but Sony will be buying into a different situation. I'm talking $50 million + to buy the footage, several million in post production costs to make it into something coherent, then promotion and distribution, which could be anywhere from another $50-$100 million+ added on top. This could end up costing Sony anywhere between $100-$200 million, which means that the film would have to be a blockbuster of Transformers/Harry Potter levels to make a profit in theaters. Despite the recent canonization of Jackson in the aftermath of his demise, that sort of excitement won't be at the same fever pitch by the time the film comes out. I don't really see a concert/rehearsal film making that kind of money, even when you put DVDs into the equation.

2. POUND FOOLISHARAMA

Once upon a time a 2oth Century Fox had a show on the enchanted Fox Network called Futurama, created by Matt Groening. It did okay, I thought it's satire was a tad ham-fisted, but it had its fans. However, the Fox Network didn't think there were enough of them, so they shit-canned the show.

But that wasn't the end of this little fairy tale. Original DVD movies did very well, reviving interest in the show, and Comedy Central offered to buy new episodes for their channel.

20th Century Fox seemed happy at first to get the show moving again, but decided that they didn't need the original cast, and put out a call for cheaper replacements.

And then it was revealed that the 20th Century Fox was in fact not a Wicked Witch, but a Witless Witch.

I can't keep up the faux-fairy tale spiel, so I'll cut it out, and tell you why 20th Century Fox has its head up its ass but thinks its brilliant...

The fans of Futurama are surprisingly dedicated to the show. They watch the reruns, and the DVDs and can recite dialogue from their fave episodes. They are going to notice that the voices they have loved are gone, replaced by illegal immigrant labour, and they are going to resent it, big time. The fans are going to hold it against the new show, and most likely avoid it as a pale imitation, or rip-off, of their beloved original, and they're going to tune out.

That's why the move was stupid, but here is my theory as to why Fox thinks they're being clever.

Comedy Central is owned by a rival company, and Fox doesn't want a rival to have any success with something that they considered a failure. So they're going to sabotage this iteration of Futurama, and gloat about their rival failing.

Of course, they are ruining the success of the show as well as ruining the potential those new Futurama episodes could have in syndication, because Fox will no doubt foist them upon the broadcasters of the original Futurama, and drive those hard core fans away from that as well.

The show will fade from syndication, and an opportunity to revive a franchise and make it work will be missed.

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 #320: No Camp Hollywood This Year

According the indefatigable Nikki Finke the annual Camp Allen Big Money Confab is on again this year in Sun Valley, Idaho and that no studio or big media honchos were invited.

OUCH!

Now some folks are saying that it's inevitable, everything's going on the internet, and that for some reason the internet won't need professional quality entertainment content, but I beg to differ.

I think it's the studios' own damn fault that they weren't invited.

This camp is where the uber-rich gather, plot world domination, realize that they already dominate the world, pat each other on back, have some beer and barbecue, and then talk about where they can put their money to work.

One of those places where their money doesn't work is Hollywood.

Hollywood had it good during the hedge fund/sub-prime boom of the last few years, investors literally had money to burn, and when you're trying to dodge America's convoluted tax system, there's no better place to burn it than in the convoluted money system of Hollywood.

We're talking about a system where a film can make hundreds of millions at the box office, sell hundreds of thousands of DVDs, exponentially beating the costs of making and marketing, and still lose money.

This is the self-fulfilling idiocy that I've been talking about since I started this blog.

For those unwilling to look in my archives for the definition of that little nugget of unwisdom, I'll restate it here.

A self-fulfilling idiocy is a plan devised to solve a perceived (but not necessarily real) problem, yet this plan is so stupid, that only a complete idiot cannot see that it will cause even more (and all too real) problems in the future.

It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy, only with more stupid.

Hollywood thought that they had a problem, namely that they weren't making enough money for themselves. So they created their convoluted accounting system that takes what should be a simple business and making it needlessly complicated.

The management tells the shareholders that it's to protect their interests and guard their profits, so the shareholders went along, at first.

Then the idiocy kicked in.

People who had profit participation in individual films started getting screwed out of their fair share, so they started demanding more money up front.

The studios then started spending more on "stars" causing costs to go up. To recoup the costs they started going after the unions. The unions started fighting back, getting more and more money up front, causing costs to rise even more.

All during this time the studio management started hiking their own salaries and perks to levels more befitting an 18th century French monarch than a mid-level business man.

Real profit margins began to shrink, but the investors stood by and let it happen, partially because of the tax write-offs, and partly because of the real money made by the occasional mega-blockbuster.

Costs keep going up, more in tune with the inflation rates of Zimbabwe than the real costs of making movies, and real margins continue to shrink. But they can continue to count on outside investment to keep them going because Wall Street was swimming in cash.

It basically went from being a business to a Ponzi Scheme, where instead of the first investors making the money, it's the management that scores the cash, through their salary and perks.

No one seemed to mind until the Wall Street money train came to a screeching halt. Suddenly investors started demanding actual returns on their investments, and the studios were gobsmacked, because they literally don't know how to do that.

So you get studios finding it hard to find financing, even though box-office numbers are strong, because who wants to toss their money into a black hole?

Which is why Hollywood was left out of Camp Allen, it's about opportunities, not idiocy. If Hollywood wants back in on the whole deal, they better get off their duffs and reform how everything is done in Hollywood, from the top down.

Hollywood Babble On & On #319: Money Musings From the WTF Files...

1. VIEW THIS?

There's a report going around the interwebs that a major studio is planning to do a big screen movie based on the Viewmaster.

I hope that it's a joke, not unlike my attempt at a Hungry-Hungry Hippos movie rumour, but a lot of people seem to be taking this Viewmaster movie seriously.

For those of you who don't predate Nintendo, the Viewmaster was a toy that looked like red plastic binoculars, but they didn't work like binoculars. You had to get a little cardboard circle, ringed with tiny photo-slides, shove it into the Viewmaster, hold it up to the light, look in, and you would see a 3D picture of the 1965 World's Fair.

Doesn't that just scream a big budget motion picture?

Which is why I hope it's a joke, because it's beyond ridiculous. Viewmasters may have pictures, but they certainly don't have any of the motion you need for a motion picture. They're the sort of toy that you use a little on Xmas day, toss in a box, and never think of again until years later and you're cleaning out your basement and say, "Hey, my old Viewmaster," look in it one more time, and then toss it back into the box until the scene repeats itself again when you're with your grandchildren and packing for you trip to the old folks home.

It's such a lame idea I'm certain that a studio is probably going to drop a few million on it.

2. MICHAEL JACKSON IS STILL EXPENSIVE

This time it's the taxpayers of California who are shelling out a reported $2.5 million for the police, and other sundries overseeing today's media circus.

AEG, the concert promoter and host of this event, has refused to pay for these extras, even though they are trying to use this event to suck some cash out of Jackson's legacy.

Now any other state would have said: "Whoa there pardner, no moolah, no memorial."

But this isn't any other state, this is California, otherwise known as fame's doormat.

A state that's paying vendors and suppliers with IOU's because it HAS NO MONEY, is taking a $2.5 million hit that it can't afford because it involves someone famous.

If AEG refused to put up the money for the police, fire, and ambulance services that have to oversee such an event, I'd have given them a big fat no. They could do it in another city, I wouldn't care. And don't talk about tourists will somehow pay for it by spending money in LA, and boost the economy, but I can't see it having that much of an effect. The state's economy, tax system, and government has become a massive black hole, where if you don't get your money up front, you're probably not going to get it at all once it's been picked apart. It's like studio bookkeeping, but writ large, and as a philosophy of governance.

Also, it's the principle of the thing. The state of California has to stop being a doormat for anyone and anything that can rouse some media attention, and get down to business.

I'd have billed AEG, and then billed the major media outlets like CNN, Fox News, and the networks for the right to cover the event. If they complain, tell them to sue, and remind them who the judges work for, and that by the time they get it to court, the event will be long over.

Sure, it's extortion, but desperate times call for desperate measures.