The biggest problem in show business is that if there is no show, then there is no business. That's why theatrical distribution (mostly, the lack of it) is one of the most critical problems currently facing indie movies. Of approximately 38,000 screens in the US (a...
A documentary filmmaker once described the process of making a small budget movie as "crawling through a field of broken glass." Admittedly, he was making political documentaries and shooting in various war zones of the Middle East. Over there, it's hard to find the glass...
Back in the early spring of 1977, an executive in charge of booking for a major Midwestern theater chain was feeling perplexed. He was trying to pick what might be the big summer hit for his company and had narrowed the choices down to one...
It is the middle of summer and already the air has taken an autumn chill courtesy of the mid-season box office report. Technically, the box office is up by 10 per cent. In reality, this is due to a couple of films that have done...
Reading Hollywood news reports is a lot like reading Pravda and Izvestia back in the days of the old Soviet Union. You have to read heavily between the lines and ignore most of what is said. This is especially true of the recent series of studio...
Life is full of ironies. After all, it is pretty ironic that a book detailing how an underfunded professional baseball team was transformed into a budget-friendly powerhouse would actually be a primer on statistics and the need to radically revamp how the statistics are determined...
Before the beginning of the silly season (better known as the Summer Releases), I predicted the impending demise of the big budget tent pole movie. But gee whiz, gosh golly, gee bang oh molly, with the whopping big opening weekend of Transformers: Revenge of the...
The great thing about the internet is the widespread availability of information. Lots and lots of little strings of information, all floating in the free-fall zone of the Web. So much information that people rarely have time to contrast and compare -- and we all...
A reporter recently got me to play the voice of doom for the summer releases. The role comes naturally, since I favor black in my personal attire, so I spent a few minutes expounding upon the likely demise of the big-budget movies that are now...
There are several major kinds of secrets in life. There are the secrets that everybody knows but is not suppose to talk about (e.g., the bunker underneath the vice president's mansion). Then there's the stuff people won't tell you about because they expect you to learn...