BOX OFFICE ANALYSIS 

1. Dolphin Tale: $14.3M – Family films rule. Shallow nihilism and conformity posing as “edginess” do not. Yet Hollywood keeps right on making them. Yes, someone somewhere is currently squandering millions of dollars on “Margot At the Wedding 2: Narcissism Is a Virtue.” They might not call it that, but you get the idea.

2. Moneyball: $12.5M – More proof the adult drama is not dead, just a certain kind of adult drama — like, say, “Margot At the Wedding 3: I Hate the parents Who Gave Me Everything.”

3. The Lion King: $11M – Never in a million years did I expect this kind of haul and I’m sure the studio would’ve been happy with half this. In fact, they probably chose to go with a re-release mainly as a way to gin up publicity and anticipation for tomorrow’s Blu-ray release.  But this is a fantastic film released late enough so that many of those who enjoyed the experience with their parents can now pass it on to their own children. Disney = magic.

4. 50/50 $8.9M – One of those neither fish nor fowl flicks people probably had a hard time grasping. Is it a comedy? Is it a tragedy? Is it a drama? I think the casting of Seth Rogen really threw people off. He’s only been associated with raunch-fests and junk like “Green Hornet,” so the fit was odd and the whole “cancer” thing certainly would’ve turned off his following to whatever degree he has one.

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In 1970 University of Kansas Professor James Gunn interviewed famed “Twilight Zone” creator Rod Serling and what he said about how badly the subject of race was handled on TV in his day is particularly trenchant.

Gunn, a science fiction writer in his own right having won many awards for his work, asked Mr. Serling if he felt that any current television fiction was relevant to the human condition. Rod was discouraged that it was, especially where it concerns the issue of race.

“Most television fiction that I watch has very little relevance. I think it’s one thing to say that we will now have a program called Mod Squad, say, and we will have one black man and one oriental and one Hawaiian to show this marvelous melting-pot concept. But I think, Jim, that’s altogether phony. I don’t think that’s… I think at best condescension and at worst exploitation. The fact is that we have so distorted the pure ethnic minority over the years by making every black man a banjo player, and a village idiot, and a coward, that suddenly we are going to reverse switch, he is now a brain scientist or an atomic scientist or any one of an equal distortion at the other end. Needless to say I’d much prefer the distortion on the good side of the scale… but all television fiction I find quite irrelevant and quite unrelated.”

That was a pretty dismissive view for Rod Serling to think of the medium that made him famous, but on the other hand it’s hard to argue with his logic. For all the ballyhooing about TV it has rarely been relevant to much of anything.

The interview is about 20 minutes long and is quite interesting: (more…)

There’s a “Twilight Zone” episode early in the first season where Ida Lupino plays a Norma Desmond-type screen star: aging, resentful, a little nuts and holed up in a dark Hollywood mansion lost in the glory days that run endlessly on an old film projector. The final Serling-esque twist is that she ends up transporting herself into one of her own 25 year old films where she can live forever in a sophisticated romantic celluloid dream, always young always beautiful, where the world is as she believes it should be. 

For some reason Serling presents that twist as though it’s a bad thing. I don’t know, sounds like a plan to me, and  if there’s one movie-world on this list that I would want to transport myself into it would be “Christmas in Connecticut.”

This 1945 Warner Brothers’ charmer is as light as the souffle Barbara Stanwyck’s magazine writer, Elizabeth Lane, pretends she can cook for thousands of magazine readers and now will have to in reality if she’s to keep her job. Using recipes from her Uncle Feliz (the terrific S.Z. Sakall), Lane has crafted an identity for her readers and employers that doesn’t exist. Everyone believes she’s a Connecticut housewife with a newborn baby living on a storybook farm when in reality she’s single, childless, can’t boil an egg, and living in a cramped New York City apartment. As expected, topsy soon goes turvy and for the Christmas holidays her boss (an absolutely delightful Sydney Greenstreet) decides to offer a returning soldier (Dennis Morgan) a Christmas weekend with Lane on her storybook farm. Oh, yes, and the boss would like to join them. (more…)

“My role in life is to be a burr under the saddle. I didn’t pick that for myself, it just happens that’s the way I am. I wish I could be one of the really sweet guys, but for me nobody has a good word. That’s because my allegiance is to art, to the work. I have no allegiance to magazines, producers, studios, networks or anything. The work is what counts.” – Harlan Ellison, on writing in Hollywood.

For those of you here at Big Hollywood who think you are playing a whole new game in taking on the Tinseltown establishment in force, I have news for you. Scribe Extraordinaire and futurist iconoclast Harlan Ellison beat you all to the punch by about forty-five years. And if you don’t know who Harlan Ellison is, shame on you! He is a living legend with more Hugos and Nebulas than I care to count, as well as four WGA Awards and an Emmy nod. And all that’s just for starters. (more…)

Fifty years ago this month the smartest television show of all time first aired. As a writer, I am a sucker for good writing. “The Twilight Zone,” as  Michael Anton recently wrote in his commemoration at National Review Online, is nothing if not a writer’s show. Modern sci-fi fans, caught up in dazzling special effects and action, lose sight of the fact that sci-fi, in its radio incarnations “X Minus One” and “Dimension X,” and its later television offerings such as “The Outer Limits” and “Doctor Who,” is the plaything of nerd scribes with creative imaginations. The megastars and big-budgets would come later. In the beginning, there were wordsmiths.

It’s telling that “The Twilight Zone’s” recurring character is not an A-list hearthrob but the diminutive, gap-toothed, akimbo-eared Rod Serling, the show’s chief writer. Rocky Balboa’s trainer, otherwise known as that bow-legged villian of Gotham, is the closest thing one gets to an actor associated with “The Twilight Zone.” Even the theme music steals the limelight from the actors.

A few years ago, I purchased the 28-disc “complete, definitive collection” spanning all five of the show’s seasons. I’m on season five, and I generally watch late on weekend nights after imbibing. The benefits to this are twofold: first, my imagination is more malleable then and, second, it enables me to enjoy the episodes a second time around without deja vu. (more…)

The way I see it television needs, among other things, the following:

1. Science Fiction/Thriller/Horror Channel

A short form/short film channel showcasing those genres. Independent producers, writers, creators could submit work to be aired. It wouldn’t have to be, nor should it be at the Sundance level of professionalism delivered on DigiBeta and starring Cameron Diaz doing a favor for the filmmaker because it’s her friend’s cousin, either.

We don’t want that. There’s plenty of that kind of venue and they turn down 99% of the stuff submitted anyway, mainly because it’s not the work of someone’s friend’s cousin. So forget that right away. It has to be underground, guerilla, shoestring and, most important, good. Very good. Damn good. But not expensive. How can you do that, you say? 

With writing.   (more…)

Even before “Star Trek” launches into the stratosphere this weekend, director JJ Abrams is taking a victory lap.

With the film hogging 81% of all ticket sales at Fandango.com as well as the covers of Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly and Wired (which Abrams guest edited), the director has just done a great sit down with Charlie Rose. 

Now Rose can be an enormous chucklehead when interviewing Hollywood types (especially pretty ones), but that doesn’t matter. Abrams is smart enough to make it interesting on his own.

He talks about the influence of Richard Donner’s “Superman,” which he says gave “a kind of legitimacy” to comic book subjects they’d never received before. Donner “respected the characters as much as the audience,” Abrams says. “They were funny. They were real.” (more…)