Suddenly, Last Summer

Having grown up in Kansas, I know how it feels to be disconnected from the mainstream of pop culture. No question, church youth group meetings, miniature golf and baby-sitting did not dominate teenage social life anywhere else on the planet in the 1970s. Politically speaking, not much had changed in the Wheat Belt since favorite son Ike had gone to Washington. Walter Cronkite never even mentioned our state on the evening news.

There was one place, however, where I believed I was an insider: Working at the Boulevard Theater. After serving up the last tub of popcorn at our neighborhood movie palace, I could slip into the back row and experience something--a thrill, sadness, a laugh--the same way people did in New York City, Washington, D.C. and even that unimaginable place, Los Angeles. At the end of the night, I called the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood to report our one-screen theater's box office. I loved reading the reports the next week to see if the movie at the Boulevard was a hit everywhere.

I still get a kick out of tracking box-office scores. For the studios that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars producing these movies and for the talent that has knocked themselves out making them, the game is more Russian Roulette than Trivial Pursuit. Corporate fortunes and personal careers are made and lost. I feel their pain, and it makes the game more fun to play. Listen, this is Hollywood. No one ever really dies. When things go to hell for folks here, it's more a purgatory of meaningless production deals and bad seats in restaurants. Abysmal failure rarely translates into financial ruin.

So I was surprised at how seriously Peter Bart takes last summer's box-office cook-off in his book, "The Gross." His thesis--that the summer of '98, dominated by wildly mediocre yet financially successful movies, was a watershed in thinking about artistic quality--is tough to buy.

Bart knows the movie business inside and out. Reading Daily Variety, the Hollywood trade magazine where he is editor-in-chief, is like checking the daily racing form at the track. You can't bet without it. Bart is a master-class player of the box-office guessing game. His book, absolutely chockablock with fab little factoids about last summer's movies and how they performed, is essential reading if you want to handicap this coming summer's. He writes as the ultimate insider, yet he remains a journalist who relishes throwing a few cherry bombs.