The 'Postal' carrier
UWE BOLL is a German-accented party crasher at the gates of legit Hollywood product. His movies are reviled on the Internet by video-gamers and genre movie mavens -- people incensed that Boll is tarnishing the movie-making art with titles such as "BloodRayne," "House of the Dead," "Alone in the Dark" and "In the Name of the King," movies whose ancillary purpose, Boll will tell you, is to offer a tax benefit to his high-end German investors.
Weeks before the release of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," the 42-year-old German purveyor of videogame-based genre flicks had made a bold pronouncement: He would send out his latest movie, "Postal," an R-rated screwball comedy with lots of gross-out humor and war-on-terror gags, to go head-to-head with Indy, where everyone else feared to tread.
Boll funds his movies in Germany and makes them in Canada, then tracks their returns in every market of the world (Turkey, Bulgaria). Never mind the big studio theatrical release -- he exists outside that system now, saying it involves too prohibitive a cost for his investors.
Thus his plan to wrestle Indy appears to have hit a snag. "Postal," which opens today at the Laemmle in Santa Monica and the Culver Plaza Theater in Culver City, failed to attract a crumb on the multiplex schedules of the giant AMC and Regal cinema chains, forcing Boll to do what he has sometimes done in the past -- cobble together a release himself, a hodgepodge of bookings and/or screen rentals.
"I said, 'Look, now 'Iron Man' is blowing everything to pieces," Boll said of his pitch to Ted Cooper, the head film buyer for Regal Entertainment Group, the week that "Iron Man" had come out. "Now next week is 'Speed Racer' coming up, and then 'Narnia,' and then 'Indiana Jones. 'Iron Man' goes down to $50 million next weekend. One week later 'Iron Man' is $25 million, and on our weekend, 'Iron Man' is history, basically. 'Speed Racer' is supposed to be crap from the beginning on. So it will not open like 'Iron Man.' On our weekend, it's down to 5, 6 million bucks."
The business of show
He was sitting at a Beverly Hills cafe on a recent afternoon. When Boll gets on a roll like this, he becomes more, not less, endearing. Never mind the oeuvre of Fassbinder; of more relevance to him is the oeuvre of German tax regulators, and how they affect movie financing.
