Movie Industry

As you may have heard, these are hard times for the journalism business. Newspapers are biting the dust left and right. My own paper's ownership has filed for bankruptcy. Ditto for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times and other media groups. Even the New York Times is battening down the hatches. When I visited the Dodger Stadium press box the other day, a lofty perch once full to the brim with sportswriters, the joint looked like a bar on the day after St. Patrick's Day.

The NBA and the NHL are in the middle of hard-fought playoffs, but basketball and hockey aren't the only blood sports these days. The summer movie season -- when Hollywood does about 40% of its annual business -- is filled with nearly a dozen head-to-head showdowns, and if history is a guide, many will end with teeth on the floor. Only a handful of summer movies enjoy the comparatively wide berth of a weekend free of competition.

In Hollywood, bad news travels fast. I was sitting in the stands Saturday evening at a Little League playoff game when one of my fellow coaches, who happens to work in the business, leaned over and shared the news -- "Land of the Lost" was a goner, getting trounced by "The Hangover." The Will Ferrell film ended up a distant third to "The Hangover" and "Up," making $18.7 million in its opening weekend, an especially woeful number for a movie that cost $100-million-plus to produce.

Dick Smith brought the devil out of Linda Blair, transformed Marlon Brando into a jowly Mafia don and punked out Robert De Niro with a startling Mohawk. So what's next for the 86-year-old special effects makeup artist? How about a tribute from his friends and colleagues? Smith's innovative work on "The Exorcist," "The Godfather," "Taxi Driver" and "Amadeus" (for which he won an Oscar) among others has had a huge influence on the field.

For most of the 1960s, Hollywood was the last place you'd go to find the pulse of the pop culture. Movie attendance had reached all-time lows. The studios were crumbling -- most film lots were either up for sale, being rented out or looked like decaying junkyards.

This city in the foothills of the Rockies has scenery more diverse than most Hollywood back lots: A 19th century castle, a Spanish colonial plaza and miles of prairie and mountains. That landscape -- along with New Mexico's generous film incentives -- has lured more than a dozen movie productions here in the last decade. The filming has brought in a surge of money, but it has also brought tension.

When Joy Papa of Silver Lake stopped by Fry's Electronics in Burbank last week, she did something movie executives wish consumers would do more often this year: buy a DVD. "Every time a new movie comes out that I like, I buy it even if I saw it in theaters," she said while clutching a copy of "Fast & Furious," which had just come out. The DVD business may be down, but it's not out -- at least for the biggest titles.

If Miramax was the house that Quentin Tarantino built, is Weinstein Co. the house that Tarantino will save? That answer may become clearer next weekend when the director's 153-minute, campy World War II action movie "Inglourious Basterds," starring Brad Pitt, opens. A lot more than the fate of the free world is riding on whether Tarantino's renegade soldiers succeed in their mission to kill Hitler. A hit could give Bob and Harvey Weinstein some much needed breathing room and perhaps quiet -- at least temporarily -- speculation that their production company is on the ropes.

Leave it to the "Basterds" to break the rules. During a season when studios have become all but convinced that audiences are losing interest in big-name movie stars and R-rated adult fare, perhaps it was appropriate that the end of summer would offer a surprise hit that embodied both those qualities. "Inglourious Basterds," featuring Brad Pitt among an ensemble cast, earned $38 million at the box office this weekend in the U.S. and Canada, according to domestic distributor Weinstein Co., far exceeding expectations by drawing a fairly diverse audience without alienating director Quentin Tarantino's core fan base of men in their 20s and early 30s. The same occurred overseas, where Universal Pictures opened the film in 22 territories, including Germany, France, Britain and Australia, to a strong $27.5 million.

If the year's first four months defied all expectations for what Hollywood could do in a recession, this summer delivered some sobering reality. Through the end of April, domestic box-office receipts leaped 17% while admissions surged nearly 16% from the previous year, according to Hollywood.com. But as the weather turned hot, business cooled: From May 1 through Aug. 31, attendance was down 2.4% from 2008 and 6% from 2007. Summer box-office revenues rose 1.3%, not even enough to account for ticket price inflation, let alone the premiums charged in a growing number of 3-D theaters.