Nikki Finke made an interesting Freudian gaffe in this story on Midnight Meat Train’s dismal opening weekend. She quoted Lionsgate’s recent credit infusion as amounting to $340, about $339 million less than the actual number, but just $27 more than what Meat Train averaged on each of its 100 screens. As Finke notes, one of the reasons for the embarrassing take (besides, you know, a complete lack of advertising or reviews) is the fact that Lionsgate booked the film in dollar theaters and second-run houses. They also skirted major markets––in fact, the film opened nowhere near New York City. So not only was this film with a built-in audience (thanks to Clive Barker’s genre credibility) made nearly impossible for fans to find, but stuffing the deck with cut-rate houses Lionsgate made sure that even if the movie filled houses (which it didn’t). it would be a statistic impossibility for it to make any real money.

In her headline, FInke asks the question, “Why Did Lionsgate Dump Clive Barker Pic Into Dollar And Second Run Theaters?” She ultimately drops the vague suggestion that “the answer may well be studio politics,” but declines to offer new insight or information, beyond citing Joe Drake’s much-reported desire to migrate “away from this genre of films in favor of more mainstream fare like Tyler Perry.”

What’s implied in Finke’s write-up and others, but never spelled out, is that in order to complete Lionsgate’s transformation from a profitable house of ill-repute into a well-funded maker of wholly inoffensive middlebrow entertainments, the total failure of vestiges of the previous regime like Meat Train is so necessary that the studio couldn’t take chances on the whims of the ticket-buying public––this is a bombing that had to be engineered.

• The members of AFTRA have ratified a proposed deal with the APMTP over a new contract. This wrecks SAG’s hopes that they’ll be able to use the dissatisfaction of the hundred-thousand-plus actors who belong to both unions as leverage against their own stalled negotiations. Another factor to SAG’s woes: after the WGA strike, nobody wants to be out of work again.
• Variety confirms Nikki Finke’s report that the Weinsteins are looking for a financing partner to help them get Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards made in time for premiere at Cannes 2009; the studio has already found a moneybag for Rob Marshall’s Nine in Relativity Media.
• Palisades Media has picked up the just-shuttered Tartan UK’s 400-film video library, which includes films like Super Size Me, In the Mood For Love, and the works of Bergman and Pasolini.

Variety reports that Time Warner is getting rid of New Line heads Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne and is absorbing the “indie” into the general Warner Brothers machine. Nikki Finke has the full press release.

I don’t have anything to say about this, other than that NO ONE should be allowed to start a headline with the phrase “Toldja!”––even if they did, in fact, tell us.

• Special guest SpoutBlogger Joe Swanberg already passed along the news that Ronnie Bronstein won the Gotham Award last night for Best Film Not Playing At a Theater Near You. Other Gotham winners: Into the Wild took Best Feature, Sicko took Best Doc, and Craig Zobel won the Breakthrough Director award for his wonderful Great World of Sound.
• From the Onion Headlines Come To Life file: a bunch of striking horror film scribes got together in LA yesterday and staged an exorcism in front of the Warner Brothers lot. Scott Kosar, who makes a living writing remakes of movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, used a bullhorn to ask God to “repel the greed that bewitches these studios.”
• Oh yeah — the strike’s still on, and no one but Nikki Finke has anything of substance to report.

Nikki Finke says “a very reliable source” has passed along word “that there appears to be a deal seemingly in place between both sides” of the writers strike. But don’t expect to hear about it anywhere but Deadline Hollywood Daily for awhile. Noting that she was “told not to expect an agreement this week,” Finke says no one else will be covering the story because “the negotiations starting today will have a news blackout.” Though she cautions that in Hollywood, “defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory nearly every time,” she seems pretty confident that she’s revealed a story that may not break elsewhere for weeks.

I’m sure Finke’s source is reliable, and I’m certainly not going to knock her strike reporting, which has been amazingly thorough, if not exactly impartial. But you have to admit, this is lovely timing for an exclusive–if this news hadn’t come out until next week, there may be room to doubt that the Speechless series of WGA propaganda videos (which Finke hosted on her site and which I wrote about in semi-depth here) played a significant part.

• Kevin offered three tips for documentary filmmakers in search of the truth.
• A look at three fine examples of pre-code cleavage.
• It’s now easier for documentary filmmakers to qualify for an Oscar nomination.
• Did YouTube “borrow” branding from a successful internet film festival?
• Nikki Finke claimed Warner Brothers had instituted a corporate policy against casting women, then baited Gloria Allred into threatening a WB boycott. WB was like, “No you didn’t,” and then Nikki was like, “Yes, in fact, I did.”
• In more devastating Warner Brothers news, the studio continues to show a lack of support for Jesse James by making it nearly impossible for non-coastal critics to see it.
• Michel Gondry’s working on an autobiographical animated film with his teenage son.
• Harmony Korine explains how he solved his filmmaking block by joining a cult of fishermen in the Amazon.
• Juno is not a remake of another film about a pregnant teen with ‘Juno’ in the title.
• The Austin Film Festival memorializes Moonlighting.
• “Any network that can be used to share cat pictures can be used to bring down a government.” This and other pearls of wisdom from from academic/blogger Henry Jenkins.
• On FilmCouch, Paul and Kevin talk to Rob Parrish, the mastermind of Next to Heaven, a web series carved out of the public domain. Watch the most recent episode of Next to Heaven here.

New York Film Festival:

• Mark Cuban confirmed to us that he would not release Brian DePalma’s director’s cut of Redacted. DePalma took the case to the DGA, who ruled that Magnolia could release the “redacted” version. DePalma eventually gives up.
• Peter Bogdanovich explains why his Tom Petty movie is four hours long.
• The Silent Light trailer breaks Karina’s heart.

Chicago Film Festival:

• The Affleck Brothers on the red carpet.
• The Filmspotting gang shares their take on the fest.

Nikki Finke has issued a response to Jeff Robinov’s response to her claim that three producers told her that Robinov is no longer putting films starring women into production. After meticulously detailing a couple of days worth of phone tag between her and Robinov, Finke writes:

Sources inside Warner’s tell me that, 1) Robinov doesn’t believe there’s an actress who can carry a movie worldwide since Julia Roberts, 2) Robinov has now gone so far as admitting to his studio colleagues that the decree I reported was made when he was “in the room”, 2) Robinov is acknowledging that the studio is reassessing the strategy of making action pictures starring women, 3) Robinov was inundated with calls on Monday and Tuesday from media and Hollywood types asking him about my posting, 4) Robinov has three pics currently in production and six in pre-production and not one stars a women as the main lead of the film, and 5) he’s nixed Wonder Woman as a stand-alone film, downgrading her to just one of four superhero characters in the proposed Justice League. Again, I stand by my story.

So, in other words, more of the same. Much more interesting, I think, is an excerpt from Lisa Chase’s interview with Finke in the latest issue of Elle, in which Finke explains why women in Hollywood “can’t get ahead.” More after the jump.

…Read more

Warner Brothers’ Jeff Robinov responds to Nikki Finke’s allegations that he’s put the kibosh on producing movies starring women. Anne Thompson writes:

Warner production prexy Jeff Robinov insists he is moving forward with several movies with women in the lead. Indeed, he is offended by rumors of his cinematic misogyny.

Action features starring women remain a hard sell for many moviegoers. But Robinov said he is still willing to put a femme star into an action role. “But, like any other movie, it has to be the right movie with the right actor and the right filmmaker at the right time,” he said.

Much more at the link, but like I said: the news wasn’t that the studio was turning away from (mis)casting female movies stars in action movies; the news was that they cast a bunch of Oscar-winning actresses over 30 in poorly conceived genre fare, and then dropped the ball on marketing. The real news nugget within Robinov’s protestation is that heavy reservation, “the right movie with the right actor and the right filmmaker at the right time.” The optimistic read on this is, “we’re taking a conscious step away from producing movies like The Invasion and The Reaping that bleed money, misuse high-caliber talent, embarrass just about everyone and please almost no one.”

I’ll leave the less optimistic readings to others. At the end of the day, the studio’s slate of projects is going to speak for itself.  Nikki hasn’t yet responded, but you know it’s coming.

I try not to get involved in inter-blog fighting, but there’s a rumble happening right now that’s just a little too weird to ignore. I’m trying to follow all of this based on Kate Coe and Mayrav Saar’s coverage at FishbowlLA. I’m still a little fuzzy as to how Fishbowl got involved, but they’ve been publishing an email back-and-forth between film bloggers Nikki Finke, David Poland and Jeffrey Wells that’s shaping up to be the cattiest thing I’ve ever seen.

It looks like it all started when Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere sent an email to Nikki Finke, to “congratulate” her for winning an LA Press Club award. The email started out like this:

Congrats — good for you, good work, hats off. That said, I have to say I’m detecting a culture of clubbiness among the winners. I get the feeling they’ve all hung and schmoozed with each other (or with LAPC board members) all year at various drinky LAPC gatherings.

Finke responded (all lower and uppercase hers):

your email wound up in my spam folder. i’ve never socialized with one member of the LA Press Club. i’ve never even met a single member. no one i know belongs to the LA Press Club. my understanding from my own newspaper is that the club itself does NOT judge the entries. i was told they send out the entries to another major press club who judges it.

Then David Poland got involved, sending an email (to Finke? to Saar?) seconding Wells’ “congratulations”. It read in part:

Considering the lame field of people who were entered in the contest, Nikki had to win. [...] Congrats! One-eyed woman, kingdom of the blind, etc; you are truly the queen of the local newspaper movie gossips!!!

Poland and Wells are clearly just getting catty because they, Finke’s fellow L.A.-based entertainment journalists, were both ignored by the Press Club. At some point, Finke apparently sent an email to the LA Press Club, complaining that other local bloggers were trying to slander their awards. FishbowlLA then published two missives from members of the club, both strenuously denying any kind of voting irregularities, and emphasizing that Finke couldn’t have gotten “drinky” with the voters, because each press club’s awards are decided by press club members in other towns. Cue David Poland:

If I was a judge in some other city and got a dozen (if that) submissions on film, I would certainly think Nikki the most entertaining by a landslide… so long as you don’t know the film business, which judges from other cities do not…Enjoy your award, Nikki. You’re the most popular car wreck in town not directed by Michael Bay. Now, go back to beating up Terry Semel on your gossip blog because some idiot friend of yours is jealous of him and doesn’t realize that Yahoo! was near death when he took over and that he is the only reason the company is at all competitive with Google.

This, apparently, was too much for Wells, who mentioned on his own site earlier this week that Poland gives him a “I’m looking at you but I don’t see you because you don’t exist” look” whenever they meet.

I realized some years ago that the only action I could take that would truly satisfy you as far as my HE jottings were concerned would be to drink hemlock or do a swan dive in front of a moving bus. All I know is, you could have been a little nicer about this.

Where’s this torrid little skerfuffle gonna go next? I know two things to be true: 1) when Saar sums it all up by saying, “This is the equivalent of watching other people’s parents fight,” she’s* totally right; and 2) The HE commenter who says he’d cast Russell Crowe and James Gandolfini as Wells and Poland in the movie of this is on to something. How about Gena Rowlands as Nikki Finke?

*added an “s” in order to connote the appropriate gender.

I should say upfront that I’m strangely ambivalent when it comes to Hostel mastermind Eli Roth. There’s a kind of sick humor baked into his baroque, balls-out extended death sequences, that, as a Dario Argento fan, I appreciate, but like most modern horror movies, sitting through the bad dialogue and endless setup that threads together the torture scenes is, actually, torture. On the other hand, I kind of get a kick out of Roth’s pretentions about the socio-political allegorical value of his movies. There’s something about the petulance of a horror movie director favorably comparing himself to Dick Cheney that I can’t resist.

That said, is it just me, or does this whiny, panicky, super-dramatic blog post on Roth’s MySpace page kind of read like those coked-up interviews Dirk Diggler gave Amber Waves for her documentary in Boogie Nights? It’s like the beleaguered filmmaker’s equivalent of the ill-advised drunk dial.

“All over the map” would be an appropriate phrase to use here, if there were a map in the world big enough to encompass all of Eli Roth’s paranoia. The ostensible purpose of the post is for Roth to announce that he’s taking some time off from filmmaking, but in attempting to explain that decision, he manages to cast blame on every conceivable outside force for therelative failure of Hostel 2. Piracy, he says, “is really hurting us, especially internationally.” He then jumps to blame film critics (who aren’t usually allowed to see allegedly “critic proof” films like this before they’re released) for allegedly reviewing the pirated workprint of the film instead of the completed version. Which critics did that? Roth “wouldn’t dignify them by mentioning them by name,” but he’s going to make damn sure they’ll lose all legal access to his films (which doesn’t seem like much of a threat, since these critics would apparently rather watch a pirated workprint than go to a press screening anyway). My favorite part is when Roth tells his fans they can help fight piracy with … piracy? “Flood file sharing services with fake Hostel II downloads just so no one can ever actually get the movie,” he declares.

A rant like this is obviously candy for for haters. Nikki Finke, one of the most vocal opponents of the so-called “torture porn” genre, ate it up. “Notice how it doesn’t even enter his mind that moviegoers rejected his twisted content of torture porn,” Finke sniped. “Maybe this year off will help Eli get a clue.” Roth is obviously playing passive-aggressive, putting himself out there as a victim so that his fans will rally around and beg him to make another movie. It’s hard to imagine a successful film director actual being so immature that they would not see how such a tactic would be doomed to backfire.

What’s the real problem with Hostel 2? Did everyone who really wanted to see it really watch it online before it opened? Could it just be that the movie industry is cyclical, and the torture porn cycle is simply dying its natural, inevitable death? For what it’s worth, the Horror Movies 101 group here at Spout hasn’t really shown much interest in the Hostel films. Whether or not you’re a Roth fan, does such an, um, impassioned message from a filmmaker make you any more or less likely to support their work?