In The Company Of Glenn

Bilbo!

You know, I don't normally do much business blogging, largely because I'm not much of a business guy, but on a day like today I kinda wish I did, because then I'd be able to publicly gloat at my powers of analysis/prognostication instead of asking you to take my word for it.

But I swear, on my honor, that when the box office returns for the first weekend of The Golden Compass came in a couple weeks back, I said to at least half a dozen people of my acquaintance, "Now the only way Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne are gonna keep their jobs is if they make up with Peter Jackson."

And lo, according to my bestest buddy Nikki Finke, it is come to pass. Check it out here, Hobbit-lovers.

UPDATE: The text of the just-sent-out press release is below the fold.
Read it, then break out into song...

Melville Shavelson, 1917-2007

The writer/director passed away this week.

One look at Shavelson's filmo and you think "man, they don't make 'em like that anymore." And then again, maybe they do.

That's Joanne Woodward in Shavelson's 1963 A New Kind of Love, in which she costars with Paul Newman. The too-full brandy glass suggests the film's an antecedent to Andy Warhol's 1964 Drunk, in which Emile D'Antonio consumes something like a fifth of whiskey in something like 20 minutes, but no. Woodward's character is bracing herself because she's a good clean American girl who's pretending to be a high-priced French call girl and now, even though she's a good clean American girl, really, she's been maneuvered into a position where she's gonna have to "do it" with Newman, who's plays an American journalist who thinks Woodward's a high-priced French call girl.

So like I said, maybe they still do make 'em like that. Only maybe with with more cussin', and skin. Some believe that makes a difference. It does. Not as much as the mechanistic quality the contemporary analogs of Shavelson's work possess. The breeziness of the type of entertainment Shavelson represented is mostly long gone from Hollywood.

Shavelson was 90, and earlier this year he published a memoir whose title, How To Succeed in Hollywood Without Really Trying—P.S., You Can't! was an apt summation of his weltanschaung. I eagerly await a New York Times op-ed bemoaning the underrating of his work.

'Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.'

Thus spoke Martin Scorsese, in as terse and true a definition as you could hope for.

Which is why, finally, Scott Foundas' exhaustive and deeply reported (well, relatively deeply reported) defense of director Brett Ratner fails to convince. You can go on for reams about how passionate, personable, energetic, detail-oriented, film-savvy, hard-working and indefatigable the guy is (I've heard it from friends of mine who've worked with him as well), and I'm not really gonna care much. Because my only reactions to what he puts inside a frame are pretty much "ugh" or "that was tolerable." If he ever succeeds in knocking me out, then maybe I'll perk up.

It can't be such a bad week, really,...

when such newly configured major works land in one's lucky, lap, can it?

Yes, that's Sly and the Family Stone's not entirely unapposite There's A Riot Going On in the middle of the four DVDs that constitute another milestone, Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinema. Actually, the Riot CD is one of seven, a limited edition collection of the first seven proper albums from Stone's unique collective. Even without the epochal single "Hot Fun in the Summertime," it's a lot to take in. As is the Godard box, in whose existence I can scarcely believe, even though it's in my house right now.

More when I get over my good fortune.

Bob Clark, R.I.P.

If ever a career defined the word "journeyman," it was that of director Bob Clark, who died yesterday with his son Ariel Hanath-Clark in an auto crash. Clark was 67.

I'm not using "journeyman" as a putdown. I never met Clark, but I've heard him speak on a number of DVD commentaries and he always struck me as a guy who loved movies, loved moviemaking, and practiced his craft with the same enthusiasm wherever his career took him. Which is not to say he always achieved inspired results. But after coming into the movie business via the grindhouse (his first released picture, She-Man, is available on a Something Weird DVD), he made one of the more creditable latter-day Sherlock Holmes pictures (Murder by Decree); redefined, for better or worse, the teen sex comedy (I find Porky's mostly unwatchable, but Crow T. Robot would want me to mention that it did help launch the career of Kim Cattrall); and, if you believe his obits,claimed Frank Capra's throne as the creator of the most popular and memorable Christmas movie ever.

Which is kind of funny, given that when it first opened in 1983 the main thing A Christmas Story's grosses proved was that you couldn't count on Jean Shepard's fan base to bring in the big box office bucks. Story has since taken on a life of its own, separate from Shepard, Clark, my former friend Scotty Schwartz (who played Flick) and so many others involved in the film who haven't profited from its revival. Ah well, that's showbiz.

For my money, Clark's one certifiable masterpiece is the deeply creepy 1974 Deathdream, in which The Monkey's Paw meets Vietnam. It was made into an excellent DVD by Blue Underground a few years back. It is not for the meek of heart. But then again, neither is Rhinestone, the Stallone/Dolly Parton big-studio "musical" that Clark made in the wake of Story.