Studios feel traumas of Tentpole Time

Superman vs. Sparrow

It's Tentpole Time in Hollywood, when the studios annually unfurl movies that supposedly are the coolest as well as the costliest.

They've delivered on the "costly" part, although I don't quite understand why people really care whether "Superman" cost $200 million or $250 million, or whether the two "Pirates" sequels hit the $450 million mark. Once budgets drift into outer space, they become too surreal to quantify.

Besides, the numbers crunchers can shift studio allocations and overheads to come up with any total they want. The numbers really start ballooning on statements sent to profit participants -- that's when a filmmaker learns that, while the studio told the press his budget was $100 million, the real number had magically become $200 million. So much for his payday!

Putting aside issues of cost, we come to "cool," and here again Tentpole Time offers its share of anomalies. There's something oddly musty, if not downright anachronistic, about the summer '06 entries. "Poseidon" seems a hand-me-down from the early '70s (where is Shelley Winters now that we need her?). "Da Vinci Code" embodies vintage '40s MGM filmmaking. "Superman" suggests a '30s sensibility given his Speedo-and-spandex uniform, and even the "Pirates" movie basically camps up an old Hollywood yarn.

There's nothing wrong with drawing on the past since this is, after all, the golden age of sequels. But with the studios recycling vintage ideas on '06 budgets, the intriguing question is this: How quickly will that vast kid culture out there sense that the dust is gathering around the edges of Hollywood's corporate imagination?

The truth hurts

"No one wants to hear the truth, so the easiest 'out' is never to tell it," Amy Pascal, Columbia's savvy production chief, told me not long ago. Her words came to mind when I read Claudia Eller's recent article in the Los Angeles Times about Disney's adventures with M. Night Shyamalan.

Shyamalan has come out with a new tell-all book called "The Man Who Heard Voices, or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale."

The imbroglio between the studio and the filmmaker started when the two top production executives at Disney broke Amy Pascal's Law. They told Shyamalan that they didn't especially care for his latest script, "Lady in the Water."

Shyamalan didn't want their opinion, he merely wanted their green light. When Dick Cook and Nina Jacobson confided their reservations, Shyamalan decided that the Disney studio "no longer valued individualism, no longer valued fighters." The filmmaker promptly switched his project to Warner Bros.

In response, Nina Jacobson, Disney's clipped and candid production chief, told Eller, "Different people have different ideas about respect. For us, being honest is the greatest show of respect for a filmmaker."

The problem, of course, is that filmmakers, like movie stars, crave adulation, not critiques. They want the green light, not the yellow blinker. Once when I informed a director that I disagreed with his take on a scene, he promptly responded by firing me. I had to remind him that I didn't work for him -- it was the other way around.

I sympathize with Dick Cook and Nina Jacobson as they find themselves targeted by Shyamalan's diatribe. In the end, of course, a bigger jury will judge their decision -- that is, both their decisions. For after passing on Shyamalan's "Lady in the Water," Cook closed a deal to distribute Mel Gibson's film, "Apocalypto," which was to be released in the same time slot as Shyamalan's movie.

Shyamalan would doubtless point out that Disney would have no opportunity to critique the Gibson movie in the manner it judged his script. Mel shoots it and Disney sells it -- that's the basic equation on a Gibson project.

Disney recently decided recently to delay the release of the Gibson film to Dec. 8. Warners has slotted the Shyamalan film for July 21, and I plan to offer Dick Cook and Nina Jacobson a chance to write the review.