Sunday 23 August 2009

Hollywood Babble On & On #355: Miscellaneous Musings

Welcome to the show folks, it looks like I've survived the onslaught of Hurricane Bill, and here's a little blog to fill the void in your life that only my special brand of cranking and ranting can do....

QUINCY STRIKES BACK

Actor Jack Klugman, most famous for playing crime-busting medical examiner Quincy on the long running crime show is once again suing NBC-Universal, claiming a share of millions in profits lost to funny bookkeeping. (hat tip to Thierry Attard)

NBC-Uni claims that the
Quincy show lost $66 million despite the $242 million in revenue generated by the show over the past 30 years during both its network run, and in syndicated reruns.

Klugman has sued before, and I've written about it before, and while it was a mistake for Klugman to do his deal on an old-fashioned handshake, Universal's claims of massive losses on a show that simple mathematics say had to have been paid for ten times over is beyond shady.

And the studios wonder why they have such a hard time finding investors willing to work with them.

WEINSTEIN REPRIEVED?

Quentin Tarantino's
Inglorious Bastards* is performing above expectations, and many who were on Weinstein Company Deathwatch Duty are now claiming that the final bell has not fully rung on the fledgling and usually failing company.

Well, I'm not giving up my post on the watchtower just yet.

The Weinstein Brothers and their unique business model of squandering tens of millions of dollars a year of investors on independent movies that are then sat on until they can no longer run through a projector due to all the accumulated dust, is not tenable. They dug a very deep hole for themselves, and I'm not sure if the rope Bastards has tossed down to them is long enough, or strong enough to get them out.

And let's not forget that after Bastards and Halloween 2 (itself a gamble, because a lot of people were disappointed by the first remake) there are a lot of jokers in the TWC deck that could still bust the company wide open.

So while I can't predict that Bastards will save TWC, my innate psychic acumen tells me that its success, and the doubling of the Best Picture Oscar nominations, will serve to make Harvey Weinstein even more insufferable.

You can take that one to the bank.

UPDATE: It looks like the Wall Street Journal agrees with me.
(subscription needed for the full article, but you get the gist.)

*Sorry, I just can't mis-spell things deliberately, even movie titles, I was the best speller in my grade all through elementary school and I refuse to do it, I just do, damn it!

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