They Had The Nerve To Talk About It

I'll keep this relatively brief. Over the weekend we got cable re-installed (can't live without the Tour de France!) and one of the things I was watching yesterday morning was this show on AMC called "Sunday Morning Shoot-Out" - think of it as "Meet the Press" for the movie industry. The guest for the day was the CEO of Sony, Sir Howard Stringer. And he was fine - actually sounded like a pretty personable dude. But, then he dropped a bomb that is so inexcusable, so astoundingly pretentious, so amazingly condescending, so attrociously dictatorial that I not only turned the station, I have vowed that I will not knowingly watch another Sony movie (of course, this would be impossible, because a) Sony makes a lot of pretty decent movies and b) they have so many 'boutique' labels that I would never know if it IS Sony).

Anyway. They were talking about how "Memoirs of Geisha was such a failure." The problem, seemingly, is that it went WAY over budget and that it was offensive to the very people whom it was supposed to represent (e.g., using Chinese actors to portray Japanese people!). In the course of the interview, not ducking the criticism, Stringer admitted to it. He admitted that it should have been made for about half the cost and they should have looked harder for real Japanese actors.

But, this is where it gets good.

He claims it was still a good movie, but that what did it in was not that it was so offensive but "because we showed a screening in Japan a week before it was supposed to come out and the bad word of mouth kept people from the box office." Fuck you Stringer! How about you not make an offensive movie!!! I can not honestly believe that a CEO would stand (or sit) in front of a television audience and tell them, point blank, the problem isn't with the movie, it's that we showed it to people. The problem is that we showed an offensive movie and didn't give ourselves the first week box office to make sure we could reap at least some profit from the offensive movie before people started talking about how offensive it was and stopped seeing it.

So, it appears, that the lesson that Sir Howard Stringer is taking out of this is not: don't make offensive movies. Rather, the lesson is: If you're going to make an offensive movie, don't show it to anybody before it goes to the general public.

And the movie industry wonders why nobody goes to the fucking movies any more.