Set Up to Fail: A History of Movies That Debuted Against Blockbusters

Well, now this is fascinating: On the May long weekend in 1977, the big movie blockbuster that everyone expected was going to clean up was the Burt Reynolds comedy Smokey and the Bandit. But, just as we’re seeing this weekend with another prospective blockbuster in The Avengers set to open, some Hollywood studios were ready to offer up some ‘counter-programming’,  an ‘alt-flick’ film, if you will, that might appeal to the few — the very few — that might go against the tide and avoid the blockbuster.

So what was the counter-programming in May, 1977 to the anticipated blockbuster Smokey and the Bandit? Some little alt-flick called Star Wars.

Read about that and more in this neat history of Hollywood’s “counter-programming” to anticipated blockbusters.

Best films about the newspaper and TV news biz?

In New York City, this month, an independent movie house is running a series its calling The Newspaper Picture. It looks like a great idea. The series leads off this weekend with Ace In The Hole , the 1951 film from ace director Billy Wilder, and closes with Alan J. Pakula’s classic All the President’s Men. It also includes His Girl Friday (1940), a favourite of one Mr. A. Coyne of Maclean’s magazine and mine, which you may have seen as The Front Page on stage or in the 1931 film or the 1974 version with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.

A.O. Scott, the film critic, writes about the series in The New York Times, in a piece with the appropriate headline, “The Fearless Press, and other legends”:

“Remember newspapers? Neither do I, to tell you the truth, even though I’ve been working at this one for more than 10 years. But you have to go back a lot further— nearly half a century — to sample the sights, sounds and smells that still evoke the quintessence of print journalism in all its inky, hectic glory.

Or you could go to Film Forum, where a 43-movie month-long series called The Newspaper Picture opens on Friday … The program is a crackerjack history lesson and also, perhaps, a valediction. Not a day goes by that we don’t read something — a tweet, a blog, maybe even a column — proclaiming the death of newspapers, either to mourn or to dance on the grave. And even if those old newsprint creatures survive, say by migrating to the magic land of the iPad, they sure ain’t what they used to be. Where are the crusty editors and fast-talking girl reporters of yesteryear? I’m peeking over the cubicle wall, and all I see are Web producers and videographers.”

Continue reading Best films about the newspaper and TV news biz?