Hollywood Takes a Gamble
By Mary Beth Gentle
This year when the Academy Awards come to town it won’t be LA that they come to, it will be more like Las Vegas. And I say that only because the Hollywood Cube Dweller Oscar pool ballot is due any day and I have not seen one movie. I know that is hard to believe – I do work in Hollywood after all – but it is true. I have my list of the five nominated movies for best picture; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk, Frost/Nixon, The Reader and Slumdog Millionaire. And amazingly enough, I haven’t seen one of them.
The nominations were announced on January 22nd and I thought I would have more than enough time to see everything on the list. I have always prided myself on the fact that I see all the top movies and then I sit down with my office pool ballot and I vote with my heart. I never listen to who Vegas predicts as the odds on favorites or who the Hollywood insiders guarantee to pull out the win. But, this year I may just be out of time. It’s been almost a month since the announcements were made and I still have not seen anything.
I quickly started making the calls around town to see who might have an Academy Screener or two that I could borrow. For those of you that don’t know what those are – they are DVD copies of the nominated movies that go out to Academy and Guild members all over town. Academy Screeners are one of the biggest gambles the Studios take throughout the year. These DVD’s have always been a top source for piracy rings. The Studios have taken steps to secure their product by putting in security codes on the discs and sending out scary legal letters to all the recipients about not losing track of or sharing their copies. Needless to say, the DVD’s still make their way all over town.
But, as with anything in Hollywood, the lists to borrow any of the top movies on DVD were a mile long and I was, as always, on the bottom of the list. So, I have done the only thing I could do, I went on line with my office pool ballot at my side and decided to throw my heart out the window and vote with the best odds I could find. I mean come on, my hard earned five bucks was at stake and during an economic downturn, a girl has to do what a girl has to do.
So, I read about the Vegas handicaps. I went to all the Entertainment sites and read their predictions. I tallied what pictures had won at the Golden Globes, which actors had won at the SAG Awards and which Guild awarded what to who in their Academy Bake-off’s. And I basically came to the following conclusions: I am not Vegas material, the internet is filled with people with too much time on their hands and most importantly, I really just need to go to a movie theatre and see the movies.
So, this year I made the decision not to join the office pool. I figure if I can’t vote with my heart there is really no point voting at all. I will just have to tune in to root for my favorite actors, rate the nights best and worst fashions and enjoy the show. Next year, I will make sure I see al the movies, so that this Hollywood Cube Dweller is ready for next office pool.
Monday, March 23, 2009
The Valley Wire - 1/20/2009
Hollywood and the Hero
By Mary Beth Gentle
Explosions. Natural disasters. Diabolical bad guys. Hollywood has always known how to set the scene that puts us on the edge of our seats waiting for the hero to appear and save the day. And for the most part, whether Hollywood gives us a character that is inherently heroic or reluctantly heroic, they do a pretty good job at delivering. Bottom line, Hollywood loves a hero. They create them. They promote them. And whenever possible they build an entire franchise around them.
From the time we are very young we find heroes at every turn. They are in our bedtime stories, our television shows and our movies. We pick our favorites, we collect our action figures and we fight over who gets to play the hero and who has to be the bad guy. Hollywood did not invent the concept of the hero, but they are better than anyone at making them larger than life.
There have always been heroes and the tales of their heroic deeds have been told and written down since the beginning of time. By definition a hero or heroine is a person endowed with great strength or ability and who in the face of danger or adversity displays great courage. Hollywood has made a pretty good business out of the telling and re-telling of the famous Heroes throughout time. There have been countless movies of swashbuckling and sword-fighting heroes, cowboy movies helped define the early Hollywood hero and of course Superheroes have become the ultimate Hollywood box office hero.
And whenever possible, Hollywood will look to the world around them for heroes that have walked among us. Every war movie ever made is based on a true-life hero or an amalgamation of the many heroes that have served our country, historical heroes are an easy mark for Hollywood as they can spin the facts in order to tell the most captivating story and then there is the modern day hero. He is the every-man, the imperfect hero who steps forward when no one else will or can.
We have had one such man in the news over the recent week, Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger. He was the pilot of US Airways Flight 1549 who went on to safely land the Airbus A320 in the Hudson River saving all 155 people on board. This is the type of heroic event that had all of us in the Hollywood cubicles glued to our computers to watch and read every detail we could. In the Hollywood cubicles we spend our days working on the TV shows and movies of the make believe heroes. It was amazing to see something that heroic happen in real life.
It is events like this that in many ways prove Hollywood right. We all want a hero. We want the innocent to be saved. We want the wrongs to be righted. We want the hero to save the day. And right now that hero is a commercial airline pilot named “Sully”.
And I know that in many ways there are heroes all around us. They are serving our communities, caring for our children or even simply taking the time to help a neighbor in need. In someway to someone, we are all heroes. But, when you want to escape the daily routine and see something that is larger than life, it’s Hollywood that we turn to for that escape.
And I can guarantee you that right now every Producer in Hollywood would love to be the person that ends up owing the rights to tell “Sully’s” story. Because of this man, what could have been a horrible disaster had a very happy ending. It is a story with all the elements to be found in a Hollywood movie, but this one has a real life modern day hero in Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger.
By Mary Beth Gentle
Explosions. Natural disasters. Diabolical bad guys. Hollywood has always known how to set the scene that puts us on the edge of our seats waiting for the hero to appear and save the day. And for the most part, whether Hollywood gives us a character that is inherently heroic or reluctantly heroic, they do a pretty good job at delivering. Bottom line, Hollywood loves a hero. They create them. They promote them. And whenever possible they build an entire franchise around them.
From the time we are very young we find heroes at every turn. They are in our bedtime stories, our television shows and our movies. We pick our favorites, we collect our action figures and we fight over who gets to play the hero and who has to be the bad guy. Hollywood did not invent the concept of the hero, but they are better than anyone at making them larger than life.
There have always been heroes and the tales of their heroic deeds have been told and written down since the beginning of time. By definition a hero or heroine is a person endowed with great strength or ability and who in the face of danger or adversity displays great courage. Hollywood has made a pretty good business out of the telling and re-telling of the famous Heroes throughout time. There have been countless movies of swashbuckling and sword-fighting heroes, cowboy movies helped define the early Hollywood hero and of course Superheroes have become the ultimate Hollywood box office hero.
And whenever possible, Hollywood will look to the world around them for heroes that have walked among us. Every war movie ever made is based on a true-life hero or an amalgamation of the many heroes that have served our country, historical heroes are an easy mark for Hollywood as they can spin the facts in order to tell the most captivating story and then there is the modern day hero. He is the every-man, the imperfect hero who steps forward when no one else will or can.
We have had one such man in the news over the recent week, Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger. He was the pilot of US Airways Flight 1549 who went on to safely land the Airbus A320 in the Hudson River saving all 155 people on board. This is the type of heroic event that had all of us in the Hollywood cubicles glued to our computers to watch and read every detail we could. In the Hollywood cubicles we spend our days working on the TV shows and movies of the make believe heroes. It was amazing to see something that heroic happen in real life.
It is events like this that in many ways prove Hollywood right. We all want a hero. We want the innocent to be saved. We want the wrongs to be righted. We want the hero to save the day. And right now that hero is a commercial airline pilot named “Sully”.
And I know that in many ways there are heroes all around us. They are serving our communities, caring for our children or even simply taking the time to help a neighbor in need. In someway to someone, we are all heroes. But, when you want to escape the daily routine and see something that is larger than life, it’s Hollywood that we turn to for that escape.
And I can guarantee you that right now every Producer in Hollywood would love to be the person that ends up owing the rights to tell “Sully’s” story. Because of this man, what could have been a horrible disaster had a very happy ending. It is a story with all the elements to be found in a Hollywood movie, but this one has a real life modern day hero in Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger.
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