Shorts, 8/20.

It's easy to laugh at Hollywood studio executives. Because they make it easy. And some of the people who laugh the hardest are the video store clerks who work next door to them. Elizabeth Segal has the delightful story in Salon: "One clerk at Vidiots, Santa Monica's indie Mecca for film rentals, says: 'I remember once getting a call from a studio exec who asked, "Do you have Citizen Kane?" I said, "Sure we do." He insisted, "But do you have the one with Orson Welles?"'" The thing is, at the very least, these suits are trying to tap into the encyclopedic knowledge of these film geeks. Lon Shimabukuro, co-manager of the Beverly Videocenter: "Some uninspired film industry person will run in here and pressure me with questions like, 'What should we remake this year?' or 'What are people renting?' or even 'What other movies do you have with big, fat Greeks in them?' They really don't know their stuff."

64 world premieres. 103 North American premieres. The stories and the lineups are all over the place, from the Hollywood Reporter to indieWIRE, but you might as well head straight to the site for the 28th Toronto International Film Festival itself. The fact sheet is fun, the film list, amazing.

The liveliest read today probably comes from Jim Ridley in the City Pages. That's because his interviewee, Troma Entertainment co-founder Lloyd Kaufman cuts loose with fury at "the Nixon-Reagan-Clinton axis," Bush, naturally, and FCC Chairman Michael Powell, Spielberg and Polanski, but champions Sam Fuller, and of course, his own forthcoming book, Make Your Own Damn Movie!.

Dennis Harvey sets out to review The Adventures of Robin Hood in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and he does, eventually, but not without a detour into Errol Flynn's My Wicked, Wicked Ways first, "a scandalous bestseller and one of the few really great movie-star autobiographies ever." Also in the SFBG: Miriam Wolf's Harvey Pekar cover story and interview and Johnny Ray Huston's review: "[L]argely an indie assembly-line product of American filmmaking's malaise."

Clever. Ed Halter files a preview of the East Village Film Festival in the guise of a dissertation handed in by "Tiana Red-dick-Aziz, Department of Media History, Trump University" in 2041. Also in the Village Voice, a welcome sight: Richard Hell returns this week: "I came to Bresson late; I'm his new most devoted convert."

Made me look twice: "The Matrix makers are facing a dilemma after the Oscars Academy said they would not accept Matrices 2 and 3 as a single entry for next year's awards." Matrices? That Guardian staff, those agencies! Gregg Kilday has background on the story in the Hollywood Reporter.

Monty Python figures. What do people do with these things?

Seems Gigli has stoked an interest in financial disasters. You know, bombs. Just yesterday, a friend sent a pointer to Kat Giantis's MSN Entertainment annotated list of "the 10 biggest turkeys of all time," movies "that tanked so spectacularly that their failures shut down studios and ended careers." Meanwhile, Stephen, over at Tagline, is thoroughly enjoying "Biggest Second Weekend Drops: Wide Releases That Fell 60% or More."

Along with an interview with Ben Affleck in which he pines for the good old days when he didn't have any money, Moviehole runs an item on a possible film based on a show that's just seen its last run on TV. The show's co-creator, David X. Cohen: "To me it seems that it would be very easy to make your money back on a Futurama movie. And any movie executives reading this right now I recommend that you take out your calculators and look at what I'm saying because it's true!"

Speaking of Matt Groening, Aaron Barnhart reminds that he grew up watching Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, the new DVD collection of which Barnhart was really looking forward to since he, too, was a fan as a kid: "Alas, not every 'classic' looks as keen as it once did to your impressionable 10-year-old brain... Now I'm wondering if The Simpsons will seem this lame when I'm 70."

Online viewing tip. An unusual Flash adventure for a defunct deodorizer.

Posted by dwhudson at August 20, 2003 8:13 AM