Hollywood's Uncertain Comeback

Welcome to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show. I'm Ted Bonnitt and my pal Phil Proctor is somewhere. Hello, Phil. How are ya?

I'm good.

You're in Delaware. You're not far from Rehoboth Bay. You're very close to Camp Arrowhead, where I spent my fifth grade summer.

That's just scary.

Our guest today is David Poland, an entertainment film, film industry veteran and journalist and critic and host of David Reads the Trades on Substack, which is something you write every day and also you host as a video.

I do the daily podcast five days a week and then I do write. Probably three, four times a week now in longer form. And that's the hot button. That one's called.

Yeah, the hot button.We're so glad you're here because Phil and I have been trying to understand the film business and the entertainment business at large here in Hollywood for the last 10 years.

And particularly the demise of the industry, which you touched upon in one of your last podcasts.

Yes.

Maybe you could help explain to us what the hell's going on in the industry.

Most importantly, I'm from Pikesville, Maryland originally,. Which is just on the other border,.The border of Delaware. We're very close to Delaware, so I feel like I'm close to Phil already. I didn't have a praying.

That's great, David.

And there's like a whole Baltimore mafia here in the business. Tom Rothman is from Baltimore. There are a bunch of filmmakers from. Baltimore, so we have a weird little. Cult here in la. Figure.

Wonderful. Very interesting. Thank you so much for coming down.

I'm happy to be here. I always like to talk about the demise of the world as we know it.

You know, it's been suggested that the media has been run by liberals for years and years, mostly has.

It's a liberal business. It's not ridiculous to say that the liberals run this industry, but liberal ideas, I'd say, are 70 to 80% of what this country actually believes.We have been separated by Donald Trump over the course of a decade now, being told he finds these things to make people afraid of and he uses them to leverage his voting and everything else. But the problem for me is that in this industry, what we're seeing is everybody was happy that David Ellison was taking over Paramount.Paramount was a flat company for a very long time, going back to when Sumner really got sick 15 years ago already. And then Brad Gray was a horrible choice over there. And it never really. The company just went.Was basically dog paddling for 15 years so there was this kind of thrill that somebody was coming in with a lot of money and maybe he would build, rebuild the studio. As it's turned out, the Ellisons are in camp. Trump, Jeff Bezos, who we think is a liberal in real life, bought the Washington Post, and he every.At first it was, oh, my God, the Washington Post is gonna have this infusion of money and power. And then as soon as Trump pushed, he went, oh, no, let me give. You some money to make us go away.

And as a result, the Washington Post has had an exodus of integrity.

Much deserved, unfortunately. But there's still some people there who are great, but they have destroyed what they were.And the same thing is happening as you see ABC or Disney under Iger. Iger is a realistic. So he gave in the first time, and you went, oh, that's not so good. But people weren't so angry.And then the second time with Kimmel, it was like, oh, now this is the fact that this is now becoming a habit.

And Eisner had to step in, of all people.

I think they give Eisner too much credit. Matt Bellany at Puck likes to talk about Eisner.

Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute, Dave. I went to school with Michael Eisner.

There you go. Didn't we all?

Okay. And I actually brought him up in front of the student council for chewing gum in class.

Did he have enough for everybody?

Not that, but he sure does now.

I think they finally sold tops. He owned Topps for a while with the baseball cards with a gum in it. They bought that out. I think they finally sold it. But Eisner was.Eisner feels like a lifetime ago of concept. And it was different. Eisner was there before DVDs existed, forget about streaming or anything else. The industry was very different at that time.

At the time that I was doing all of my major work, the industry was much more of a community. And that started to erode once the online presence happened.And so all of a sudden, instead of sitting in a green room, waiting to go into your agent's little booth and record an audition, yakking with all your old friends and everything, you're sitting down in your little makeshift studio in a basement or somewhere, talking alone into a microphone.

But that also accurately mirrors the consumer at this point who's sitting at home alone, siloed into their confirmation bia.

Yes and no. It's a weird thing. I think there are things that are true about how it's changed.I think there are things that are not true There's a great book that I always reference called Movies and Money by the great producer David Putnam, who ran Columbia for two years before he got murdered for being too adventurous. But he's a great producer and he wrote this book.And basically going back to 1910, every decade there was a bunch of media and whatever saying cinema, the theatrical business is going out of business. That there's always been the naysayers. There's always been the attacks on the industry, the idea that things were going to die.My personal journey in terms of theatrical, really conversations about it. But it really.My big fight started with Sharon Waxman at the New York Times in 2005 when she started reporting on the box office and saying how things were terrible. It was the year after the Passion of the Christ had done this enormous number in February and March. And so it had skewed the numbers.So she started with, the box office is down. It's all over. The kids are playing video games. The kids are doing this. They have their computers.And then the middle of the summer, it had caught up already, so the numbers were now going up. Then she came up with, there are fewer tickets being sold based on blah, blah, blah. And they always find an excuse to be negative.And the New York Times has been negative about theatrical ever since. There's this. And I've been. And you guys haven't been reading me that long, which is probably good for you.But five years ago, I was talking about the fact that the industry, as it expanded for streaming, was doing something that was insane. The idea that they all went from spending. Television budgets for a company were three or four billion dollars a year if they had a network. Yeah.Movie budgets were 2 million. 2 Billion or less. There really was nobody spending over 2 billion till Disney had all those franchises. They started spending 3 billion a year.It was very unusual. All of a sudden, Everybody went to 18 billion a year because Netflix did it. And it was inevitably not going to work.

That was more money than Hollywood was making gross in a year.

Crazy, though, there was a moment for DVD where there was more money, but then they blew DVD in three years because they oversaturated the market and started price competition internally. So that's what killed just literally three years. The space of it was seven years, but the heat of it was about three years.And it died before streaming, before these other comparisons were out there, before the Internet had become what it had become.

You're talking about the negative aspects of the business. What are movies made of in the old days? Negatives. So it was inevitable.

But the visionaries came in.I had a personal close encounter with ted Sarandos in 2001 when I was selling my documentary at the Video Software Dealers association in Las Vegas at the Rio. And we had a little independent film lounge and he came in with an entourage and it was 2002, I think.

So was red envelope a thing at that time?

Yeah, it was still red envelopes. And he came in and he looked at my DVD and. And he said, oh, that's a nice looking disc. I said, yep, five colors.He goes, yeah, if I buy it, I can't have any of that. Why? He says, because all that ink makes them fragile. I'll have to buy blank. He ended up buying 3,000 printed. So it didn't come true.He picked up the disc and he like reached in about 6 inches from my face and he waved my disc in my face and he said, rube Goldberg device. And I said, how's that? He goes, it's all going to be streaming. And I don't know why I didn't fall to my knees and say, please take me with you.But that was. He knew.

The thing about streaming, and I say this a lot, is that it's not a actual revolution. It is not really a change. All it is another delivery system. Yeah, that's right. We remember.We're all old enough to remember the early 70s when there were no other delivery systems besides you could see a movie at 11 o' clock at night on your local station and that's the only time you ever saw it again after seeing it in a movie theater. Yeah, I mean, everything changed once we got VHS.And then when we really changed, we got to DVD in 1999, where they were sell through was the decision by the industry to make the sell through dvd. And then streaming obviously was not possible back then. And when Netflix started streaming, it was terrible, but.And at that point studios were getting paid $30 million. They were thrilled to get the extra $30 million.But the format became made more sense and it makes sense and I think everything will end up being streaming technically. But what's the difference between stream broadcast television or linear television?

It's a choice, right?

What's the difference between seeing. Between streaming apps and seeing something in a movie theater? It's a choice.

It's also accessibility.

But accessibility's always. We've overcome. We've already engaged sensibil availability of everything for 10 years.We're a long time into having access to more content on any one of these streamers than any of us could watch in our entire lives and when.

We want it technically.

But we're already at a point where people are saying, I got every streamer, but I can't find anything to watch. What people ask me every week at the. I hang out with this group of guys at the end in Hollywood every week.And every week, is there anything to watch? Is there something to watch somewhere? My sisters call me, my friends call me. People like everybody wants to know, is there anything to watch?And I say, two weeks. Some Slow Horses is coming back, so you can watch that.

I just flew five, five and a half hours from L. A to Baltimore and there was a selection of film, and I swear to God, David, I could not recognize maybe a handful of films I recognized. Luckily, I stumbled across the Penguin Lessons with Coogan, Steve Coogan. I don't know if you saw that picture, but you would love it.It's brilliantly made and yet I'd never heard of it, and it was just dumb luck that I caught something. But all of these different movies. Where's my hat? Screwballs. Screwball three, Although I've never heard of these things.

You're listening to the Sexy Boomer show. And our guest today is David Poland, industry entertainment veteran who knows the film business upside and down, and does.He's the host of David Reads the Trades and the Hot button on Substack. And you've been in this business forever and ever. So we've asked you to come in to lend us a perspective.

Almost as long as you guys.

Yeah.

Talking about the switch over from VHS and. And beta. Wow. Beta and VHS and DVDs.That all meant residuals to us, the working actors, and especially to me as a voiceover artist because I've added different voices to hundreds of movies, and I still get little pieces of money from people buying them or showing them, and it just ain't there anymore. It's really hard to track the streaming of films and things.

The amount of money you get from.Them as an artist is almost nothing. I was good friends with the late great Scott Wilson, who was an activist in SAG a lot of the time. And I remember they didn't end up having a strike.They wanted to have a strike at one point because the amount of money that you were being paid, a flat annual rate essentially, for things being pushed to streaming. And so they were avoiding the revenue that a lot of people were making.Besides voice actors, there were some voice actors were making with reruns on network television.Network television just stopped doing reruns that's right, because it costs a lot more to put it on broadcast as a second time, you got paid the same as you got paid the first time, and then the third time you got paid half of it or whatever. Whereas on streaming, they were paying $125 or $150 for the year to run it as many times as it ran. There was no. No limitation on it. It's gotten a little better since then, but not a lot. It's still not real money.

Not a lot.

Let's go back, like 20 years.

Yeah.

Even 25 years when there was a model and it was fairly consistent in terms of people went to the movies on a regular basis. I know Covid had a big impact, obviously, on changing habits, as did streaming. And film festivals had their heyday. Sundance was huge.Then, of course, the award shows, which were huge moneymakers for the studios. The Golden Globes, which I think you took to task, Hate Golden Globes. Yeah. Well, we always knew that was a bit of a sellout.Always a scam, but now a real scam, overtly. Let's come back to the present day now. Let's start with the film festivals. How relevant are the film festivals?

Film festivals are dying pretty much left and right. They've been reduced in size and length and amount of films, and they're all having finance.All the major ones are having financial troubles, Every single one of them, unfortunately. And I think the film festivals are going to have to come back to the point where they are really local events.So the New York Film Festival is actually one of the healthy ones with a few healthy ones of any size, because they're really a very small, very specific contingent in New York City. And a lot of moneyed people who are part of that.Something like Mill Valley, which is up in Northern California, is a set group of people who have a lot of money who will support that festival.

Same with Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

Santa Barbara International film festival transformed 15 years ago, 20 years ago, because it became about the award season stuff and less about the festival. And I know that Roger Durling, who runs that festival, passionately loves the film festival side of it, but seven people go to see it.The truth is, that's become all about talent showing up for Oscar season and doing the, you know, half a dozen events or 10 events or whatever they have up there during that one week period. And that's all the attention they get, and that funds the film festival. But the film festival isn't that popular, and it isn't that important.

What about the Markets.

To some people. I'm a little out of the range on this. I think I'm completely right. There really is no demand for markets anymore. The whole idea of sun Sundance is a beautiful festival.It's been a beautiful festival, but the idea that it's a marketplace because they have original content is great. Except that the idea of going up. To the mountains, whether it's there in.Boulder, which it'll be after next year, to go see movies in a room with 500 people, and the people go crazy. And then three studios will say, I need that movie. And they'll fight over how much they're going to spend. But really, at this point, nobody goes.They've either already bought it or they're buying it. They're watching it on their. In their studio, in Netflix, on Vine.

But that was.

Whatever.

That was the way it was back then, too.

Fifteen years, there would be, like, screenings like there are at Cannes still. There would be screenings during Toronto. There'd be a bunch of private screenings where the buyers. Where there'd be five different companies or. Eight different companies seeing movies on a big screen for the first time.The need for that, the technical need for that doesn't exist anymore. There's no reason to go up into the mountain anymore. And sadly, the truth of the Sundance movie is that two movies end up. Emerging as remembered from the festival each year, and the rest of them are just lost.

Lost.

They end up on United Airlines.

Exactly.

But it's been.

They end up on Peacock in April, just be floating out there. And they may be great or they. May be special in some way.

The documentary film market has been dead.

The theatrical market for documentary has always been up and down, but it's not what it was. There was a period where there were.A bunch of documentaries that were doing $10 million in theatrical. We have a new thing with the stunting going on that's been going on this month because the studios are not making enough movies for release.And you have movies like Jaws. 50Th anniversary screening was one weekend, and IMAX did $10 million. What was it the recent anime went on and did?It had a $70 million weekend two weekends ago from Crunchyroll. And the last time they did it, it did about $10 million. This time it did 70.And now we're going to have another Taylor Swift movie in October at AMC is around the country. So they're filling the holes that are being left by the studios. The problem is the studios really aren't making enough movies.

How many movies are Being made a year now.

It keeps on shifting around. It's somewhere around the 75 or so that are getting released by the majors now.

It's very small number 75 a year.

There are only five majors left.

Didn't it used to be like 2, 300, 500 movies a year?

There still are 3 or 400 movies, 500 movies a year, but they're not by the majors. So the majors numbers gone down.A fascinating phenomenon actually maybe to me at least, is that you now see a bunch of a 24 neon and small distributor movies on 2000 screens.Because there's not enough being filled up the majors anymore.So all of a sudden these little tiny indie movies that don't have marketing budgets to support a 2000 screen release are being released on 2000 screens. They're doing $2 million and people are like, why isn't it doing better? There's no marketing money.

The marketing money was very rich back in the 90s and the early aughts. Film marketing was relatively huge.

Yes.

And it all got to the point where it rested on Thursday and Friday night of opening weekend. It was really critical to open big.

It's still critical. But it was always an illusion. There was a period 25 years ago where movies played for six months in a theater.Star wars played for a year and a half in first run. Jurassic park played for a year in first run. The world was different. But opening weekend still matters.But you can over to some degree, you can overcome it. It's really just a matter of perspective. And we've lost.The media on my side of it has really lost perspective on how to tell the story of what's happening.

But isn't that part of the loss of the collective experience? You would have a huge campaign. Beyond trailers would be television and radio campaigns for opening weekend. And it was mass audience promotion.

Word of mout, word of mouth, word of mouth.

The second weekend.

I guess they rest on sequels so much because you had to create an entire echo sphere of excitement over a title. And it was a lot of work.

Still is.

And a lot of money.

It's a work. It's a lot of work to fail too.

Mind you, now that nobody reads newspapers really anymore.

Yeah.

And nobody's watching broadcast television much anymore.

That's an illusion. Also.

That's good to know.

They're watching football more than they're watching anything.

Okay, but marketing a movie now, how are they generating excitement?

They all think that social media is God, except they have no idea what they're doing or what Anything means.So it's gone from being selective television and whatever, which they still are doing, but then they're on like the hot wings show or they're doing all this crazy. Any celebrity eats hot wings. Which of course is a kind of a ripoff of Jimmy Kimmel in a way. But it's like everything is stunty.Everybody's waiting for some sort of thing to break out, but there's no indication, if you look at the numbers, that any of it actually matters. I am of the belief that social media stuff is good for awareness. It's critical. If you don't have awareness, it's important to do all that stuff.It's critical. But awareness is only the first step because you have to get somebody to actually leave their house and buy a ticket.A lot of the time now what we're seeing is movies that people weren't expecting people to leave their house and buy a ticket they're going to. And the movies they were expecting them to go to, they're not.

We've had Greg Laemmle on and he's talked about the challenge that they're facing just for survival. It's pretty remarkable. We talked to him during the pandemic and when that was all going on.

They don't have the advantage of the. They have, I think, three plexes, but they don't really have the 15 screens where you can play. And it's.And it really is an advantage to be able to manipulate those 15 screens. And that was designed and that was intentional.When the exhibitors were going out of business in the 90s, they all declared bankruptcy at some point and rebuilt. And they rebuilt into these rooms with bigger screens, smaller seat counts, and that way they could expand the number of seats.So back in the 90s used to go. And movies were sold out. When's the last time you saw a sellout of a movie? 20 Years.It doesn't happen anymore because if Star wars is opening, it's on 13 of the 15 screens that night. And then they go to 11, and then they go to eight, and then they go to seven. And the second week it's on. On six screens.

And.

And it's a. It's the way it works.

We're speaking today with our guest, David Poland, an entertainment industry veteran, journalist, critic and author of the substack the Hot Button. And David reads the trades, which is, I gotta tell you, you gotta watch. Because David's not afraid to speak his mind.

No, tells it like it is.

He sounds like the guy that's been around the block way too many times.And when we had lunch before the show, I asked him about his background and he told me about his long storied career in show business, including working at Saturday Night Live and producing TV shows and the whole thing. And you had so many typical show business letdowns.

Yes, many. So many in the best way possible.

But you have such a wizened attitude about this business. Google. David reads the trades. And you don't have to buy the trades anymore. You can just listen to David reads.

A lot of people do that. When I was 18 years old and. I was producing a show off Broadway and I had an actor who was. 60 Something, he was a very nice guy.But he said to me, I can. Look into your eyes and I can see the glimmer of thought and intelligence. And then behind them I can see.Dollar signs and behind them I could see knives. And I thought, what a great compliment at 18. But I've tried not to live up to it.

So like Ed Asner on the Mary Tyler Moore, you've got spunk.

I hate spunk.

But David, I've always said that Hollywood is the only town where you can get stabbed in the front.

Let's talk about some of the highlights because we still love movies.

Yes. And movies do I.

And the moviegoing experience is still alive.

It is exaggerated what it is that the media again has become obsessed with this idea of hitting the number from 2019 right before COVID And in fact, the business, the domestic business is still at is at nine and a half billion dollars this year. It's not $11 billion, but it's over $9 billion. The height of it domestically was 11 something.The thing is, international hasn't recovered as much as domestic, so that's an issue. But they were at $30 billion or so a year in that last 2018. 2019. 2018 Was the biggest year ever.

Okay, so you're talking about 9 billion domestic.

Yeah. And something. 20 Something international.

Okay, how does that compare to what's the income for Netflix?

Let's say in some way, it depends what your company is. But you could be more profitable than Netflix. Netflix is an amazing company. And I always say people think I beat up Netflix.

Netflix.

I'm not beating up Netflix. But Netflix took a long time to get here. They got into streaming more than five years, five, six years before anybody else did.So they this whole long Runway and they just in the last three years became profitable. They were not a money making profit.

Like Amazon.

Like Amazon. But as it is now their revenues are somewhere around $40 billion a year. Their net is somewhere around $8 billion a year.So it's not terrible, but it's not extraordinary or life changing. But the stock market loves them and sees them as somehow sort of a tech play.

Is Ted Sarandis the most powerful man in Hollywood?

Everything is relative. The most powerful man in Hollywood is the person who gives you the money for your project. Right?So ultimately, wherever you can get the money is where you get the money. If Netflix is handing out more money.Than anybody, then he's very powerful in that regard. But. And Ted, I don't mean to drag Ted either, but he's a TV guy. The quality of Netflix product is 80% junk. More if the networks were doing 60% junk.Netflix is 85% junk. It's just the way it is. It's not, they're not designed for the best of quality.Then they go do fund some very good international shows and some great movies and things like that. But it's the power of Netflix is that it's so much money, is the pot is so big and they're willing to spend $18 billion.

Have a different perspective too, because globally, when we look at box office and what movie studios look at in terms of audience potential, the international streaming business has got to be a magnitude greater.

Netflix has by far the biggest international business in terms of streaming, in great part because they started, I mean, when Netflix started, it was A$10 a month,. 90% Of the country had cable, 90%. Of the world had cable or something.And then they came along and said, here's $10, you can have all this content unlimited practically for $10 a month. And everybody said yes. And the international said yes. Their international audience is twice as big as their domestic. And so they now have 300 million people.And it's amazing nobody else who came along with the major studios five years ago, six years ago, has been able. To do that internationally yet.

But their approach editorially, lowest common denominator, if you will, is broader because of that, because they have to transcend many different cultures.

But they're also throwing more stuff against the wall. Yes, they're doing more cultural stuff.They've led the way in that, in many ways. They've led the way in translation. However, it's either the, it's the deal of Netflix.Netflix kind of became something you got used to, like ABC or CBS or whatever, where you felt you had to have it. And when it started it was 10 bucks, now it's 20 bucks. But people are still hooked into it.As one of those things that's just a given. Like you have. You have a tv. You have to have Netflix. Netflix and the others don't have that advantage. Disney has a little bit of it.Do the kids stuff. But it's a different thing. And Netflix's business doesn't require everybody to like everything.Netflix's business requires people to like four programs a week. If you can find four things on Netflix or anywhere this was true. Anywhere this is true is actually successful streamer. If Netflix.If you find four hours on Netflix every week that are good that you like. They've won because they're not. It doesn't matter how many people watch it. Even though that's all anybody it talks about.What matters is that you keep your subscription.

Do they reflect that? American films exported so well because everybody idolizes the American dream overseas.And so there were a lot more American values reflected globally in motion pictures because of that. Does that still hold true? Because I know a lot of productions are now outsourced overseas because it's just cheaper to produce. But are they also.

But they're still set in Chicago even though they're shot in Bulgaria. You know.

But. But is Bulgaria any more interesting to the global audience than it was when Just America was of interest Then Nobody.

Makes a movie about Bulgaria.

That's true.

Or TV show. There are now game shows that are being done overseas in Eastern Europe because it's cheaper somehow.And I don't really know how that math actually works. But to take an entire crew and everybody to Bulgaria or wherever and shoot.I think the floor on NBC is one of those shows where they shoot the whole show in Eastern Europe. None of it suggests for a second that it's anywhere other than downtown Burbank. But it is. Because somehow that's cheaper.There are issues with production and the cost of production in Los Angeles. The cost of production around the country. Who's giving. What kind of tax credits.

Is California coming back? I'm hearing that business is starting to come back because of the new $750 million incentive. Is that happening? Is it working?

It's seems to be. But it's too. I think it's too early to really guess that.My thing is that the whole business overexpanded and that I've been saying for literally for years that the business was going to contract by 30 to 40% because it had to. Because everybody made too many shows for a while.So I think part of what's going on in the last year or two Is that people who were used to being able to work every day of the year, and at first there was a problem because Netflix and others were doing eight and ten episode seasons and trying to keep people on hold when they weren't working so they couldn't go get another job. And all those complications have been worked out to some degree. But people were working a lot for a few, for four or five years.And then right before the strikes, right before, around the time, little after Covid, a little right before the strikes, the studio said, okay, now it's time to suck it back in. And basically the industry has contracted, so it feels like everybody's being tortured.

Was the big strike with the actors, was it three years ago?

Now it's now two years ago.

Did it do more damage than good?

No, because I believe that the studios did it on purpose. There's no question in my mind actually about this that if you look at what happened, they had the wga. WGA went on strike.They stopped negotiating with the wga. Oh, we're gonna wait for sag. Then SAG went on strike. And then they did not negotiate with SAG for four months.It wasn't that they were talking and it wasn't going well and they couldn't decide or whatever and they just wouldn't talk to them.

What was the purpose?

I feel the purpose was absolutely to cover this regression that they were already doing. They were already cutting back on staff, they were already cutting. They were already firing people left and. Right in the companies and the amount of content they wanted to make was. Going to be smaller. And that they let this five month.Period go because it was easier for. Them than to actually take the heat. For starting to fire people dump their shows. It's also an opportunity because of contracts.To be able to dump things that were not. Had not been made yet.

So the industry was overextended and was contracting.

It was contracting and they used, I. Believe they used the strike as a very cruel but very functional tool.

Let's end on an up note here because you still love the movies.

I do.

You have gone to see one battle after another.

I've seen it twice in VistaVision and once in an iMac70.

How do they compare?

Slightly different. Where I was sitting in the theater mattered and that kind of thing. Every time I see it, I've gotten more out of it because of the movie.Ultimately, it's a beautiful movie. The bigger screen you get to see it on, the better you're going to be. Sean Penn's performance, which I think is likely to win the Oscar.Agree is his just seeing his eyes in the close up are the work that obviously Paul didn't direct him to do and just captured it is amazing. Just looking at his eyeballs, moving around is fascinating. He can win the Oscar for this.And Harvey Milk in the same lifetime is beautiful as far as I'm concerned. There are people arguing about whether it's the best film of the year, best film of the decade, whatever.Everybody's trying to hyperp verbally themselves out of it. But it is a significant and important film and it actually is about something.

You got to see it in the theater.

By far the best experience theater. It is a big movie. The biggest screen you can find. Go see it.

Okay. Some other movies that are out or coming out that you think are must sees.

The hot movie out of the festival is a movie called Hamnet, which is about the William Shakespeare and his wife and the son that they have who passes away and that ends up leading to the making of the writing of Hamlet. It's a very powerful motion picture. It's Chloe Zhao who won the Oscar for the movie with Fran McDormand a few years ago. The homeless movie.

Oh.

Oh, that was great. Yeah.

So it's a beautifully made movie about itinerant. Seasonal roles are definitely part of it. I've seen Frankenstein now, which got slammed at the festivals, and it's actually quite brilliant.It's maybe a little long in the first act, but there's a performance by Jacob Elordi, who is this 6 foot 5 beautiful boy who everybody's in love with and wants to all the girls are hot for. But the trick, the truist of this Frankenstein is that Frankenstein does learn and speaks and has ideas and thoughts about being Frankenstein.And Elordi presents this, his character, and I think he's gonna get an Academy Award nomination for it. He is actually quite brilliant. Much to my shock. I thought he was just a pretty boy, but he's really good in this movie.And Guillermo del Toro makes a beautiful movie. So there's that. There's a Catherine Bigelow movie called A House of Dynamite about a nuke essentially getting loose.We don't know where from, but it's gonna hit Chicago in seven hours.

And what city plays Chicago? Bratislava.

We only go to Chicago briefly because somebody's kid's there. But it's really. It's the people who are the power people who are trying to figure out what to do about it.So it's the president and the different people who are trying to figure out, can we shoot it down? Can we do this? Do we let Chicago go? Who do we bomb? If we start bombing, does the entire world go away? It's quite a brilliant little movie.Great documentary. Marty Scorsese documentary that's coming to Apple in a couple of weeks is breathtaking.

Original movies not franchise times 12.

Warner Brothers has done amazingly well with. Original movies this year.Other people are doing all kinds of things, but original there is nothing. Ultimately, you have to sell everything. And I think one of the things we've learned is that just because it's IP doesn't mean it's sells on its own.So you either have to figure out how to sell that, but if you have an original movie and you can. Find a way to connect with people's feelings, you can get them to come. Out to those movies as well.

David Poney, Speaking of connecting with people's.

Feelings, where can they catch your show?

I'm online on Substack. It's David reads the trades in the mornings. I could do about half an hour to an hour of yammering about the trades and the news of the day. And then I have.

Very entertaining, by the way.

And then it's the hot button is the the written piece that's do three or four times a week.

David Poland, thank you so much for coming down and maintaining your faith in the motion picture business. Thank God.

I feel so close to Phil.

Hey, listen, we have to have you back on the show. I have to be in the studio with you. So we'll figure that out. Okay? I'm Phil Proctor.

See ya.