Studios Torn By Conflicting Desires To Tout Their Box Office Successes And Torture Greedy Guilds
mark · 09/04/07 12:42PM
While film executives would like nothing better than to celebrate Hollywood's unprecedented $4 billion summer by boasting about the current quality of their cinematic product and commissioning a two-page spread in the trades depicting the heads of the major studios slathering their naked bodies in peanut butter and rolling around in stacks of hundred-dollar bills the size of freshly raked autumn leaf piles, they know that the looming labor war with the various guilds requires public restraint over showy exuberance. In today's NY Times story on the studios' ongoing attempts to remind everyone about how producing nine-figure-grossing blockbusters is a terrible way to make money, execs cry poor while WGA officials lick their chops over every report of another box office record shattered: