Season’s Gleanings

‘Titanic,” the blockbuster wannabe directed by James Cameron, is so expensive it took two film studios to finance. Everyone involved struggled mightily to finish the picture in time for an early summer opening, but Cameron’s legendary meticulousness made meeting the date in question impossible.

Given all that, and given the myriad financial reasons Paramount, the film’s domestic distributor, has for wanting to start earning some money back as soon as possible, you might think the studio would place the film before the public the minute it was ready. If “Titanic” was done in late August, it would open in August. If it wasn’t ready until early January, it would come out then. But if you thought that, you’d be wrong.

For in Hollywood’s view, the four seasons and 12 months of the year are hardly created equal. The studios see these time frames through their own particular prism, through a lens made up of what they think is shrewdness but probably has as much to do with lock-step adherence to conventional wisdom as anything else.

“Titanic” was originally scheduled for a prime summer slot because that is the time when young people, that bulwark of today’s domestic audience, are let loose from the shackles and chains of school attendance and are free to go to the movies as early and often as possible.

So the weeks of summer, starting with the Memorial Day weekend, are when studios prefer to position their potentially biggest grossers of the year, intimate, thoughtful films like “Independence Day” and “Men in Black.”

Because the studios are greedy, early in the summer is much preferable to late in the season. And because the studios are often nervous and lacking in confidence about their product, they also want a clear weekend, a Friday opening when no other similarly excessive production will clog the airwaves with competing TV commercials.

Once “Titanic” couldn’t make its summer date, the Christmas season became, to the studios’ way of thinking, the obvious fallback position. Once again, though it is of shorter duration, a major vacation is involved, and also one that brings family members who may not have much in common into forced intimacy with one another. What better way to pass the time than to herd everyone into the nearest multiplex?

The weeks close to Christmas also are the focus of another Hollywood agenda. Since it is assumed that the august members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have the attention span of a harried gnat, studios like to place what they look on as their major contenders for serious Oscar consideration into those precious weeks.

So this year we have Steven Spielberg’s “Amistad,” Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun,” James Brooks’ “As Good as It Gets” and the Gwyneth Paltrow - Robert De Niro - Ethan Hawke-starring “Great Expectations” all opening practically on top of one another.

Hoping to avoid this kind of Christmas rush and still catch the eye of Oscar voters, studios have in the past opened films as late as Dec. 31 just in New York and L.A. and specifically “for academy consideration.”

Last year, however, in a delicious example of a Frankenstein monster rising up and smiting its creator, the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., an organization that owes its current position exclusively to the studios’ insatiable appetite for year-end applause, decided to enforce a long-forgotten rule about how many days a film must play in L.A. to be eligible for an HFPA award. Which led to the amusing spectacle of studios frantically trying to find theaters available to exhibit their films earlier than they had planned on.

Are Christmas releases the only films that win Academy Awards? Of course not. But while “The Silence of the Lambs” shocked everyone by taking the best picture Oscar even though it was released in March, that time of the year is still considered nowhere near as prime as Christmas.

Nor is it thought to be as good as the months of October and November, when studios put out primarily two kinds of films. This is the time for quote-unquote serious films like the upcoming “The Sweet Hereafter” that have award potential but are not considered a sure thing at the box office. And it’s also the time for commercial films--like Francis Ford Coppola’s version of John Grisham’s “The Rainmaker” and Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of the best-selling “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”--that might need a little head start at the box office.

Though no films in recent memory have come out to celebrate Arbor Day or Flag Day, studios like to take advantage of the public’s putative holiday mood whenever possible. So MGM is considering opening a made-for-each-other romance called “Music From Another Room” just in time for, yes, Valentine’s Day.

Thankfully, there are signs that the studios’ rigidity about what kinds of films can come out when is changing. Part of the impetus for this are the smaller, more independent companies that have figured out that Americans are not completely robotic and that it is possible to enjoy offbeat films at blockbuster times of the year. Sony Classics, for instance, plans to open the deft, small-scale Cannes hit “Ma Vie En Rose” just in time for Christmas.

Also adding pressure for a change is the sheer glut of studio product. Just as a continual rise in the number of people who demand to live in Manhattan has led to a renaissance in neighborhoods once considered beyond the pale, so studios are now moving better films into once-taboo slots.

The month of January, for instance, was once an elephant graveyard of legendary proportions. But Warner Bros. is currently planning to open “Fallen,” an excellent and absorbing Denzel Washington supernatural thriller, right in the middle of the month. If the studios aren’t too old to learn new tricks, there may be hope for humanity after all.