Sharon Waxman

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March 22, 2007

L.A. Blogger Continues Campaign Against N.Y. Hollywood Press

Posted by misskarina under Bad Journalism, Blogs, Box Office, Death of Print, Film Blogs, Film Criticism, Nikki Finke, Sharon Waxman
[3] Comments 

Kate Coe, the blogger behind Mediabistro’s FishbowlLA, has a real problem with New York-based journalists writing about Hollywood, and she’s not shy about admitting it. The day after the Oscars, Coe savaged David Carr and Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times, and Rachel Sklar and Melissa Lafsky of The Huffington Post’s Eat the Press blog, for revealing their own personal biases, preferences and Hollywood-history blind spots in their write-ups (so, basically, acting like bloggers). “New Yorkers really shouldn’t be allowed to cover the Oscars,” the L.A.-based blogger sniped. “Maybe it’s something in that water that calcifies vital showbiz synapses. Or maybe they should drive more.”

Then, yesterday, Coe used Nikki Finke’s deconstruction of Sharon Waxman’s typically clumsy report on the battle between Joe Roth and Julie Taymor over Across the Universe as further evidence that New Yorkers should stick to their own turf. Where as Waxman painted Taymor as a poor artiste, victimized by the big bad industry, Finke defended the producers right to try to salvage a nickel from a pretentious trainwreck, and ran with the headline, “Why Did They Hire Her in the 1st Place?” The fact that Finke is a better, more thorough reporter than Waxman isn’t at issue; the attitude with which each woman relates their findings is. Finke’s “It’s just capitalism, stupid” attitude is the “correct” one. To Coe, Waxman’s dippy “why can’t we all just get along?” take is just more evidence that “New Yorkers don’t understand show biz all that much.”

I think many of Coe’s points, across both posts, are valid. Carr’s seasonal Carpetbagger blog is often insufferably twee in voice and mind-bogglingly hazy in facts. Rachel Sklar is a fine blogger and is well-suited to ETP’s usual mix of political savvy and pop culture snark, but anyone who doesn’t know who Thelma Schoonmaker is shouldn’t be blogging the Oscars. It upsets me that Gawker has turned Alessandra Stanley into such an easy target (if only because it pains me to watch the Gawker brand itself devolve into all-bullying, all the time) but the fact remains: she’s basically the Sharon Waxman of television critics. Speaking of Waxy … well, the fact that I have an entire category of this blog devoted to her bad journalism says enough.

But if Coe and I are in agreement that a lot of bad Hollywood journalism is generated by the New York Times, I’m still not willing to buy the assertion that the problem is geographic. (more…)

 

February 5, 2007

Fact Checking Sharon Waxman…Again

Posted by misskarina under Bad Journalism, David O Russell, Sharon Waxman
1 Comment 

Questioning Sharon Waxman’s reportage skills is not exactly a groundbreaking endeavor. I’m not only not the first to hop this train; I actually hopped it myself two years ago, in a short-lived column on Cinematical where I called out Waxman and friends for pumping the box-office-slump vein that was all the rage the summer of 2005 (succeeding regimes have, for reasons unknown to me, taken the heading in a different direction).

I’m not particularly eager to sink into old habits, but Waxy’s  latest conversion of laziness into dollars (possible subtitles: “I H8 David O. Russell”; “Writer’s Block Makes Cameron Crowe Nostalgic For An Imaginary Lost Era”; “Laura Ziskind, An Important Artist When She Produced Fight Club, Is Now Just A Sellout”) inspired me to crunch (or, at least, Google) some numbers.

I’m particularly concerned with Waxman’s assesment that I Huckabees, the fourth film directed by David O. Russell, is/was “disastrous.” The actual sentence: “Mr. Russell, widely admired for his original mix of comedy and seriousness in Flirting With Disaster and Three Kings, has dropped from view since his disastrous I Heart Huckabees in 2004, and is not close to making a new film.”

Waxman’s personal relationship with Russell has been well documented. I like Russell’s work very much, but even I can’t defend his interpersonal skills; he is, reportedly, not just a New Age kook, but a New Age kook who likes to beat up his more famous colleagues (search this page for the terms “fistfight” and “headlock”), and that’s just unspeakably offensive. Still, for a first-stringer at what is suppossedly the nation’s classiest daily paper, Waxman has proven that she’s not above leveling petty threats: an email sent from the journalist to the director shortly before the publication of her own personal S.C.U.M. Manifesto, Rebels on the Backlot included this gem: “I think you’ll regret your nasty behavior when you read the book. But that’ll be way late in the day.”

So it’s clear that Waxman’s vision is a bit clouded by contempt. But is that a proper excuse for sloppy journalism? Here are a few random facts I collected in relation to films mentioned in the article:

  • World gross of the “disasterous” I : $21 million; it never expanded beyond 900 screens in the U.S.
  • Domestic gross of One Hour Photo, which Waxy holds up as the hit that makes her miss Mark Romanek: $31 million on a fairly wide, 1,330 screen release
  • Domestic gross of Fight Club, which, as Waxy conveniently forgets, was considered a bomb until a year or two into its DVD release: $37 million on 2,000 screens
  • Blatant lies peddled about David O. Russell: at least one. She claims he’s “not close” to making a film, but that might have something to do with the fact that he’s producing a pilot for FX. He’s also attached to direct a Vince Vaughn project, according to IMDB.


I could go on and on, but I have work to do. Bottom line: It’s one thing that Waxman chose Hollywood journalism as an outlet for her obvious contempt for film and filmmakers; it’s another that her hate speech is consistently propelled by petty, personal issues, and is quite often verifiably inaccurate.