Three Men and a Baby

The entrance to the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank, CA.

I worked for Walt Disney Pictures on the the Walt Disney Studios lot (500 South Buena Vista Street, Burbank, CA, 91521 - but who's counting?) in Burbank for just under a year from mid-1987 to mid-1988.

The department I worked in was called Creative Film Services.  With a name like that, any idea what the department did or produced?  I'll give you a clue: we were a division of the Marketing department.  You would see our work every time you walked in to a movie theater.  Some of the work we did would go on to become valued by movie memorabilia collectors.  You would hear our work on the radio and see it on television.  If it's any consolation, I had no idea what the department did either until I started working there.  Give up?

Creative Film Services was basically the in-house ad agency for all of the feature films released by Walt Disney Pictures and Touchstone Pictures (Touchstone released all the PG and R rated films that might not be considered worthy of the family-friendly Disney name).

The print side - where I toiled - produced the large, glossy "one sheet" or "lobby" posters of films that you see every time you enter the lobby of a movie theater.  The print department also produced the graphics that would make up the print ads that would be placed in newspapers and free weeklies around the country.

Down the hall was the A.V. side of the department that produced the radio and TV ads and "coming attractions" or "preview" trailers.

Walt Disney Pictures had just exited a long period of creative and financial stagnation, and under the new management of Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg - both new to Disney after successful runs at Paramount Pictures - would greatly increase the slate of films produced, as well as diversify the subject matter.  Disney was not just going to produce family-friendly, G-rated, kiddie fare anymore.

I was brought in, on a temporary basis through a staffing agency, to be the assistant to the Director of Creative Film Services, basically the Art Director on the print side.  He was a young, brash, temperamental New Yorker who had graduated from a highly regarded Art & Design school in New York and then been recruited from an ad agency in New York to come West and help create this in-house ad agency for Disney.  He was definitely a fish out of water in Hollywood, but he had artistic talent.  Most importantly in that business, he could produce work quickly.

It would be a couple of months before I would learn that he had previously gone through assistants like Bon Jovi goes through hair products.  Everyone was amazed that I stuck.  He was definitely a difficult person to work for, but we got along fine.

I arrived in the summer of 1987 - fresh out of college - and the studio was starting to ramp up the marketing of what management thought would be its big Holiday hit at the end of the year - Three Men and a Baby.

The lobby poster for Three Men and a Baby.

Three Men and a Baby, starring Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg and Ted Danson, was a remake of a French film that followed three working professionals, confirmed bachelors, who found themselves suddenly responsible for a young baby girl.  Comedy hijinks ensued.  None of the stars were "hot" or expensive at the time, and the film was shot in Toronto (less expensive due to the exchange rate).

It was what the new Disney management loved most in a film: low risk, low budget with the possibility of a high reward.

About a month after I started working in the department, when it appeared I was going to stick around for a while, I was told to go into an empty office and watch a videotape of the latest cut of Three Men and a Baby on a small TV.  It was a still a couple of months away from its release date, so the cut was very rough - the music hadn't been scored yet, there was plenty of ADR, Foley and sound mixing work that still needed to be done, the print wasn't color corrected and the transitions (fades, dissolves, wipes, etc.) were still indicated with marks on the film from a grease pencil.  I was familiar with looking at a film in this condition because it looked just like the prints of films I had worked on in college.  It was the first time, however, that I had seen a major studio film under these conditions.

I sat alone in the office, admittedly not the best of conditions to view a comedy, for ninety minutes and watched the movie.  Maybe it was the fact that I was getting paid to watch it, or the thrill of seeing a work print of a major studio picture for the first time - or perhaps the undeniable giddiness of watching the great Steve Guttenberg - but I thoroughly enjoyed the film.  I was definitely on board with everyone else at the studio who seemed to think this would be one of the biggest comedy hits of the Holidays.  Scheduled for release on Thanksgiving weekend, it would be a great date movie for couples of all ages.

Or so I thought.  You never knew for sure in that business.  There were stories of plenty of movies that everyone inside the studio loved before it was released, and tested well for preview audiences, only to die a quiet death once it was released in the open marketplace.  This was going to be the first time I would form my own opinion on the financial viability of a film long before it had been released to the public.  Would my opinion hold up?   In Hollywood, the public is ALWAYS right.

One of my main responsibilities in the office was to catalog and organize the literally thousands and thousands of large, white, hard cardboard composite sketches - internally known as "comps" - that were mock-ups of prospective one sheet posters for a movie.  The sketches and concepts for a movie's poster would start as soon as the movie went into production.  Everyone working on the marketing of the movie would have access to the original script and a rough cut of the film shortly after it finished production.  We would also see hundreds of production stills - photographs from the set of the movie - that would give us an idea of the look and feel of the film.

I would estimate that Disney had about 30 films in various stages of production while I was there - from the most recent "greenlight" picture that would eventually be titled Cocktail and star Tom Cruise (which I read before it was produced and just didn't understand why they were making it), to the carefully calculated re-releases of such Disney animated classics as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella - and each one of these projects had 100 - 200 composite sketches for the final one sheet poster.  It was common for my boss to ask me to gather 15-20 composite sketches of an upcoming release that were first presented to studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg six months earlier, and that he wanted to see again in his office in ten minutes.

The iconic Mickey Mouse water tower on the Disney Studios lot in Burbank,

I found it was quite common that if the perfect concept was presented in the initial marketing meeting for a movie - even if everyone loved it and thought it was perfect - the entire department went through the same steps and machinations and produced hundreds and hundreds of these composite sketches only - always at the last minute - to return to the idea originally presented in the first meeting six months earlier.

If you move to a new town and are looking to buy a new house and the first one you see looks perfect, you're still going to spend a couple of more days looking at homes to see if anything better is out there, right?  It's human nature.  I was amazed how often the first idea out of the box won the day.

As concepts and ideas started to become clearer and details of the artwork and copy came into focus,  in-house copywriters and freelancers on the outside would come up with pages and pages of tag lines - the catchy and clever one or two sentences at the top or bottom of a movie poster that make you interested in seeing the film - from which only one line would be chosen to appear on the finished poster.

My boss encouraged me to have a go at copywriting and I did submit pages and pages of taglines for a couple of movies that were in production, but I didn't have a knack for it and nothing ever stuck.

I was involved with a lot of the accounting (billing, invoices, payments, etc.) on the posters and art work that went through our department, and I saw that our typical budget for a major studio release was about $200,000 (double that in today's dollars).  That included trips to the film location and New York for my boss, paying artists to draw the hundreds of composite sketches along the way, paying the copywriters,  paying a name celebrity/fashion photographer for a photo shoot, or an artist for the final artwork if it was a painting and the cost of the final run of 5,000 or so glossy lobby posters.

If memory serves me correctly, well-known celebrity/fashion  photographer Annie Leibovitz did the photo that would wind up as the artwork for the Three Men and a Baby poster.  My department worked with her and Greg Gorman quite a bit, but I think she did that one.  Their typical rates were $15,000 - 20,000 for a one or two day photo shoot (again, double that to get the equivalent in today's dollars).

(Side note for Trekkies:  Most people probably don't remember that actor Leonard Nimoy directed Three Men and a Baby.  As the director, he had some input to the marketing of the movie.  I never met him in person, but spoke with him several times over the phone, and he was always polite, friendly and intelligent.)

Three Men and a Baby was finally released on November 29, 1987.  It grossed $10 million on its  opening weekend - a smash hit - and would go on to make over $150 million in the U.S. - the highest grossing film released in 1987.  I guess I was able to smell a hit.

At the same time that my department was working overtime on marketing Three Men and a Baby - a film that everyone felt had big, commercial smash hit written all over it - I was rooting for a more serious, sometimes violent, melancholy war film with comic moments starring Robin Williams - who was not a big box office draw at the time - that was directed by one of my favorite Directors: Barry Levinson (Diner, The Natural, Tin Men).

The studio's faith in the film was shown by the fact that they quietly released it on only four screens during the last week of of 1987.  Shot on a low budget of only $13 million dollars (double that for inflation and that would still be a very low budget Hollywood film), it would go on to gross over $100 million and garner Robin Williams an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

Come back next week and we'll discuss what I learned about film marketing on Good Morning, Vietnam.

The Strange Case of Kathryn Bigelow

A scene from The Hurt Locker (2008), directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

Since the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences first started awarding Oscars™ for film excellence in 1927, there have been 324 nominees for Best Director and 85 people have won the award.  On March 7 of last year, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director.  She also was the first woman to win the coveted Director's Guild award as Best Director.

She directed The Hurt Locker - the gripping tale of a company of demolition experts on the front lines in Iraq.  There were few female characters in the movie.  It was what Hollywood refers to as an "Action" picture.  In other words, the first woman to win the Best Directing award, won for directing a film a man would usually be called upon to direct. 

Don't get me wrong,  I'm not implying in any way that Bigelow won as any part of a sympathy or movement vote - i.e, she only won because it was finally time to give the benefit of the doubt to the next woman eligible.  I would have voted for her among the five finalists that year.  And you must admit, her win was all the sweeter when she beat out her former husband, James Cameron (is there really an attractive woman left in Hollywood who hasn't been married to James Cameron?), who directed Avatar, that year's champion at the box office.  Art winning over commerce. 

Kathryn Bigelow holds her Oscar™ for directing The Hurt Locker.

Why does Hollywood consider directing such a male-centric position?  Why have there only been four women to even be nominated as Best Director?  (The other women nominated have been Lina Wertmuller for Seven Beauties, Jane Campion for The Piano and Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation (one of my all-time favorites).

87 men have been nominated for the Best Director award multiple times, a lucky 18 actually winning 2 or more Oscars™.  No woman has been nominated more than once. 

I mention this because the Director Guild of America announced the results of their annual diversity report last week. 

The DGA analyzed more than 2,600 episodes produced in the 2010-2011 television season from more than 170 scripted television series.  The report showed that women directed only 12% of those episodes.  Eight TV shows didn't have a single woman director the entire season.  And while this study only applied to television, I'm sure the figures for feature films directed by women are even lower.  And if you're a minority woman?  Forget it.  You can share 1% of all episodic TV directing jobs.

I was a film major at a large, Southern California university back in the 1980's, and there were plenty of women in the program back then (I would have guessed 30-40%) - I'm sure those figures are even higher today.

So I think the numbers of women aspiring to be directors are there, and Ms. Bigelow has shown that a woman can excel in the position on a physically demanding action picture, with mostly male actors, in inhospitable conditions (much of The Hurt Locker was shot in Jordan during the middle of the summer).

Hollywood is a tough business for anyone to enter and achieve success, but this male directing domination doesn't extend to the equally important tasks of editing or producing or writing.  Women editors have won the Oscar™ six times in the past 30 years; a woman has been nominated virtually every year during that time.  (By the way, the best way to win an Oscar™ for editing is to work with Martin Scorcese.) 

The figures are about the same for female producer and writer nominees as editors.  The director position stands alone as the final bastion of male dominance in Hollywood.  Studio executives just prefer to have a man in charge of the set.  Even female studio executives.

Kathryn Bigelow directs The Hurt Locker on location in Amman, Jordan.

The Academy Awards are certainly not the definitive judgement in film excellence in a given year (such legendary directors as Robert Altman, Charlie Chaplin, Federico Fellini, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Ernest Lubitsch, David Lynch, Sidney Lumet and Orson Welles never won an Oscar™ for Best Director; Tim Burton and Spike Lee have never even been nominated).  They merely honor what's considered to be, usually, the best big budget/studio pictures made in English, mostly by Americans, for any given year.  But I think it's still an excellent barometer of trends in the industry as a whole, something that the recent DGA report certainly backs up for women directors in television.

So if you're raising a young daughter or daughters, and they seem to show an interest in working in film or television; you may want to steer them away from directing, and into editing, producing or writing.

Because if you want to be the one who yells "Action!" or "Cut!" on a set in Hollywood, it's still a Man's world.

Jeff and Geena

Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum at the Academy Awards in 1990.

I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job.  - Bill Murray

Fame is a funny thing.  We see people on television or on the big screen and somehow we believe that we know them.  I completely agree with Bill Murray.  I have no problem with people who just want to be rich.  I would love to be rich.  Who wouldn't?  But I'm very suspicious of someone who just wants to be famous.  It's just not a healthy desire.  If you want to be the best in your field and that may result in fame, fine, but if your end game is just to be famous, I think you need to have your head examined.

When you live or work around famous people, as I occasionally have, you realize that they don't "glow" or necessarily stand out in a crowd.  My theory is that people who really don't want to be recognized generally aren't.  I've had famous people on some of my flights, walked by them in the airport or seen them out and about in Los Angeles or New York.  If they're dressed normally and minding their own business, they're not going to be recognized or bothered that much.  Dress and act normal, keep walking and don't make eye contact, and it's amazing how little attention you attract.

If you're strutting around in outlandish outfits, wearing shades inside a restaurant or airplane, and have four bodyguards shadowing your every move, well, you're probably going to attract a little attention, but then that's what you really wanted, isn't it? 

As someone who has been a lifelong "observer" of human behavior, I think being famous would be the worst curse in the world.  This is particularly true of actors who literally make their living trying to observe and portray other people.

Fame also creates an odd familiarity.  Just because we see someone every week on television or a movie screen, we think somehow we know them.  We project how they would actually be in real life. I must admit I've done this.

"Yeah, that Tom Hanks seems like a nice guy.  Russell Crowe though, big time d-bag."

That's the impression each of those actors gives off, but I have no idea if that's reality.

When I was first dating my wife, she shared a rental with a couple of her friends in a small house in the Beachwood Canyon area of Los Angeles.  The homes at the bottom of the hill were often reasonably priced, and then as you moved up the hill or into the canyon, the real estate values skyrocketed.  But it was a livable area conveniently located between Hollywood and the film and TV studios over the hill in Burbank.  We would bump into famous people at the cute, pricey, little neighborhood grocery store - the Beachwood Market.  We would see famous people when we ate breakfast at the local cafe.  No big deal.  Just part of life living in Beachwood Canyon.

Drama queen Lindsay Lohan and her then partner Samantha Ronson exiting the Beachwood Market.

But one famous couple caught our eye.  Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis were at the peak of their careers in the late 1980's, and were one of the hottest couples in Hollywood.  They must have lived in Beachwood or the surrounding area, because we kept seeing them around town: at the movies, in a restaurant or in the grocery store.

The Village Coffee Shop in Beachwood Canyon

And however gorgeous they may have looked on the big screen or in People magazine; they looked more beautiful and adorable in person.  They were both statuesque.  Some actors lie about their height to give the illusion they're much taller than they actually are (Ahnold, cough, cough, Stallone, cough, cough, Gibson).  Jeff and Geena were so tall that they probably lied by claiming they were shorter than they actually were.

We perceived them to be smart and clever.  And they were, of course, both gorgeous.  Did I mention they were gorgeous?  When we'd spy them around town, they just looked so cute together.  They were always touching each other, whispering in each other's ears and smiling.  My wife, in particular, loved it every time we saw them.  She thought they were just so cute.  I had to admit they were a handsome couple.

The historic Cinerama Dome in Hollywood where we saw The Untouchables with Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis.

Sometimes you'll have a group of couples who are your friends and there is a couple or two who just seem perfect together - you know they'll be together forever - and others make you wonder "what in the hell were they thinking?"  When you hear news of the former breaking up, your first reaction is "oh, that's too bad, they were a cute couple."  When the latter finally breaks up, you think "thank goodness, how in the heck did they last that long?"

Jeff and Geena were magic.  You just had to root for them.  Young, talented and beautiful - the toast of the town.

So when word came out that they had finally broken up as a couple - which is just about inevitable in Hollywood - Cindy took it like two of her best friends had broken up, not just two random people we'd never met.  They were Jeff and Geena.  They were perfect together.  Remember the time we saw The Untouchables with them at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood?  We had breakfast together at the Village Coffee Shop, shared some late night cherry pie at House of Pies.

I wonder if they'd just been two prominent people in another profession, something normal without the fame and constant travel, would they have made it?

Time marched on, my wife and I got married and eventually found a home in Sonoma County - 50 miles north of San Francisco.  One Fall day in 1993 I headed out with our pup to the dog park and spotted a bunch of helicopters flying overhead.  Several of them, all flying quite low.  You usually only see helicopters in Sonoma County when there's a large wildfire.  I felt like Ray Liotta in the end of Goodfellas.  What in the hell was going on?

Turns out Geena Davis just couldn't stay away from us.  She was getting married that weekend to the action film director Renny Harlin at the Kunde winery in nearby Kenwood.  Our invitation must have been lost in the mail.  News reports said the wedding cost them close to a million dollars, an amount believed to be the most ever spent on a wedding in Sonoma County, up to that time.  Money didn't buy happiness.  They were inevitably divorced in 1998. 

Davis has now been married four times.  Do you think she's nuts?  A drama queen?  Maybe, but I don't think so.  I think it's just very tough to be in a relationship with someone that famous.  Goldblum never married again.

My wife and I will just remember them as Jeff and Geena.  The cutest couple in Beachwood Canyon.

The Film Snob Quiz

Film Snob Quiz Question #1:  What is the greatest American movie of all time?  (Tip: if you even have to think about this answer, then you're going to have a tough time on this quiz.  And it's certainly not Star Wars.  Geek.)

My lovely wife and I will occasionally escape for a movie matinee, buy a bag of popcorn (large - free refills!) and a cup of Dr. Pepper (10, 2 & 4!), and settle in to our seats, ready to be entertained by the latest offering from Hollywood.

Two hours and thirty minutes later, because NOBODY except Woody Allen* makes 90 minute movies anymore, we will walk outside, stop for a moment, look at each other, and I'll ask, "well, what do you think?"

My lovely wife will cautiously ponder the question for a moment, and then say something positive such as, "I thought the acting was good.  It wasn't as violent as I thought it was going to be.  The costumes were pretty."  A movie has to be incredibly bad for my wife to trash it immediately upon exiting a theater.

I will nod to her answers and we'll start walking again.  Then she'll hesitantly ask me what I thought.  Long sigh.

"The leads were terribly miscast.  The exposition in the first act was sloppy.  The music was obtrusive and distracted from the film.  The camera work was dreadful - I detest when they constantly use those trendy shaky handheld camera shots - um, I would guess they didn't have an ending when they started shooting.  Oh, yeah, and the pacing was brutal.  You could chop 15 minutes out of that thing - EASY!"

"Well, yeah, but you're a film snob" she'll say, "most people won't see it that way."  Fair enough.  Guilty as charged.  I AM a film snob.

Orson Welles' 1941 masterpiece, Citizen Kane

Film Snob Quiz Answer #1:  Citizen Kane (right).  Orson Welles' 1941 masterpiece still holds up 70 years later.  Although it initially received positive reviews from critics, it was a financial failure when it was first released.  Loosely based on the life of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, Hearst did everything in his power to have the film buried.  Welles received Academy Award nominations for Best Actor, Best Director and won for Best Screenplay (co-writer).  It continues to place number one on the American Film Institute's list of greatest American films.

Fact o' the day sure to make your life more meaningless: Welles was all of 26 years of age when he co-wrote, starred in and directed Citizen Kane.  

Film Snob Quiz Extra Credit:  Citizen Kane was released by RKO Pictures.  What did the letters R-K-O stand for?  (No fair using your computer.  Or your smart phone, wise guy.)

I believe that in this day and age, more than a 100 years after The Great Train Robbery, any professional filmmaker should know how to make a film.  And if you have six months to write the script, four months to shoot it and six months for post-production, and you have vast resources to get the best actors and production people in the world,  then it should be more entertaining and skillfully shot than an average episode of a primetime TV show.

Film Snob Quiz Extra Credit Answer:  You googled, didn't you?  You have that Google look about you.  R-K-O stood for "Radio-Keith-Orpheum." RKO Pictures was the combination of David Sarnoff's/RCA's theater chain and Joseph Kennedy's distribution company, as well as Pathe's small film studio, to form the first fully vertically integrated (production, distribution and exhibition) motion picture company.  Add two points if you knew that already.

Film Snob Quiz Question #2: This one is another gimme if you are a film snob.  What is considered the "Greatest" year for American films?  And it wasn't 1977 because of Star Wars.  You would think there would be more debate on this question among film snobs, but there's a pretty solid consensus.

Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in the Howard Hawks' classic Only Angels Have Wings.  My heart flutters just looking at a picture of Jean Arthur.

Film Snob Quiz Question #2 Answer:  1939.  The end of the Great Depression and just before World War II.  The heyday of the studio era.  You would presume that with our technology, film schools and 100 years of film history to study, we would be able to crank out a few more notable films than they did just twelve years after the introduction of Talkies.  But no, the pinnacle of American film was 1939.

The Best Picture nominees that memorable year?  Dark Victory (Humphrey Bogart & Bette Davis), Goodbye, Mr. Chips (Robert Donat, Greer Garson), Love Affair (Irene Dunne & Charles Boyer), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (James Stewart & Jean Arthur), Ninotchka (Greta Garbo), Of Mice and Men (Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney, Jr.), Stagecoach (John Wayne), The Wizard of Oz (Judy Garland), Wuthering Heights (Laurence Olivier); and the Best Picture in 1939 went to ...the envelope please...Gone with the Wind (Vivien Leigh and that Gable kid).  Wow!  That's quite a list.  Classics all.

And that doesn't even include these other notables from 1939: Destry Rides Again, Gunga Din, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Only Angels Have Wings and Young Mr. Lincoln.

There are more films on the National Film Registry from 1939 (17) than any other single year.

For the record, my favorite of the "golden year" films of 1939 is Only Angels Have Wings.  A young Cary Grant and Jean Arthur.  Tough guy pilots flying dangerous mail routes in South America.  Directed by Howard Hawks.  Worth a viewing if you've never seen it.

Jeez, you're thinking, can't we discuss a few films that were made after I was born?  Maybe something that was shot in color?  No problem.  The answer to our next question was shot in color and made in my lifetime.

Film Snob Quiz Question #3:  Speaking of the Academy Awards, what was the last comedy to win the Best Picture Oscar™?  This is another freebie if you're a film snob.  Comedies are highly undervalued and just don't do well at the Oscars™.  Film snobs remember the rare ones that win.  Still thinking?  No, it didn't involve Judd Apatow or Will Ferrell. It was made in the 1970's, but it wasn't Star Wars.  There's a clue* up in the third paragraph.  I'll give you a moment.  La-dee-da.

Diane Keaton and Woody Allen in Annie Hall (1977).

Film Snob Quiz Question #3 Answer:  Woody Allen's Annie Hall won the Oscar™ for Best Picture in 1977, the last comedy to do so.  Allen was also nominated for Best Actor and won for Best Screenplay (co-writer), becoming the first to achieve this trifecta since - are you paying attention - Orson Welles for Citizen Kane!  A thinly veiled, autobiographical account of his relationship with Diane Keaton (Keaton's actual surname is Hall),  it was originally written as a dramatic murder mystery with a romantic subplot, but Allen expanded the romance plot after it overtook the rest of the story (Allen would go on to use the murder mystery plot with Manhattan Murder Mystery with Keaton in 1993).  Allen, of course, did not show up to win the award (he has only appeared on an Academy Awards telecast one time - to introduce a film tribute to New York City in the wake of the 9/11 attacks ).  He kept his regular Monday night gig playing clarinet with his Dixieland jazz band in New York.

Film Snob Quiz Question #3 Extra Credit:  Every year there seems to be a Best Picture Oscar™ nominee that "directs itself" - the one picture that receives a nomination for Best Picture but not for Best Director.  Can you name the picture in 1977 that "directed itself?"

So how are doing so far?  Did you have Citizen Kane, 1939 and Annie Hall?  Great!  One last question.

Film Snob Quiz Question #3 Extra Credit Answer:  Herbert Ross for The Goodbye Girl.  He was the only director of a Best Picture nominee in 1977 not to be nominated for Best Director.  

Film Snob Quiz Question #4: OK. You ready?  Last one.  Which OTHER 1977 film, a sci-fi classic, following a young boy on a quest, a princess and a renegade pilot, went on to become the second highest grossing film (adjusted for inflation) of all time?  Hint:  its success led to five sequels.  No, not Close Encounters.  Saturday Night Fever?  No, only one sequel from that one.  Need another hint?  "Let the Wookie win."

Just because I'm in the mood for a legal injunction from Lucasfilm, LTD.

Film Snob Quiz Question #4 Answer:  Yes, Star Wars!

Film Snob Quiz Question #4 Extra Credit:  What is the  highest grossing film of all time (adjusted for inflation), just ahead of Star Wars? 

Film Snob Quiz Question #4 Extra Credit Answer:  The highest grossing film of all time (inflation adjusted) is Gone with the Wind, which was made in - I hope you're paying attention - 1939!

See, even on the Film Snob Quiz you can't get a zero - just like the S.A.T.  So how did you do?  Here's how you can score at home:

1 answer correct:  You're never going to be a film snob.  Sorry.  But, hey, those Star Wars movies are pretty cool, eh?

2 answers correct:  Not bad.  You are permited to use the words "montage" and "auteur" when you describe a film.

3 answers correct:  Now we're getting somewhere.  You are definitely a cinephile.  Very high potential as film snob material.  Can't believe you didn't get the one about Star Wars.  

4 answers correct:  You ARE a film snob.  You drive your wife and others crazy after every movie.  Can't you enjoy anything?  Can't you watch a movie in color?  What's the matter with Star Wars?  It's a lot of fun and millions of people loved it.

Thanks for playing. That's all the time we have for our Film Snob Quiz™ for today.

Although I see there's a double feature of Bicycle Thief and Open City at the Rialto...